Truth Unites - Chatting About Life and YouTube With Paul Vanderklay

Episode Date: April 25, 2024

Gavin Ortlund and Paul Vankerklay chat about life, culture, YouTube, and Christianity. Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/

Hey, everybody, what you're about to watch was one of my favorite dialogues that I've had on YouTube thus far. I emailed Paul Vanderclay and asked if I could put it out on my channel as well. I think what stood out is two things. One is it was more personal rather than intellectual. Most of my content on YouTube tends to be the intellectual is the focus and then the personal can come in. This was just basically, we just talked about life, about YouTube, about our culture, ended on a really wonderful note as well. And the second reason that it was kind of fun is we just took our time. You know, it was more leisurely, and so we didn't feel. Usually, I'm actually, if you notice this, I'm actually pretty driven. I try to not to waste people's time and just

keep it on point. But sometimes it's also nice to just take your time and just work through things. So hopefully, hopefully you'll enjoy this as much as I did. Take your time with it. It's about two hours so you can listen to it in installments. I'll try to put timestamps. Hope you enjoy. Hi, this is Paul. And the other guy with me today, many of you will need no introduction. Some of you have no idea who he is. And so today we'll, we'll, we'll address both of both sides of that equation. This is Gavin Ortland and he has a YouTube channel. And the name of your, your name isn't the name of your YouTube channel. It's, what is the YouTube channel is called truth unites. Truth Unites. That's right. That's right. I should have had that written down. I have, I have watched a good number of your

videos. I just, you know, I just always think Gavin Ortland. I don't think truth unites. I just think you. So I'm really, I reached out and I'm, or you reached out. I don't remember who reached out first, but I'm really glad we get a chance to talk today. Yeah, me too. No, I've been looking forward to it. Appreciate your work. This will be a lot of fun. Okay.

I think so too. So basically I liturgies and rituals emerge and one of mine has been, after talking to hundreds and hundreds of Randos on the internet to basically start with your story. And the reason I do that is because, you know, partly because, once you're on the internet and stake a position about anything, especially with respect to religion, people will either line up with you or against you based on, it can be the tiniest opinion that you might not even hold, but they might read on to you. And therefore, everything that they hear after that is colored by this. And so part of the reason I do such so

much biography is that when, in my experience, when you do biography, it sort of works the other way. It's sort of different, different, different, different, different, different. But then when you come into something that's the same, well, you know, maybe he's a Calvinist, but, you know, he had a dog. So maybe I'll listen to him. So that's part of the reason I do what I do. So it makes a lot of sense. I've sometimes regretted even letting people know that I'm a Calvinist because I've found that people attach much more significance to that than I would have myself. Yep. To me, it's like, hey, you got to believe something about this extremely mysterious and

difficult matter of God's sovereignty and how that relates to creatures and so forth. But man, people, as you know, people run with that one. Yeah. I'm regularly, I'm regularly accused of not being Calvinist enough and because there are whole other filters involved there. And I frankly just don't worry about it because I'm, I'm a, old man. I'm not really old old, but I'm old enough now to think, I don't really care. So let's let's get into it. Tell me, now I do know a little bit about your past because either

a video or not. I saw a little bit about it. So talk to me about the home you grew up in. Yeah, I'm always happy to do that because I had a great, great family, have a great family. Three older siblings and then my parents are all just some of my friends. You know, there's great people. Truth Unites actually now is a ministry under my parents' ministry. So my parents have a ministry called Renewal Ministries, and we formed our partnership. Truth Unites is a ministry of renewal. Renewal Ministries was started by my grandparents. So I have a lot of ministry in my family. My grandfather was a pastor, and he and my grandmother, so this is on my dad's side, I wrote a lot of books.

He pastored churches and mainly in California. And he's one of my great heroes. When I think about what I want to be like, I think of my granddad and my parents, honestly. So what's your grandparents' names? Okay, so my granddad is Ray Sr., Ray Ortland, Sr., and my grandmother is Anne.

And then my parents are Ray Jr. and Janie. And just all four of them are, among my heroes. You know, I remember, like, I have memories as a kid of walking in, seeing my granddad in prayer. And, like, you know, sincere prayer. Like, or I have memories of going and going to the driving range with him and hitting golf balls.

And, you know, I'm probably 21. He's probably like 74. And yet, it felt like just two buddies hanging out, just laughing. He had a great sense of humor for a very godly man. He was just so easy to be around, and he had such a natural humility. So, yeah, I feel like I've seen the real deal in my family in terms of just an authentic love for God, love for people, joyfulness. And my parents are like that. My parents are finishing well in ministry.

And the more I do what I'm doing on YouTube, but I know you see the same thing. We see a lot of deconstruction. We see a lot of pain, you know, cynicism. There is a lot of darkness right now. So it makes me grateful for my family because I feel like I've been given a priceless gift. I often think, and this is, I just think if I could just kind of maintain what I've seen in my family and I don't have to do anything fancy, but if I can just, you know, follow in the footsteps, I'll consider my life well spent.

I am also a third generation minister in the Christian Reformed Church. And I can tell a similar tale. neither my my father maybe had a little bit of fame in the christianiform church not much my grandfather didn't really have any but the christianiform church is such a small thing that it's sort of like an extended family so people know each other and and i too can can just point to you know grandparents on both of my on both sides who are were all men and women you could look up to and and and and very much the case that homes of faith and Christian service and sacrifice and no, no. And I completely, I completely understand that.

I think sometimes people are surprised that, well, you still sort of believe what your parents believe with respect to a lot of things. It's like, yeah. And why would I stop? Because I saw it bears such beautiful fruit in them. So, no, that's a real blessing. Yeah. Talk to me about your grandfathers. And I realize there could be a good number of people out there that are familiar with him. I'm not. So talk to me a little bit about his ministry and then how that then worked then to your father. Yeah, he was a pastor for many years and then later in his life, I think he was pastoring Lake Avenue Church in Pasadena, California when he began to have a little bit of a broader influence, I guess, later in life. And I think it may have been his first book called Lord. make my life a miracle, which I love. He wrote devotional books. He didn't write academic books.

So this is just a book about wanting to see the genuine power of God in your life. And it's a wonderful, just devotional read. And then he was involved in radio ministry. People may have heard of Haven of Rest. And then it was shortened to just Haven. And he would speak on the radio. He wrote other books. And then, of course, my parents have been in ministry.

Here's the weird thing, too, is I have several. uncles who are pastors. And both of my older siblings, so I have three older siblings, and two older brothers and one older sister. And both of my older brothers are in some form of ministry. My oldest brother, Eric, is in London, teaches at an Anglican school. My older brother, Dane, is a Presbyterian minister. And then I have a sister named Krista, who's also just such an amazing person. I look up to and admire for her godliness. So it is actually kind of a weird thing in the sense of I had to work through my own sense of calling and this deep insecurity, to be honest, of, am I just doing this because it's what I have seen?

And that took me like six years. And I still sometimes have to work through it. But it took me a long time to kind of work through that just because I was nervous. Like, you know, is this really from the Lord or is this just something that? And I finally just realized, though, and it kind of freed me. that my family is not a reason to go into ministry, but it's also not a reason not to go. Yeah.

So when I was in college in the southeast, I went to University of Georgia, and I was kind of involved in PCA circles, so Presbyterian Church in America, and had a really great experience in the PCA. Always will be grateful for that denomination. Learned a ton. Just met some really godly people,

went to a Presbyterian seminary. So when I was in that context, I was kind of working, I was doing youth ministry at two different Presbyterian churches in Georgia. One was in Tennessee, just over the border, one in Georgia during my college years, doing youth ministry, loving it, just feeling this magnet in my heart toward this happy thought. I remember the verse in Matthew where Jesus speaks about being fishers of men. I remember just being captivated by this imagery of, you know, thinking of fishing for people. for souls and in a good way of trying to, trying to, you know, direct people to Christ.

And I just was feeling drawn to that. And I finally had this freedom of just realizing it's okay to just follow the Lord and what I think he's calling me to do and kind of shove aside, you know, any other complicating factors or any concern of what do people think or how does it come across and just put all that to the side. Yeah, yeah. Well, let's go back a little bit. Let's talk about PKs because you probably know as well as I do that.

preachers kids can have a reputation and sometimes well earned. I've known preachers kids that have been rebels because they very much rebelled against their parents. I know preachers kids that have kind of, you know, so what was it like for you growing up in a not only a, not only a minister's household, but a multi-generational minister's household and one that had a bit of visibility? How was that for you as a kid? Did you go to public school, Christian school? How did that shake out for you? Yeah, it was interesting for me. I went to public schools growing up in the Chicago area.

And what was a little bit of a factor for me was that my dad was not a pastor for most of those years. So he was a seminary professor for kind of a middle portion there. So he planted a church in Oregon when I was really young. So we lived in Eugene, Oregon when I was like ages two to six. And prior to that, I was born in Scotland when my dad was studying there. He got his Ph.D. at the University of Aberdeen. So I was born in Scotland. And then we moved from Oregon when I was six to the Chicago suburbs.

My dad taught at a seminary for nine years. And my... Which seminary? It was a Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Yeah, yeah. So my friends, I don't think I was a believer. believer during that time. I think maybe I became a Christian at some point in there, maybe in fourth grade, but I was very lukewarm in my faith. I didn't really have a vibrant faith at all.

All of my friends at school were non-Christians. So at public schools in Chicago, nobody cares if your dad is a seminary professor. I mean, there was, you know, that, that didn't earn me any street credit or anything like that. So I was not, that didn't actually affect me, maybe in the same way someone might think if you're, you know, a pastor's kid and everybody thinks of you like that. Probably most of my friends didn't necessarily even know what a seminary was. I mean, they may have had some conception, but it wasn't a prominent thing. So, yeah, so during that time, I wasn't necessarily rebellious against a stereotype. I would just say I really just didn't have a vibrant walk with the Lord at all. And I don't even know why. It just didn't take root.

for some reason, and I just wasn't interested in spiritual things for some reason. I played sports. I was into other things. And then weirdly, and maybe just coincidentally, it was when we moved to Georgia right before I started high school, and I got involved in a youth group that was just a really vibrant youth group, to which I'll always be indebted because of the influence it had upon me. That's when my Walk with Christ, I would say, really began in an authentic way, which is when my dad became a pastor. So I guess I never really went through the whole kind of rebellious pastor's kid phase. And maybe because of the sequence of things, that might be a part of the reason why. So were you baptized as an infant or after you had this experience?

I was baptized as an infant in the Church of Scotland, which is, as you know, Presbyterian. and then I was by conviction. So here's, I guess we're getting into the. Yeah, we're getting into stuff now. This is fun. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, well, so in seminary, Covenant Seminary, so after a University of Georgia,

I went to a Presbyterian seminary, and at a Presbyterian seminary, I became convinced of Frito baptism. And so at our local church there, which technically was a susspetarian seminary, Baptist Church, although it didn't have the word Baptist in the title, I was baptized by immersion on the theology that the first baptism was not a valid expression of baptism. That was never a big deal emotionally in the sense of, you know, I talked it through with my dad. He actually sent me,

he had been the one who baptized me as an infant. He actually sent me a written testimony of Spurgeon for when Spurgeon made the decision to do that. And sort of, of not even necessarily an encouragement, like you should do this, but just more an encouragement in the sense of, hey, no hard feelings. I get where you're coming from. It wasn't a big deal like that. And even to this day, I still wrestle with the question of what counts as a valid baptism. And I can definitely put myself in the other shoes and see that issue the other way. But that's where my convictions led me on that. So yeah, so baptized as an infant. And then I would say validly baptized, I suppose, as a 24-year-old.

Wow. That's fascinating. That's fascinating. Thank you for sharing it because I mean, a lot of, some people might say, well, what does it matter when you got baptized? But no, this is obviously a very sensitive issue in, in many communities. So that's, that's very interesting. So you, so your family moves. Your father's now a minister in a local church. You have this experience. You begin. I would, you know, the Christianiform churches, you know, practices infant baptism. Then we have profession of faith. I was baptized as an infant. I made profession of faith before I went to college. But as is true for me, too, how the timing of the ceremonies, and let's say the experiential internal life in terms of, especially as you grow and have a little bit more agency over yourself and self-identification, identification.

I mean, that's all a really complex thing. So you start, you start not only, let's say, having, can you, can you re, I mean, so now we're going to ask a Methodist question. Can you remember a time when you felt this quickening, or how did that go for you? I'm very much sympathetic to this idea that you don't need to identify one specific time. Okay. Simply partly because of my theology, partly because of my own story, it's hard to drill it down to just one because I feel as though I've had several kind of catalytic experiences in my life that have just been so huge and so consequential.

Actually, I mean, in fourth grade, I did pray a prayer to receive Christ. I was at an event. I heard a gospel call. I went down and just knelt. I didn't say a thing, but I just knelt. And in my heart, I was sincerely convinced. and I really felt the sense of, wow, okay, God is real, I know God is real, I know I'm not in a good way with him, I'm sorry, I want to relent, I want to repent, I want to surrender,

and I felt that, and that was sincere. And so, you know, that's why I sometimes think maybe I became a believer there, but then I kind of bumped along for a while without, at least to my self-awareness, having a real vibrant walk with Christ in any discernible way. I mean, I wasn't hugely rebellious either, but it just wasn't a huge thing in my life. And then something just took root in ninth grade. But even as an adult, I've had experiences that I feel like where the love of God kind of just, I don't know, it just hits me at a deeper level.

And I feel as though I've moved forward in some way. So all I guess I'm trying to say is I don't even know how to interpret all the experiences. And to our friends in the traditions that really emphasize the sacraments, that is one point I can appreciate about the object of baptism as this kind of marker you can point to. So even though I'm not, you know, I'm on record for disagreeing with, you know, certain construals of baptismal regeneration and that kind of thing, I do really understand and appreciate something of why people are emphasizing that,

because it is kind of, it is me. And that's, you know, something in even in the Baptist tradition that's been an emphasis and certainly in the reformed of this emphasis upon baptism and its role for assurance of salvation. So, but anyway, yeah, It's been a bumpy process, I suppose. But that's okay. So why did you wait so long to get baptized? Well, I wasn't studying that doctrine when I was in high school. I wasn't, I mean, I was aware of it, but it wasn't really something I was diving into.

And then even in college, but then my last semester of college at University of Georgia, I started to feel this calling. That's kind of when I started to break through and sense, okay, I'm called to ministry. That's when I realized I'm going to be baptizing people. Potentially, you know, if the Lord confirms and guides and provides, I'm going to be an ordained minister. So I really need to figure this out because I'd always been sort of on the fence on it. So once I felt that calling, I conducted a study that last semester of college, that first year at Covenant Seminary, and that year and a half time at the end of that, I came out on the

Cretobaptist side. But I'm kind of an interesting Cretel Baptist in that I'm not, I'm a little bit more, I'm closer to the Pytobaptists than a lot of capital B Baptist. That's because we got you in early, but go on it. Exactly. Yeah. So talk to me about your call to ministry. Was there an event around that, or was it that also sort of a few events in there? Or what was that like for you? Also a messy process, not one thing. But. But I can remember moments where it was hitting me. I remember sitting on a sort of stadium seating after hanging out with four seniors in high school. I had just finished my freshman year in college.

I had spent, it was at the end of the summer of 2003. And I remember I'd just been earnestly praying for these four seniors and reaching out to them all summer, trying to have an impact upon them. And I remember the feeling of joy in that. And I remember this feeling of like, this is what I want to give my life to. This is what I want to give myself to. So I can remember certain moments like that, certain conversations with people. But that was a process as well.

And like I said, one of the key moments in that was that breakthrough of understanding, of just feeling a sense of freedom to pursue and not worrying too much about my family or appearances or things like that. What did you study in college? I was a philosophy and religion. double major. At the University of Georgia, the religion department has the highest number of atheists of any department. And so, of course, right, secular university, everyone goes into it to try to disprove it. And I just loved it. I almost weekly, I kind of miss being in an academic environment like that where you're surrounded by different ideas and you have to respond to

challenges and that kind of thing. So, and I love philosophy. I've always loved philosophy. I've always philosophy. I've always felt like it's a more natural interest of mine, just thinking abstractly. So even though I've studied theology more, my natural love is a little bit more philosophy. So yeah, I love both of those. Did you date a lot in high school, college? How did you meet your, I assume you're married. How did you meet your wife? Dated not a lot in high school, a little bit in college, and then was not planning on getting married, but before I went to Covenant, wanted to get some ministry experience, and I've always loved the West Coast, just something about the diversity and the weather and just find it kind of fascinating.

Yeah, that's nice. Yeah, California, especially Central. I know you're near Sacramento, right? I'm in Sacramento, yeah, I'm in the city proper. So we met in Santa Cruz, and basically I wanted to do ministry, get some ministry experience. I thought, you know, a lot of people take a few years off before starting seminary to do ministry and then go, I thought, well, at least I'll take the summer to do ministry, and I wanted to be out west, worked at a conference center, wasn't planning on getting married.

No, it was right down the road from Mount Herman. Everyone always thinks of that one. It's in Scots Valley, which is right where Mount Herman is, but it's called Mission Springs, and it's kind of a rival conference center to Mount Herman, just very close by, beautiful area. Okay. And yeah, met Esther basically became best friends over the summer, and we were married 13 months after we met. Wonderful. It's not uncommon.

I mean, people don't understand why single young Christians go do. I mean, they go for all the reasons, but they often fall in love. That's not an unusual story. Yeah, I always say it's never the thing I necessarily recommend that you go that fast. But at the same time, it's like, hey, if you know you want to get married, why wait, you know? Yeah, yeah, well, wonderful. How many, do you have any children? We have five kids.

We do. Wonderful. Yeah, yeah, we have two boys and three girls for us. How about for you? Okay, we've got three boys, two girls. The oldest is, let me do some quick. The oldest is 33, and the youngest just turned 24. Okay, very nice.

We're in a different season of parenting than you are. We have our eldest is just turned 11, and our youngest will turn 2. soon. So we are in a season where, you know, the kind of thing where it's like, you will probably hear them at some point during this discussion because it's very full and noisy in our house, but in a very joyful way. Nothing would make me happier. I love my children all love each other, love being together, and we love, we've got two of them living with us right now. One is saving he moved out of his apartment. He's saving money because he's getting married next month. And so, and one just graduated college.

And so he's back living with us. And no, I, five kids. It's a great number. It's a great number. So I've heard you, maybe you can give me some encouragement here. I've heard that as you, as your kids get older, it doesn't get easier, but at least you get more sleep. Yes. Have you found that to be true.

That is very true. You get more sleep. But I, I still remember, I still remember a night when. our youngest, you know, sort of slithered into bed with us, which happens, of course, with kids. And I remember he was, he was getting older. It wasn't very old, but he was getting older. And I thought to myself, I wonder if this will be the last time. Because on one hand, you know, you're sleeping with one or two kids in the bed with you.

And it's like, you know, they're kicking you and you're just not getting sleep. But on the other hand, it's also so sweet because there they are and you love them. and and then that was the last time. And it was like, and so I think about that. And it's like, on one hand, yeah, getting more sleep. But on the other hand, gosh, you miss the little critters when they're living. It is totally mixed emotions for us as well. I remember that when our eldest first could buckle himself into the car seat.

We were so happy because we thought, oh, you know, this makes life easier. You have no idea the satisfaction that. gives you. And then at the same time as I look back at pictures from him from that time, it's, yeah, you feel very nostalgic as well. Wait, wait until the, so, so my youngest just graduated college. And I'll tell you when, and he went to a public school, which was the only one of our kids that went to a public's college, all the other kids went to private schools. And I'll tell you, when we finished paying for college, it was just kind of like, because, I mean, basically, I,

worked to keep a roof over ahead and food on the table and my wife worked to pay college bills. I mean, yeah, it's coming. So anyway, God, that's a wonderful thing. So talk to me about what seminary was like for you. Loved seminary, and I'm not, as I praise various people at institutions here, I don't just do this to be nice. I really mean it. We just had an absolutely fantastic experience. Covenant Seminary in St. Louis.

So both Esther, my wife and I were both students there together, which was kind of fun. She finished her last year of college during my first year there. So my last two years, she was a student. They were both full-time students. So she did a Master of Arts in Counseling degree. She's worked in mental health fields and has a real interest in human psychology and personality. and all that kind of stuff. She's so gifted in those ways.

And so it was fun for our first two years of marriage to be in that community. We just made some really great friends, lots of people in the same season of life, starting off marriage, newly married, that kind of thing. And then Covenant really marked us just in terms of the godliness of the professors and the culture there.

The stereotype I have of seminary is sometimes that it's an intellectually rich time, but a spiritually dry time. Yeah. It is for many. And that's what I almost was afraid of. And Covenant really wasn't. It was really spiritually a rich time as well.

And I think a lot of that is just most of the professors there have pastoral experience. Several of them. I'm thinking of their faces right now. It just comes across so clearly from them, the pastoral frame of everything that they do. And I just kind of soaked that in. And just the culture there. It's hard to describe. Until you've been in an environment where there truly is grace in the culture and kindness and warmth,

you know, my experience is a lot of places that are more theological. They're a little, they're not as warm. And Hovenant just had a warmth to it. And I've always said, Esther and I've always said, you know, we've always felt like we're dissatisfied if ministry feels like anything less than that. It's got to be love and warmth and kindness and kindness and kind of human. mainness as well as theology. And Covenant really modeled that well for us.

So, yeah, I'm always thinking back. And I can think back on specific things I learned there. There's a, yeah, well, I could go on about Covenant. Where is Covenant on sort of the ecclesiastical theological landscape in America? Okay, so it's PCA, which Presbyterian Church in America. So, you know, I would say kind of just within conservative evangelicalism. Yeah. Not super feisty about some of the particulars as you might find in kind of, you know, leaning fundamentalist direction.

Westminster's, let's say. Yeah, there'd be some other, you know, when we might think of like reformed institutions, it's not as tight, perhaps, in the ethos as some places. But, you know, but it is decidedly reformed. And so you're going to get a lot of like Louis Burkhov and a lot of. of John Calvin and a lot of great reformed theologians as you go through. So I would say very solid, but that's what I loved is it didn't necessarily lead off with a real tightly defined theological ethos, at least as I experienced it, it was a little bit more of a fully-orbed kind of culture.

So yeah, but, but, you know, broadly within kind of the conservative evangelical space, I'd say. And so you're getting ready to lead. What were you? anticipating doing as you were sort of landing the plane on your seminary career? What kind of ministry were you expecting? Yeah, I was kind of open. I actually loved doing both youth and college ministry just for the honesty of it and just the sense of a lot of times in those younger years, there's a little more openness sometimes to really build relationships and build community, and we just had so much fun doing it, especially that summer out west. But, I think the long-term thought was, I would just love to be a pastor.

I do have just a love of preaching and then a love of pastoring people, a love of shepherding people. I really do enjoy that. It's meaningful to me. So that's been something, you know, I have a role at a church right now, but I'm no longer a senior pastor or like a, you know, a full-time minister. And so that's been actually an interesting transition of, I do miss it. I miss that. On the one hand, I love driving to church with my family and just sitting with my kids in church. I mean, that is pretty awesome. And just being able to be there for my wife on Sunday mornings. Yeah, it's a big deal.

So there's things I love about it. And I do feel like I'm catching my breath a little bit from what was an overly busy season that would have probably burned me out over the last five years. just the weekly onslaught of sermons and everything else combined with my online ministry, I was just doing way too much, and that's partly what led to the change. So I feel an exhaling from that, but I do miss that. That was the thought as being a pastor, and I really, you know, being a pastor is an interesting thing. I'd be curious what your observations are on this, but my experience was it can be very painful, and there are unique forms of pain that are associated.

with ministry, especially just when there's relational hurts and conflict or people wound you. That can be really, really brutal. At the same time, there's also these unique joys and this sense of you get to be there with people in the deep moments of life, and you get to be there at the hospital, and you get to pray with people, and it's this incredible privilege. Yeah. So, yeah, so I do miss it. Oh, that's all that's true.

And you've been a pastor for many years. So I've been a pastor at Living Stones for 27 years. Before that, I was a foreign missionary. Ah, okay. In the Dominican Republic. So I did that right after seminary. So I've had two jobs. My father, my father went 36 years with one job.

He pastored one little, I call it a racial reconciliation church in Patterson, New Jersey. And that's where I grew up. And it was mostly black folks. And but it was Christian reform. So I went to a Christian school. and but yeah he spent his first 36 years in his first church. Amazing. I said, what's that?

Well, I said amazing. And I was just, if I could ask you this, because I think it's honorable whenever someone, I mean, of course, as you know, the norm is no longer, and I guess never was to be long term. Certainly at one church, but even just in ministry, what has enabled you to remain in ministry for so long? because a lot of people, of course, they don't, for whatever reason, it's, it is more rare to see that, it seems like. Yeah. I'm stubborn, maybe. I don't quit. I, you know, I don't know.

I watched my father spend 36 years in one church. He watched his father. That was back old school Christian reformed where my grandfather was usually in a church between three and six years. And so most of those churches first were sort of in the Midwest during the Depression era, and then the World War II era. And then after the war, he had his longest serving church was a church in Canada that my aunt and grandmother, they really didn't like being in Canada. But at that point, my father was fluent both in Frisian and Dutch because actually we found out

not too many years ago that actually that whole family was Jewish. and they had sort of left the Netherlands and slid in among the Dutch and and sort of figured out a way to assimilate, which was fortunate for us because, of course, during the war, all of our more distant Jewish relatives in the Netherlands were all wiped out in the Holocaust. So crazy things happen in this world. So my father spent 36 years in Patterson, had a number of opportunities to leave, had a number of calls to leave, but just love the people and love. the work. I remember coming to, after I left the Dominican Republic and came here to Northern

California, I was obviously younger than I am now, and just talking to noting meeting some ministers that were burned out but didn't have many occupational options behind it. And so we're sort of staying in the ministry. And then amongst clergy would speak with more transparency. And I remember talking to one guy who was just saying, I would never tell my sons to do this. I thought. And, you know, it was clear that he had, he had sort of checked out and was staying in the role because he wanted to make it to retirement. And, and so my father's still alive at that point. So I went and I was talking to my father. And so I said, dad, because he was retired at this point. So it was funny when he retired is that kind of took my mother's by surprise because,

they left the city that they were pastoring his last church in and then they moved to the city she grew up in and he of course was neck deep in ministry in and now the place that they were and their church that she had grown up in and you know he's leading four Bible studies and he was being interim pastor when they didn't have him and he's doing all of this stuff and I said dad how do you like that I says I've never loved it better I mean as he went through life he just loved serving the Lord more and more and more and more. And, you know, so, and I've got some of my mother in me too. But, you know, my father was sort of a babe in the woods. He never saw evil in anyone. He trusted everyone, loved everyone. And so I've got part of that in me. I've got a little bit

of my mother's vinegar in me too. So I can be a little more cynical than my father ever could. But just, you know, got to this church and loved the people and they loved me. And so it's been a, you know, it's been a dying church. It's been a long, slow, steady decline, which actually sort of afforded me time to do help with church planting in Sacramento, other Christian reform churches, and then do denominational work. And then when I made a video about Jordan Peterson and that thing took off. So then do all the YouTube ministry. but I never could have done this if I had had a church of hundreds that was sort of, I never

simply would have had anywhere near the time. So, and also, you know, my children are now out of the house. That makes a difference too. So, but no, I, I've got enough of my father and me that I love the people. I love the place. And I don't want to leave and I've been able to stay. So wonderful. It's a blessing. Well, I won't, I won't apply you with too many questions here, but I am No, go ahead, because I'm going to apply you with plenty more. It's fun just to talk. I mean, this is such a refreshing YouTube conversation because a lot of my YouTube comment or content, as you know,

is content, you know, theology-driven. And so it's fun to just have a conversation. But I was going to ask you, do you see the challenges we're facing in our culture right now? In all the years you've done ministry, do you feel like we're in a uniquely challenging time? Because I'm looking at the world. right now and I keep thinking like, wow, this seems like a weird time that we're living in.

And I keep wondering like, well, is this just another, like, have we been, do we go through this every 10 years or 20 years? But it seems to me like unprecedented times we're living in. No, it's when I think back, I talk to my mother about this actually often. And she's, she's like, it's a tough time to be a minister. She's just looking around watching it. Because, you know, my grandfather was pastoring Dutch immigrant churches that were living mostly in, isolation, where the tradition that they carried over from the Netherlands was basically the container of the world they lived in. And you had radio and television. You had some of that. But, you know, mostly in rural areas, they were just dealing with what was within inside the tradition.

You know, fast forward to my father outside of New York City. Obviously, the great events in America in terms of racial reconciliation, all of these things were churning in the church. My father's church did a lot of when heroin sort of came through Patterson. My father's ministry in church did a lot of work with heroin addicts. I mean, I grew up going to church as a kid with all of these guys who were trying to get off heroin, which is an interesting thing. Looking back on it, now as a kid, they were just, you know, they were just corky and homes and all these other guys that were just, you know. And, but still at that point, still at that point, the, sort of the alignment, the change that happens after the Cold War where you see the rise of

new atheism, because, you know, there's always skepticism about, say, conservative Christians, and, you know, they're not really getting the history and that stuff right and the fundamentalist modernist tensions. But then when you get to after the Cold War ends, and before, let's say, conservative Christians, according to, let's say, the main line were perhaps wrong on facts and a little anti-intellectual, but for the most part, the morality's lined up. After the Cold War, that all collapses, and you have the new atheist attack against Christians. And Christian, serious Christians aren't just, let's say, prudish. Now they're immoral. And of course, that doesn't happen uniformly across the country, but in a place like

Northern California, even the changes from when we were doing church planting in Sacramento, in the late 90s and aughts, you could still go into a suburban area and sort of still work what had been predominantly the post-war method, which Tim Keller talked about, in terms of activating sort of sleeper Christians. Now, I mean, even just church planting in a city like Sacramento,

we approach it in a totally different way because I think Aaron Wren pretty much nails it. we are very much in a negative environment. And you have to be fair to Tim Keller, I know the New York City area, because that's where I grew up. And yes, you very much had a negative space there too. But overall, the mass of the country has moved negative in some significant ways, which is much more like, you know, that have been to England a couple times, what they face there. So it's, it's, it's, It's a lot harder now than it was in some ways. Evangelism has to be a real turn for a lot of people.

They are first looking, assuming churches are places of corruption and bigotry and the kinds of churches that you and I are used to being in. These kinds of churches are that way. And now they're going to join, now they're going to join this bigoted organization, which requires a much steeper turn. And, you know, the argument for the main line is that, well, you don't have to give up your evolved sexual ethics if you join the main line. But it's like, yeah, but that doesn't mean the main line is thriving in most places. So that's the way I see it, basically.

Yeah. Yeah, I think about this a lot and I feel very sobered and just a desire to encourage pastors because, you know, there's all these cultural dynamics you're talking about are on the table, but then also the way technology. affects us, you know, even just preaching is hard because everyone's attention span seems like it's shorter, probably thanks to YouTube videos and like other things, but everything. Right now, it's a unique, it's a unique time. So I often try to do whatever I can to encourage pastors, like, just don't give up, you know, and don't think it's, don't think you're crazy or it's you if it feels hard right now because it's kind of everywhere.

Yeah. Although, you know, my father's ministry was hard too, but it was just hard for different reasons. Among African Americans, there was still the church, I mean, Easter Sunday, we would have attendance like we never have any other, and people would come dress to the nines. It was all that culture from the South and the black church sort of, you know, would walk through our doors in Patterson. But that has, that has changed in the African American community too. So, no, it is a, it is a different time. And, well, when we get into talking about ministry on YouTube, I'm sure we'll talk about that. So what did you do after seminary? So after seminary, I did one pastoral internship at a church in Washington, D.C., Capitol Hill Baptist Church, and we were there

for about one year. And then we moved to California, and I served as a youth pastor at a church for a few years. And then I became an associate pastor at that church for a few years. And that's when I did my PhD at Fuller. Okay. So, and then I'll just finish off the narrative here for clarity. So from there, I did what's called like a postdoctoral fellowship at Ted's at Trinity, where I had grown up and took a year to work on Augustine's doctrine of creation. But we wanted to go back to California.

We went back and served in Ohio, California, which is kind of near Santa Barbara, a little bit north of L.A., and we were there for five and a half years before just a few months ago moving here to Tennessee and I served as a senior pastor there. And Ohio, I'm guessing, probably has some similarities to Sacramento. What we're describing about the culture in general is there in a little bit of a concentrated form. Very, very, you know, not a very Christian kind of place. In fact, very spiritually dark. A lot of witchcraft and sorcery.

and things like that. But also some great people there as well. Some great churches. But it's just a smaller percentage of the population. Yeah. So, well, let's talk about serving in Ohio a little bit more than what. Well, when did, how did the YouTube stuff start? I'll ask that.

Because you're serving a local church. How big was the church? Small church, maybe 100 people. Right around there. Okay, small church, about 100 people. You obviously had a bent towards philosophy. What did you do your PhD at Fuller? The PhD was in basically historical theology.

Okay, okay, okay. And who did you study with? Oliver Crisp was my doctoral supervisor, and then John Thompson, James Bradley, some of the other church history faculty, I studied under a little bit as well. Okay, okay. And well, how did you like Fuller?

I had a great experience at Fuller. It, you know, when you do a PhD somewhere, especially when you're studying full, you're studying and I was going through it full time while serving full time. Yeah. So that was one of those kids. We had our first two kids during that time. So that was one of those seasons. I remember it was like, you know, Wednesday morning is studying Latin vocab and Wednesday night is playing dodgeball.

You know, this kind of like different things going on all at once. I love Fuller. I got such a small slice of it because I did a lot of directed readings. And I kind of, I'd taken about three years off between my master's degree and the PhD. And so I had done, I kind of knew exactly what I wanted to do. And so I just kind of dove in and it was, I was very independent. So I didn't necessarily feel like I got a huge sampling of Fuller in terms of even just different faculty outside my department and that kind of thing. but it was great because it gave me a lot of freedom.

I mean, a lot of my time was spent studying the languages. Fuller's super, you know, they have what I prefer, which is the kind of old school model on languages. So if you have to have Greek and Hebrew as prerex, and you have to do German, French, and Latin, and you have to be able to demonstrate. Like the test is literally you just show up and translate something. And all you have is a dictionary.

So you can't fake it. You know, you have to actually be able to, So a lot of my, you know, a lot of those first two and a half years were spent with things like that, just really pouring into languages, directed readings. So yeah, I had a great experience. But I love academics. I'm a total nerd. So anything related to that, I just find, I actually find kind of fun.

And so it was a nice, it was actually nice to have something to work at while in ministry. The church we were serving at at that time was going through some transition and some challenges. And so in some respects, it was kind of this healthy, almost a hobby or a project that kind of kept me buoyed while serving it in a context, like a different kind of challenge to throw myself into. Yeah. Yeah, you must have been crazy busy. And you must really love academics too. I mean, because, yeah, I mean, that's a, it's a fun mix, but you have to love the mix. Totally.

And when people ask me about, you know, advice about getting a PhD, I often will say, you know, you have to count the cost because it really takes a toll psychologically and in terms of your time, it's not an easy. I mean, unless I guess PhDs nowadays, it seems like some of them are getting scaled back and they're getting a little smaller. But, you know, if you do like a robust program, it's a major, major life commitment. And, but I had it deep in my DNA. I just, I just really wanted to do it. I just, I couldn't, you know, to me, it was like, I can't not do this because I just felt this deep longing that I want to become the best theologian I can be. That's a part of me.

And so that was just a part of, part of that season. I was just so grateful, God opened up the door. I had thought that getting a PhD was an idol. Earlier than that, I had given up that dream and said, okay, this is an idol. This is something that's getting undue place in my life. I just need to serve in the local church. You don't need a PhD to do this. And then I felt as though once I relinquished that,

because I wanted to study at Princeton Seminary, I wanted to study at Carl Bart. I had all these dreams. I had planned it all out, and then I felt like I needed to surrender that to the Lord. And so then I end up at this church, nine minutes down the road from Fuller, and I felt like the Lord gave me that back,

one side surrendered it. And so I was just grateful to have the chance to do it. Yeah. So what did you learn about yourself than pastoring a local church? Similar to you, I found pastoring, especially in Ohio, as I mentioned, the experience in our previous church was kind of up and down because the church was going through a lot. In Ohio, I found a congregation that, and I may even get emotional talking about this, but I found a congregation that actually really accepted me and loved me.

And they had had some bumps prior to my arrival. And so when I got there, I think they were just happy to have a pastor. So even me was okay, you know. Well, you're pretty exceptional. I mean, you've done a lot of education, and you obviously have a warmth about you can talk to people. So I think they were pretty darn happy they got you, I suspect. So go on. Well, I just felt, I felt spoiled in a sense in that the people at our church were so exceptionally kind. And to the point of just embarrassing you with coming over to help, oh, your dishwasher broke, I know exactly how to fix that.

I can be there right now, you know, this kind of thing, just like very loving people. And there was a unified congregation. A lot of churches that you go to either are in decline or they're in conflict. And so actually that's part of the challenge of pastoring. Sometimes you don't know what you're walking into. You don't know what you're walking into. And it's hard to find a good fit. And then culturally, you know, sometimes the style of the pastor and the style of the church aren't a great fit.

There's so many things that can make it challenging. But I inherited this wonderful unified church that was stable and solid and loved preaching. of the word. And so, you know, to answer your question of what did I learn about myself, it was a deeply healing experience to just have a good pastoral experience. Because I've seen so much church trauma in my life. I've seen so many church splits. I've seen so many wounded sheep bleeding, you know, as they leave the church. I've seen so much of that. So just to have an experience where I just, I genuinely love the people. They genuinely love me. It was one of the more healing experiences of my life. And I'll just always be grateful to God for that, those happy five years.

That's great. Okay. So on to YouTube. How on earth did you wind up in this very strange space? How did that happen? You're in a wonderful church. You're starting your family. You've finished your studies. Everything's going good. And then almost sounds like a cautionary tale. Let's hope not, but, you know, YouTube's a weird thing. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it'll be fun to talk with you about YouTube, and I will want to hear a lot of your thoughts on it because I am finding it fascinating, really fun, and really interesting, really complicated, and challenging.

Challenging to steward it well, I am learning every day. I mean, I'll put out a video, and then one week later, I'll be like, oh, you know, is it? So it's interesting. but yeah, I started YouTube on a whim. So summer, let's see, sometime in 2020, the pandemic hits. Right. And I find that there's my experience in 2020 was like, you know, all of a sudden,

everything gets really busy as you're kind of adjusting and shutting things down. By the time you get into like May, everything is kind of dry and slow. And I'm like, okay, I need a new hobby. I need something to work at. And I was watching other YouTube. I like watching YouTube. I like watching debates. You know, I've always loved watching like William Lane Craig.

You know, he's debating one of the new atheist type persons. I'll just watch them over and over. I just think they're so interesting. And so I've always, so I was watching capturing Christianity and Pines with Aquinas and other Christian YouTube channels, watching their debates, just finding it enjoyable. and over that summer, I just completely on a whim, not knowing anything about videography. All I know about cameras is that you point them and click. I don't know anything, you know, like absolutely have no technical expertise at all. But I just thought, what a cool opportunity.

What a cool medium to try to engage with people. And I was finishing a book on the existence of God, why God makes sense in a world that doesn't. I finished writing that right around that same time period, right around summer 2020. And so August of that year, I launched Truth Unites thinking, this would just be a cool side thing as just another extension of, you know, this is a way I can maybe somebody who would never come to my church. They would never honestly even read my book. But they may well click on a YouTube video. And they actually are.

And there actually is amazing amount of high level content on YouTube. I mean, it's, you know, there's actually, it's not all watered down. There's some deep stuff on, on YouTube. And I was thinking, this could be a cool opportunity to engage with people. Started doing it. I just found it fun. I just found it fun. The community of people, you know, like us getting to interact with you, you know, this is cool.

It's like, what an honor to get to know these different people. And then the particular way of engaging, it's so different from Twitter where it is more personal. Of course, social media always has some downsides, but it is more personal than other forms of social media. And yes, I just found it fun and then, you know, how it is. And this is, you know, one video leads to another. You start responding to things. You start interacting. You start, and then, you know, the big thing for me has been what I thought it would be is basically apologetics and just general theology.

And I got pulled into Protestantism type stuff. not because of any desire in advance, but just because of circumstances of just seeing there's a real need for this because sometimes on YouTube, it just seemed like the Protestants were underrepresented. And I kept watching debates or videos and thinking, boy, we kind of got to do better as Protestants that's stepping up to the plate here because sometimes,

I mean, I don't want to insult any others who are doing that already, but in terms of the volume of people and stuff, It just wasn't as good. And so I was feeling like, okay, so then I started getting into that stuff, to my own surprise. And that's a focus of mine, but it is not the sum and total of truth unites. I really want it to be a broader thing. And I'm trying to do a lot more engagement with atheism, slavery in the Bible, conquest of Canaan. That's all the kind of stuff I'm researching.

I've got books right here kind of working on that stuff these days. Okay. Well, let's talk about, so you made your first video. What was your first video about? Was it about the thing that you had written the book about or the existence of God? It was. It was one of the arguments in the book, which is an argument for God from math. So I probably started off in the most nerdy way possible.

It's a very abstract kind of argument. Yep, first video argument for God from math. And then a lot of the following ones were out of the book, too, just basically arguments for God. Okay. And what kind of people could you tell were sort of picking up on it and what kind of feedback did you get? I got so and when I started, I had a small sort of platform maybe a bit. You know, I'd written a few books and I had a few people on Twitter who were following me. So when I started, I kind of had some people who maybe like, I think that first video probably had a lot of people who maybe watched it because I put it out on Twitter because I announced them. on a YouTube channel.

So I started with a little bit of that. And so the initial reaction like that was just probably more positive because it was a bunch of friends. It was people who already knew me for the most part. And then the evolution in it was, I remember one of the YouTubers, I really like Austin Suggs,

who runs the channel Gospel simplicity. I've just done a ton of stuff with him, and I just find him a nice guy. And he had me on early on. And he's one, who's also involved, he interviews a lot of Roman Catholic apologists, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Protestants. And so I remember that conversation as being one when I was probably still under like a thousand subscribers. And from there, you know, I just remember a lot of other people

kind of in that space, you know, starting to learn. I remember I went on the channel Reason and Theology, went back when it was Michael Lofton, Eric Ybarra, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, William Albrecht, some of these other guys. I remember doing a couple of interviews with them very early on, and then it's just how it works. You know, just one thing leads to another, and I just kind of got further pulled into a lot of those conversations as well along the way. And it just, I think there was just a real need for Protestants to engage with that.

I just think a lot of Protestants, we are like low-hanging fruit to the other traditions because we don't, sometimes we don't study church history at all, and it would be a real problem. Yeah. Well, that's that I think you're, I agree with you about the Protestant present on YouTube, which is really fascinating in America because of course, Protestantism is the majority religious Christian expression in America. I mean, by far, if you take all of those Protestants and put them in one big bucket, and then even if you add some of the other groups like the Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormons who are, you know, and we can throw in my friend. my friend Sam, the Unitarian, I mean, it's, it's massive. And the Catholics are big too, but it's a different thing. And so it is, it is interesting to think about Protestantism and YouTube. Although I do, I do think that, I mean, part of what we see happening now with the coming of the

Orthodox is that there is, I think, in some ways, a Protestant spirit that is almost table stakes in America for participating in a religious conversation. I think it's, I think these, I don't mean that Protestant in terms of confessionally, but Protestant in terms of procedurally, it's, there's something that happened in the Protestant Reformation that has for the most part simply made everyone at least a procedural Protestant in this world, except in some deep places of, of tradition of other places. Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. So you start making videos and then you start getting response. What has surprised you,

what is something that you have now learned and are pretty sure of that before you started on YouTube, you could not have imagined? That's a good question. I'll be curious if you would answer this question as well. I'd just be curious to see your thoughts. I would say, well, it has surprised me how much fun it is and how much you can build genuine relationships. You know, I might have tended to be a little cynical about relationships that aren't embodied. And I totally agree with my friends who will talk about the importance of having embodied relationships where you're with someone face-to-face. That is so important.

But it doesn't mean you can't at all be blessed by these online relationships. And I've kind of been amazed at there are people right now that I can say, that are kind of dear friends. We will be praying for each other. We'll be texting each other. And I'm like, and then it suddenly hits me like, I've never actually met this person in real life. And it's so weird.

And it's like, how do you do that? But it happens. And I've been kind of surprised by that pleasantly. I would, I would agree. I would agree with that. I would completely agree with that. And that has been. So my, my genesis with this was I,

So my first, I had, people had often asked me, why did I never do a PhD? And, well, I had a busy family and I had a church. And I had actually early on had a possibility of working at a Christian college. And I've looked into that a little bit. And I just had my MDIV. and then I got what I would have made at that Christian college. And here I'm pastoring this dying church in California, and I compared what I would make at that Christian college.

And it began to dawn on me, you know, if I got a PhD, I would spend tens of thousands of dollars getting a PhD, and what I would mostly get out of it is a pay cut. Yeah. And I thought, huh. Now, I think getting a PhD would be fun, but it would also be called. costly, not just in terms of money, but especially at that point, you know, when I came back to

the United States, I had three kids and the oldest was six, seven. And so depending on where your kids are, that's a really important question in terms of what you can do. Anyway, so I looked at a PhD and said, nah, and I looked at a D-Men and really said, nah, I saw my father do that. And I thought, I'm not, you know, now you're paying tens of thousand dollars and you're not even getting anything. You know, he never got a bump in the little church he was pastoring in inner city, Patterson, New Jersey from getting his D-Men. So then some of my colleagues were writing books. And I noticed that these are wonderful pastors, they're smart guys, they're.

And I began to notice, well, number one, most of their books are sort of fleshing out the sermons that they're preaching. most of the people who buy their books are members of their church, their family, friends, and colleagues. And I wondered, how many of these books are really getting read? And what impact are these books having? So then I thought, and one of my friends said, you know, if I had to actually total up the amount of time that I spent writing that book, what I got from that book was well under minimum wage. So I thought, I don't know if, I don't know. I know if I wrote a book, my mom would, my mom would read it. The people of my church would buy it.

But I don't know if it would make a big difference. So then I, I wasn't a big YouTube watcher, but I thought people watch TV. I mean, people really watch TV. And so I thought, so that actually made a couple little videos. I've been blogging about the denomination and doing sermon prep on my blog. And I played with that. But, you know, a few hundred. people followed it, but not a lot. And I had in in the early, in about 2006, I was in a place where I was

really, I probably would have burned out if I hadn't found Tim Keller's sermons. And I started listening to two, three, four, Tim Keller sermons a day just to just to keep walking. And, and, and, and so that was a help. And then I thought, huh, there's something about this media stuff. And then, so I made a couple little videos, just kind of playing around with things. I was watching what was happening in my denomination about 2010, 2011, 2012. I'd always been sort of on the progressive end of the denomination because of my roots in racial reconciliation. But then I began noticing the discourse around LGBTQ stuff, which I was pretty much set up sort of on the affirming side. making a big deal of things. But when I was listening to the theological discourse around it,

that really got my attention because unlike the racial reconciliation stuff, where I didn't really notice a real change in theological discourse between those who were for it and those who were resisting, I began to notice new strains coming in around the theological discourse with respect to what I would call sexual liberationism. And I thought, there's something going on here. And so I would, and I was seeing the tensions rising in the Christianiform church. And so I just sort of watched all this. And of course, everybody sort of expected me to line up with the progressives on this and to go to war with them again, as we had done with women in office and racial reconciliation and all those things. And, but I was, I had hesitations. Because I,

I was listening and thinking, there's new, you know, I was thinking theologically and saying some of the categories that had basically people have tried to hold before were really slipping noticeably among these groups. Definitions are changing pretty significantly. And modes of reading scripture seem to be transforming. And so I was watching all of this and I was blogging about this. And I was watching, I was doing that with respect to like intramural stuff in my denomination. I made a video about, I made a post game show for I think synod. I don't remember 2016 or something. Just made it on YouTube.

I didn't know how to make a YouTube video or anything. I was just playing around with that. A member of my church, a member of my church named Freddie had been a mook on a shock jock on a rap channel in Sacramento. These are the weird. These are why I never want to leave the local church. because they will bring you stories and things that you will never notice any other way. So Freddie's on this local, he's a mook on this local shock jock and the family had sort of tried to keep me from knowing this because all they did is mock him.

It was sort of a Howard Stern type situation and he was one of the people they mocked. But he loved the attention. And then that guy had said something and he basically had to pack his bags and leave town. and so the radio career ended, which I thought, that's probably a good thing. And then he says, Pastor Paul, why don't you and me do a TV show together? I didn't want to say no. I mean, that that was fulfilling a legitimate thing in his life. And he had gone down to public access TV and done time there, but it's like, I don't have flexibility of schedule.

to go down to public access television and do a TV show with you, Freddie. So I said, look, this is what we'll do. I'll take my smartphone and we go out to lunch fairly regularly and I help them out with this or that. We just do this. And so I'll tell you what, let's let's have the Freddie and Paul show. And we can talk about the Sacramento Kings. We'll talk about the Oakland days.

We'll talk about the 49ers. And then Freddie loves to rap. So then he'll do a wrap. and then we'll be done. And every now and then we'll bring friends on. We'll have a like a 1970s variety show like the Carol Burnett show. And Freddie has a real good sense of humor. So we start making the Freddy and Paul show.

And I watch it. And I share it with my family sometimes. It's kind of funny. And his mom watches it. And so we have the Freddie and Paul show. This goes on and on and on. And Jordan Peterson comes around. And it's like,

boy, there's something going on here. And I notice things in comment sections. And one comment in particular, someone said in a Reddit post, I used to I used to listen to a lot of Tim Keller sermons. And then I found Jordan Peterson. And I'm listening to him. And I thought, that's really interesting. Who is this guy?

So I start listening to his stuff. And that's really when I start listening to YouTube. And I'm listening to hours of Tim Keller. I had listened to hours of Tim Keller. Now I've listened to hours of Jordan Peterson. That's like. And very quickly, no, he's not an evangelical. That's not what's going on here.

What is going on here? And so I don't want to talk to my colleagues about this. And it's like some of them were watching, but some of them were telling me like, I was watching too much Jordan Peterson, so I stopped. I thought, well, that's interesting too. So I make a video because I'm having trouble finding people to talk about this with. And I thought, maybe a dozen people will watch this and I'll make a friend or two. And that'll be it.

I didn't understand anything. And so I make this video And of course the Freddie and Paul show usually had, you know, 10 or 15 views on the Freddie and Paul show. But I make this video about Jordan Peterson and I wake up the next day I thought I should see what happened with that thing.

About three or 400 people watched it. It's like, oh, that's interesting. And then, you know, then I have a few dozen new subscribers. And then the next day, 800 people watched it. It's like, and then I have a couple hundred subscribers. And there was a bunch of messy. I didn't know how to do audio or anything.

So then I've had another video. That one really took off. And then I'm reading the comments and that's interesting. But then I start getting emails. And everybody wants to talk to me. And it's like, what do I do? I can't say no to these people. And most of them are atheists,

seekers, people with complicated stories, and they all want to talk to me. So I start talking to them. I start talking to as many as I can. And of course, the church, you know, a little church like this, it's up and down. I get a fair amount of flexibility. I start talking to dozens of these people, mostly young men. And so that's how this, and then I thought, well, I'll keep making videos. What am I going to make videos about? I'm going to make videos about whatever I'm thinking about. So I just make more videos. I don't care how many people watch them, really. And people keep watching them and people keep commenting and more people keep writing.

And then I'm having all these conversations with people. And I realize it's getting repetitive for me. I'm saying the same thing to multiple people. And you know, it'd be nicer if I could just. So to one guy I said, could I just share this? Well, first they're asking me. They're saying, well, you said, did you say this or this or this? It's like, I don't remember what I said.

But Zoom, this is before Zoom, it's popular. There's a little record button. I said, well, so then I'd say, shall I record this so that you can have a copy of it? So you'll remember what I said because I won't remember what I said. So I start recording him. And then one guy says, why did I just share it on my channel? He says, sure. So I shared on my channel.

And then everybody who's been watching me and having questions and having conversations is like, oh, you can do that. So then more and more get recorded, more and more get shared. and then everything is just sort of off to the races. And the goal has never been for me to say push content, but it's much more been exactly the observation you just made, how much genuine relationship not only can you have, but are people having in this medium?

And it's like, huh? And so then I go, from just pastoring the 75, 60, after COVID, 40, 50 people here to thousands of people on the internet. And I keep telling them, I'm not your pastor. I can't really be your pastor. You really need to go and find a local church where you'll have a pastor or a priest or someone who can actually know you because I can't do that for all of you. But I will talk to you if I can, when I can. And then so, I mean, that's, that's been my, that's how I got here. Yeah.

And one thing has followed another. Yeah, yeah. It's awesome. No, I can very much relate to your comments. And that challenge, I'm the same way of, I don't, I would never want someone to watch YouTube videos as a replacement for local church membership or, or local friendship or anything. But as a supplement, boy, it is, there are needs that can be met and as vulnerable as it was for me,

both to start my YouTube channel and then to give it more focus. Both of those were actually, you know, it actually took courage. I felt so vulnerable about it. I thought, how is this going to look? You know, it's, you're aware of, you know, and then you're questioning yourself. And I'm saying, are my motives right about this? And I'm thinking like that. But the thing that I'm feeling along the way is exactly what you're describing in terms of

the people coming. There's incredible need and there's incredible opportunity. and the main people who watch my YouTube channel are young men. And young men right now have a lot of questions and they need bothering and they need disciplining. And it's just I just, that's what's got me into it is I'm drawn to this sense of need and opportunity. Talk to me about, because I have, you know, I am still, I still preach every week.

You know, I've still got, you know, I've still got, again, it's sort of a dying church except I've got seven new people in my new members class. So, and I tell people it's a dying. church and then they're like, but you've got seven people in your new members class. Is it really dying? I don't know if it's dying or not dying. I don't care. I've been saying for 20 years it's dying. And it sort of has been, but ministry is weird. Okay. And for me, it's very weird. So I'm, but I love, I love, love, love preaching every week. Yeah. I love being people's pastors, even if, you know, being people in real life, they're pastors, not just on the internet.

And so I don't want to give this up. And but I can imagine, I can completely understand exactly what you faced as your channel is growing. You're making videos regularly. That very quickly begins to impact. I mean, you only have so many hours in a day. You have a family of small children. You have mouths to feed.

college bills will come. Retirement does happen. I mean, I understand a lot of the pressures that you're in. So talk to me about this transition because I personally am extremely curious because I don't know if this church, so what part of the thing that started happening was I had just always put, when COVID happened, we had to turn on online giving because everything went weird, of course. We didn't stay closed. We stayed closed just a few weeks because I had all these seniors. And on one hand, everyone's like, you can't let these seniors come to church. But on the other hand, these seniors are like, you know, I'm going to die. I know that. I don't want to die at home alone. I'm coming to church. Open the door. All right, we'll open the door. We won't tell every,

we won't tell the city the door is open, but I'm not going to kick anybody out. So, you know, but then, of course, we have to have online giving because we can't pass the play. And so then I put the link on YouTube and many people who just watch what I do, they've just generously given to the church, which is the best thing to do. And so now, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, income from the internet is a significant portion of what keeps the church paying my salary. And, you know, again, I didn't seek any of this. It just happened. So, and there's a lot of people that say to me, Paul, this little local church, it's only a few dozen people. Thousands of people out there. Shouldn't your focus be on the thousands out there and not on, you know, taking Freddie.

out to lunch. And I say, no. But at the same time, I understand your point. So talk to me about this transition and what that was like for you and what you're thinking is. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not, I ask all these same questions of how do you, how do you prioritize and compare, you know, a large volume of views and the fruitfulness represented by that versus a smaller amount of embodied. people because they are your it's like apples and oranges that you're trying to compare and you're trying to say you know there's good in both of these things and how am I managing it and I don't really feel like I've figured this all out I know for me uh in the final year in oh high we had our fifth child and I just hit a point of it because I was also traveling and speaking a bit and writing and I

have a passion to write I have several books I'd like to work at and so I just had a point of just facing some pretty, pretty serious consequences in terms of just a feeling of mental clutter, feeling overwhelmed a lot, you know, you open your email, you see a bunch of email, and you feel a sense of dread, like, oh, I've got to answer all these emails, you know, these kinds of feelings that were warning signs saying, hey, you need to have some kind of game plan here. You need to think through to make sure that you don't burn out and that you're not basically trying to do like three jobs at once, kind of a feeling. And so we, I just, I really don't have a silver bullet kind of thought about this that that could apply to anybody else, except just in

my own case, I just feel like God really kindly provided an opportunity for me to do what I feel like is most in my heart right now. I would not have made this change of moving to Tennessee and focusing more on Truth Unites if I didn't have a local church connection here. that it is not a full-time salary kind of thing, but I'm able to serve in the month of February, I did a Wednesday night course there. I preached there a few weeks ago, so I'm still active in local church ministry.

That's really important to me, just with how I feel led. I never want to leave that off, but I also really like the thought of just being a little bit more of a support person and trying to encourage our pastors and other leaders, trying to be kind of like, hey, let me grab an oar and row alongside you and be a blessing and serve and see if I can

pick up some needs and meet some needs without being the guy. I actually kind of like that. I don't need to be the guy, but I like being able to be active and support. But I think for me, I just, you know, it came down to a question of I just can't maintain everything I'm doing right now. I just can't. It's just not workable. It got to a point.

It went from like hard to harder to crazy to insane. I mean, it got to a point where it's like, this is just absolutely not sustainable. I'm doing too much. And I have to, and then I just felt this compulsion, you know, in the book of Acts, Paul talks about compelled by the spirit. That's it, constrained by the spirit. I'm going to Jerusalem. And I don't think it's too, too much to say.

I feel constrained by the spirit about our world. I feel every day a longing for revival among Gen Z. I pray for that every single day. I pray that God would create a new spiritual movement in which the anxiety and depression would abate and recede and peace. The anger and polarization and rage would soften. And our world and our culture would experience a renewal and a refreshing, you know, the Bible talks of times of refreshing from the Lord,

a revival in our time. And that's what I want to give my life to. And I do feel, as much as we left Ohio with a great sense of sadness and love, I do feel that what I'm focusing on right now is the wisest way I can deploy my life and the best way I can spend my energies. I wish I could say it's been a lot less busy. Moving. Moving is so, you know, we're just starting to feel a little settled now.

you know how it is, you move, and it's like, especially with young kids, it just takes some time to get into things. So I've been trying to slow down. I've been getting into, for the first time in our life, we own a yard. Oh, congratulations. In Southern California. You have something to cut. Yeah, you don't have yards in Southern California. You know, you just have orange something, sand or something, you know.

And so for the first time, I actually, so I've been getting into yard work. And so that's what I do with my kids now because they like it too, which is kind of a fun way to connect with them. So we've been putting in mulch and doing all this stuff. And so that's been a way for me to relax and kind of unwind. So I am trying to kind of pace myself better now. But it's been a transition of it. And it has felt like a burden lifted and that I am a little bit less a little less cluttered. But I actually, my wife and I talk about this a lot, I think it's going to be some time before we start to feel kind of a new rhythm.

It'll feel normal. Yeah. Well, and I'll be interested to talk to you in a couple of. years to see how, because you're right, these, in mission, back in when I was doing missionary work, basically the, the word was, it takes about two years to make a transition like this, even though this isn't another culture, Tennessee to California, there's some cultural differences. And so I'll be interesting to see two years into this, what, what your reflections are. Talk to me about how YouTube distorts.

see that you can take this question a few different ways, but distorts Christianity or the Christian life, because there very much is a distortion that's going on in this medium. You cannot have a medium like this, which, again, I like you, was surprised just how much you could do with it, but I'm also, I'm also very conscious of the distortion, like this lens I'm using right here, probably a little bit more into photography than you were. This is a fairly, this one isn't as wide angle as that one, but I know that, you know, for the one thing, I'm almost six foot five. And people, when they meet me in person, are like, yes. Well, that's because there's a distortion. I'm only, I'm only this big in YouTube land. If you watch me on your phone, I'm only this big.

So when you meet me in real life, you're really big. So how do you think YouTube distorts, when you can take this broadly, because it's the church. It's the Christian life, Christianity, if we can talk in those terms. What are your thoughts? I'll be curious your thoughts on this, too. I think the one thing is the extremes are all always more visible. So, you know, we talked earlier about Calvinism and how people find great significance in me being a Calvinist. I'll be doing a talk on some topic that's, from my vantage point, not really related to Calvinism very much.

it might be some aspect of the doctrine of God or something like this. And I'll see all these comments about, well, because Ortland's a Calvinist, comma, dot, dot, dot. And you're like, okay, here. And it's like, this is a big deal for them. And then, but then I slowed on and I realize I totally get it. Because what they have seen represented by that label is more extreme than what I have experienced as represented by that label. And I completely understand where they're coming from in reacting like that. And that's just one example where it seems like everything is more combative.

Everything is more extreme. I think this especially happens on Twitter more than YouTube because Twitter out, Twitter tends to, or I guess X, we now call it. It tends to reward the outrage and it tends to reward snark. And I think that's so toxic that we actually, it actually fuels some really ugly human tendencies. And I think YouTube can do that. I think it's less maybe not, doesn't have a little. the same things as Twitter, but it's, there's a danger there of always being, because, you know,

we know what generates clicks, and if you comment on a current event and you're outraged about that current event, and you scare people, if you're both angry and if you're, if you're scaring people at how angry you are, you know, this is going to generate more views, all other factors being equal. And that's dangerous. And it distorts things. And it's, you know, the broader thing here is that actually a lot of things about the world are better now than they were 20 years ago. But the news and everything that comes at us makes us feel like the sky is always falling. And so that's a huge danger. And I, you know, earlier we mentioned how I wrestle with this.

I regularly wrestle with how do I both kind of navigate in this space and be mindful of best practices and yet not succumb to the bad aspects of the bad aspects of the, best practices. And that's attention. You know, on the one hand, it's okay to comment on current events. And it's okay sometimes to speak with more force when appropriate. And there are these theological differences we have to work through. And I, you know, so like with apologetics, there's some downsides to apologetics at the same time. You know, I see people having anxiety about, oh, the church fathers, a lot of them are citing these Deuterocanonical books as, as scripture, what do I do?

Or, oh, the Bible has these verses about slavery that are harder than I thought they were, you know? And so you want to give resources to people, help them, and give a defense. But at the same time, you don't want to succumb to all the negative things that can sometimes characterize apologetics. And so those are the kinds of tensions I regularly wrestle with. No, I think that's very true. I think it's very well said, too. I think part of it is that there's a dis one of the things that I noted in long, even before I got into ministry, but noted in seminary and then continue to see confirmed in the world is that the context of, in real life you live in a very rich context and you don't tend to notice it.

And now having, you know, learned from, say, John Vervaki, some cognitive science. Well, the reason you don't notice it is because you sort of, you have to mask it out to work just with a few things at a time. You have to do that because the world is just massive. And what we do when we get into a context, not dissimilar to when you first learn to drive a car, there's so many things to pay attention to. and what you're what you actually mentally wind up doing is your mind then sort of just learns all of these things and then you can pretty drive pretty automatically same thing if you're learning a sport if you're learning basketball oh you mean i can't walk without bouncing and so you know for the first while you're and you know this with little kids because they're all working on these kinds of

things all the time and then before for a while you can just you can just walk around and bounce that basketball and you're not thinking anything up you can think about anything you want because Because, and that mode is in the world. And when it comes to, when it comes to religion and how people actually live their lives, all of those dynamics ring true too. And so there are always these commonalities, let's say, between churches. You know, I noticed that the Christian Reformed Church had a tradition of being fairly theologically self-conscious and fairly conservative, but also because it was an immigrant

denomination, there are loads of cultural things that sort of came in that same bucket full that had the confessional elements. And so people's ole-bowlin, you know, which is this, basically this Dutch apple fritter, people's only bowling and their canons of Dort just all sort of ride together. And, and then, you know, Oli Boland might get remembered and Canons of Dort might sort of be pushed to the back or vice versa. But yet then, especially I saw in my father's ministry, because unlike many Christian reform churches, like in my grandfather's generation, when you're going to the same Christian school because the Dutchman didn't trust Americans to educate their children, you're going to the same church. Most of you are, say, all running dairy farms,

or working on dairy farms. I mean, you had this little community that was so, if you married a girl from the Reform Church of America, people had serious concerns. And never mind a Roman Catholic. But I was growing up in a place where most of the folks were African American. And then a few duchies joined in. And so my father's men,

is just sort of appreciating the rich heritage of African-American Christianity, because so many of the people, whether they, you know, signed the form of subscription of the Christian Reformed Church, talked about the Hydeburg Catechism of the Belgian Confession, they, you know, they were brothers and sisters in Christ. And so you had this real practical ecumenicity that was happening at a very low, deep level. And all of that richness is not on. YouTube. I mean, people, one of the things you learn very quickly is, you know, so my beard, I am, I am not a person given to scrupulous personal maintenance. I'll say it that way. I don't, I do bathe every day. You won't find a smell. I brush and floss my teeth. I don't have

bad breath, but I don't really care about the hair on this part of my body. And my hair has decided it doesn't really like to grow much up here, but it loves growing down here. And I get tired of managing this. And so the hair just gets long and I cut it all off. I tell my wife, I said, honey, I'm going to trim my beard. I'm going to hear about it on the channel. And that's just an example of the kinds of distortions that actually happen as many people who, let's say, have either a very painful experience in the church or no experience in the church now suddenly are basically experiencing a form of catechesis through YouTube. And I think, I praise God, the fact that the majority of my people in my don't church and my church don't watch me on YouTube at all.

And my wife doesn't watch me in YouTube at all. Sometimes people express surprise and my wife is like, why would I watch him on YouTube? You know, I have him in real life. I think I know who he is. I don't need to watch him in this strange thing. But as I, on one hand, so I'm wrestling with those two things. On one hand, I'm not turning my back on this. So if Living Stones were to go under, I could easily get another call to another church,

but I know full well, you know, I'm seven years from retirement. I know full well, most churches are going to say, we're only going to probably have you for six years. And we really don't want you spending all of that time with Randalls on the internet making videos about hot takes on whatever it is you're talking about because we don't actually even care to watch your videos now. So at the same time, I'm not going to leave this space. But I realize that there are many distortions, the extreme, the clickbaitiness. And then, and the thing that I really want to talk about is, and we don't have a lot of time left, but that's okay. We can talk again if you have time. When I talk about Christian YouTube, and I'm not really thinking about the YouTubers, because just like

with what I said, I very much expect that people who are on YouTube and have really leaned in and now been formed by the algorithm, they have taken this extremism into themselves and have now learned this is what I must do for my job. I was surprised when, I'm not real surprised. So like Jordan Peterson went to Daily Wire, Jordan Peterson made a comment on one of his videos. All these Daily Wire people, they would what they'd really love to talk about is religion but what they get their what they've made their lives what they've made their fame what they've made their wealth what they've made everything on is maybe not so much in religion although there's a fair amount of religion in daily wire but the politics of it because that is what's paying the bills and when I see that

When I see how YouTube is forming the voice of Christianity within this space and forming the people who are voicing these things, I think about that. Because when I think about how churches go wrong, it's almost always the perverse incentives, you know? The perverse incentives. And I think about this for clergy, who, again, I talked earlier about my experience with my father was he was never corrupted by the

church, but you can be corrupted by the perverse incentives that arise in the church. And sometimes when I look at Christianity on YouTube, I think, I really don't want to see this bleed then back into the church because the church already wrestles with a variety of perverse incentives. know this as a pastor, but even a small local church. You know, if I'm honest, because that's the thing about a local church and any real human community, if I'm honest, it's going to cost me. And integrity is about, I'm going to be honest, and it's going to cost me. And it might even cost my local church, well, I'm going to take that hit because it's the right

thing to do. and so there's my there's a little there's my little take on on christian youtube i'd love to know what your thoughts are on that i i wrestle with similar tensions in my own channel uh and how to be in this space and how i think i mentioned this a moment ago but just to say it again there's this tension of on the one hand i mean like i like here's the danger in reverse so So the opposite danger would be I get on YouTube and I just so disregard the algorithms that I just say, I don't care about the algorithms. Who cares?

And so my thumbnails are terrible. And I don't use timestamps and I don't talk clearly. And I, you know, I just- You're talking about my channel, but keep going. Well, add on 10 more things then. Okay. Because you're clearly doing something right. doing something. But you're talking, you're talking about the balance. You are. Keep going.

So, so take that, take all those things and put them to the extreme. Okay. So like, you know, you just don't care. You don't care about reaching people or touching people. You're just basically you just saying, hey, maybe there's a place for that. Maybe you want to talk to 10 people and just talk, and that's fine. I'm not saying necessarily that would be wrong. But, you know, so that's one extreme. So then in the process of moving away from that extreme, then we face this challenging question. of at what point do I cross the line, right? And it's no longer just sort of mindfulness of best practices, but it's clickbaiting. And that is the tough thing.

And I basically, I'm deeply gripped by a line I heard back at the church, the pastor of the church in Washington, D.C. We were at, he said, what you win them with is what you win them to. And I find that really illuminating. And so then the motivation of my heart from that is to say, okay, If I ever start getting traction because of something that's inauthentic to who I am, now I have, I'm actually what I'm doing is putting a burden on my shoulders. I'm actually shackling myself to something. I'm becoming a slave to the algorithms.

I'm actually, it might look like my channel's growing. All right. Woohoo. But actually, I'm becoming, I'm putting a burden on. I'm putting 30 pounds on my shoulders that I've now got to maintain this. because I've attracted people with this, and then there's the pressure. So what I try to do, and I think I do it with a clean conscience, I don't think I'm violating anything major.

What I tried to do is basically let every video be who I really am, and what I would really say if I was in the room with somebody, you know, and not, but there is a tension there because you do have, I actually have grown through being on YouTube. It's helped me see some of my personality eccentricities and some ways in which I need to grow. I can see, wow, I look back on a dialogue I did three years ago. I'm like, oh, I was way too nice.

I was so overly afraid about giving offense. And so I realized that, okay, I need to crank it up a notch next time. So there's good growth. So then as you're going through the good growth, you need to keep mindful to not go too far. So that's the tension is, you know, be mindful of the best practices and the algorithms. But I think where I land for me is just let it be authentic to who I really feel like God has built me, to be in my theology and in my philosophy of ministry and so forth. And that's what I aim for. And I think I'm, I don't think I've done any video that I look back on. I feel like,

oh, I should delete that video or I really crossed a line. But there's things in the area of judgment call where I think you always are wrestling with that. I mean, just recently, you know, someone asked me a question of like, oh, did you see what, I can't remember her name, Pearl, something, was saying on Twitter. And it's like, would you ever consider doing a video about that? And I was like, well, you know, on the one hand, I know that that gets traction and views, but on the other hand, I'm not actually naturally already listening to her or interested in her. So I was like, no, I'm just, I'm not going to go out of my way to learn about something just so I can make a video on it, you know, even if that video would do well. But with what Bill Maher said about abortion that I saw last night, I thought maybe I would do that because I'm really interested in that. I'm really careful.

I would talk about that over breakfast with my family, or I would talk about. that with a friend anyways, so it feels authentic to what I naturally do. So those kinds of things help me think about this. But yeah, I think it's probably always going to be a tension that we wrestle with of, you know, trying to follow the best practices, but also have total integrity in how we go about it. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think it's well said. That's well said. And well, I know you've got a hard out, and I don't want to, I don't want to, I promised you at least sometime to be nosy with me. aired a few things, but I before, yeah, so I appreciate your answer. And I appreciate, I think, I mean, we always, you know, I think you and I agree that each of us will be called to give an account

for what we've done, not only with the time, but with the opportunities that we've been given. And both of us have been given now some rather remarkable opportunities to bear witness to Christ. And so these issues, these issues I wrestle with. And they're tough because it's hard to know. And someone for yourself who was a student of church history, you know, Martin Luther had no idea what he was starting when, or did he? I don't know because, you know, I don't know if you listen to the rest of history's take on Luther, which was an interesting series of episodes.

But yeah, you know, we are at the forefront of something here that we have no idea where any of this is going to go. Yeah. And so what would be your hope? If you could, if you could, if God came to you like Solomon and said, you know, ask for whatever you wish, or if you could change one thing about the church today or, or. And that would include, you know, Christian YouTube and this kind of stuff. I mean, what would be, if you could change one thing about just the state of Christians today and how we are functioning, what would you change?

I would love, there's a lot of people out there who are skeptical about the church and for a very good reason. Because, and I think you would probably agree with me, people on the inside have probably five times more reason to be skeptical than people are just looking at it from a distance because we've seen the hurts. We've seen when people have done horrible things in the name of Christ. We've seen all this. Yet we believe and encourage and promote. I think both of us have that in common. I would love for more people one way or another to actually get a chance to appreciate

the love that ordinary Christians on a very regular basis, the sacrificial love that ordinary Christians on a very regular basis, give to one another and especially those they don't know, even up to and including enemies. Because it is, when Jesus says, a new commandment I give you, now someone could have said,

is it really new? Probably not. It's been all along. a new commandment I give you that you love one another as I have loved you. And while I have seen Christians fail that. And every time I do confession, it's a regular part of our liturgy at church. You know, I always pitch it. We have failed to love God and love our neighbor as ourselves.

That's why, that's our motive for confessing. But I see on a regular basis saints in the church. giving of themselves to love their neighbor, the stranger, and even their enemies. And to the degree that people will see that, they will begin to believe that everything that Jesus said is true, and that he does, in fact, really want the best for them. And trust in him will lead them not only in this age, but the next, into a kind of life that while painful in this age is something that they could probably never feel possible because it is that good.

That's what I want. And that is what I think the church is for. And I would love to see us on YouTube figure out. I mean, just be saying those words. I know YouTube people are going to be cynical. As a pastor, he's saying those words. And I understand that because talking. is cheap, but I have seen at a regular basis Christ love through people in his church.

And I want for more and more people to know that. And then to be able not only to know it on the receiving end, but it is more blessed to give than to receive than experience that on the giving end. So that's what I want. Beautiful. If only we were better known for that. But you're right that that is such a reality, especially when you look off of the extremes online

and you're observing actual Christians in your community or something like that. But if we were better known for that on YouTube as well, that would be a very happy thing. And I'm afraid, I mean, I love your story because he's baptized as an infant. He's going to a reformed seminary associated with the PCA and he gets rebaptized?

What's wrong with him? But, you know, what your father did was say, you know, hey, you know, you're my son. And I love you. And I'm sure when you received that from him, you received it in the spirit that it was given. And this isn't, you and I have both been recipients of the grace of God poured through his church, through multiple generations. and you and I probably better than a lot of people who have been wounded, it is relatively easy for us to believe that all of this talk isn't just hype or bullshit or propaganda or anything because we've seen it in, we've seen it lived out.

And what we'd really love to do is to say for those who have not been blessed by everything that you and I have been blessed with to say, it's real. You can trust him. And here's a place you can start. And we can, both of us can testify. No, sometimes it is really hard and sometimes things are discouraging and sometimes it is tremendously costly. But there's nothing in the record that says that that isn't the case because the

son of man didn't come just to say a few nice words. But look at what we did to him. And he still blessed us from the cross and after he rose. So anyway, now you got me preaching. you got me preaching. I love it. It's good. What you just shared in these last few moments, I think, is a great thing to land on. And kind of, I don't think I would want to say anything. I don't even want to say anything right now just to let that what you just said be kind of the final ending point and focus, because I think that is so worthy of emphasis, you know,

for Christians. And then for us to all take that, that call. and do that and show sincere love to other people. It's amazing. I mean, that's the kind of church that I'm at right now. It's a genuinely loving church, as our church was in Ohio. Genuinely, somebody once said there's no hurt like church hurt, but it's also true. There's no healing like church healing.

There's no love like church love. I mean, there really is a power. That is a powerful experience. And, yeah, you know, people may not believe in Christ until we do that. People may find the gospel, especially if they've been really wounded, they may find the gospel not credible until they felt that sense of love. And I hope that comes, I actually pray that way that every YouTube video I do that would convey that, that every single video would convey love. Because it doesn't matter if you're right, if that is not present. Right.

But if that is present, it meets all the differences that I see that is decisive for the impact it has. Amen. Amen. Well, I'm going to end the recording before we mess this up. But Gavin, I just want to say thank you for your time. And thank you for indulging me and my own little style of how I like to do YouTube. And anybody, anything you want to promote? Truth Unites. There's this channel. And many of you finding, I'll put the link below. Anything else you want to say? No, love the conversation.

And no, I mean, I have a book coming out. I have a book on Protestantism. People are interested in Protestantism. They could check it out. The case, what is it called? I can't even remember the title of it. What it means to be Protestant, the case for an always reforming church coming out August of 2024. That sounds interesting.

That sounds interesting. All right. Well, I'm going to end the recording, but thank you very much. Thanks, Paul.