Amen. Well, it is our privilege to host everyone this week. So thank you so much for coming and I'm definitely not going to be giving a sermon here today. In fact, not even exposition of scripture per se. I'm going to depend a lot on what I assume my audience already knows and look forward to a good discussion. In fact, I'm going to try to move through my presentation fairly quickly in more of a suggestive manner and get into some discussion which I hope will be helpful both for you but also for me in learning, thinking through these issues as a pastor engaged in pastoral ministry, trying to be faithful to the Lord and glorify Christ. In fact, I appreciated that a time of worship to enter into this, to turn my heart in the right direction, even as we consider these issues today. We started yesterday. Kevin kind of laid the foundation of what we're discussing here with scripture. Ryan worked this out in relationship to our inner man. David put this into the context of our preaching ministries. And I want to broaden this out to consider what I believe is a crucial context for conservative faithfulness going forward. in our day and age. And perhaps you notice the title of my little presentation here, Neo-Babylonian Captivity? Conservatism that sets the church free to serve in our secular future. I want to consider briefly just the context in which we serve today and how that highlights, I believe, certain very practical actions that we can take as pastors and church leaders which I think are going to be crucial in fostering the context in which conservative ideals, ideas, can be heard and understood, rather than just being an abstract sort of thing out there, and maybe even a foreign thing to people. So, I want to move briefly here today, or quickly here today, to do this. I want to start talking about just the liberal narrative in which we live, and we're feeling increasingly today the illiberal nature of the liberal society in which we live. No doubt, I mean, you can just any given week pick out examples, and what is it this last week you think of Massachusetts? I heard they are enacting an ordinance where you're not to refer to, where you are supposed to refer to a transgender person according to the pronoun by which they want to identify. So, in other words, if a church were to say to a transgendered man, he, rather than she, as he identifies, then that would be considered wrong. You've heard about, of course, the NCAA pulling some of their basketball tournament from North Carolina because of their so-called bathroom bill. You maybe heard of just this last week up at West Point where the football team engaged in a prayer in the locker room afterwards. And a video of that went out and sent the officials there backpedaling and editing the video to make sure that We aren't offending anybody by doing this sort of a thing, and so on and so forth. We can multiply examples endlessly. We all feel that. We all recognize this, especially pastors here. You recognize this is the context in which we're living. We're ministering, and we want to be faithful in this. So what are we going to do about it? Well, I want to stop and think about it a little bit. evaluate it just briefly here to help us understand even ourselves and the way we think. And I say we, I'm probably primarily thinking here of American context just because that's what I know and live in. But I hope it'll be helpful for us in this. Liberalism in the modern West. can be identified by its refusal to say what the chief end of man might be. That's one of its key characteristics. It refuses to say what the chief end of man might be. Now, the goal of this is to leave every man free to choose his own ends. And the ostensible reason for that is to promote peace and prosperity. Since, as we look back in history, according to this view, we would say that answering ultimate questions on a political level leads to coercion and conflict, we have to leave these questions to individuals. That, of course, raises the question, then, how can human society stick together if you don't answer any of these questions in the public sphere, if you just leave them all up to the individual to answer? what actually makes us cohere. The older answer, of course, in the West, in medieval Christendom, was our religious beliefs hold us together. That was even taken up in the Reformation, at least to the extent that in many places, the settlement kind of came out. The religion of the prince is the religion of the people. This region, we have this religion, and that's what holds us together. Liberalism came along saying, no, we don't have to do that. The answer given by liberalism was the will of the people. The will of the people is what makes us cohere. And of course, this is famously theorized as a social compact. The social compact theory of human society. According to this conception, the individuals first exist in a state of nature where they are totally free to do as they wish. And that is their freedom to be able to do as they want. However, there are certain advantages that we all recognize to joining with other people to do things. And so in order to form a society by which we get some of the benefits of this, we agreed to voluntarily surrender some of our freedom in order to work with other people. And then we have a society in which we work. We gain those benefits in that way. And that means, as we play this out to the state level, that that means that the authority of the state is, in an ideal world, simply the will of the people reflected back to themselves. That's what the authority of the state consists in. It's because the state is doing what we want the state to do. And so as it enforces things and uses its authority, it's simply telling us what we already want to do or have chosen voluntarily to agree to, and therefore we get along. And that's how we work in our Western civilization. Now, in such a social compact, the job of the state is to protect the rights of its individual citizens. These rights do not entail responsible relationships with others per se as intrinsic to their rights, but they're primarily conceived of as exemption from coercion. You can't make me do it, to put it in more colloquial words. Exemption – that's what Mr. Gates' job is, to protect me from other people coercing me in any way that I don't want them to. The limiting factor for the exercise of individual rights is often taken to be the utilitarian harm principle. You can do whatever you want as long as it doesn't hurt somebody else. Okay? And then we'll all agree on that standard and we go forward there. Now, I've described this all too briefly here, but when these operative assumptions are in play, an intriguing situation develops. And by the way, I should maybe pause here to say, and many of you know this, I'm sure, as you study history, there were many powerful reasons why these kinds of ideas came to the fore. It wasn't like society was perfect before and then now this is all just this story of everything going wrong. There were a lot of challenges they were facing back then, just like we do now. But we're paying attention to where we're at today in history. When these operative assumptions are in play, this kind of a situation develops. No comprehensive public good is set forward or acknowledged. We can't do that. No comprehensive public good. This is the chief end of man that we all agree to, or are all involved in. We don't set that forward. We can't make that judgment on that level. But that leaves the political order, formally conceived as managing the power relations between private interests, as the only publicly acknowledged overarching context in which we live, move, and have our being. The church, for example, certainly cannot represent a comprehensive public good because it's only one choice out of many that free citizens may make. They may or may not choose this. The state, on the other hand, is the one thing you cannot opt out of without being a very bad person, of course. It's simply a given. And in this kind of a scenario, liberalism pretends to be neutral regarding ultimate commitments and ultimate reality. But as I think we know, that's never really possible in the real world. Jay Budziszewski has said, has kind of organized it this way, saying, all states will be confessional states of one of four types. All states will be confessional states of one of four types. One, the convictional basis of the state is neither declared nor coerced. So it's there, but it's not very well promulgated, and people aren't really held to it, he actually says, it's kind of hard to see if that kind of a state has ever really existed. Two, the convictional basis of the state is declared, but not coerced. Three, the convictional basis of the state is coerced, but not declared. And then four, the convictional basis of the state is both declared and coerced. And of course we tend to think of obvious examples of that last one, like say Mao in China or something like this. This is what you will believe and this is what we are going to enforce and everybody must obey this. Bujazewski himself believes that modern liberalism attempts to live by number three that we've just mentioned here. It attempts to live by the convictional basis of the state is coerced but not declared. We just won't say. We won't have to argue for it. We just start to put this into practice as what you have to live by. By claiming that the state does not have to answer any ultimate questions, and by denying that there is any ultimate order of truth to which it must conform, and by denying that it has anything to do with worship, the modern liberal state covertly makes itself the ultimate arbiter of truth. Its structures become the structures of meaning for society. It becomes the determiner of what peace is, and of what freedom is. And in the name of defending our rights as individuals, the modern liberal state becomes our savior. So the liberal state, by its own internal logic, treats religion, as it would use that category, religion, as instrumental to its own overarching purposes. Religion becomes an instrument that it's fine with, as long as it serves the overarching purposes. And by the way, this was brought home to me, living and ministering in this context here in Colorado Springs, one occasion with particular clarity. Several years ago, I was attending a conference hosted at First Nazarene Church down in the South End. not put on by the church, but they were providing their facilities there. And it was for military families and military people. And one of the main speakers they invited was a colonel from the Air Force who came. And in his remarks, he made clear what I had seen in practice, many cases of working with various military families, that The United States military is great with people being Christians, because you help our people be better soldiers. That's the point. And as long as you do that, we really want you helping out. That was about the time of the surge in Iraq, and there was a really heavy deployment schedule, and lots of guys going all the time, and families are getting left a lot. Well, we need support networks back home. We need churches doing these kinds of things. Hey, we want you in this. Now, don't criticize what we're doing, because then you're starting to step out of your place. Your place is to support what we're doing. You're an instrument for our larger purposes. That's really the way the liberal state treats religion, and it's perfectly happy to have people be religious on a private level. Do that all you want. If it makes you better people, great. We like that. In a liberal state, the church must be treated as private. It's not a public good. The civil religion, then, of the state dominates all other religions by sublimating them into itself. I think modern liberalism rolls downhill by its own nature to totalitarianism. Now, why do I take time to set this up here today? I believe that in Western society, in the pursuit of a merely formal or negative freedom, that is, purely freedom from, defining freedom entirely in terms of, don't fence me in. That's freedom. Don't tell me what to do. That's freedom. I believe that the Church has often been taken captive, and I believe that the Church can reclaim her freedom only by being all that Christ has called her to be. And I think conservative ideals will help the Church to operate in the freedom with which Christ has set her free, no matter what the state says, rather than being conformed to and ultimately controlled by any human polity. So if you look at liberalism from the perspective of every man being free to choose his own ends, then there has been a strong streak of liberalism in the entire history of American Christianity, including those with what we might call doctrinally conservative belief systems or doctrinal statements. Whether it stems from, and we could talk about this all day long, whether it stems from something like Bacon's conception of knowledge, or Roger Williams' conception of conscience, or Locke's conception of politics, or however we want to break that down, we have long put individual choice in the place the church used to hold in terms of man's relationship with God. Just to give you an example here, in his letter concerning toleration, John Locke wrote, a church then I take to be a voluntary society of men joining themselves together of their own accord in order to the public worshiping of God in such a manner as they judge acceptable to Him and effectual to the salvation of their souls. Of course, I'm going back here to the progenitors of the modern liberal order and looking at John Locke, and they certainly weren't saying, let's get God out of the system here. But it's interesting where they see the source of things coming from and how he defines a church. A church is a voluntary society of men. joining themselves together of their own accord to worship God as they see fit. And although this is now, today, in our day, a common way of understanding the Church, I don't believe it is the biblical or the historical Christian perspective of the Church. God is the one who makes the Church. God's presence makes us His people. The presence of Jesus, based on His work, constitutes the Church as His temple. In union with Christ, by the power of the Spirit, the Church becomes what it is. Just again, to pull an example, this is writing from a confessional Lutheran perspective. Kurt Marquardt writes, the modern notion of the church as a club, or as a federation of such clubs, formed by the banding together of like-minded individuals, is a caricature. I think he's got a good description there, a caricature. It retains some aspects of the truth, but exaggerates others. The church is created from above, he goes on, by her head, not from below, by her membership. The church is the mother that begets and bears every Christian through the word of God. So when the idea of the church as a voluntary society was wed in America with a pietistic or revivalistic understanding of conversion, then the church became, in principle, unnecessary to participation with God. I can have a personal relationship with God, whether the church exists or not, whether I'm a part of a church or not. I have this, that's totally outside of this. So I believe, without going into all the historical details, I believe that historian George Marsden was precisely correct when he observed that by the time of the 20th century in America, the institutional church often had little standing except as a convenient, pragmatic device to facilitate God's work in the individual and in the nation. That's exactly the liberal order of things. The state and the individual, all mediating institutions, sometimes they're called, are absorbed into that, dissolved into that dichotomy. The church was in large measure captive to liberalism. And by that, of course, I hope as you're tracking with me here, I'm not talking about theological liberalism per se. I'm talking about Western civilization. All right. I'm going to give you a chance to ask questions, and I was mentioning earlier, if you don't ask questions when I get done, I'm going to ask you questions, because we've got some good discussion to do on these things. But I want to move on then. If that's the context in which we live, and we need to understand some of that context in order to understand ourselves and how to minister well, I want to turn now to God's order of love. What should we do in this kind of a context? And I believe it is not wise to try to pull liberalism back from its illiberal present to its liberal past. And I actually believe that's what many Christians in America want to try to do. Let's just re-champion some of the things of the past, like say, individual liberty. I would actually suggest that those are not sufficient. What I think we need to do is form real communities where the love of God is actively guiding and shaping our lives in Christ-centered ways. So I'd like to suggest some strategic practices which I think set the context for our discipling people in conservatism, really. And these, I think, are more foundational than any political action in our current society. I do believe that politics are downstream of culture, that what the church does is crucial to being salt and light. I think this is first and foremost what we need to be concerned about. I believe also that these practices will be much more formative than merely theological or philosophical arguments for conservatism. in terms of on the ground, in the pew, in our churches. Sometimes amongst a group like ourselves, some of you I know, you study deeply, and you think, and you read philosophers, and you read theologians, and make good arguments. And these are crucial for understanding conservatism. But as David and I were just talking about back last night over supper a little bit, As pastors, we know church folks don't sit around doing this all day, do they? They have lives to live, and they've got busy schedules to keep, and they're trying to work on all these things, and they haven't sat there thinking about all these kinds of things going on. What can we do to serve them well? I think what we need to do is set a life context in which conservative arguments can be heard and actually understood. You see, they set the context of Christ-like love in the body of Christ that is so crucial moving forward. So here's some suggestions, just practical, everyday suggestions I think that are important. for us to practice in churches. If you're a pastor, you can think about how these might work out in your pastoral ministry as a church member. Just understanding how this might work out in our relationships with one another as fellow members of the body of Christ. First suggestion I want to make is that we teach and practice church membership as intrinsic to a personal relationship with Jesus. that we teach and practice church membership as intrinsic to a personal relationship with Jesus. We're very familiar, Evangelicals in America, with that language, personal relationship with Jesus, right? I mean, that's our bread and butter. That's what we talk about all the time, personal relationship with Jesus. And we need to help people understand that the church is intrinsic to a personal relationship with Jesus. Your relationship with Jesus is certainly personal, but it is not private. You cannot have Christ without having his church. And by the way, just as a little aside, this actually answers a need that sociologists have long identified within modern liberal states, which is a lack of community. Robert Nisbet, back in the 50s, was talking about this. Robert Bella in the 60s brought out how this atomization of society feeds into a civil religion. That was his terminology, all the way up to recent Robert Putnam and American Grace. Perhaps some of you are familiar with his book there. Church membership is analogous to marriage, for marriage was designed by God to manifest the mystery of Christ and his church. Marriage is a very personal relationship, is it not? I mean, it's hard to imagine a more personal relationship, but it's not private. In other words, I don't get to, by my own will, just decide what makes marriage and what doesn't, and who has to recognize the marriage and who doesn't, right? This is a public issue that involves more than just my personal will. It's very personal, but it's not private. So it is with our life with Christ. It is personal, but it's not private. Church membership is intrinsic to it. That's the first suggestion. Second suggestion. This one might be a little bit more controversial, but I think in some ways it's just a practical outworking of the first one. Do not publicly acknowledge any unbaptized person as a Christian. Do not publicly acknowledge any unbaptized person as a Christian. If you're not baptized biblically, I would argue, and we can get into discussing this later, you are not known to be a follower of Jesus Christ. This is how scripturally you become known to be a follower of Christ. How you are identified with Him, how you are baptized into His name is the scriptural terminology, and that's what that term Christian is. It's His name being applied to you. You are identified as one of His, belonging to Him. And what is the public right or ritual that God has given to us by which to do that? It's baptism. That is the entry right into the body of Christ, the church. Now, that forces a somewhat jarring shift for many American believers, because it removes praying the sinner's prayer as the sacrament of initiation into the body of Christ, and puts baptism in that spot. And I use that language on purpose because many American evangelicals, who are even sometimes loudly anti-sacramental, intriguingly, actually think of the Lord's, the sinner's prayer, not the Lord's prayer, as a sacrament that puts you into the body of Christ. But I don't think this is a good biblical way of conceiving it, and I think it actually is detrimental to our making disciples in this day and age especially. That means, of course, just following on from that, that only baptized believers ought to partake of the Lord's Supper. Those who are not baptized ought not to partake of the Supper. Why? Because that's the ongoing rite of fellowship, participation in the body of Christ. But by the way, notice what this does, what I've just suggested here, what this does. It removes Christianity from being merely a private thing in your heart and makes it, by its very nature, a comprehensive relationship involving the whole person, body and soul, in all of his relationships. It's no longer a privatized religion. It's now a very public one. And that is indeed, I think, what Christ calls for when he calls us to come and follow him. Pardon me. Christ is not just Lord in your heart, if by that you mean some privatized little sphere of life. You can't have that and follow Christ. There's an internal contradiction there. Again, we won't take time to go into this, but you see even John in his gospel bring out the tensions of those who believed in Jesus, say like at the end of chapter John 11, but then wouldn't follow him. They were afraid. They couldn't make that step. They're left in this weird liminal state. The text almost makes you ask, so what about them? Well, and the whole thrust, of course, of the gospel is to say, pull you out of that state. Believe. Follow Christ. Don't say you believe in him, but then not follow him. How does that work? That's impossible. All right. How do we get at that? Well, if you don't publicly acknowledge any unbaptized person as a Christian, you're forcing this issue. It's going to come out. You're going to have to interact about it. You're going to have to talk about it. You're going to have to teach, in many cases, reconceive of what this means to be a follower of Jesus Christ. Another suggestion here. I'm pushing hard to limit my time so we can make sure to have interaction here. worked very hard for unity amongst churches. I believe that atomized Christianity is very easily dissolved into the larger narrative of liberalism. And this is what has happened to us. We could cite numerous sources, but let me just pull one here. This is from Edmund Clowney, deceased now, Presbyterian theologian. the evangelical world, institutionalized primarily in a vast number of parachurch agencies, left church unity to the ecumenical movement. That was his observation. And I think he's right on that. That's basically, in America, the only way we know how to do unity, practically speaking in the public realm, is through parachurch kind of organizations. That's just, that's how we've done it. And this isn't just a 20th century phenomenon. We've tended to do this since the founding of our nation. I would challenge us to work and pray toward a word and table kind of unity, not merely a pragmatic unity of lowest common denominator things like prayer meetings and rallies and T4G or you name these things. I see many of these movements, as well-intentioned as they are, as basically keeping the status quo. They're doing what we've always done as Americans. And I would ask us just to at least consider the situation of if what we've been doing has been digging our hole deeper, maybe we should stop and say, doubling down on what we've been doing is not the smartest thing to do. Not that all of it's wrong, or not that all of it's bad, and not that God won't work through things, and not that Christ won't build His church. He certainly will. But I think we need to work for the full dimensions of what Christ calls us to, and this is going to be challenging. You say, yeah, it's easy to suggest. Now how do you do it, right? There's no quick fix silver bullet. Let's just do this and this will fix it all. However, I guess I'm suggesting today that even by some of these things we just talked about right here on a personal level in our local churches, we start doing these kinds of things, we will start to learn more, I believe, of the love that God wants us to have for one another as believers. We talk a lot about love today, but again, our love is almost always premised on an underlying assumption of, if it suits me. Whether it's on a personal relationship in terms of a church member to the church members of which they are a body. You know, I love you and we'll do fun things together. But when we run into a hard situation together, it's really easy for me just to walk out the door. I have no obligations of love to my fellow believers. And I can walk to another church and they won't ask any questions and life will go on and I'll love them too, right? And I'll love everybody. premised on unstated assumption, as long as it suits me. Again, going back to that liberal assumption, my will is what makes things what they are. And we're learning a whole new order of love, God's order of love, that's a given in his creation, in his plan of redemption. Again, the same debate is played out in the whole homosexual marriage issue in our society. Is there a real given order of love prior to our wills to which we must conform in order to be free? I believe there is. And I believe that's what we need to see and strive for and begin to live out as our churches so that the world around us can see it, rather than being sublimated into the liberal mindset of, and even beginning to present the gospel in those terms. It's just a personal decision for Jesus. And once you've done that, you're good to go. You know, I mean, you have a personal relationship with Jesus, right? You prayed something, and it's totally disconnected from the order of love that God builds in. Therefore, we don't really know love. We're kind of like juveniles trying to figure out how to get along because we don't know how to love each other very well. We've never had to practice hard. But God calls us to that in life in the church, doesn't he? He calls us to have to learn how to love. Learn when it means self-sacrifice. Learn when it means to be like Christ, like laying down our lives for other people. Learn to do that when they don't return the love. But this is the calling. This is God's design. This is God's plan, His church. And I believe it's a wonderful opportunity, really, if we will commit ourselves to it, trusting in Christ, that we really can love by His Spirit shedding His love abroad in our hearts, producing that fruit in us, we really can love like He's called us to love, and that that can transform this whole illiberal, liberal order we live in into something much more like what God has designed His world to be. We will be the salt and the light that we were designed to be then. All right? I'm stopping there because I want to discuss some of these things with you. First of all, I'll just open up for questions. I covered a lot of territory there, I know, in a surface fashion. It didn't even take time to go to the scripture and dig up all the proofs for these kinds of things. So if you think maybe something I've said isn't scriptural, feel free to bring that up and we can talk about it here. But questions you have first, and then I'd like to ask questions of you too. Yes. Yes, great question. Because that's where the rubber meets the road so often, even just in witnessing to people. Good, as I've wrestled with these things, it has impacted the way I talk to people about Christ. Of course, the conversation can go in different ways at different times. But, key thing for me, and I'm just sharing what I've tried to learn, and others can chip in here as well, I present the claims of Christ, the truth of Christ, who we are, who He is, all that, why we should trust Him, but I never leave it at, pray, pray, do that. I leave it at, trust Jesus Christ, and how's that gonna manifest itself when you trust Him? you are going to call upon his name. You are going to commit yourself to him in that way, depend upon him. That's what prayer is, is the chief exercise of faith. But it's also going to show as you then confess him before others. And God has given us a way to do that, and that's baptism. God didn't just leave us at random to say, here's how you go about believing in me. laid it out here. And I think that's important even to coming back to the gospel because that is great commission. I mean, Jesus said, go make disciples, baptizing them and teaching them. You can't leave that out and still be doing the great commission. And again, so much in our mentality is we're doing the great commission if we're our terminology is usually evangelizing. That means preaching the gospel. Fair enough, and good for that. But it's got to lead to baptizing, otherwise you're not fulfilling the Great Commission. And I think we need to make sure we keep those things together and not separate what God has made to go together there. So it is a way of talking to people that does change. Yeah. Chris. that church membership is also intended to represent. That it's not individual, it's a person, it's a Christian. And I would agree. I think that's good. Chris, back here. You had a... Okay. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, a more realistic example would be, say, you know, a kid goes to a camp up here in the mountains, prays, and they say, okay, boom, we'll baptize him right there. Does he do that? An even more challenging example that I've wrestled with in our context was actually discussing this with Dale Getz when he was deployed in Afghanistan. What's the role of a chaplain? How does that work when you're out there in Afghanistan witnessing to soldiers and you know, you want to tell them to follow Christ, well, how does this work? So there's definitely lots of practical challenges, but I think what you're getting at with your question is, does it need to be a function of the church and not just an individual? Is that what you're getting at? Yeah, great question. Here's just some of my thinking on that. And again, others, feel free to chime in as you have wisdom on this. Yes, I don't think individuals ought to think of themselves as agents outside of the church, and even within the church structures that God provides. So I say it this way. Someone who baptizes ought to be recognized as an agent of the church. And they're not just acting on their own initiative, that this is the church's function. Therefore, I think it is wise to have, say, pastors baptized. They're recognized function, you know, they're functioning on behalf of the church. They're representing the church in what they do. It's not just, hey, I decided, you know, I witnessed this guy and he prayed, so I walk out to the floodway here and we baptize him real fast. That would be an individual operating on his own agency, rather than being recognized as... And that works for both the church and the individual being baptized. The church needs to recognize that this is... legitimate baptism, the person being baptized needs to recognize that as well. This is God's authorized agent, the church, applying his baptism to this person. It's not just any old guy, grandpa in the backyard pool, doing it now. Because grandpa, as grandpa, isn't an authorized agent of the church, so to speak, or of God in that sense. A lot you can get into there, but that's some of my thinking on it. David. Yes, I think you're articulating a challenge I wrestle with a lot, and I'm sure others do as well. Just again, sharing thoughts as I've wrestled with it. I do think that manifesting the love of Christ, which is crucial to true culture, really, has got to start where we're at. And that's really where we're primarily responsible for. Here's kind of a funny example, but maybe it plays out into what you're talking about. Sometimes people might ask me, as a pastor, hey, what do you think about John Piper? And you can understand why they might ask that. They might want to know if I identify with his theology or something along those lines. But I've never yet had anybody ask me, hey, what do you think of Todd Hilkeman, who's the pastor of the CRC Church right down the road here? And you know what? There's a real sense in which How I relate to Him, who's an actual person that I see and I do run into and I talk with, as opposed to somebody I've never seen in my life and really don't know at all. I mean, I've read a few books or whatever. How I relate to this person is actually much more revealing of my life with Christ than what I think about some celebrity preacher kind of a thing. But we tend to organize our mental maps even in liberalism according to those kinds of things. And I would emphasize local relationships. but more of a network of love that spreads out. And I hope you all understand here, and I think you, I'm assuming this, you all understand when I say a network of love, and I use that term love, I'm not talking even so much about the squishy sentimentalism that so often goes for love. We're talking about loving indeed in truth, as 1 John tells us, and as is revealed in Christ. So it takes into itself even the hard things of, I have doctrinal disagreements. with that brother down the road. And I take him as a brother. And I even think his denomination has some serious problems in it and things like that. But I can't opt out according to God's word. I can't just say, sorry, I don't want to have a relationship with you because you're different than me. And so therefore, You know, you stay on your side of the road, I'll stay on mine and we'll all be happy here. I have to learn to love and I think actually that opens up knowledge and opens up opportunities for growth that begin to transcend our individual islands. in good ways and not just in sloppy ways. Let's all just pretend to get along here kind of a thing. To me, those are much more weighty, at least in my life, than say national or international organizations. Not that those things don't have their place, but that's a starting point for me. I say, Lord, help me to start where I'm at and do what I can in obedience to your word. The network of love. There you go. I like it. Good point. Todd. Yes. Right. It reminds us of where we are in terms of not individual heads floating around. I am a member to something, and wow, it's significant. Changing that, especially in a local area where I can drive by myself, is significant. I don't know if you were thinking of that as kind of the themes or perspective of, you know, we all come to do things with faith in that, or was there anything specific in terms of, I agree with you that some of the, some of our efforts in terms of being careful that pleading are perhaps not, they don't stick, or they're not perhaps useful. Great question and you may have even better ideas than I on that too. My concern in bringing that up would be say like sometimes I don't want to treat as insignificant say even expressions of friendship between churches or those are good. I mean you get together and play basketball with somebody and that's a good thing you know. However, Just to think of it in terms of Christian fellowship, I can get together with any unbeliever and play basketball. You know, there's no necessary Christian connection going on there other than the fact that, you know, if it's believers and we have that in Christ. On the other hand, you start dealing with issues of word and table, as I put it, you're dealing with issues of necessary Christian connection that by their very nature can't be avoided. And they're going to bring up doctrinal issues, and they're going to bring up all kinds of things that separate us sometimes. And that's good. I say that's good because I don't think we should be content with the pluralistic way of the church. Although we might recognize in humility this is our situation, I don't think we need to capitulate to it as if That's the final word. I think God calls us to work hard on these kinds of things and Ephesians 4 is a good passage to bring up in that regard. So if I can't have word and table fellowship with somebody that I take as a brother, we ought to recognize there's an internal contradiction there. There's something not right about that. Because those are the very foundational expressions of accepting somebody as a brother, you know, in the church. So, for instance, and this is why these things are significant and serious and why we have to work on them. If I say to, you know, a Presbyterian brother, I can't come to the table, the Lord's table, together with you, Symbolically, I'm saying we're not in fellowship in Christ together. And I know that, but I also recognize there's no easy fix to that. So God needs to do a work and we need to learn more. Again, not the squishy, hey, let's just all get along and just overlook differences. I think that leads to nothing but pragmatism. But may God bring out more light. here, we need to learn and grow, because we're not able to do what we should. There's an internal contradiction in our own beliefs, and we want God to resolve that in a way that glorifies Him, that's true to His Word, and we want to work forward on that. That's why things like baptism and the Lord's Supper are so central, and I think we need to hold them up and teach people that they're central. And the more we teach people they're central, the more we're going exacerbate those kinds of tensions. But maybe that's good for us, because it will force us to work on some of those things together. Other thoughts, questions? Still got a few minutes. Yes, sir? Right. Right. That's why I'm saying we have an internal contradiction. Because if we... Right. So that's... If you say they're not a believer, then you don't have a contradiction. Right. Yes. Right. So I guess I'm putting out there something is going to have to learn and grow better than what we've got right now. And maybe that's just me. Maybe I don't get it well enough. But I think we haven't, like say a Baptist and a Lutheran. And they can recognize one another as believers in Christ, that you trust in Jesus and you trust in Jesus. But our respective theologies of baptism don't say that. And so we have a tension there, which I'm not able to resolve at this time. Unless I was willing to say to somebody like, you know, like a pedo-baptist, no, you're not, I can't recognize you as a Christian. If I was willing to say that, then I wouldn't have attention. Okay, I see what you're saying, yeah. So basically you're saying, be consistent and say, I really can't recognize them as fellow Christians. I guess that's the question I'm feeling like you're saying. And the other thing I guess is just sort of from listening to you, there's like five studies that seem to be in the same category. But when we say it's the body of Christ, I think you may be able to, you know, you could Right. Great point. Yeah, I can touch on that and obviously it's going to get into the whole doctrine of ecclesiology here a lot. But this is one of the errors I think we're prone to that I'm trying to be careful not to fall into is totally divorcing the universal church from the local church, as if you've got two churches, two different entities. That was actually what Roman Catholics like Bellarmine accused Protestants of doing at the time of the Reformation. And Protestants, of course, repined it. No, we're not doing that. But I think later Protestants have actually done that in some ways in our thinking. We've divorced the two as if they're not really related to one another. So I'm trying to avoid that problem and not end up with two churches. There is one that's manifested in local assemblies. And so maybe that's leading to some unclear statements on my part. But I see the participation in the local assembly as the participation in the whole body of Christ. And so what's manifested in each local assembly is the body of Christ at that place in that time. And so I don't know if I'm answering your question adequately. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Well, here's how I would explain it biblically. If I was to go through the book of Acts, I see baptism as the capstone of conversion. And that in all ordinary circumstances, someone who has not been baptized is not counted as converted at that point. Yes. Right. We're not setting ourselves up as God at the final judgment and saying, and I think that is important. Yeah, yeah. It's definitely a challenging pastoral issue in working with people. Because I, for one, don't want to make baptism optional in any way. I don't want to make it optional. I don't want people to trust in it either. We're trusting in Christ. But it's precisely because we trust in Christ that we show that in the way that He has set up that we do that. So that if we don't, we are bringing into question whether we really do believe Him. in all ordinary circumstances. You know, the thief on the cross and all that kind of a thing. But in all ordinary circumstances, that's how He's designed it to be manifested, just like the local body is the manifestation of the universal body. Anyway, yeah, great point. A couple other questions, then we're going to have to wrap up here. We could describe it that way. I think that still doesn't get around some of the very tensions we're wrestling with here. So I recognize it personally, but my church doesn't. What does that mean exactly? So we're still wrestling with that same kind of tension. Let me just pick up one more question here. Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah. Right, you got the whole spectrum. So good point. I think there's definitely, at least if nothing else, a level of appreciation for that and benefit to all of us when they're discipling people to say church membership matters. Again, beyond that, we start getting into all these issues we're just discussing here. So good. Keep the discussion going here, but let me just wrap up by kind of refocusing on what really is the big picture here, although it brings up all these subsidiary points, is my point is to say that if we want conservative ideals to flourish, to be understood even implicitly in people's hearts, we need to be building communities of love, God's love, in our churches that are true commitments to one another, that are not just Jesus privatized in my heart. If you've got that scenario, I would suggest that conservative ideas and arguments are going to have a very hard time getting through. when you've got somebody in a real body of love and a body of the church and working through these things together with other believers, you've got a much more fertile soil. for even beginning to understand some of these things and live them out, even if they've philosophically thought through all the issues or not. That's really the big point I'm trying to drive at here today, so I hope that's helpful. Again, thank you so much for the feedback, interaction, and I can learn some more here as we go forward.