 The Anabaptists don't talk about the early church. They don't realize that they're following the historic faith closer than these other churches that like to trumpet they are. That, you know, we really, we have a gym that we don't even make use of. David, welcome back to the podcast. It's fantastic to have you on again. It's been probably a good little while since we've interviewed you. It has, and it's a pleasure to be back. Yeah, so I mean, probably don't need much of an introduction, but yeah, David Burso, you've wrote a bunch of books. You've done a lot of different things as we talked about in one of the last episodes we did with you was how you were once a Jehovah's Witness and your story of coming out of that. So that'll be linked down below if people wanna watch that or listen to that episode. But once you went through that period of leaving that movement, where did you go from there? And what was that like? Okay, so after leaving Jehovah's Witnesses, I went on a quest, you know, where is true Christianity? What does it look like today? And we visited a number of churches. We, after a few years, we ended up in a Bible church, just a standard evangelical church. And with a great, great pastor who was just a really, really big help to Debra and I, he and his wife, reaching out to us, helped us kind of across the bridge into, you know, more Orthodox Christianity. And so that was super. But yeah, there were some things that church taught that didn't seem to be what the scriptures were teaching. And I wanted to make sure I wasn't just being influenced by my Jehovah's Witness background. So probably the biggest one was once saved, always saved. And he's like, man, I'm just not seeing that in the scripture, it seemed like there's so many verses that indicate the opposite. And then that pastor went to Haiti and we got a new pastor. And so, you know, I re-raised the issue with him and he was adamant, no, no, this is what Christians have always believed. I thought, well, that's true. I'm not, I don't want to go against the historic faith, you know, but I thought, you know, I'd like to see that for myself. So that's what, you know, I bought a set of the Antionizing Fathers and that's what got me reading the early church. Yeah, just what did they believe right after the apostles on once saved, always saved on the Trinity, on a whole host of subjects. Yeah, I was very curious. So, yeah, that's how I didn't know it was gonna change my life, it was, you know, I was just getting answers and questions, but yeah, it ended up being life-changing for me. And that was fairly soon after you left Jehovah's Witnesses. Well, that would have been like nine years after I left. Okay, so a little bit of time, you're in just a pretty standard American evangelical church before that or in this time? Yeah, for five years and before that, like I said, we were just visiting different churches trying to find something almost, we found a Quaker church that interested us a lot. A Quaker, interesting. Yeah, that was, they were called the evangelical Quakers. So they were Quakers who were not the liberal ones that you generally come across. These were more, you know, Bible believing in that. And I was going to college and law school at the time. So it was like, I didn't have as much time to devote to the search until I got out of law school. And, but during that time, you know, my wife and I were thinking, we thought, yeah, I think the Quaker, I think that's gonna be the best, our best choice. So on the way home from moving, from where I'd gone to law school, moving back to our hometown, I called them up and said, yeah, Deborah and I have decided to join you guys. And I got the, it was a couple that we had met. And it was talking to the wife, she said, oh no, I hate to tell you, we just last weekend disbanded, you know. Oh, wow. So there's an alternate future possibility there that you would have been a Quaker, at least for a time. It's a possibility. Yeah, that, oh man, did that hit hard. Wow. So it sounds like this is a period of like just trying to find like, oh, where, you know, what kind of church, where do we fit in and dissolve? At least initially would have been all very new coming out of Joe's witness and stuff. And just before we started this episode, actually we were talking about one of your books, the Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs by Hendrickson Publishers. And on the back of that book, it identifies you as an Anglican priest. So somewhere we go from, where does that come into the story? From Quaker to Anglican. Yeah, exactly. So actually when the Quakers didn't work out, then it was after that that we joined the evangelical church. And then like I said, I got into the early church and then I could see, wow. Yeah, evangelical, I thought, yeah, there's gotta be something a bit closer that this is, there's too many differences. Not that I still appreciated the evangelical church, appreciated the, wow, helped me restore my faith in God and all of that, played a crucial role in my pilgrimage for sure. But yeah, so then I started continuing checking out various churches, came across the Anabaptists during that time period, but there weren't any conservative Anabaptist churches near us. So yeah, we were looking in other directions, holiness churches, a number of things. I wrote the book, Will the Real Heretics Police Stand Up, and one of my motivations, it wasn't the main one, but one of them was, I was hoping God would see the book would get somewhere and I'd hear from someone and say, hey, this is exactly what our church believes. And I did get a lot of letters from Anabaptists. So yeah, I initially was looking that direction and of course it's where I eventually ended up, but yeah, there was a intermediate period. So yeah, the Anabaptists really were enthusiastic about the book and I was invited to a lot of places to speak and it was really well received and it was really exciting. And then I wrote the book Common Sense and yeah, that had the opposite reception. And I got really lambasted by not most people, but in a few quarters, yeah, I got attacked pretty strongly because of that book. And so it was very discouraging and at the same time, the book found its way into different orthodox circles. And so just to be clear, you're getting a lot of, initially you write your first book, everybody's like, wow, this is great, the Anabaptists. So you're in that world and you write the second book and you're hearing this from some of the Anabaptists, right? Where it's like, whoa. Yeah, really strong. So I go from hero to villain, I mean, overnight. It was so sudden, I mean, I was stunned. I mean, it's just like, wow, I can't believe it, that I was so warmly received. And I'm not saying this in criticism or anything, I'm just saying, obviously, I wasn't careful in saying some things in the book that, because it was mainly, the criticism was mainly misunderstanding the book was, and I hope someday to revise it, it's on my list of things. Please do, because I had read it. I have one of the few remaining copies, I guess, I don't know, but yeah, and I remember being like, whoa, okay, I could see how this could rouse some people the wrong way. So you were on the receiving end of that. Yeah. I was probably a pretty shaky time then. Yeah, so that really discouraged me. I thought, wow, I don't seem to be welcome in the Anabaptist world anymore. So what do I do? And then at the same time, I'm getting all these letters and calls from Orthodox people, mainly people who converted from evangelicals to Orthodox. And they say, oh, this is a fantastic book. Wow, you know, you belong in the Orthodox church. You know, I said, I don't think so, you know. Well, yeah, can I come out and talk to you? You know, one guy, and so he spent the weekend with us. He was a very good apologist, you know, for the Orthodox faith. I mean, he didn't convince us to go that route, but he certainly made us rethink some things. And like I say, it was just nice being appreciated, you know. And when I was being attacked, you know, by the people I thought, you know, I was going to embrace, you know, and it's like, oh, I just felt like that door was maybe closed, you know. It wasn't that I couldn't take criticism. I just felt like I don't think I'm welcome there anymore, you know. So, but yeah, the Orthodox was a bit of a leap. We'll maybe talk about that a little bit later, why I didn't choose them. But it got us interested in what I call the ancient churches, that the churches that can trace themselves back, you know, to the beginning, historically, doesn't mean they're teaching the same things, but that, you know, that they would have a direct lineage, you know, one way or the other. And on that journey, Dean Taylor was with us. I know he's been on this as well. So we were all, we were looking at every kind of, I mean, churches, most people have never even heard of, you know, but we were looking for ancient churches that maybe had not gotten into venerating Mary and, you know, icons, you know, there were a number of things that, yeah, we knew we're not early church. We weren't going to embrace. And so then he discovered this group called the Continuing Anglicans, and they were the conservatives who had broken off from the Episcopal Church here in the U.S. And they were trying to get, and I think it's finally succeeded, but they were trying to unite with the Anglicans in Africa and Asia who tended to be more conservative in those countries. And so they were trying to, yeah, getting communion with them. But anyway, but they broke away from the Episcopal Church. So he said, hey, we ought to look into these guys. You know, I mean, one of two people that we both admired a lot were William Law, who was a writer who influenced John Wesley. And then of course, John Wesley was one of our favorites. So, and they were both Anglicans. So we thought, well, yeah, I mean, so there's been a lot of good things come out of the Anglican Church. And one of their things is, we liked in their statement of faith, no one shall be required to believe anything that cannot be proven from the Holy Scriptures. So we thought, okay, this is good. We can maybe fit in here. So anyway, so yeah, we got acquainted with them and they were very welcoming. They liked both, will the real heretics please stand up and common sense, you know? And yeah, we're very eager to have us join. And we asked if we could come in as a religious society, kind of like the Methodist society that John Wesley had started. You know, we said, our lifestyle is more Anabaptist. You know, we would look, I mean, our sisters wore head coverings and you know, we're, you know, dressed modestly and we were, you know, embraced non-resistance. I mean, we were, I'd say, Anabaptist in most aspects. And they said, yeah, that would be fine. You could draw up your own rule of life and if one of you wants to get ordained, yeah, you could, yeah, then, you know, have your own priest there and, you know, and so. So this is like a small group that you'd be meeting with at the time that was doing this? Start off as a house church. So we had a house church that had started off, you know, maybe quasi-Anabaptist and then, yeah. Wow, yeah. So yeah, and then, yeah, like I say, with all the criticism of common sense and other things, yeah, we kind of started on this journey. So, yeah, we thought, okay. The continuing Anglicans look like, yeah. Place we can fit where we still have one foot in the biblical world, you know, we can relate to the Protestant world and then one foot in with the ancient churches. And so then I and another brother who's with us, Tom Schenck, he and I both then started working on getting ordained. I forget how long that took, two years or something, you know, our studies on that. But so, yeah, I eventually got ordained. And so I was telling you before we, we went live. So when I started the project of the dictionary of early Christian beliefs, which that wasn't my title, that was, Hendrickson came up with that title. I had a different one, but I wrote them to see if they would be interested in it. I picked them because they did a lot of academic books. I mean, so many of the books reference books, Christian reference books, I thought if they'll print it, it'll help get it into seminaries and theological libraries, which, yeah, I wanted to have that kind of influence at a level, not just the common Christian reading it, but the people in seminary and that sort of thing. So when I wrote them, I just mentioned I'm an Anglican priest. I was at the time. And so, yeah, they were interested in the project and they said, yeah, you know, go for it. And so I did. Well then, yeah, when I finished the project, I ended up leaving the Anglicans. And I, yeah, I never brought it up again. They never presented the back cover to me. I didn't know they were gonna, that was coming in the back cover because nothing had ever been said. And I was shocked to see what else when I was like, oh no. And now it's permanently, you know, on that book. Yeah, they're not inclined to wanna change the stuff. Because I didn't know this part of your story and someone gave me a copy back in the day and I'm very grateful to have it in my library, which all of y'all should check it a copy, I would say. And I remember flipping it over and reading that and be like, David was a Anglican priest. This is wild. I have to ask you about that. Cause it was, I think it was after I'd interviewed you the first time on the JW thing. And anyway, so I did and I heard some of the story. Yeah, but that's kind of a wild experience. It doesn't sound like it lasted very long, but you were initially there. Like you were an Anglican priest for a bit. You had your church group. You did that for a bit. Eventually that, obviously you're not that anymore. So tell us that part of the story. Okay, so, you know, as I said, you know, we were Anglican, but it was more, you might say, working under their umbrella. Since we were a religious society, not monks, but like I say, just what the Methodist society had been, but we were a little different. We were like I say, basically Anabaptist. So someone looking at us would have thought we were an Anabaptist church, but our service on Sunday, they said the only thing we had to do was use the Book of Common Prayer on Sunday morning, their communion service for Sunday morning. So we used the Anglican liturgy for Sunday morning. So our worship service on Sunday would have looked, and it was very Anglican. We actually grew very much to enjoy it. It's a very reverent service, very totally biblical. There was nothing in there that was not biblical, well thought out. So yeah, we actually enjoyed that part, but then our Wednesday night service was just more like an evangelical or Anabaptist prayer meeting Bible study. So yeah, we were kind of a hybrid group. It was, but yeah, we were just some of the issues. I mean, the issue that made us leave the Anglicans, that was a very big issue to us was divorce and remarriage, which we did not wanna be part of a church. Well, we knew they allowed it, but well, what they told us when we asked, I mean, like the Orthodox, I mean, they allow three divorces and to get remarried three times, which is like, that was one reason we didn't wanna go that route. So we talked to the Catholics at least held a pretty strict line, but they've gotten loose on annulment, you know. Originally, annulment was only for if you married like your sister or your daughter, something that would be forbidden in the book of Leviticus, then the marriage would be you could get it annulled or you were supposed to get it annulled because it was an illegal marriage under church law. Yeah, now the Catholic Church has expanded that. Well, it turned out the Anglican had just pretty much followed the Catholics in that respect. So they told me when I inquired, yeah, we don't allow divorce and remarriage. And we go, okay, well, good, you know, we don't, yeah, that's one of our convictions. But then we found out, okay, yeah, what they mean is they don't allow, they allow annulment, you know, and then you can get a secular divorce. Oh, okay. And then it was pretty easy to get an annulment, you know. So over time, this turned into enough that it's like we, you know, we had to break away. Yeah, it became an issue. Well, we found out our bishop was, had had an annulment, you know, and it was like, okay, this, yeah, we thought, yeah, we're not comfortable with this. So we broke our affiliation. We kept meeting as a church for another five years. And we kept using the Book of Common Prayer just because we had grown to really like the service. But then we were, you know, we didn't have to, we just, like I said, we enjoyed it. We started incorporating various things that were more early Christian and that. So that's a story there. That's definitely a story. So it's like your group didn't fracture and splinter over this. It was like, it seems like you stayed together fairly well, but it's like we can't be part of this larger, you know, church group. We lost, we did lose some families, but enough remained that, yeah, we were able to carry on. Sure, sure. So that is an interesting window into different, I'm not very familiar, honestly, with Anglican or really just the different, what I call, I don't know if this is the right word, you know, the high church forms, orthodox Catholic, things like that. And I think that's, I think it's pretty important to understand what that's like. And so one of the immediate questions I had when I was working through the script and we were emailing some about this, what about this whole thing of apostolic succession? And were you attracted to that? Did you find that, ooh, that's interesting? And like explain what that is first off and let's dive into that a bit. Yeah, so that would have been maybe one of the big attractions that we as a house church, like I say, we would have started off more Anabaptist, free radical, whatever you'd wanted to, you know, describe us. And, but as different ones in the group, you know, others started reading the early Christians, which was up to that point, you know, I had read them and then I was sharing with other people, but I didn't have anyone I could really converse with. But now, yeah, there were other people in our group reading it. And yeah, some of them got interested in apostolic succession. They see the term, you know, succession of bishops and things like that in some of the writings. And so, yeah, we got started looking into that. And yeah, I got convinced that, okay, there's something to this, never to the point that I felt like, oh, other people aren't Christians or their communion isn't valid or, you know, if they didn't have apostolic succession. But I thought maybe it did help bring about more unity that there was some value to it. So that was, I think, one of the things we were seeking. So, and of course, I got ordained. I've got a, it's probably back here somewhere, big long scroll and my ordination, supposedly goes back to the apostle John. Really? Yeah. Wow, okay, so that's what we're saying when we're saying the apostolic succession, at least in the sense that you had with the Anglican church. Like they actually made that, like actually had a scroll with, wow, going all the way back to the apostle John. Okay. Well, that's interesting. Man, if we could take that out, I would love to see that. Actually, I would love to see that. So they, yeah, I mean, they were really bought into that as like this is one of the key pieces. Oh yeah, they would feel that's very important. I mean, another reason we chose the Anglican, the Anglican church in America, the Episcopalian was never a state church in a national sense. It was never, some of the states, it would have been an official church of like Virginia or something like that, but it was never like the national church of the United States or something like that. Now the Anglicans in England were definitely a state church. But here in this country, we felt like, okay, yeah, we felt like a closer connection than we would have been comfortable with, but we felt like, okay, at least this is much further away. And yeah, today at the Episcopal church, would not believe in church and state being one and that kind of thing here in the United States. So back to, so you mentioned apostolic succession as something initially it seemed to, oh, this is one of the, this is a positive, and as you get into this church group, you're starting to see some more of the negatives with some of these different things. Somewhere along the line, I'm guessing apostolic succession was not as important anymore, which I know that is a really big deal to a lot of these different church groups, right? It is, it is. Somewhere along the line is like, oh, actually maybe this isn't as important, what changed your mind, what changed there? It wasn't that it wasn't as important, it was that it's not what the early Christians teach. That's what, yeah, see, see the interesting thing is when I originally read the early Christians on my own, I was not convinced of apostolic succession in the way that it is taught. Of course, I didn't know what it meant. I'd heard the expression, apostolic succession, and then I see they talk about succession of bishops and all of that, and I thought, oh, well, this is maybe what it's meant, but no, then when we got around the Anglicans and the Orthodox and all that, what they mean by apostolic succession is, yeah, you aren't validly ordained unless, yeah, you've been ordained by someone who was ordained by someone who you can trace yourself all the way back to one of the apostles who ordained, and so you've got this kind of line that this chain of apostolic succession is passed through on the ordination, okay? And so you're not really validly ordained, and so therefore it's not, I don't know if the Anglicans would not say this, but the Orthodox, it's not a valid communion that you're having in your church if the minister who is presiding was not ordained to apostolic succession. But what the early church, but what they're talking about is who ordained whom? I realized it was when I was working on the dictionary, okay, so I'm starting over fresh, I go to the Any Nicene Fathers, I start in chronological order from the beginning, okay? And I'm just writing these quotes on a Jillian subject, you know, anything I thought was important. And, you know, since I was Anglican, I was trying to be very neutral on both from the Catholic side, small C Catholic and the Protestant side. I was, you know, just what do they say? And I was thinking of topics that were of interest to Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican topics that were of interest to Anabaptists, to Baptists, whatever, you know, just things that would be of interest. So I had, you know, one of them was apostolic succession. So I'm looking at the quotes and I'm realizing, okay, they're not talking about who ordained whom. When they, their list of succession is a list of who followed whom in office, not who ordained whom. So like, normally a person stayed in office till he died. So they didn't ordain their successor. You know, it doesn't have anything to do with the laying on of hands by someone who's been, you know, someone got zapped by the apostles and then they can zap the next person, that kind of thing. They're not talking about that at all. And the only reason they even bring it up at all is because the Gnostics, they had this weird strange doctrines. I mean, so strange that you can hardly call them Christian. I mean, it's like the God of the Old Testament is not the same God as the God of the New Testament and they rejected most of the books of the New Testament and stuff like that. But anyway, Jesus never came in the flesh for, you know, anyway, their teachers were saying, oh, well, yeah, I was a companion of Paul and we got this from the apostles. And so Irenaeus' response was, well, our church is we can show the succession of the bishops that we can trace ourselves to the apostles. He's talking about the doctrine, you know, that this person got his doctrine from the apostles and then this one got it from that guy and all of that. Yeah, where is your list? Where did you, you came from nowhere. You know, you just popped up and you come up with this doctrine. We can trace ourselves back to the apostles but he's not talking about ordination that, yeah, this made your ordination valid or invalid. It was that, yeah, you're carrying on the historical faith that's being handed down from the apostles. And it's a good argument. I mean, Irenaeus wrote about 170, 180 somewhere in there. It's a very good argument, just 70 years after the apostle John died. Now it breaks down when you get, you know, three, 400, 1,000, 1,500 years, well, yeah, you're not necessarily still carrying it on. In fact, you can show very positively, you're not teaching what they taught back then. So I saw that when I worked on the dictionary of early Christian beliefs that, okay, yeah, this teaching that the Catholic church, the Orthodox, the Anglican that they have on Amesauce Secession, it's just, it's not what the early Christians are saying. It's, yeah, that's totally false. It's invalid. And so, yeah, so from that point, yeah, it was of no particular importance to me. Now, not everyone in our church, I had not tried to necessarily convince them. Some of them still felt fairly strong about it. And so I did not wanna split the church over, you know, we had a nice group there. I mean, eventually, I guess I did make an issue of it and it did kinda create a stir in the church. And then at that point is when we broke up because it's like, okay, if Amesauce Secession isn't important, which it's not, and it's not even valid. I mean, I realized looking at my scroll, it's like, this is fake. I mean, it's purporting to say who ordained whom. Well, we don't even have a record. Their record is who followed whom in office. There's no record of who did the ordaining. Oh, yeah, okay. So, and there's big gaps in the historical record that they've filled and they've, I just realized this isn't even valid, you know? That's so ironic though, that you're kind of coming to terms with this. While an Anglican priest, and while you're actually writing the one book that identifies you as such. And in that process of re-going through the early church fathers, you know, and the Nicene Fathers is actually when you started reevaluating this and saying, wait, I'm actually reading this wrong. Or like, I got this wrong. Yeah, that's fascinating to me. Yeah, it was a number of other doctrines. We won't go into them now, but yeah. Oh, it was a learning experience for me because I'd never had that luxury. See today, people who are researching the early church, one thing now it's available electronically. So you can do word searches, you can do things like that. There's AI stuff where you can do topical searches now. I mean, back then there was nothing. There were some Catholic source books that had different topics and then they had their proof quotes. But yeah, that was it. There wasn't the dictionary of early Christian beliefs. So yeah, when I wanted to research something, I just had my notes and they were just by right or not by topic, you know. So you had just brute force like go through. I mean, the set is however many books is in the Ananiasing Fathers or whatever it is you're studying, yeah, that makes sense. So I mean, I would have done the dictionary of early Christian beliefs for my own research if I hadn't done it for publication. I was just like, I hate that I don't have all of the needed quotes, particularly in chronological order, you know. So you can see like, whoa, they've all been saying this and now they're suddenly saying something different. See, I didn't have that option. I just, it was kind of a jumbled sort of thing. And so yeah, it busted a lot of myths doing the dictionary. And I'd say by the end of it, yeah, I realized I still appreciated a lot of things about Anglican worship, about the ancient churches, you know, that some of the things are accused of as being false actually is genuinely early Christian, but then a lot of stuff is definitely something that was added on through the ages. So I'm not sorry for the experience, but I feel like it's made me a better well-rounded Christian, but I definitely saw the Anabaptists as the lifestyle I saw in the early church, which rereading them again and compiling the dictionary, it just stands out so much their emphasis on living the Sermon on the Mount, you know. And there's so few churches. I mean, the Anabaptists, the Bible believing Quakers, which there aren't very many of those. I mean, that's about it. I mean, that, you know, are centered on we live, we take the Sermon on the Mount as a way of life, not as an ideal that's unattainable, which is what most evangelicals teach, that either it's a different, it applies to a different dispensation or it's unattainable. Jesus gave it to just show we can't live by laws, you know, I hear that a lot. Yeah, and so out of this experience, you're actually coming back around to that and saying, wait, this is a real, this is a quarter piece of what I want. And so from there, what did you say? Because when we, at the beginning of this interview, you were saying how the second book you published, Common Sense, kind of ostracized you in some ways from the Anabaptist world, however you wanna say it, went through this Anglican thing. And now as you've given up on apostolic succession or seen it's not as important, did you find yourself heading back to the Anabaptist world then at that point? Like, where does the story go from there? Yeah, so at that point, we actually are, I call it a house church, but by this time we were meeting in a church building, we disbanded and I didn't think, I honestly thought when I demonstrated that apostolic succession was not what the early Christians taught. It wasn't biblical and it wasn't essential that, yeah, then we'd just carry on, you know, and maybe it would free us up, we could affiliate, we talked about affiliated with charity or something like that, but yeah, it turned out it just, wow, it kind of threw people off, people didn't know what they wanted to do, so yeah, the church ended up just, fortunately it was very amicable. I mean, you know, there was no friction or anything, but we just realized we didn't have a clear vision anymore and Dean Taylor was hoping maybe we could join charity. We invited Danny Keniston to come down and do a weekend of revivals and stuff like that. But yeah, the group decided not to go that way and like I say, just everyone had something different that they wanted to pursue church wise, you know? And so Dean and Tanya, they moved up to Pennsylvania and joined charity. And so, yeah, so then I was, my family was like, okay, you know, what do we do? For a while we just had house church at home, just so I wasn't really eager to get another house church going. It's a hard struggle, you know? House churches don't tend to have long lives, you know? And I did appreciate the Anabaptists, they've kept this thing going 500 years. That is not easy, you know? I mean, there's been a lot of perfectionist, what I call perfectionist churches, I don't mean that in a negative sense. I mean, churches that are centered on, hey, we live by what the scripture say, we don't water it down and that, but most of them don't last more than a generation if they last that long, you know? I mean, there's been so many. You could fill pages with all of these different groups that had these wonderful ideals. And like I say, you know, when their founder dies, that's the end of them or often they don't even last that long. And like, okay, a group that can last 500 years, I like the stability knowing that they would be here for my family and my children, grandchildren. But yeah, there was the issue of the early church that I was gonna cross that bridge. But yeah, maybe that would be better for another interview. No, it's an important part, you know? Where, yeah, so it's a bit, everybody's path in life is a little different, you know? And as you've bumped into some of these things and it's like, wow, that actually didn't work. And you find yourself coming back to the Anabaptist, you know, even after initially, there was some, I don't know what you would call it after that second book and some challenges in that. That's actually something I've been thinking about a lot when people go through things like this. It is very easy to just say, you know what, fine, I'm just out of here. I don't ever wanna be a part of this again. And the fact that you did come back and say, hey, there is something really valuable here that I want and you come back. And now I guess you're part of the Anabaptist and you've been that way for quite a while now. Yeah, I think that's significant. Yeah, so like I say, working on the dictionary, I realized that the center of early Christianity, what they talk about the most, when they present the gospel to the pagan Romans, I mean, the thing they talk about the most in addition to the person of Jesus, his incarnation in that is the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus, yeah, how he taught us to live. And that, none of the ancient churches, the Catholic, the Orthodox, the Anglican, the Coptic, I mean, any of those, they don't even come close. I mean, that doesn't even begin to describe how most of them live. Now, there have been outstanding Roman Catholics, there have been outstanding Anglicans. I've mentioned William Law, John Wesley, who lived these really godly lives. Same with the Orthodox. I mean, there have been individuals, but as a people know that doesn't describe them, they wouldn't even claim, yeah, we live the Sermon on the Mount. And so, yeah, I realized the Anabaptists don't talk about the early church. They don't realize that they're following the historic faith closer than these other churches that like to trumpet they are. That, you know, we really, we have a gym that we don't even make use of that, like, wow, yeah, we can really say, hey, we are following the historic faith. Now, there are a few doctrinal differences, but I mean, I can only think of really two main ones, and as far as theology, and so even theologically, the view of salvation, the view of one saved, always saved, are general not putting the emphasis on theology. The early church, as I said, their emphasis was on Christian living. That in itself is a significant part of early Christianity, that it was not doctrineity. It was not built on, you've got this long list of things. The Apostles Creed was all you had to believe theologically, which every group that calls themselves Christian just about believes the Apostles Creed. And so, yeah, just the fact that the Anabaptists are not big theologians actually, yeah, brings them closer to primitive Christianity. You know, that wasn't their emphasis either trying to dissect these complex doctrines and that sort of thing. And so, yeah, I realized I maybe did a poor job of kind of presenting things in common sense. I could definitely have presented it better. But yeah, the Anabaptists don't realize that they've got these fantastic ties. That other churches who wanna trumpet it, like the Catholic Church, I mean, they're nowhere near as close as the Anabaptists are when you take into account the whole picture, not just certain doctrines. So there's a lot of others out there that are reading the early church writings, Ananiasing Fathers, the Patristics, so forth. And that is taking them to some of the more high church traditions, you know, Anglican, Eastern Orthodox, Orthodox, whatever, Catholic. You've been reading these for quite a long time. You've written many books about it. And you ultimately went the Anabaptist route. And you've said a little bit of why that is, but like, how are they reading these texts different than you? What are you doing that's different than they are, I guess, when you read this material? Yeah, so the problem is, and you know, I'm working to change this within the Anabaptist world. And it is changing. I mean, a lot more people now, I've found just in many places are reading the early Christians, are becoming more familiar with the historic faith and realize it's not in any way incompatible with Anabaptists and that it fits us closer. What happens to people is exactly what happened, you know, to me with common sense. Now, they don't get attacked the way I did. But the Anabaptists, because generally throughout history they didn't read these writings. They've never, you know, thought about them. So yes, there are views the early Christians had that are not Anabaptist views, but yeah, there's an awful lot of views there that are not Orthodox or Catholic either, you know. But the ones who generally do the reading of the early Christians, like, you know, most, you know, I've got a bookshelf just, you know, laden with all kinds of writings and things about the early church, well, almost all of them. If it's a early Christian writing, the translator is invariably, usually Roman Catholic, you know, sometimes Lutheran, not usually Orthodox, but occasionally, books about them tend to be, again, it's either Anglican, Catholic, Orthodox, something like that. They've made that their field. And the Catholic Church, you know, their doctrine, their teaching, official teaching is doctrine developed. And so God gave the church the authority to develop doctrine. So yeah, they can read Justin Martyr and all that. Okay, he said this or that, and that wasn't wrong in his day because that's all God had revealed up to that point. But now we understand things a little better, you know. I mean, like Tertullian points out, you know, Mary's failings and, you know, her sins and things like that. And they would say, well, okay, yeah, they didn't have a clear understanding of Mary that later than the church defined that, you know, Mary was sinless and things like that. So for the Catholics, it's not intimidating because yeah, well, we've just developed beyond that. Now, the Orthodox would say, oh, we haven't changed anything, which at least the Catholics, I'll give them credit. They're honest. I mean, you know, that, you know, it's developed. Yeah, we're not claiming that. Yeah, we're practicing the same thing they were back then. I didn't realize that. Yeah, that's interesting, but you're saying the Orthodox are not that way. Yeah, they say, oh, no, we haven't changed anything. And I heard all the time from them, yeah, Luke painted the first icon and it's like, come on. I mean, just, you know, throw out total legends and, you know, it just, I don't know when that developed, you know, that one, you know, long after Constantine. But yeah, and so they can throw out proof texts from the early church that makes it look like, oh, see, this fits what we teach. I mean, you can proof text the Bible why there's so many different denominations to make it say almost anything. And you can proof text the early Christians and people who just look at those proof texts and they're being enticed, and we'll see, yeah, this is the historic faith. And on the other end, see, up until the present time, and you know, like I say, it's changing, but Anabaptists haven't been saying, well, no, see, you can go back and show that what we practice is what the early church did, you know. I mean, there would be a couple things. I wish the Anabaptist would maybe be a little bit more open on a couple of doctrinal issues where what the early church taught is so literally what the New Testament teaches. I mean, you know, it was an overreaction against the Catholic Church. But like I say, there's only a couple of doctrines that really are like that. For the Orthodox, you've got all these problems with Mary and icons that, you know, the early church, you know, it's definitely nobody was sinless. I mean, there's no teaching of Mary, you know, immaculate conception or that she was born without sin or that she is, you know, ascended to heaven or the Orthodox don't say, we don't say she was assumed. They have a little twist on everything, but it's basically the same thing. She went to heaven. They both say she's the queen of heaven. They both pray to Mary. They both, you know, she's the most exalted figure. I mean, none of that's in the early church. You read the early church. I mean, you go a whole volume and there's hardly any mention of Mary. I mean, she's not this central figure. It's just like the New Testament. After the book of the first or second chapter of Acts, I guess the second chapter of Acts, she's never mentioned again in the whole New Testament, you know. So, yeah, I mean, it's people taking the early church and proof texting things. And because most people aren't well read, yeah, they can't answer. It makes me think when I was a Jehovah's Witness, the easiest people to convert were Catholics because they didn't know their Bibles at all. You know, it was a closed book to them. So it was very easy as Jehovah's Witness. You know, take the Bible, show them this proof texting. You know, the Bible says this, the Bible says that. Oh, wow, yeah. Yeah, they didn't know anything. They couldn't, you know, defend themselves. And it's the same way, you know, so few people know the early Christian writings so that it's like, oh, maybe this is historic. But, you know, we were talking at lunch about this, that it always alarms us when someone leaves the Orthodox, the Anabaptist and goes Orthodox or Roman Catholic. I've known a few people, you know, who've gone Roman Catholic from either Anabaptist or from Kingdom churches. But, you know, maybe the ones I'm aware of, I could probably, you know, maybe 20 people or something like that. The number who've become evangelical would be in the thousands who've left, you know, either the Amish or one of the Mennonite groups, you know, have maybe gone to a more liberal Mennonite church and then they just kind of, you know, just slowly drift and then, yeah, they joined some evangelicals. We're not as shocked. We're disappointed, you know, usually here, oh yeah, they're not plain anymore, but people aren't shocked by that. But that's by far the greater danger, which is one of the things I've been trying to get out. We're worried about, yeah, this dozen or so people, 20 people or so who, you know, read the early church and go down the wrong trail. But, you know, what about the hundreds who go down the wrong trail for one thing? Because they're not founded in the historic faith. We worry about, yeah, the few chickens escaping out this little hole and the big, the gate is open and, you know, hundreds are going out the other direction. But anyway. So is this a thing of which of the early church fathers they're reading? I know you'd hinted that a little bit before we started recording, is that some of these orthodox Catholic scholars, are they maybe reading later writings and your specialty is the Ananiasing Fathers, which is the first, you know, what, 100 to like 380 or something like that. 325, yeah. Yeah, to 325. Is that some of what's going on here too? Like, are y'all reading different texts or are they? Yeah, again, I'm just trying to parse that out. So the Catholic church, the orthodox, their fathers, I mean, they quote, they'll quote Ignatius or, you know, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, when it suits them, you know, and you can prove text, you know, you can take an orthodox doctrine and you can find a sentence from Irenaeus that makes it fit that. Well, likewise, you can take Jehovah's Witness doctrine and everything they teach. You can find a verse in scripture that supports it. I mean, you know, anyone can do that. That's kind of child's play, you know. I mean, if you can prove text in the New Testament, which is what, I don't know how many words. Well, when you talk about 10 volumes of writing, you know, you've got a lot of stuff to pull proof text, you know, from. Plus, you're dealing with fallible people. So even if somebody actually said that and if you're not taking it out of context, that still doesn't mean it's right. If you can't base it on scripture, the fact that Irenaeus says something, well, okay, I mean, he's a human like you and I, and maybe he's wrong on that point. It doesn't make it right that one of them says it. Your foundation has to be the New Testament. But so, yeah, like the Orthodox, their big teachers would be John Chrysostom, who I like. I mean, most of the things he says, I think he's a good expositor of scripture. Gregory of Naziansus, Basil, I think those are their big three. But those would be later. Yeah, so those are all post-nice scenes. So the Orthodox Church sees, in fact, Constantine is officially one of their saints. Oh, really? Okay, interesting. Yeah, the Catholic Church doesn't view him as a villain, but they don't make him a saint. Well, yeah, he's actually a saint. They have a feast dated to Constantine. So they don't see the gigantic upheaval when you take the kingdom of God and meld it with the kingdoms of this world and that everything started changing, you know, after the Council, it really started before the Council of Nicaea, but once you get state and church joining together, yeah, it was just a few decades before Christians were going to war, originally against pagans, but then pretty soon it was Christians fighting Christians. A very short time before you have persecution, Christians persecuting other Christians. I hear it had been the pagans persecuting Christians or the unbelieving Jews, and now it's Christians persecuting Christians. And through the ages, I mean, the number of Christians who were put to death by the pagan Romans just hardly compared with how many were put to death by the Orthodox and Catholic churches. I mean, it just, yeah, that became such a horrible, just so contrary to the kingdom of God, you know, of persecute. I mean, and again, the early church is so strong. We do not persecute other people. We do not persecute heretics. You know, we don't, you know, we put them out of the church and it stops at that point. So see, there's all those kind of doctrines that the Orthodox never bring up, and they want to focus on things, you know, like say, a proof text here. I just did a series that I know the Orthodox apologists don't like, but on just believers' baptism. They like to present it. We'll see the early church was being infant baptism. Well, certainly it was practiced, at least in the third century on, but believers' baptism is what you see up until that point. And even when you see infant baptism, I think the evidence would indicate believers' baptism was still just as common or maybe more common. It looks like clearly in the fourth century, and I think most infant baptizers would acknowledge that the fourth century believers' baptism is the main practice. So, yeah, so we kind of let them, oh, well infant baptism, okay, that's the early church. Well, no, we can take a stand. The early church has a strong witness for believers' baptism. We are following the historic faith. Interesting, because isn't that, that sounds pretty controversial, depending on who hears you say that, because they're like, oh no, that's not what the early church taught, whatever, whatever. Which I guess in that case, we're gonna have to do a whole other episode on it. But you said you did a series on this. So is that something people can check out and listen to? Yeah, so it's on scroll publishing now. There's four CDs. It starts with the New Testament, and that's one of the problems with people who go Orthodox. You've got to stick with the New Testament. The early church, the early Christian writings are best commentary on the New Testament. But when people start using them as an authority in their own right, you know, then they're dangerous because they're fallible humans, and they would have never wanted to be used that way. They're just trying to expound the New Testament, and we have a witness of what they believe, but they weren't trying to write things for, oh, this is what everyone should do for ages to come or anything like that. But yeah, always stick with the New Testament, and so that's where I start with the New Testament. Do we see anything about infant baptism there? You know, I go through the book of Acts. So many baptisms, every time, you know, it says they believed, they believed. You know, even if it's a whole household, it said they all believed, you know. So, and then we look at the second century. You know, any mention there? I mean, we go through quote after quote. They, you know. Oh, wow. So, yeah. So then we get to where we do start getting some clear evidence of infant baptism, and first, it's generally emergency baptism. An infant is dying, and so a lot, not everyone did it, but a lot of parents, like to baptize them, they could feel like, okay, they, you know, were baptized when they were buried. No teaching that the child was lost if they weren't baptized, but yeah. You start seeing emergency baptisms, but again, you see emergency baptisms of people 12, 19 in their 20s. So it's obviously weren't baptized as infants, or they wouldn't be getting an emergency baptism, you know, when they're 12 or 19. You know, it's always because they have some fever, they're about to die, and they get, you know, this emergency, you know, deathbed kind of baptism. So even that practice shows that the only reason even those infants got baptized was because they were going to die. Otherwise, yeah, they would not have been baptized. So actually that practice shows that believers' baptism was the norm. Because again, if all babies were baptized from the start, then you wouldn't have to do these emergency ones, you know. The fact you were doing it shows that, yeah, they didn't get baptized, you know, when they were newborn, and you're baptizing them at the year one, or something like that, age one, you know, one year, because they, you know, are dying, and the parents want them, you know, baptized as a Christian, you know, before they're buried. I'm not saying I approve of that practice, but I don't know that there's any tremendous harm in it either. Well, that's so interesting though, because yeah, I think that has been one of the critiques I've heard about your work over the years. It's like, oh, well, he's selectively reading early church writings, he's missing one, which one of them that someone did mention specifically was that issue of baptism, which I did not know you'd done that series. I'm going to definitely text that person and be like, hey, check out this series, let me know what you think, because they were like, they weren't necessarily agreeing, disagreeing, but they're just like, I think that's a blind spot. You know, Bersot needs to, you know, whatever, he needs to address that. And that's really interesting to hear you say that, you know, there's definitely people out there that are, yeah, maybe they're reading a different era of church history, they're reading it in a very different way, and I think that's important. And to bring influence, I mean, even us, we wouldn't have gone down the journey we did in Texas, but like I said, the only source books we had outside the Indian Icing father, which again, that's a lot to try to find, what did they say about this, were these books published by Roman Catholics that, you know, topically had this laid out, so you see only quotes that fit the Roman Catholic doctrine. And we didn't have anything, you know, even when I did the dictionary and I don't regret it, I made it as theologically neutral as I could. I didn't, you know, and I was in a good position to do that because like I say, Anglican is kind of a bridge between Protestant and Catholic and but I just, I wanted to be honest that people could find the quotes there, but I didn't just selectively put ones in that fit, whomever, I mean, but like I say, all the other people, yeah, their stuff is always just the stuff that fits them and so, yeah, it's convincing if you don't want to look at the broad thing. So yeah, people who think I'm only selectively quoting, I think it's just the other way around. I've tried to, yeah, put everything in there and acknowledge, you know, what is there. They've never talked to me about the subject of infantism, so they just think they know what I believe because I never, I never did any CDs on that. I mean, this is the first time. Yeah, that's fascinating here. Actually, I, yeah, I didn't know that that had been done. I think what I'm sensing from you is maybe reading the whole trunk, like all volumes of The Anno-Nicene Fathers, not just a little bit of this and a little bit of that and maybe this person's writing, but you're saying, like, get the whole thing getting immersed in that world and you've read them multiple times. It's interesting because we were looking at your shelf before we started recording and you're like, yeah, we had to like, rewrap these to hold them together because you can't even read the spines like falling apart, you know, and you have been with these texts quite a lot. Am I getting it correct? Do you think that has something to do with it? Like this reading the whole chunk instead of little pieces? Yeah. Is that what you're encouraging people to do? Well, if they have the time to do that, that's definitely, yeah, don't be very careful of, yeah, people are just giving you proof texts and yeah, smooth apologists who, you know, whatever. I mean, just ask yourself, when you read the New Testament just just read it without any, you don't have to read it as an Anno-Baptist. Just read it. Do you see infant baptism? Do you see the veneration of Mary in there? Do you see people praying to icons? Do you see Christians going to war? Do you see Christians you know, holding political office and you know, what do you see in the New Testament, you know? That's really, yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, you mentioned this a little earlier about some of the people in the Anno-Baptist world changing and going to Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican, what have you. And it seems like I've noticed that more in the last few years than before. I don't know if that could just be me, but I wonder if that's a bit of a trend and a little bit of an uptick. And I know you said, you know, hey, like let's keep things in proportion here. You know, we have a lot more going to evangelical American fundamentalist or whatever you want to call it. And I agree with you. I know a lot more that have gone that route. But I still wonder about that. Why do we have some of those people that are going to the Orthodox groups? Like, basically, what are they seeing there that they're not getting in their Anno-Baptist churches? Which is obviously very broad and we can never fully answer that. But I'd be really curious if you have input on that. Yeah, I don't know for each person what, you know, what all of their motivation is. You know, because I haven't talked to all of them. I mean, one person who, he was not Anno-Baptist but he was in some Kingdom circles was a convert, you know, from I don't know what his background was, but he went Roman Catholic and he emailed me, you know, and to just try to talk me into going Roman Catholic. But his argument with miracles, you know, that, you know, Roman Catholics have all of these miracles or acclaimed miracles. And of course at Pentecostals that's their, you know, acclaimed of fame. And that was one thing I know when the Orthodox people came and talked to me they always talked about all these miracles and this or that I, you know, I went to see some of the things they talked about that I certainly didn't see any miracle there, but whatever. It's a larger trend in society. So just like there's been a resurgence in the last 40, 50 years of Calvinism. I mean, it was kind of seemed to be dying out in the 60s and 70s. I mean, it was hard to find somebody who was a die-hard Calvinist in back in those days. I mean, there were obviously thousands around, but I mean, just in the circles I was in, you know, when I was evangelical and stuff, you didn't find too many five-point Calvinists, you know, and there's been this, you know, resurgence. Well, likewise there's been a lot more people who got interested in the Catholic and the Orthodox churches. So it's Protestants, if there's a few Anabaptists, that they're just part of a larger trend of Protestants who are get burned out on Protestantism and then, you know, look into Catholicism and or Orthodoxy. And ironically most of the time, the ones who are the great apologists, they have some very excellent apologists, both the Catholics and the Orthodox, they're nearly always converts, you know, which always find interesting. You mean converts to that particular Orthodoxy or whatever it is. Exactly. Nearly always their background is Protestant. Oh, it's interesting. Yeah, it's very interesting that how come your native-born people, you know, aren't the apologists because they're not, like even getting the Orthodox Study Bible, which was, you know, finally a good translation of the Septuagint into English, there were certainly a lot of, you know, native Orthodox behind that, but there were a lot of the converts that were, I know, had been pushing for this from the time they came into the Orthodox world, you know, we need the Septuagint translated into English. I mean, we read it in Greek in the church or whatever and in the Orthodox church, all these centuries never bothered to translate it into English, even though that is their Old Testament, never bothered, you know. Whoa. No, I did not realize that. Yeah, it's just... That seems a little bit odd. Yeah, it's just yeah, it's so these converts have, yeah, been very effective that way, but as I remind people for every Protestant who converts to Catholicism, there's probably 500 Catholics who become Protestants, you know, and the other way around. So again, keeping things in proportion it's not like, oh, everyone is like, yeah, this is the truth. Well, yeah, look how many people are flocking out of the Orthodox and the Catholic and all of that and going to, you know, Bible believing churches and that sort of thing. So yeah, we got to always keep the sense of proportion. But yeah, they make very grand claims of this is the church that's been here from the beginning. And obviously that's appealing that notion, you know, to people. And like I say, people get sometimes well, it can be a number of things that turned them off of conventional Protestantism. But of course the same with the Jehovah's Witnesses, I mean they've grown enormously and again, people from the Catholic, from the Protestants, from Orthodox convert to Jehovah's Witnesses. It proves nothing that people, you know, it proves maybe you're doing a good job of evangelism, of, you know, of proselytizing, but it doesn't it doesn't prove anything as to who has truth or doesn't have truth. And of course unfortunately nowadays, the biggest growing group are the the nuns, the nuns, you know, they don't belong to any religion. When they put in you know, in a survey what church you belong to, they click none, you know. And so that's probably the biggest obstacle facing all of Christianity today to all of the groups, you know, that Christianity, people are being attracted to the world and losing, losing faith not so much in the Anabaptist world thankfully. I mean we have some, but it's mainly out of the other churches, including from the Orthodox, the Catholic, the mainstream Protestants and that sort of thing. Yeah, I think that's good perspective. Yeah, so in some takeaways for this podcast, I feel like maybe some reading more of the Ananiasing Fathers wouldn't be a miss. I feel like it's a good encouragement for me to, hey, what does this stuff say? You know, and also too I'm just finding, you know, your story of joining the church as you leave Jehovah's Witnesses and things. You know, it was a bit circuitous at points, but you were like, you were trying, you were searching, you were you know, and you learned a lot along the way and you didn't give up on that and I think that's a really important lesson here. A lot of people give up on the church and just say, you know, forget it, it's not for me. Yeah, and you didn't do that, you know. Yeah. Yeah, it's and there's been disappointments and the grass can look green or other places, you know. But I'm glad because of growing up Jehovah's Witness I did understand non-resistance in the two kingdoms. They have the correct teaching on that so I knew that's what the Bible taught so that I'm glad I had that as sort of an anchor that, you know, it's so clearly in Jesus's teachings and that the sermon on the mount was a central teaching. Now Jehovah's Witnesses I would say do not live it as closely as the Anabaptist, but at least they preach it as something we should live by. And so I think that helped me a lot and so for an Anabaptist we maybe don't appreciate enough our own heritage or even know enough about it, you know. A lot of the things some of the criticisms have gotten on the early church, it's like the person doesn't even, it's like from a man and I, they don't even realize the early Anabaptists believe the same thing as the early church. You're criticizing, not just the early church, you're criticizing our forefathers because you've been so influenced by Protestants, you don't realize how much you have drifted from the Anabaptist realm. And I think that's one of the things that helped me and drew me to the Anabaptist world is I got acquainted with them first, not from meeting them, but from reading Menno Simons, from reading Michael Sadler, from reading Conrad Grebel and some of those people. I've read those writings before I ever met an Anabaptist in the flesh. So I knew what they had taught and I didn't even realize they had lost some of those teachings. So when I read that, I remember way back when I first had read the Antionizing Fathers, it was just like maybe six months later that I was reading all of the reformers, Luther Calvin, and then I was reading the Anabaptists, I realized, whoa bingo, Anabaptist, okay, this is really, man this really resonates with what the early Christians were saying. Again, a few theological differences, but this big emphasis on living the Christ life, that the reformers, particularly Luther, was not teaching and the ancient churches weren't teaching. But maybe it's enriched my life that there wasn't just a beeline from there to the Anabaptists, but at that time there were no conservative Anabaptists in Texas at that time, or they were just being started, I didn't know about them, I wasn't able to find any. So, yeah, that made the journey a lot longer because of that. And you learned a lot of lessons and you've written a lot of that stuff down and you've made it available to others and I think that's significant, that's important. Again, I think it is really key that you didn't give up on the church through all this. There's a lot of people who do that. So, maybe this is just to put that out as an encouragement for people who are out there, because I guess what I'm saying is we get a lot of comments on our YouTube channel and emails and comments, things, people saying I'm trying to find a church and I'm still figuring this thing out and I think what you're sharing here is an encouragement to those people that don't give up, you know, you keep searching and don't give up on the church. Yeah, don't give up on God and don't give up on the church. I mean, the Anabaptist, we've never claimed we're the only church. We are the church. But I would encourage an Anabaptist don't give up on the Anabaptist. There are fortunately various choices. So, you might be in a group that you feel like you're not going anywhere spiritually there but there are other types of Anabaptist. I've liked that there is that variety. It is bless me, you know, because I know some groups I probably wouldn't fit in very well and then others, you know, I'm at a place now where, you know, fit in very well, you know. I'd also say if you're an Anabaptist and you're thinking about going to the Orthodox or the Catholics or something like that contact Scroll Publishing. I would be very willing to just personally talk to you if you're thinking of that. I'm not going to criticize you for thinking. I like people who think and explore. So, yeah, I don't think I'm going to like, oh, jump all over you like, how can you think of such a horrible thing? You know, I understand. I went down a similar journey so I'm very sympathetic. But yeah, let's talk because there's a lot of things that you probably aren't aware of that, you know, you're seeing certain proof texts and you're not seeing the whole picture. Yeah, that's great. We'll link Scroll Publishing down below. And maybe some of these other things you've referenced to the series on infant baptism and some of this stuff. I think that is really important. I don't know if you're very curious to look at the comments on this video. I'll be curious what people think. I'm sure there'll be some interesting feedback. But yeah, in the end don't give up on Jesus. Don't give up on God's people and keep trying. I guess is the word or like, yeah, you didn't give up and that's commendable and that's worth remembering. Amen. Wow. Thank you so much for sharing, David. Pleasure to have you on the podcast. Thank you, Reagan. Thanks for listening to this interview with David Burso. If you found this interesting, we interviewed him several times in the past and you can find those linked in the description below. We love to hear from our listeners. So if you have any feedback or suggestions for future topics, be sure to send us an email or leave us a comment down below. As always, you can find all our content over on our website at anabaptistperspectives.org and we'll catch you in the next episode.