The Eric Metaxas Show - J.P. DeGance
Episode Date: March 18, 2020Communio.org is a new initiative to help strengthen marriages and, by extension, communities across the country -- President and CEO J. P. DeGance shares Communio's many success stories. ...
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Eric Mataxis show.
Ladies and gentlemen,
today's show is brought to you
by the maker of Pinocchio,
the puppet who becomes a board,
and who has recently transitioned to a girl,
and then more recently back to a wooden puppet
who goes by the pronouns it,
puppet, and dummy.
Oh, and the maker of the puppet
who was once called Pinocchio is, of course,
Chippetto, but now he goes by his
new hip tabloid name,
G-pet.
Ha, you can't make this stuff up.
Anyway, here's Eric.
All right, folks.
Welcome to Hour 2 of the Eric Mataxis show.
This is the bunker version.
We have Eric Mataxis, that's Blay.
We have Chris Himes hanging out in his bunker.
We're all quarantined.
We got James, our engineer, in his bunker.
We're quarantined.
Endemic that's raging across the country.
And, hey, I've got a question to open up Hour 2.
Where the heck is Albin?
That stupid...
Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't even notice you were gone, Albin.
I know. I was grabbing something to eat here. It's like, you know,
guys can eat, doesn't eat? The last...
You know something? We're down to our last two squares of toady paper.
Oh. And there are three of us in the household. We're going to draw straws.
I got two.
It's tough. It's getting tough, man. It's getting tough.
Chris, how much toyty paper do you have?
We have probably four rolls, maybe five,
but here's what I do have, a secret weapon.
We have a few packs of diaper wipes.
Really?
Yes, from the littlest among you.
Well, you know what?
Hey, so run all the fittest, what did I say?
I heard Honey Hill say one time,
do unto others, then run.
And that always stuck with it.
You heard Benny Hill say that?
Yeah, it was in a Benny Hill episode.
Not Benny Hill.
No, Benny Hill.
Yeah, Benny Hin wouldn't say that.
Now, I remember a t-shirt from the 70s that said, do others then split.
Yeah, yeah, that's pretty good.
I like the split.
Like, we don't use that anymore.
He split?
Yeah, scrammed.
Hit pavement.
Okay, so we've got a lot of important stuff to talk about, but unfortunately, we're not
going to talk about that. We're going to talk about the really dumb stuff.
First of all, we had a very important conversation about fracking with
Jan McInney and her husband, Thelam McAleer. And I tell you, if you want to know the real
scoop on fracking, don't miss our one today. It is unbelievable. It is absolutely
unbelievable. Today we're going to be talking away. In this hour, we're going to be
talking about marriage. I'm hearing weird noise. Is that, is that, is that, is that, is
Is that...
I don't know.
It's probably me coming through your speakers coming back to me.
Anyway, it doesn't matter.
In our one today, in the beginning of hour one, in the opening 10, this is the opening 10 of
hour 2, we wanted to give a little bit of historical perspective on what I think of as the
first Chinese virus to hit America.
It's about over 40 years ago now.
It's an amazing thing.
And if you want to know more about that, you have to go back and listen to the first part.
You can rewind to the first hour.
But I'll just give you a little hint right here, just so you get a flavor to get some historical perspective on where we are now dealing with the current Chinese virus.
This was the first.
And it hit the nation.
It was just unbelievable for those of us who remember it.
Here it is.
I just can't even know.
It just blows my mind.
We got through that as a country.
We're going to get through this Chinese virus as well.
As you know, from hour one, we believe there's a real cure, not a vaccine, but there is a cure.
Kevin McCullough talks about that on his radio show.
So we're feeling pretty good.
But the nation is in lockdown.
Did you guys notice that yesterday was St. Patrick's Day?
Yeah, I know.
We forgot, didn't we?
Yeah.
Are we not Irish?
Are there no Irishmen here?
I'm 100% Slovenian.
Yeah, my oldest daughter actually made some green, like kind of pancake, lodkae things.
I don't know what's a good guy.
You didn't answer the question.
Are you Irish?
I have a little bit Irish in me, yes.
Albany.
My wife has about one-fourth Irish.
I'm 100% Slovenians.
James?
James, any Irish?
Just a town.
I've got zero Irish.
And I don't even like the Irish.
I've had it with them.
Okay, enough of the wearing of the green.
We're putting a stop to that right now.
But it's the weirdest thing.
Yesterday, in New York City, for the first time in 250 years, there was no St.
Patrick's Day parade.
It was shut down by our totalitarian mayor, and I say that, no judgment, Bill de Blasio.
He shut it down.
and he murdered this freaky.
He murdered a leprechaun on camera yesterday
just to show basically where he's coming from.
And I got to say that I don't even believe in leprechauns,
but that was wrong.
You know what I'm saying?
Well, he asked everyone to parade in place.
So that's what we did here in Terrytown.
Yeah.
It's important.
There are people out there they need.
They have the idea that they need to know these things.
But the idea that he would do that, I mean, to butcher a leprecha, and then to film it is even sicker.
If they did, I just want you to try to picture that this is the kind of a mayor who did that yesterday.
What do you guys doing for fun?
Like, basically, I've decided I'm going to watch all of Dickens and Jane Austen on, like all the
BBC productions.
They're available on like, you know, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Netflix.
You just put in Dickens or Austin.
It's unbelievable.
This is like the greatest stuff ever.
And there you are.
I was thinking of punching in and watching all of Eric's old shows and then getting paid for overtime.
We don't pay overtime, do we?
Okay.
Then I'm not going to watch all of Eric's shows.
We can't afford to pay overtime.
We're going through a tough time right now.
This is actually a lot of people,
the country. The most seriously thing I think is that financially this has hit a lot of people.
I was saying yesterday that a lot of my engagements have been, is somebody blowing their nose?
Is that everything okay?
I think that's your phone buzzing.
Are you blowing a fuselah?
What's it called?
They were blowing a fuse here.
A fuselah?
A fuselah.
I can't.
But anyway, the point is that I'm going to give you a shalacken with me, Shaleli, if you're not
careful.
But the truth of the matter is a lot of people are so financially, and we are.
So I'm joking, but that's really tough.
So I want to say, again, folks, just pray.
God is real.
He hears our prayers.
He knows what we're going through.
This is not a joke.
This is not a happy idea.
It's true.
So trust God in your difficulties.
And I quoted one of my favorite scriptures yesterday is, all things work together for good
for those that love the Lord and are called according to his purposes.
Even the bad things, if we give them to God, something can come.
out of it that is wonderful um well the other thing can i quote a scripture here since we're doing
that second timothy one seven god has not given us the spirit of fear but of power of love and of sound
mind that's another good one i woke up with that one preaching my brother
god has not given us a spirit of fear right but of power of love and of sound mind and chris
and and james you guys are buddhist right uh yeah
Pretty much.
I like the verse in judges where the guy puts his knife in the overweight ruler and the sword gets awesome.
Oh, that's beautiful.
That speaks to me.
Was he a leprechaun?
And Cicero with the tent peg, that is some sweet stuff.
Okay, so seriously, we're probably, we're almost at a time.
When we don't have a lot of time, I just want to say we're going to be talking about marriage in this hour.
And we'll be back at the end of the hour.
But when I don't have a lot of time, this is the song that I like to play.
It really speaks to me.
Hey there, folks.
It's the Eric Metaxa show.
You know, sometimes on this program, we bring you nothing but good news.
I'm sorry to say today is one of those times.
I've got really good news.
I'm not joking.
I'm sitting here in the studio with J.P. DeGance is the CEO of Communio.
that's a nonprofit that consults with churches to use 21st century data tools and best practices in relationship ministry to strengthen marriage and to strengthen families in their community.
You can find them at communio.org.
Now, I have to say, I first read about Communio in Newsweek.
That's because of my friend Lee Habib.
He wrote about the work they had done in Jacksonville, Florida in DeVal County.
Now, this is what amazes me.
as a result of communio working with churches, only with churches, okay?
They managed throughout the entire county to lower divorce rates nearly 30 percent,
three years running, and to drive church attendance up.
To me, that's a stunning thing.
Before we dig into this, I want to talk about the state of marriage in America and churches.
We know that many of our social issues,
crime, sex abuse, so on, is profoundly impacted by family breakdown. We know this family breakdown
means marriage breakdown. So to my guest, J.P. DeGance, first of all, welcome. And let's talk
about that. Eric, thanks so much. That opening issue to open us into this. Yeah, absolutely. You hit on
something big because marriage right now is at the root of so much social decline and so many challenges
in our culture. You, whether you are talking about education, crime, abusive,
different sorts, domestic violence. It's, it's, uh, ameliorated or affected by healthy relationships
and marriages. Uh, in fact, uh, there's something called ACEs, uh, adverse childhood events.
And those adverse childverse, uh, those adverse childhood events, the more of them that you have,
the more likely you are as an adult to suffer, uh, obesity, depression, suicide. And what they found is
a kid who comes from a home that isn't married is way more likely to have these aces, these
adverse childhood events. And it's wreaking havoc on adults. Women in particular also are
more vulnerable. A woman who's married is the most safe from violence in America. And conversely,
a woman who lives with her boyfriend is the most vulnerable to domestic violence in our country.
When we talk about marriage, we have to talk a lot about the health of our communities, the health of our kids.
Well, I want to go back briefly to 1965 Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was a liberal from New York,
famously or infamously, wrote about the breakdown of black families at that time.
Of course, he used the word Negro.
And he said that that was at the root of everything.
And the statistics that he gave for black families in 1965 are now the statistics and then
some for all families, for white families.
We have known that marriage is the glue.
Families are the glue that without that you have all kinds of social breakdown.
We're living at a time where we don't like to talk about that because we're nuts.
But that's the fact.
The only thing I started out saying that this is great news is that when I heard what Communio is doing, obviously I get excited.
First of all, I know Lee Habib. I trust him. But when I hear that, you go into churches exclusively.
You don't go into the community. You go into churches. And by going into churches with this program, the entire community is affected.
That, to me, it's like that's something I would dream up, but it wouldn't happen. It's just,
a nice idea. But you tried this. And so three years running in, what's the county? It was in Deval
County, Florida, Jacksonville. 30% improvement. Yeah, dropped 28% in the first two years and then
leveled off at about a quarter decline after a three-year project. And we really, we worked
through a large coalition. It was an ecumenical project of churches. First, we have to give
some great credit to our fabulous partner there, which has Live the Life Ministries.
led by Richard Albertson is a great guy in Dennis Stoica.
And working with them, we worked through more than 50 churches, the Southern Baptist Convention.
We worked with some of the largest community Bible churches, Celebration Church.
We also worked with Catholic parishes throughout the county and moved more than 58,000 people through four-hour or longer couples' relationship education, made more than several million, millions of digital and
impressions focused on those who had looked, had relationship health risk based on the predictive
analytics that we were working with. And, and the results really speak for themselves. We had
independent third-party evaluation, look at what happened and say that there was just, there's no
other form of demographic explanation for that sharp decline. Well, the reason I find this
funny and delightful is that you only work with churches and it affected that kind of
number that kind of percentage across the community. I mean, that to me, it says a few things. It says
about the vitality and the importance of churches, but then it also talks about how if you want to
affect the community, I've always said the church should be the starting point. You've actually
done that. Yeah, churches are the greatest aggregator of social capital in the world. And social capital,
a lot of sociologists would say, on the left and on the right, say that social capital,
is critical for upper mobility. Social capital is that invisible connection between our families or
voluntary associations and even our churches. And so the more of it you have, the better off even the
poorest are in that community. And what we saw is that churches have the greatest reservoir of it because
they're motivated on the gospel. They're motivated on love. And when given the right tools,
when they see what we've been working with churches, we could help.
them identify challenges in their community using data, challenges in their congregation, that
makes it personal to them. And then giving them effective strategies that they could apply in their
church and then using it as outreach in their community became transformative. And so that
unleashed a tremendous amount of volunteer energy and social capital into the community.
I want to throw a quote at you. This year marks the 10th anniversary of when my biography
of Dietrich Bonhofer came out. So I'm right now finishing a forward to a new 10th anniversary
edition. And in it, I recount meeting his niece, Renata Betka, who married his best friend,
Abrahart, Beitka. And at their wedding, Dietrich Bonhofer was already in Tegel prison,
so he couldn't attend, but he wrote a wedding sermon for them. And in classical Bonhofer fashion,
it's kind of thing you can engrave on granite. It's so beautiful. But the line that sticks out,
He says, it is not love that sustains your marriage, but marriage that sustains your love.
First, he says that, you know, love leads you to marriage, but that once you're married,
it's not love that sustains the marriage, but somehow marriage that sustains the love.
What do you say about that idea?
In a lot of ways, love is also a choice that we make each and every day when we wake up.
and so frequently we've confused love with a with something ephemeral that like a feeling right like
I feel lovey-dovey today right and and so our churches are generally uh what we've seen
frequently is they're not as and what excites us Eric is churches are less engaged right now
in this space than than they should be we've we've now seen that we did a study with
the Barnag Group, and we found that just 28% of churches overall have a substantive marriage ministry.
In 80% of evangelical churches reported spending 0% of their annual budget on marriage ministry.
Okay, now that's, I got to stop you there. You said 80% of evangelical churches spend
zero. Zero percent of their annual budget on it. That's right. So that's kind of a big.
That's a big donut, right? And it's kind of wild. Actually, I'm a little, I'm surprised at that.
No, well, what happens is a lot of our churches believe that they're engaged in marriage because they might have small groups.
And small groups are good, and they're usually typically going through Bible study content, which is good.
But they're not going through skills-based relationship enrichment, which is key.
You know, in churches, we oftentimes think if there's a great sermon on marriage that that's sufficient.
I created it, you know, there's an analogy of a friend of mine, Dennis Stoica uses, that,
talks about if you want to learn golf, you could watch the masters, okay, and you might be entertained or you might be bored of tears, but you're not going to know how to drive and you're not going to not a pot. If you want to learn out of golf, you need to have a coach that teaches you the skills. And in marriage, if you want to have a great marriage, there's skills that are both known and learnable. And a lot of times our churches don't necessarily know what those skills are, know how to teach them. And so where Communio comes in as we help churches set up ministries that,
that teach those skills so that folks can live marriage well.
And what I'm gathering is that you go into churches and you work specifically with each church.
It's not like a one-size-fits-all.
You try to create a program that they can utilize.
That's right.
That's right.
We're going to go to a break.
Folks, if you want to find out more, you just go to communio.org.
Communio.org.
I'll continue my conversation with J.P. DeGance when we return.
Hey there, folks. It's the Erkman Taxis Show. We're talking about marriage. Remember marriage?
I'm talking to my friend, who's the CEO of Communio, J.P. DeGance. J.P., I want to ask you about how you ended up where you are right now. You've adopted some kids. You're yourself married. You're in the D.C. area. What is your story?
Yeah, well, about 12 years ago, I came to D.C., like a lot of people, motivated on the idea of trying to save the country by focusing.
on the public policy process. And I think God worked a few things in my life to redirect me.
And 12 years ago, my sister called me, and she was in a bad spot and asked us to take in her
four kids. And I wish I could tell you. I immediately thought that was a great idea. My wife
was such a hero and pushed me, pushed us to do that. And that's a gigantic commitment.
Yeah. We had three little ones of our
own at the time, three down to about six months. And we got a PhD on parenting pretty quick and made
a lot of mistakes. We learned how to parent teenagers and really saw an experience. Actually, I never
learned that. My daughter's 20 now and I never learned that. Wow. Well, we're still learning and
we learned all the mistakes that or we learned our own mistakes and then we also learned what
happens when you lose a mom and dad's daily presence.
And that became really important to me on a personal level.
And I started really gradually seeing relationships in our church.
There were a number of divorces.
And I really thought the things that I was interested in the policy process were really being driven.
I started seeing more and more by what was going on in the home.
And it became both personally important to me and professionally important to me.
And so I made a big change about seven years ago to try to figure out what could be done,
applying a lot of the strategy that exists in the policy world into ministry to strengthen marriages.
It's kind of funny because you think, why didn't somebody think of this before?
I think sometimes when we think of things like marriage or love, we tend to put it in the category of
there's some mysterious, mystical thing that we can't look at the way we would look at drug addiction
or crime or whatever, you know, and that's just wrong.
and you somehow saw that and you dove in.
And the results speak for themselves.
I mean, when I saw that, you know, you had changed nearly 30% in an entire county just by working with the churches.
You have to think, wait a second.
If that were a business, I would want to invest.
Like, I would freak out.
I'd say, that's never been done before.
I know that there's a quote from the article in Newsweek that I have.
It says, love and mission allow churches to tap into networks of volunteers.
and staff to run and deliver programs. Tell us a little bit about this idea of social capital,
because that's not something I know about. Yeah, no, you know, a lot of times when the federal
government has jumped into this trying to solve it, they've given grants out to secular
organizations to run programs, and they usually have to pay people to run those programs.
And what we started understanding is that churches were a lot more efficient at being able to
serve people because they're motivated, again, on love. And they could tap in,
to volunteer networks that any other nonprofits weren't able to do.
The other thing is that there is a stickiness in churches.
So if me and my spouse go to a church for the first time for a date night event,
you and your wife might meet me and we might hit it off.
You might invite us over your home for dinner,
or we might become friends outside of the context of a program.
Look, this is exactly what the founders and Edmund Burke wrote about the little platoons.
they understood that these little communities work.
When it becomes a big federal thing or a big state-run thing, it just isn't as effective, period.
It just isn't.
That's right.
But I mean, it's amazing that we have to rediscover this in 2020.
No, that's right.
And so with a little bit of focus on understanding what's going on in my community in a direct way,
so if I can understand the percentage of people struggling in their relationship,
and I can put that in the hands of a pastor,
what we realize is that that motivates a pastor and the leadership team at that church.
And then by giving them the tools to do the kind of targeted outreach and then not holding
tightly on content.
So we don't write an author content.
We work with 34 of the best content authors in the world that's evidence-based content to help
marriages thrive.
And so then we can help a church figure out what works best for them, their community,
their context, and we help them design a strategy for outreach.
Just to show people what we're talking about, I've got a clip I'd like to play from a marriage that was saved because of Communio's help.
This is Christopher and Lucretia Hannah from Jacksonville.
Let's see that clip.
I looked at my upbringing from a single mom household.
And I just saw that what we was going through, how much of a greater impact than just my wife and I.
I saw the greater, bigger picture that it affects generations down the lot.
So we went to counseling, and of course, he signed us up for the American class.
They taught us how to communicate better and how to express myself and how to explain how I was feeling.
Having this class was just like a continual education.
It gave me the opportunity to say how my day was and listen to your day.
We always talk about we don't have time, but you always have time for what you truly value.
Those 10 minutes a day or every other day, to me, is what really pivoted our merch.
Well, you can tell by what we were saying earlier, I get very excited about this because it's like discovering, it's like a scientific discovery where you just go, what we figured out a way.
to improve everything.
By improving marriage, we can improve the whole culture.
It's a huge, huge thing.
We're going to go to a break.
We'll be right back, folks.
Go to communio.org for more info.
Hey there, folks.
This is the Eric Mattaxas show.
You can tell by the bumper music.
And I'm talking to J.P. DeGan, CEO of Communio.
JP, tell us about the clip we just heard.
I mean, I'm moved when I think of how many people have already been affected.
Well, you know, you can get lost in the numbers.
It was three-year huge decline in divorce, 24% over three years, and then 58,912 through four-hour longer programs.
But behind all those numbers are stories of real people, of lives changed.
We heard from Chris and Lucretia.
There's another couple, Patrick and Rebecca, whose marriage nearly failed.
They were down to, they told me, down to the last $40.
They heard about an adventures in marriage class that was brought into the, the,
city through our partner, live the life. And they used that $40. And they said that,
they told me it saved their marriage. And great couples like the pages, Chris and Miko, who have
probably themselves saved more than 100 marriages themselves as being a mentor couple and training
other mentor couples. So it's really encouraging when you start seeing it unfold.
I mean, I believe this kind of thing can lead to revival in America. This is just huge. Now, we've been
talking about Florida. I want to play another clip here. There's a church, the LCBC church in
central Pennsylvania. Church team ministry leader Jason Mitchell talks on this clip about how
Communio partners with individual churches. Let's play that. Communio has really helped us to focus our
efforts. And so we've been able to take some existing programs that we've been doing as a church,
but actually be a little bit more strategic with how they funnel in and work together.
One of the things that our partnership with community has done specifically
has been to give us a strategic framework for how to think about how to move people into more relational health.
And so a couple of different ways that kind of plays out for us is community has pushed us to think about outreach events,
really to create a new pool of people that aren't part of our church that we can continue to create relationships with.
And also just to then, they partnered us up with incredible content.
that we can do even in our weekend, our weekend gatherings, our weekend services that we've used,
and really kind of, we've got our kids ministry involved, we've got student ministry involved,
we've got the adults, we've got our small groups involved, and it has been a unifying moment to kind of go
into this year all talking about relationships and what it looks like to have God honoring relationships.
And so we're coming off of that. We've got thousands of people now in groups that were not in groups before.
As a result of this, we've got kids talking with their parents and using the same language.
We've got students who are talking about this and hopefully making wiser decisions when it comes to relationships than ever before.
And so we're feeling very, very confident with coming out of this series about what God's doing in the life of relationships right now.
I don't know anybody who's in a marriage that's having trouble that doesn't want to fix it.
So this is very interesting to me because you're sort of at a place where people are hungry for this.
They just don't know where the heck to go.
suddenly you guys have done this thing that you call communio.
But how many, what cities are you in?
Because now we've talked about PA, we talked about Florida, but where are you around the country?
We have citywide initiatives in Billings, Montana, the Permian Basin, Midland and Odessa, big cities in Denver, Colorado, and Fort Worth.
And then we have individual churches in every time zone who've reached out to us that we're directly consulting with.
That one LCBC from the clip, largest evangelical church in the state of Pennsylvania.
15 different campuses.
And we're consulting them with them directly and helping them build out what we call a data-informed
full-circle relationship ministry.
And that's sort of our trademark strategic framework where data-informed, we mean using data
to diagnose what's going on in your congregation and then your community,
and then using the same data to do targeted outreach for evangelization, inviting people in
to engage in the full-circle relationship ministry.
that means following strategic best practices for folks at every stage from single life, single again, married, marriage enrichment, marriage and crisis, those who are engaged.
And then building up.
This is like the proverbial felt need, right?
That's right.
Churches are always thinking, how can we reach out to our community?
How can we offer help to our community?
This is one of the major ways.
There are people out there.
They don't know where to turn.
And if you can let them know if you come here, we've got something that can help your members.
marriage. That's right. That's pretty big. Huge. And the culture's been lying to us for the last 60 years
about our relationships. Oh, yeah. And 75% of millennials want to get married and are interested in marriage.
They don't, the culture's telling them all sorts of behaviors that, an interest that will lead them in a
direction that will undermine their future marriages. Those who are married are being bombarded with messages
undermining their relationship health.
And so the church can be that hospital, that place of healing, the place of renewal.
And the framework that we're showing and helping churches build out can be applied in their
own way.
So the pastor's in charge of the content and how it's delivered.
We give them a framework where we've tested a lot of different ways that this is applied,
and it can look differently in a Hispanic event.
evangelical church in a downtown area versus a white suburban church and everything in between.
And so do churches reach out to communio.org and say we want this here?
They are and they have been. And so they can go to community.org. They can email us at platform
at communio.org. And then we have a conversation and help them start figuring out how we can get to
work in consulting and serving them. I was going to say it's almost funny because I know
in the notes it says that church attendance rises, tithing goes up. Now, I don't know any church
that doesn't want that, and it's not like you're trying to be cynical, but that's sort of how
it works, right? You meet a need. It's the way the free market works. You meet and need. People
come to get that need met, and lo and behold, you have more people in your community, which is
sort of supposed, it's supposed to work that way. That's right. That's right. It's strong marriages
are great for the country. We know they're great for communities.
and it turns out they're phenomenal for churches.
You know, a millennial who's grown up in an intact married home
is 78% more likely to go to church every week
versus a millennial who didn't grow up in an intact married home.
And 73% of every person who sits in the pews on Sunday
is from an intact married home.
What that means is marriage is not a nice sideshow.
It's actually absolutely central for evangelization.
And the church needs to embrace marriage.
No, there's no question. Strategically, to grow the church. There's no question. We're out of time,
but I just want to say that in my mind, this is the key to everything. This is God's plan for
everything. And it's great that there's a place to go. Communio.comunio.org. I know folks are
checking it out now. I'm just so grateful, J.P. DeGance. Thank you. Thank you.
Hey, folks, we're back. I hope you're digging the groovy music. If you missed our open.
segment, let me just say keep on missing it because you didn't miss anything. The opening
segment was an embarrassment to us, to Salem Media Group that we represent. We're sorry. And to all
those of you who participated by listening, by watching it on YouTube, shame on you. Okay?
Don't share. Do not share. You, Chris Heimes, Albin, James. What are you even thinking? What is
wrong with you people?
I don't know positive.
We are doing an amazing thing
with food for the poor. We haven't talked
about at this hour. We've been talking about
fracking. But I
have to tell you, we're doing a great
job with food for the poor. Those of you who've
not yet given a food for the poor, go to metaxus talk
dot com. Be sure to click on the
banner. Do we
have any audio we want to play for that?
We can play tomorrow.
It doesn't matter. The point is that
I want to say that we're doing a great
job we're not there yet but i just want to reiterate that every week we're doing a grand we're pulling
a grand prize winner everybody who gives that week uh get uh just to win like an insane grand prize
we've mentioned many times i'm not going to go into it but uh i do want to say that whenever
bad things are happening one thing we can do well two things we can do we can pray and i do think
that we should pray that god would use this weird time uh
to turn people back to him, to turn families back to each other, to spend time with each other
that they wouldn't have. I've got my daughter home, which is an amazing blessing for us during this time.
And there's a lot of weird stuff going on. Pray that God would use it for his purposes.
Please pray, because I really think that these really weird things can lead to revival.
I actually am believing God for that genuinely.
But I want to say another great thing you can do right now to do something good in the midst of all this, if you feel powerless, is go to Metaxistock.com, click on the banner for food for the poor, and give anything you can to Food for the Poor because there are families in Guatemala literally dealing with severe malnutrition, $80 of our American money. That's how amazing things are right now. If you have any money to spare, not everybody does. But if you do, please go to Food for the Poor, the banner at Metaxistock.com and give what you can.
Again, $320, which is $27 a month, that's a great way to do it.
If you've got a family and you want to teach your kids, your values as a family, give $27 a month.
And you'll be feeding a family of four for an entire year.
That's for $27 a month, $320 a year.
You're also giving them water for a lifetime because many of these people do not have clean drinking water.
It's horrific.
We've talked about it on the program before, what they have to do to get water,
and then even the water that they get through absurd means, even that water is not safe.
It's a tough situation.
So if you want to do something good during this time, you feel a little bit helpless.
Please go to Metaxotocococ.com.
Please give generously to food for the poor.
They really are depending on us right now.
And as you know, since we're all focused on ourselves and what we're going through, we tend to forget about them.
So we really do need your help.
We want everybody involved in this program to please do what you can to help them out.
What else we have to talk about, Albin?
We have about out of time.
We have Honorable Coffee.
We should remind people that we want everyone who listens to this program to subscribe to
honorbound coffee.com.
If you don't drink coffee, you can subscribe for a friend, honorbound coffee.com.
Every penny that they make in profit goes to help military families.
That is so amazing.
I can't even tell you.
I feel thrilled that they are a sponsor.
Honorbound Coffee.com.
We'll catch you later on.
Thanks for listening.
Thank you, China, man, from Funky Chinatown.
