Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
The word evangelical is a difficult one to define for many people today. And I see you. If this is you out there, I get it. This word has more negative associations than positive. In this video, we'll try to be honest about the pathologies and besetting sins of evangelicalism, or at least what often goes by that term. But what I have in mind by evangelicalism is a global transdenominational movement within Protestant Christianity that emphasizes biblical authority, personal conversion and the gospel message itself. Of course, there's a lot more to say about unpacking that definition, but I'm just trying to be clear here. I'm not thinking of American non denominationalism as such. Republican politics, the latest manifestations of evangelical celebrity culture. There's lots of things that our minds conjure up. I want us to think globally and historically here. What I feel called to give my life to is to try to serve this movement as best as I am able. Basically, it's what I want to spend my life on. This is why I do apologetics and theological triage and theological retrieval and I talk about revival and things like this because I want to serve evangelicalism. For those of you out there who want, who value evangelicalism like me, let me unpack five proposals here that maybe are ways to move us forward. This is not an exhaustive list, just some ideas to get us started. Just to hope this could serve pastors and others thinking about these things. I know a lot of you value this, as I do. Number one, recover confidence in the gospel. Number two, lean into depth. Number three, overhaul pastoral culture. Number four, focus on community formation. And number five, build cross denominational partnerships. Let's work through each of these. Of course, there's so much more we can say. And I'll have an action point on each of these. An action point for Christians and an action point for pastors as well. For each of these five points, try to make this practical. By the way, at the end of this video, I'll do a personal update. This is my first real video after a vacation. I did a short one earlier and so I want to tell you about the novel. I've been writing to tell you about the next videos coming out. And then I'll address what happened to the beard. The comments of my last video made me laugh so hard. Thank you for that. I read them over our family meal to my kids and we were laughing at some of them. You guys are hilarious. That true entertainment value in reading the comments sometimes. But let's talk through these and then we'll get to the fun stuff at the end. Number one, recover confidence in the gospel. That word confidence is important to me. It's one thing to affirm the gospel, but it's another thing to keep returning to it over the years as our functional and emotional center, center of gravity. The gospel cannot be simply assumed. We never want it to fall into background noise. It needs to be continually explored and then applied to current ailments. This should be our rallying point. Even lesser goals, like the renewal of Western civilization, are not the ultimate interest of the gospel. The gospel is about eternity, and the gospel is about God. Knowing God, this is the most exciting message you could possibly imagine, because every human heart is aching for God and Jesus through his life, death, resurrection, has made it possible for any human being to know God. That is the message we want to keep coming back to. I'm preaching to my own heart on all these points because I just got back from vacation and I had a lot of time to reflect upon what I want my ministry to be about and the times where you're plotting faithfully, where it's not necessarily always as exciting, but you want to be faithful. And I was thinking, I gotta keep coming back to this myself. Why am I doing Truth Unites? And I want to keep coming back to this over my vacation. I was reading this book, Strange Rights by Tara Burton. Fascinating book. And it's analyzing current culture in the west. And she's showing that we're really not getting more secular, really. Religion is changing, but we're still very religious. And she's analyzing everything from techno utopianism to political identities on both right and left, to wellness spirituality, to some unsavory things popping up. Witchcraft, satanism, polyamorous, sexual communities, things like this. And just really insightfully looking at the whole landscape of Western culture right now. But the thing, amidst everything else that is going on, one thing emerges very clearly. Profound spiritual hunger. Hearts are empty, aching. And as followers of Jesus, those of you who are fellow evangelicals like me, we believe Jesus is the answer to that hunger. And I just want to keep coming back to this. And we never. I know it's a simple point, but we can fall away from this, right? Charles Spurgeon once said, never lose heart in the power of the gospel. Do not believe that there exists any man, much less any race of men, for whom the gospel is not fitted. I love that. So this means the gospel is suited, fitted for western hearts in 2026. If you're not in the west, of course, this is applying to you as well. But I'm especially interested in trends in our culture. Where I live in America, for example, Jesus is alive right now. He still longs to give himself to restless, broken hearts in the world and what people are searching for. All the unique craziness going on in 2026, 2027, the ultimate need is still the. So often evangelicals become focused on something other than the evangel. Even though that's like our whole calling card. This is the one message we can never replace or outsource or assume. And I've talked about this a little more in this video. Evangelicalism has fractured now what? But I just want to lead off with this simple point. But it's worth reminding ourselves of okay action points for each of these. If you are a Christian, look for opportunities to talk about the gospel with people around you. It's simple. But we can forget to do this. Especially when we're busy. We forget to look at the spiritual needs around us. Actually, right now there's a lot of opportunities to share hope with people because the world is so crazy. We were just on vacation one night at dinner, our waiter came up to my wife and I and he was just commenting, he seemed intrigued and he was saying, you guys seem happy together. Which we are. It was our 19th wedding anniversary and he could just tell that we're comfortable with each other. And somehow it came up and he was asking about that and it was an opportunity and it just, you know, it's kind of awkward sometimes, but you just be bold and put it out there. And I just said it's because of Jesus and what he's done in our lives. And then you don't put pressure on people. So if they don't want to keep talking, you don't force it, you know, but just there's lots of moments like that where people around you are going to be, you can tell. It's like, wow, that person needs some hope right now. And you get an open door. And boy, sharing the gospel with others makes it rebound. The joy comes back to your own heart. For pastors and ministry leaders, just an encouragement. When you are faithful to the gospel, your actions are literally shaping eternity. Just don't grow weary and don't forget about that. I'm picturing pastors and other ministry leaders watching this video. I know that sometimes it feels like we're in a drought right now. I know perseverance is the name of the game for long term Christian ministry. Just don't forget that 10 trillion years into eternity, the work you're doing right now will still be shaping the future. That's the power of the gospel. So that's the first thing. I hope I didn't lose you on that one because we just got to say that over and over again. Now let's get a little more specific. What else does evangelicalism need right now? How can we serve this movement? Second point is to lean into depth. And by the word depth there, there were too many adjectives, I couldn't stack them up in the title. What I'm thinking of is theological depth, historical depth, liturgical depth, sacramental depth. Basically right now people are aching for this. People want a weightiness in the experience of Christian worship, the sacraments, even the sermon. And this hunger is sometimes what we see manifested in people leaving Protestantism, sometimes the tensions between the high church and low church Protestant traditions. Something I also talk about related to this point and this concern. And basically to cut to the chase here, I think we can be honest and admit that too often evangelical churches have drifted into a kind of shallowness and lowest common denominator culture. The DNA of the seeker sensitive movement that tried so hard to make church easy and accessible is shot throughout evangelical culture. I think it's often assumed in evangelical culture. And the interesting dynamic right now is many hearts, especially among younger people, sense that church should feel strange. Church should be demanding, of course, not deliberately obscure and unwelcoming. But nonetheless church should draw us out of the consumer culture that we are baked in up into the things of God. Now I talk about this a lot, so I won't dwell on this point too much. Here you can see my fuller treatment of evangelical worship services in this video. And I've also talked about the specific love of church history in Gen Z, because I love this and I'm excited about this in Gen Z. So all these videos will be linked below. Suffice to say for now that we as evangelicals can lean into our own Protestant heritages and our own historic liturgies to partially redress this problem. We evangelical Protestants have a lot of richness we can retrieve from our own histories. And this would be where I would object to some of the critiques of evangelicalism which used the term evangelical as though it were a synonym with anti institutional. This came up in my dialogue with Radim Zumer, whom I love and respect and appreciate. But this is a point where we see things differently because I think this is an eccentric use of the word evangelical that tends to focus on certain trends in America and the west more broadly. But evangelicalism is a global international transdenominational movement. You think of like, for example, evangelical Anglican churches that are deeply committed to evangelical distinctives, while at the same time worshiping through the Book of Common Prayer, following the Christian calendar, reciting creeds, gathering around the Lord's table every week. There's diversity in Anglican practice, but some of these evangelical Anglican churches booming in places like Uganda and Kenya and Nigeria, it's just amazing to see what God is doing. You can see evangelical Lutheran churches growing in certain parts of the world. It's kind of fascinating. I was just learning about this particular example in Ethiopia that you can Google and learn more about. But even just like what I grew up with, confessional Presbyterian churches whose worship service moves through the historic rhythms of Christian worship. A call to worship, confession of sin, assurance of pardon, scripture readings, very doctrinal preaching, frequent communion. When I was in high school, we went back and read John Owen's the Mortification of Sin. That was part of the DNA. And yet in this particular environment, we never had trouble calling ourselves an evangelical church. But you could think of other examples. It's actually a very basic point I'm trying to make here is I don't believe we have to choose between evangelical convictions on the one hand and their strengths and some of the positives and ecclesial depth on the other hand. Because the term evangelicalism is not synonymous with the recent trend toward anti institutionalism that characterizes much of American evangelical culture. And too often the critiques of evangelicalism I think are too American focused. It's exciting to see how evangelical churches and movements are growing in other parts of the world. I've often talked about in Iran, where you go from 1979 to the present day to like 500 Muslim background converts to over a million according to some estimates today. So it's pretty exciting. At any rate, here's some action points for this because I think most of you who watch my channel are probably sympathetic to this point, that we need more depth. There's a shallowness that is one of the besetting sins of evangelicalism. So what do we do about that? For individual Christians, one action point could be to simply find one historic text about the Lord's Supper from your own tradition. If you're a Methodist, read something of John Wesley. John Wesley had a very high view of the sacraments. If you're Reformed, read Thomas Watson's book, I Took My Church through that book and basically again diving into our own traditions. This is what I'm trying to say is we have a lot of resources in our own particular denominations. For pastors, I would love to continue to beat this drum of encouraging reflection about the issue of frequency of communion or the Lord's Supper and then how we help our people understand the significance of what we are doing. I'm not trying to say there's a one size fits all approach for every, but it's at least worth wrestling with for those of us who are church leaders. Our sheep need the institutions that Jesus himself initiated. How can we serve them by offering them in the most meaningful possible way in our context? Again, retrieving our own historic practices helps with that. I was amazed when I started reading about Baptist practice and theology of the Lord's supper in the 17th century, 18th century. It's amazing how rich it was. All right, number three, overhaul pastoral culture. Now I took that word overhaul out and then I put it back in because I was wrestling with. I don't want to overstate this, but I don't want to understate this, but I think overhaul may be what we need. I mean, I would say we have some serious problems in the culture of leadership within evangelical churches. And of course this is going to happen elsewhere as well. So for example, we have burnout, major burnout rates of pastors and church leaders. It's hard to finish. Well, we also have a lot of issues of pastoral abuse. I wonder if both pastoral burnout and pastoral abuse in part stem from too much pressure, too much authority being put on one person to sustain the ministry of the church. So most evangelical churches have a senior pastor. And I don't think that's necessarily wrong. I've served as a senior pastor myself. But we can remember that's not a biblical mandate. It's not a biblical category. But often what happens is too much focus is put on one person. We have concerns that come up about celebrity culture and platform building, too little accountability for leadership, unhealthy expectations of charisma in the pastor. The pastor needs to sparkle, right? He's got to be a great counselor. He's got to be at my kids soccer games. He's got to be a great preacher. He's got to have great social skills. He's got to do it all. And we put way too much expectation on that one person. Sometimes there is a neglect of character and ordinary faithfulness being the values that we should have. Sometimes pastors are expected to comment on everything going on in the world, which is very difficult. And this seems like a particular issue to me. Tell me if you think I'm wrong with this. To me, this seems like a particular issue among evangelical churches. If you go to non evangelical churches, it seems to me you're less likely though this can happen as well, to have people thinking, well, the homily was boring this week, maybe we should try some other parish. That can happen. But I think that happens especially in evangelical contexts. And I'm wondering, how do we depressurize this on the one person? Of course excellent preaching is important, but what if people thought, well, I need to go to my church because number one, I need the word of God to feed my soul, but number two, I need to be practicing my spiritual gifts, I need to receive the sacrament, I need to confess my sins, I need the fellowship of the saints and all these other elements also getting emphasis so you don't have so much focus put on the sermon by this one person or the sermon and a great worship team. Right? How do we democratize the expectations a little bit to all the different elements of worship? And I don't have full answers about how to do this, but I think about for our pastors, how do we serve our pastors well in the culture that we're creating for them? Can we consider more frequent sabbaticals for our pastors? And if we think, oh, but if they're gone for six months, how will the church survive? That's kind of part of the problem, right? Shared leadership models, education about abuse prevention and healthy leadership dynamics. Something many churches don't have. A lot of churches you've got great the, but you haven't learned some of these leadership dynamics and interpersonal skill issues. How do we integrate the laity into the ministry, including the women in the church? Sometimes I put out a video recently arguing that the office of elder is for men only, but the general ministry of the church is not for men only. And this is one of those ways where the church ministry can get bottlenecked. And it's a real problem where you've got women who are filled with the Holy Spirit and God's given them gifts and the body of Christ desperately needs those gifts and they've been sidelined. Diaconal ministries. How do we revitalize our diaconal ministries? I've heard it said many times, a church without effective deacons is a church with burned out elders. I think it's the Holy Spirit's wisdom that we have these two different offices and they need to be serving each other and so forth. And there's so much we could say about all these things. I'm trying to throw some things onto the table here, but the Overall vision is let's simultaneously reduce the quantity of ministry expected from the one leader in the church and simultaneously at the same time, increase support for that person. And so an action point for us individual believers can be encourage your pastor as much as you can. He needs it. I guarantee you he needs it. Because it feels like we're in a drought season right now. It's hard to be faithful for pastors. In addition to the obvious things like take a vacation, take care of yourself, things like this, here's a specific thing I found really helpful. Ask the Lord to show you who are the prayer warriors in your church, and then regularly ask them to pray for you. An amazing thing to receive the ministry of the body of Christ, which is good and healthy in of itself. But also there's probably some people in your church who have a gift of prayer that you can benefit from making yourself in more contact with. Number four. These last two will be quick focus on community formation. Community is one of the deepest needs in our culture Right now. We are in a loneliness epidemic. And it's exciting to think about being creative about how do we bring the hunger and the food together? So in 2026, hearts are deeply longing for authentic community. And the gospel uniquely creates community. The gospel creates a particular kind of freshness and honesty. When we're really keeping in step with the gospel, it creates this beautiful culture. And so how do we bring the food and the hunger together? Well, it's exciting to think about new structures and new strategies for that. You think about back in the old day when Sunday school was developed. Now that was serving a particular purpose, maybe a bit more teaching focused, hence the word school. But Sunday school served a purpose well in many contexts. But right now, now we're asking, what do we need right now? Right? And it's good to be strategic. It's good to be organized. During the first great evangelical awakening, John Wesley discovered the need for organization. It's like, you know, God can send a revival, but you still need to have basic organization to handle it. And so they created these classes and bands which are kind of like small groups, but much more intensive. And they were very effective at stewarding what God was doing. And I'm asking today, how do we steward what God's doing? How do we help serve our young people by drawing them into community? When I was serving as a youth pastor, we would do something called fight night. A bunch of the guys would get together, maybe eight to 10 of us, sit around the living room, try to do something fun to break the ice and then at some point we'd come around and we'd basically say, let's just talk about how we're doing. And you try to create a safe environment for people to confess their sins, people to encourage each other. The only rule is no giving advice. So no lecturing somebody else telling them what they need to do. Just a safe environment for support. And I was amazed at the way people responded to that. And I'm asking the question, how do we create structures like that today where we can deal with the loneliness epidemic by bringing and inviting people into community? And this is a real thing. If you want to feel as I feel a sense of being crushed by the needs of the culture around us and a sense of just like being devastated by how much brokenness there is, just start researching how much loneliness there is right now. You see this in people turning to AI for emotional care, how desperate a human heart is for connection. And. And we as believers in the gospel have an opportunity to call people into healthy ways to meet those needs. The joy of connecting with other people is something we can offer people through the gospel. So action points for this one. Here's one that I've found all these I'm trying to draw from my ministry things I've seen that actually work. What I've found is the older people and the younger people in the church often want to have relationship more than is evident to either side. The younger people actually want to be mentored. The older people do care about the young people, but there's intimidation and there's disconnect and so forth. So if you're an older person in the church, approach younger people at your church and ask them if they want to be mentored. Just take like a three month season, not a lot of pressure, but just try it out. If you're a younger person, find a godly person you respect and say, would you mentor me? And those relationships can be really fruitful for pastors and church and ministry leaders. Are there ways we can create opportunities for human connection in our churches? I read recently that it takes 200 hours to become close friends with someone. I started calculating how many hours 200 hours is. I realized, wow, no wonder that we're lonely. We're not spending enough time together in the church. How do we do that? I found that serving alongside one another is often very helpful, sharing meals together. But we need to be intentional to create these structures. Just preaching good sermons alone is not going to do it. It's not going to happen all on its own. Lastly, again, these are just ideas to get the ball rolling here. I want to hear your thoughts in the comments too. Build Cross Denominational partnerships We're in a time of incredible fragmentation. This is what my last video on this topic was about, being a Christian in 2026. How do you describe this? It almost feels. Maybe it's because I spend too much time on the Internet, though the last month has been glorious. Just step away from it. But it feel like you're walking through a mall in which all the ceiling tiles are just randomly falling down and smashing on the ground around you. So you're always keeping your head up. Kind of like, am I going to get squashed here? But also just you hear these things breaking and you're just saying, okay, what's going to fall apart next? Maybe I'm being too negative. Honestly, it feels like there's a lot of disintegration in the world around us and so many Christians, relentlessly, even with cruelty, are attacking each other. Here's a happy what does it look like to learn afresh what healthy partnerships in the gospel look like right now in this environment? So in a time of fragmentation, how do we learn to reach out more? How do we repair trust where it's been broken? How do we build new institutions, new coalitions that are going to outlast us in our lifetime? Lord willing, no one of our traditions has a monopoly on the ministry of the Gospel. We can learn from each other, the high church to low church conversations. We can learn from each other there. I have a video on that if anyone's interested. We can learn from traditions outside of evangelicalism. My hope for evangelicalism is that we would have the posture of a servant to want to wash the feet of others, not to look down our noses at others. But all of this also means learning from other evangelicals in a different tribe. And I understand this is complicated and you can't be friends with every single person and you need to protect yourself and so forth. Nonetheless, how do we build transdenominational institutions right now? So seminaries, for example. A lot of seminaries are struggling. One of the things I want Truth Unites to be for is not just supporting local church, but I'd love to support seminaries. However, I can encourage people to study the seminary. I teach at Phoenix Seminary, just merged with Talbot at Biola, which is very exciting. Talbot's a wonderful institution. I'll be sharing more about Talbot in times ahead and just incredible opportunities there. Amazing people. It's great to go to school and study. I want to encourage this, but Seminaries are just one example of an institution that not always, but often will be multi denominational or at least it's going to require partnership across differences. And so I think right now we need to wrestle with this question because of all the distrust swirling around us is how do we rebuild this ability to partner across our differences? And that's going to mean a lot of theological triage, which is why I talk about that so much. It's this question of the gospel is bigger than my tribe, so how can I join with others to support that? I think a model in my mind of this is the passion conferences that I would go to back in high school. I remember if you know this movement and now it's a wonderful church. Louis Giglio I remember talking about this so much. They made it so clear that, you know, what this is ultimately about is the glory of Christ. It's not about us, it's about him. And I remember that sense of, wow, yeah, we're coming together for something that's bigger than any one of our tribes or denominations. And I just think it's thrilling to think about. What does that look like right now? How do we do that right now? That's exciting to me. I'm sure it's exciting to many of you as well. It's worth thinking about action points for this one. For Christians, let's think about how we can speak well of Christians in other tribes when we can. We can't always, but when we can, that's a wonderful way. We can honor Christ himself. A lot of times, to be honest, I think that means we have to just completely step back from the culture of online discourse. In many ways, it's just gotten so toxic. All I know to do sometimes is just completely withdraw and redirect my efforts to other conversations. Maybe some of you feel similarly. For pastors, a great thing to do is pray for the flourishing of other tribes, other churches, other ministries. When I was pastoring in Ojai, we would pray for revival. One of the happiest prayers to get my heart into was, lord, send revival and make me just as happy if it comes and starts at that other church across town. Because it's not about us. And I think that's one of the needs we have right now. Final thought, if you're discouraged right now, it sometimes feels like the world, like we're in a tough season. I know there's a lot of discouragement and pain out there. Sometimes it feels like we're living through a drought. But remember, a drought is not death. And these five things that we're talking about refocusing on the gospel, leaning into depth, building healthier leadership cultures, forming real community, reaching across denominational lines. The Lord will use these things more than we can see, and, Lord willing, will be planting seeds that will last long into the future beyond what we can see. Again, I'll just give this final encouragement from 1 Corinthians 15 that our labor in the Lord is not in vain. To the extent that you give your life to serving Christ sincerely, let this thought encourage you. It is shaping what will last forever. Jesus is still alive. His gospel has not lost its power, and the future of the church does not rest upon us. But as we give ourselves to this task, he's using it to shape eternity, which is wonderful. So these are some starter thoughts, hoping they'll encourage, hoping they'll inspire. Other thoughts. Maybe churches could watch this and talk about it on their staffs and figure out what else can we do? We need a lot more than just these things. All right, now, for those of you who are interested, a little final personal update. This is my first video I'm recording after my vacation. Not really my first, because something came up earlier this week. I was responding. I was watching a Bart Ehrman setting. He's trying to say his name correctly. Sorry, Bart Ehrman video responding to West Huff. And I made a quick comment on that. But of course I It's so funny, the comments. I didn't shaved all month, right? Because I'm on vacation. I don't like shaving. I'm not. So I had a. Not all month. A couple weeks. And I was like, you know, this will be a little bit of a distraction to have a beard in this video. I hadn't had a haircut either. I looked like I'd been lost in the woods for a couple weeks. But I'm like, you know what? It doesn't matter. I don't have time to get a haircut. Let's just record this video really quickly. Maybe a couple comments will be focused on this and be distracted. It was so funny. There was probably maybe 3% of the comments of that video talking about something other than the beard. So now I've shaved and I know people will be disappointed. Let's just hope the comments section does not get overrun with comments about that. But some of the comments were so funny, I literally pulled out my phone and I was reading through them. My kids thought they were funny, too. It's been a great month of vacation. Thanks. For those of you who prayed for me, I felt like I needed it and it was good for my soul. And I'm excited to get back in. A couple of videos coming up. Oh, by the way, and what I basically found myself doing about halfway through I just started writing a novel and I'm excited to share more about it at some point. It's pretty short. It's about the length of the lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. This is pretty nerdy, but I would describe it as like a fantasy novel. It takes place in something similar to medieval Scandinavia, and it's about a prince who's captured and escapes and is trying to make it back to his home country and all the politics of that. And it was just fun to work on. I've got 22 of the 24 chapters written, so I'm hoping to finish it soon. So I'll say more about that at some point. It might be a long time before I can say anything else. I don't. It's really hard to publish fiction, so we'll see if I'm able to get it published at all. But if I do, I'll keep you updated. That was a lot of fun though. I've just had a lot of great time with my kids and just resting and going on bike rides and listening to music and just not thinking as much. The truth is I've been tired. I've been feeling the weight of just the attrition factor and that's why I took some time off and it was good for my soul. But I still need more of it too. I still feel like the name of the game for me right now is Persevere. But I love my ministry. I'm so thankful to be doing what I do. Thank you for watching my videos, some of the ones that are coming up. I'm going to have a video on Lutheran Christology. It'll be the last time I ever critique Lutherans because I love Lutheranism. But I've been reading a little bit in that and I realized there's just loose threads from my previous video and responses to it. So just a brief video on that but hoping. Not real harsh critique, but just explaining a Reformed view in distinction from it. But like I said, that'll be the last video I do on Lutheran Christology, but it'll go pretty deep. That'll be one of those nerdy, deep theological videos that I hope serves people in the way of like I'm trying to put this stuff out on YouTube to just serve and deep, long videos. That would be, I hope, like what you'd get in a seminary course or something like that, because I know I get enough comments saying, no, we want the depth. Don't shy away from it. So that'll be one of those videos. Just really going into it and again, just explaining the Lutheran critique of, sorry, Reformed critique of Lutheran Christology. But like I said last time, I'll address that topic. I got all my books over here. I've been reading. The big project is the reliability of the Gospel of John. And that will funnel down into, Lord willing, one video. Just making a basic case. I'm not a New Testament scholar, but I can channel some of the scholarship for some of the top reasons, for a fairly modest claim that the Gospel of John is a reliable historical witness. Not arguing for inerrancy in that particular video, just reliability. And I think there's some case we can make for that. And I think actually that's a huge apologetics issue because the Gospel of John has the highest Christology. And so if you can push against those who want to say, oh, this comes way late, it can't tell us about the historical Jesus. That has a lot to do with how we understand who Jesus was, the Lord, liar, lunatic arguments and this kind of thing. I'm going to have a video on the burning of Michael Servetus and John Calvin's responsibility in that when I talk about Jan Hus, I don't want to let the Protestants off the hook who've also participated in these terrible incidents. And so that's one I've been planning for a while. And it'll just be a chance to just try to work through the facts and just acknowledge what happened and reflect, not in a spirit of saying, how could they? But just like I do with the Jan Hus video, trying to understand the historic how much has changed in 500 years from Calvin's day to our own. And as one who's broadly Reformed, critiquing Calvin's role in that event. Another video I'm going to have is on the book of Song of Songs, and the title of it will be is Song of Songs about God or sex? And the answer will be, of course, both. And I'm basically going to just make an appeal for a historic interpretation of that book that recognizes a legitimate allegory is going on, even though that can go off the rails. So those are four videos coming up. I got a lot of other things I could talk about, but I have rambled long enough. It's great to be back on YouTube. Hope you all are all blessed. Leave me a comment in the video. And let me know if there's other topics you'd like me to address because my fall slate is pretty open and my book's coming out soon. Why Christianity Makes Sense. Boy, I'm recording this August 1st. That book will start getting shipped out to those who pre ordered it within the next few weeks. So that's really exciting. All right, thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you in the next video.