162. Canceled In The IFB - Joe Vanella (Ninety-nine for one Podcast)

I found my freedom in you I found a joy I can't lose And thank God it's true You wrapped your arms around me And heaven broke through From the moment you found me I found my freedom in you Welcome to the For Freedom Podcast. This podcast exists to bring the freedom of the gospel for everyday Christians with everyday issues. Now here are your hosts, James Safer and Brad Martin. Welcome back to the For Freedom Podcast. It is a wonderful day to serve the Lord. And we are so excited about our episode today. I want to just come and share some things with you today. Brett, continue to pray for him. He's still having some health issues and still working through some things. He's got some doctor's appointments. He will be on our episode today, but I just wanted to intro that by just continuing to pray for him, continuing to lift him up, and excited to get back into our rhythm of things. It's hard to believe that we're already halfway through this season, the first part of the year, and got some great content lined up, some great interviews lined up for the remainder of this season. Thank you for tuning in. I want to remind you to go check out our cigar line at ForFreedomPodcast.com. You can also see that at 1689cigars.com, the For Freedom collection that is there. And I got some great lines of things there for you, and excited about what the Lord's going to be doing through that. Also, we have our Israel trip that we have lined up. That's going to be in the end of January, February, that we are excited about going back to the Holy Lands. If that's something that you're interested in, please reach out to us. You can also find those details out on our website. And we are very excited about that and getting that line back up. And then last but not least, we will be in Dallas, Texas, in June for the convention. If you are in that area or would like to hang out, meet up, or if you're going to be coming to the convention, let us know. I'm actually going to be there the entire week before that to spend some time with my sister who lives in McKinney. So we're going to be around. Brett's coming down. We're going to have some hangout times and some times to get together with you. If it's something that you're around that area or would like to come and meet up with us, please let us know. We would love to hang out, meet with you, get lunch, hang out. And man, we're just so excited about what the Lord's doing and what we're going to be a part of. Today we've got a great interview lined up. His name is Joe Vanilla. And we're excited about having him on the podcast today. And so without further ado, we're going to jump in to our series today of Joe's story and how he experienced some cancellation in the IFB. We hope you enjoy today's episode. We cannot truly worship God while we stay silent on injustice in all kinds of areas. And I know as a white pastor, I have blind spots. So I am part of the problem. James, Paul, elected to unhitch the Christian faith from their Jewish scriptures. And my friends, we must as well. White people fear black men. That's not fair. But it's true. Jesus repents of his racism and extends healing to this woman's daughter. I love this story because it's a reminder that Jesus is human. He had prejudices and bias. And when confronted with it, he was willing to do his work. I believe in the non-binary God whose pronouns are plural. I believe in Jesus Christ, their child, who wore a fabulous tunic and had two dads and saw everyone as a sibling child of God. I believe in the rainbow spirit who shatters our image of one white light and refracts it into a rainbow of gorgeous diversity. I believe in the church of everyday saints as numerous, creative, and resilient as patches on the ace quilt, whose feet are grounded in mud and whose eyes gaze at the stars in wonder. I believe in the calling to each of us that love is love is love. So beloved, let us love. I believe, glorious God, help my unbelief. Amen. This woke self-loathing. And we will never let the woke left take it away. It's because they're putting woke ideology. To a woke mob that can't even tell you what a woman is. In this season of the For Freedom Podcast, we want to bring to you some enlightening topics that deal with the wokeness of the church. We want to bring to light some issues that are often overlooked. And we hope that it will be a blessing to you in your listening experience. Welcome back to the For Freedom Podcast. What a great time it is to be here with you. We have this wonderful interview lined up today with Joe Vanilla. and we are excited to have him with us and excited to hear his story. He has shared some things with us and reached out to us about maybe having an opportunity to share his story. So Joe, I want to introduce you to our audience and sort of give us your church background. He also runs a podcast called 99 for One. Maybe talk about that for a little bit and then we'll jump into what we have going on today. Yeah, yeah. Thanks for having me, James and Brett. Yeah, like as he said, my name is Joe. I'm a bivocational pastor at a little church in West Virginia, and I want to talk about that a little bit, but I want to open with this thought before we get into the church history. Just a couple things to name. This is a long story of God's grace despite my failures and the failures of other people. When I found the For Freedom podcast, it really helped me to escape legalism, along with the Recovering Fundamentalist podcast and several others, and I just want to make sure that I'm keeping the first things first. I've been talking to James for a few months now. I prayed for a long time before I ever approached him about the interview, and after we started talking about it, I sat down with the elders and the other men of my church, and I just kind of let them poke holes in the idea to make sure that my motives were pure. And after some talking, there weren't really many holes to poke, and they agreed that it was a good idea. So most of this story, it revolves around events in a single IFB church that anybody who knows me knows what's going on. I don't want people to perceive my sharing this story to be a result of any sort of distaste because it's not. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the church that most of this story revolves around has an awesome pastor. I believe God's going to do a great work there. When he came in, I went and helped him learn how to run the audio-video system that I designed while I was there. We have a wonderful relationship. He was even kind enough to donate some critical equipment to our music group, Love This Life. Love This Life is the other ministry that I don't think I ever mentioned to James or Brett. It's a parachurch ministry, gospel-centered music ministry that we travel around to different churches, and it was founded in the midst of the chaos and confusion that we're going to talk about today. But I'll explain that founding if we get to it. But all that led around to the creation of the 99 for 1 podcast, and we're just finishing up the final touches as we're recording this on our first real episode, and hopefully it'll be published by the time this goes live. Long story short, that podcast is just primarily going to be Bible study and looking at the Bible, allowing it to speak for itself, and sharing some of the things we've learned along the way about how legalism and how hyper-fundamentalism, if you will, can skew our interpretation of Scripture and just trying to back it up and let God speak for Himself. But if anybody listening has ever listened to The Rise of Fall or Mars Hill, which is a podcast hosted by Mike Cosper and Christianity Today, it tells this story about how God did incredible things in a community, despite the awful things that occurred within the campuses of the church. The story that I'm going to share today is not a whole lot different, to be honest. The context is different, but the events are pretty similar. There was a period of about two years when there was a vacuum of power and really no leader to fit to shepherd the flock, including myself. And the Bible says in Proverbs 29, 18, where there is no vision, the people perish. And I suspect that a lot of this is a result of that principle in action. We're going to see hurt people hurting people. I'm not trying to diminish sinfulness by any means, but I'm trying to distinguish the fact that we shouldn't be surprised that this happens. That's why I'm sharing this today. That's why James and Brett have this awesome ministry. It's still happening. People are still being hurt in churches across the IFB and beyond it, and they still need healing. And just for clarity, I do not intend to defame anyone or any church for the purpose of reducing their value. Instead, I hope to help others realize that that's what legalism does, especially when it comes to the notion of cancellation. Every one of us are born in the image of God, and we hold this value. God so loved the world. God so loved them that he sent his only begotten son that whosoever believes on him should not perish but have everlasting life. That's God's value on me. That's God's value on James and Brett and all the people who are listening, all the people who have received hurt, and all the people who created hurt. And maybe I'm leaving with a punchline, but I think it's right. The hardest thing about leaving legalism behind, the hardest thing about being canceled, has been remembering how much God loves those people who hurt me. And the second hardest thing has been realizing that God is calling me to love them just as much. So I just wanted to kind of name that and throw a couple of reservations in there because I don't want anybody to think that I'm out to hurt anybody. And you can trim that however you need to to make it work. So as a means of introduction, I'm Joe. I'm an associate pastor at New Discovery Baptist Church in Sutton, West Virginia. I have two daughters and a wonderful wife who homeschools our kids, and she helps lead a fledgling nursery ministry that we just launched at our church as a result of getting some new babies. I told you about the music ministry. We sing, and my friends Elijah and Maddie and I sing in churches wherever God allows us. We all just try to live a really simple life. And it sort of sounds like the IFB Dream Team family, and for a season it really was. I'm going to try and take hopefully no more than 10 minutes to distill five years' worth of experiences, and some of the questions that we're going to talk about will fill in a little bit of the gaps. So for several years, I was a volunteer Bible teacher at the biggest IFB church in a small West Virginia county. We had about 150 adults on a typical Sunday morning, and sometimes as many as 100 on a Sunday night. We ran four vans all around the county, had a huge kids' ministry, and there was always people out on visitation on Saturday. The church really was healthy for the first few years, not just in the visible aspects, but actually healthy. We had excellent leadership. We had a great vision. We were definitely IFB, but we weren't really fundies, if that makes any sense. People were loved, treated like humans, discipled, encouraged to serve, to give, and to grow in their faith. So after a couple of years living in this Baptist paradise, our pastor stepped away into God's next ministry for him and his family. I truly believe this was a God-led decision, and for the record, I'm still friends with this man and his family today. He spent months getting us ready for his absence, unbeknownst to us, but looking back, I could see that he spent months training up all the men in the church to lead, and he left on excellent terms. And what happened after that? It's hard to wrap my head around. It's hard to imagine, but I don't really have to imagine because I lived through it. We formed a pulpit committee, which is a pretty normal thing, but they came up with a list of about 40 or 50 doctrinal and positional questions that were sent to any candidate whose resume was acceptable. Any single wrong answer to a question led to the disqualification of the candidate. There was a strict set of rules established for how interviews were conducted, and should the candidate master the written examination and jump through all the hoops well enough, they got an opportunity to teach and preach in front of the church, and then they went through the process of possibly electing, selecting. In the moment, it seemed perfect. It was methodical, it was fair, and it was deliberate. But in retrospect, we sucked the Holy Spirit right out of it. It couldn't have been more worldly. So we ended up with two candidates, one from Hiles Anderson and one from a copycat school that had imploded years earlier. I don't remember what it was called. And one got voted in. It was a mess. It turned into a popularity contest. But in all this confusion, we missed one critical thing. Both of our candidates were biblically disqualified. We got so wrapped up in finding someone who believed exactly what we believed, we failed to effectively consider what God believed about a pastoral candidate. We picked up on one earlier than the other, but the other we picked up on about six months after we had selected him as pastor. So, I don't want to get into the other candidate, but the one that was selected, he was biblically... Try that again. The candidate that was eventually selected, as I said, was also biblically disqualified, but I totally missed it. He was not able to rule his house well. In fact, he didn't rule his house at all. Later, it would be revealed that his wife made all the critical decisions in both their home and in their ministry. Unironically, the next church that they went to would draw the same conclusion after about the same amount of time. The only reason that I'm sharing this is because it's really relevant to topics that we're going to unpack later, and it's a great example of how legalism takes the focus off of God and puts it on to men. We had created so many qualifying measurements for our man of God that we weren't sufficiently focused on God's qualifying measurements for his man of God. So this pastor was there for about a year. Things got really crazy, and eventually they were forced out against their will. We'll explain some of that in a bit, but essentially, they tried to cancel the dissidents. Then they tried to cancel the church leaders. Then they tried to cancel the church constitution in what could only be described as an attempt at a coup. As for me, while I was experiencing all this, I've really been struggling with the whole notion of what church should be, and I really should unpack that a little bit. I love my church. I love the structure, the rules, the hoops that I had to jump through, the boxes that I had to check. I needed that structure in that time of my life. But I had visited my grandma's home church, which was an SBC church. Now, if you're familiar with the IFB, visiting other churches is highly discouraged, but visiting a Southern Baptist church was practically apostasy. So before I went, I sought counsel from some of the older men in the church, and I explained to them that I knew that it was wrong to visit a church that was another denomination, but I really wanted to spend some time with my grandmother, and that I thought it was a great way to do it. So they acknowledged the grave dangers of visiting a church that was part of an association. And they told me to be very wary of their doctrine, which was sure to be entirely liberal. So I went with the armor of God and my King James Bible in hand and sat in for Sunday school. When they started reading scripture, I didn't know what to think. I didn't initially know what translation they were using, but it surely wasn't the right one. So at one point, the teacher, he asked me to read some scripture, and the strangest thing happened. In that moment, I suddenly became concerned about having a King James Bible instead of whatever they were using. I asked if it was okay that I read out of the King James, to which he responded, of course, King James is a great translation. So I did it, and nobody gave me any weird looks. Talked to the lead pastor after the service, asking why they used the Christian Standard Bible instead of the King James. And this is what he told me. He said he wanted the congregation to be able to understand their Bibles, and that as good as the King James was as a translation, it was so challenging to understand that most people really couldn't handle that. So that was, I walked in expecting a den of vipers, but what I found was a bunch of people who loved Jesus more openly than anything I'd ever experienced in a corporate worship service. It really felt like the Spirit of God was flowing over me like a waterfall that I was standing at the bottom of. That whole experience, it shattered a paradigm that had been placed upon me, the paradigm that we in the IFB were the only ones who were doing church riot. I couldn't rationalize any longer. I could no longer rationalize that idea because God was so clearly working in the lives of these people, even though they wore street clothing to church, they sang contemporary songs, and they read from modern translations. Now, that last one was the hardest to unlearn. So many people had given me so many arguments for the King James that I had accepted those arguments as gospel. The King James had always been God's word in my mind, and nothing else was sufficient. So how could God be speaking so loudly to me through these people? All that started a journey that I never thought I'd take, and it led me to a place I never thought I'd land. A good friend of mine who's now a pastor at a Southern Baptist church in another state, he helped me wrap my head around this paradigm shift from King James only-ism. He was raised up and called to preach from my old IFB church, but God had led him out of legalism. When he came in to visit, he was asked to speak at a church, none of us knowing that he'd moved on to the ESV as his preferred translation. When he spoke, I picked up on two things. First, I saw how much God had grown him. He spoke with authority, maturity, and wisdom that he just didn't have before. The second thing, it was clear that he was struggling to read the early modern English of the KJV. So that was a juxtaposition that stuck out like a sore thumb to me, and I dug in. They streamed their services, so I watched some online stuff, only to learn that they weren't using the King James at his church. So I asked him, and instead of him telling me what he thought, he pointed me towards James White's book, The King James Only Controversy. He told me that I had to answer the question for myself that I had only recently begun to ask. Why do we believe the King James Bible is the only true English Bible? He didn't give me his position. He didn't tell me what to think. He simply told me to look at the facts and pray for God's wisdom. So that's what I did. I dug into James White's book. I also read Dr. Ouellette's book, A More Sure Word, as recommended to me by an older man in my church. This man told me, he said, read Dr. Ouellette's book. It'll answer all your questions. Instead, the pener of the book, which I read was very angry and in many places errant, led me to ask even more questions. So the same person who recommended that book told me that using modern translations was a guaranteed path into doctrinal disaster and subsequently shared a story about a relative who was in a church that believed something that was definitely not a good, solid doctrine. The trouble was that I already heard the story, and I knew that his relative was in the King James Only Church. When I raised that fact, he closed the door on the conversation and refused to open the topic again. The only person on the KJV side who would take up a serious conversation was the previous pastor that I mentioned in the beginning. He heard my questions, he answered them thoughtfully, and we finished the conversations agreeing to disagree. And like I said, we're still friends today. So in the end, I concluded that it was unreasonable to think that all the other translations of the Bible were illegitimate, but I was still stuck serving in a King James Only Church. I didn't know what to do. So I reached out again to my friend who'd recommended Dr. White's book in the first place, and his response was that it probably was not going to change the minds of the people in my church, so I'd be well off not to advertise my position. Sorry. If asked, answer honestly, but don't come out and announce it. That's what he said, and so that's what I did for as long as I could. But the further I dug, the more difficult it became. Along the way, I discovered the foreword of the King James from the translators, which wasn't in any KJV Bible that I'd ever seen. This was probably step two towards my cancellation, the first being asking questions at all. So I shared the preface on social media, and I was pulled to the side by the same leader previously mentioned and told that I was in danger of church discipline because I was publicly going against what the church believed for sharing the preface of the very Bible they claimed was God's perfect word. The next big discovery that I made was Tony Hudson's sermon clip on reprobates, along with Peter Ruckman and some of the other people who'd catalyzed the IFB over the past half a century, and I was offended enough that I wanted to clear the air with people in my circle that the hateful lies in those sermons were not what our church or what God represented. As a result, I was admonished again for illuminating something that, quote, risked bringing a negative view on the church, unquote. But nobody could validate the hateful messages that were being preached out of these churches. So this course, it repeated itself in one fashion or another for quite some time. We were, my family, my girls, my wife, were starving spiritually. I was drowning in frustration and confusion, and I didn't understand how our church had lost what it had. We were no longer a place where people were loved, treated like humans, discipled, and encouraged to serve, give, and grow in their faith. So after a lot of consideration in prayer, I shared a devotion with the church entitled, We Do Not Serve a Quid Pro Quo God, and I walked out the door for the last time as a member of that religious institution. That's the 30,000-foot view. We're going to dip in and out of that story in different places as the conversation continues. But we prayed and cried and cried and prayed about what to do. We knew we had to stay in church. We were going to starve spiritually. So we visited some local churches. We found no peace about any church that we visited, except for one that was around 50 miles away. None of it made sense, but if I'm being honest, God had been dealing with me about that church since my first visit years earlier when I was asked to read out of my King James Bible in this non-King James church. So my wife and I resolved to land there until God showed us something otherwise. It was inconvenient in a number of ways. First and foremost, that it was an hour drive one way, but it really seemed like the only thing that God was pointing us to. It was there at New Discovery Baptist Church that I finally quit wrestling with calling a pastoral ministry. And it was there that I realized that God was calling me to be the change that I hope to see in the world, to someday plant a conservative biblical church that preaches the truth in love plus nothing and minus nothing. And that's my story of how I got into and out of legalism. And I know James and Brett, you both have some questions that you want to talk about regarding cancellation. And that's the framework in which all these answers are going to fit. So I'll turn it back over to you. That's great. Before Brett asks his first question, I think it's interesting. You mentioned about the King James and last, this past week, I had a great conversation with a former teenager of mine who's in ministry. And we were talking about versions and what he was using and what I was using. And he said, you know, he said, I was on a cruise the other day with a couple of pastors and he's a young guy, he's in college. And they did like a young married couples tour cruise thing. And he said, I asked him, why do you preach out of the King James when you have to spend so much of your time explaining and defining these words? And he said, well, it's very simple. He said, I use it because it adds 10 to 15 minutes to my message and I don't have to study as much. I've heard it before, but when he said it again, now that I'm preaching every week, I thought, man, how much more can I do with 10 to 15 more minutes? And I am doing with 10 to 15 more minutes of not just having to define the words. But he literally said, I just love being able to define those words because it adds this extra time and it's less time I have to study and prepare for my message. Wow. And oftentimes, I was like, dude, I can't believe this guy just admitted that, but he did. Yeah, that's one of the things that really helped me really start challenging my beliefs was I was preaching in children's church and I spent most of my time just getting them up to modern English. You know, we're talking about, you know, five to 10 year olds and I was, my sermons were English lessons and I'm like, this isn't right. Yeah. Brett, go ahead. What's your thoughts, man? Well, you were right about, you know, going to SBC church is a no-no when you go to an IFB church. That's definitely, we would go to the IFB church, like for us, it was 50 miles away before we go to a local SBC church for that reason. And I think one of the hardest things you have to do, because I've been in your shoes where you're in an IFB church and the, or any legalistic church and the scales start to fall off of your eyes, but you're stuck there. And so there's a part of you that has to toe the line a little bit to stave off this, this incoming onslaught of, of cancellation, you know, is coming because, you know, if you express your thoughts too soon or, or, you know, you're wise to, you know, with, with caution approach that, because, you know, you have to toe the line a certain bit. Now, I will say that one thing you mentioned is you mentioned the Mars Hill podcast and all about that Mark Driscoll thing. And one of the things that, that I took away from that podcast that you mentioned was he had this, while he was there, he had this scorched earth policy where if you went against him, or if you quit, you had to sign non-disclosures, you had to sign non-competes, you couldn't start a church within, you know, within the town. And he would have people in the church shun you and not talk to you and turn their back on you. And these people are going through deaths in their family. They're going through a hard time. They need the church, but the church is in essence, turn their back on them. And so that, I think that correlates a lot to our subject today and some of the stuff we experience in the realm of legalism. And, you know, listening to these stories, a lot of this drama, it all centers around a new pastor coming in. I don't know what it is. And I think you hit the nail on the head. Looking back at my experience, a lot of drama came in when we brought the new pastor in. And I think it was because, you know, as a legalistic institution, we were looking at the wrong things. We were looking at, you know, we need to get all our, make sure they believe the same thing we believe instead of saying we need to make sure they're qualified according to scripture. And I know in my personal experience, the only weapon that the most effective weapon that the church uses outside of manipulation, once they understand they can't control you anymore, is to shun you, is to cancel you, is to actively work against you. I know for me, it was posting an NIV verse on Facebook. And that was all it took, man, for the onslaught to come on towards me and being trying to be canceled, being shunned. I've seen different areas in my life. I've seen missionaries on the field that have had their support canceled. I've seen evangelists that have had their meetings canceled. I've seen people where they're actively trying to get them fired from their jobs. And so because we're on this subject, the next question we want to ask you is, what areas in the IFB have you seen people canceled over? Well, yeah, that's a great question. And I can't really answer everything. It would be too much. But I want to talk about a couple of situations that I think might be helpful to some people. So during the midst of our second term without a pastor, after the short time one was pulled out, we had an abundance of lay preachers and pastors that would come and fill our pulpits. After the train wreck, as it was, it really didn't seem like anybody wanted to pastor the church, but everybody wanted to fill the pulpit. It's a really strange thing. So one Sunday morning, I was the sound guy. I was always there first thing to unlock the building, get the lights on, get the heat on. And one of the deacons would always come in early. And often we would pray together. Super great guy. Love him. Don't agree with him, but I love him. But he came to me to inform me that one of our regular speakers, one of the lay preachers that had been visiting, that he'd been using other translations as a reference and that his home church had asked him to resign and to leave the church as a result. So this young preacher had been forthcoming about what he had learned to his congregation and had been literally canceled in his home church as a result. So I asked the deacon what he thought about it as I tried to remind him that this young man had been faithfully coming in to feed our flock in the absence of a pastor and that he was doing a fine job of it. His response floored me. He said, I don't know. I think we need to be careful. Even if he preaches from the King James when he's here, he's being influenced by other translations. So I believe it would be safest not to have him back. What I didn't know at the time was that his previous home church had been calling around all the IFB churches in the area, warning them that this young man was out of the will of God and that it was dangerous to have him in to speak. Not only had this young minister been canceled in his church, he had been canceled in the IFB. I didn't know it at the time, but I was pretty much next. But if we want to step back in time for what I think is a more helpful example, especially for a lot of people who might be coming in to listen to this podcast after having lived through the types of things that we three have, I kind of have to delve a little bit into the madness that was the ministry of the short-term IFB pastor. So unbeknownst to us, his wife had been spiritually and verbally abusing many of the ladies in the church. It went unnoticed for months because none of the victims were willing to speak up. And as a side note, it's really scary to see all this in retrospect because this person knew exactly how to pick victims. It's like a disgusting sixth sense that she was able to pick out the weak and the vulnerable. People I'd been friends with for years and never would have seen them putting up with something like that. So little by little, people started noticing things that just didn't add up. Some people were being pulled out of healthy ministries and being replaced for no apparent reason. Come to find out, for the most part, those were the people that were the families of the ones being abused, but we didn't know that in the moment. The pastor, he brought in a friend from that now-defunct Bible college to take over song leading and run the choir and eventually the youth group. And later we learned that he was secretly paying him out of church funds against the church's will. We began to see small outbursts of frustration from both of them, sometimes body language, other times brief mistreatment of people, especially from this pastor's wife. But we gave continual grace as a church as she was coming into a brand new culture with a whole lot of responsibility as an IFB pastor's wife, and he had never led a church anywhere near that size. They really had a lot on their plate. But eventually the dam broke. One day, a young lady from the youth group, she spoke up against a perceived injustice and was verbally attacked by the pastor's wife in a public place. The family was incredibly well respected in the community and in the church, and so they sought recourse through the deacon board. They simply asked for an apology and repentance for the actions, but no real effort was made to right the wrong. In lieu of an apology and repentance, the family was instructed to forgive and forget because that's what was best for the face of the church in the community. With that, they opted to leave the church. When I found out that my friends had left, I reached out to them and they explained what had transpired. In a failed attempt to advocate for them, I spoke to the other leaders of the church, only to learn that my friends had been reduced to an acceptable loss for the greater good. This man, his wife, and their children who had served faithfully for years in that church, they were collateral damage. They'd been canceled from their home church. Now, you might think that it's a stretch, but I really think it's a shining example of canceled culture in the IFB. They spoke against the family of the, quote, man of God, and the consensus of leadership was to shut out their concerns and thereby shut them out. And there are countless more examples, but I think that really paints a fair picture of what canceling can look like, what I've seen, the different reasons, probably the two most prevalent reasons for people to get canceled in the IFB. Yeah, we often talk about how when people began this eye-opening experience, these moments where the dam breaks, we begin to see more and more. Are there any personal examples that you have of you being canceled or a situation where you were canceled in ministry or shut down or hindered in what you were doing? Yeah, yeah. I think I have my questions out of order, so I'll scroll to my notes here. So I do want to share some stuff that hopefully will be helpful to people based on my personal experience. I mentioned earlier about our music ministry, and what I didn't say is it helped me learn a new degree of hate within Christianity. So Love This Life was founded within the walls of an IFB church, actually at a youth rally with Elijah and Maddie, the two that I mentioned earlier. But it was never a church ministry. It was always a parachurch ministry. I led music at that church for a couple years, and actually that's one way in which I got canceled is when the pastor brought his friend in. Suddenly I was no longer the song leader, which was challenging in its own. But I helped a lot of people serve in the musical ministry during that time. But Love This Life was always a parachurch ministry. So having said that, we were asked to sing at our church during a revival meeting. This was right after this interim pastor had been forced out, and the church was a wreck, and they had begged me and the other family had been pushed out to come back. So we were asked to sing around four songs, and we did. We sang Amazing Grace, the Chris Tomlin, My Chains Are Gone version. We sang Goodness of God from Bethel. We sang I Can Only Imagine, and one that Elijah wrote himself called Hallelujah. So this visiting evangelist indignantly told us that since we didn't have a pastor, that he was going to pastor us. He went on to tell us, never having met any of us, that we did not have the discernment to choose our own songs, and that we should ask other people which songs we should sing. He then stated that the author of Goodness of God was a heretic who was unsaved and on our way to hell, and that there would be no dancing in heaven because we'd be spending eternity on our faces if we even made it. And I even went back and listened to the audio clip again yesterday to make sure that I was objectively sharing what was said. It's been two years ago, and it still really, really, really frustrated me. But to our point, this is a little goofed up being out of order. This is when I really started to figure that out. The next day I spoke with a standing deacon who was unable to be there that night about the way the things were approached and how it impacted some of the people in that church. I will say that there are members of that church who walked out that day two years ago and have not yet returned over those statements. I asked him to listen to the audio, and he declined to. He had already spoken to the elder who led the service, who was related to the speaker, and also the same person who had sided with Tony Hudson and the others, and the matter was settled. Nothing had been done wrong from his perspective, and we were asked not to sing at our home church while that visiting preacher was there. Man, that's rough. Definitely. Well, let's ask you this. What do you think the typical response is when people are canceled? Typical response or the mature response? Because the typical response is definitely not the mature one. So I guess we want to ask what happens when people get canceled. Everyone's experience is different, but I'm going to do the best that I can to share what I've experienced as minister to others who have been canceled, and then, yeah, maybe even a little bit more about myself. Who knows? So talking about my friends that I went to bat for, without saying so much as to name them, they're pillars in the community, and I cherish the friendship of the whole family. The first thing that really popped up when I talked to these people, I sat down with them, and we discussed it, is a feeling of desertion. You mentioned shunning earlier, and that's really what they experienced and later what I experienced. Over 100 people for years who have claimed they loved you, they mostly turned their back on you. Desertion doesn't do even the beginnings of justice to the feelings that were had. Seeing the biblical model of repentance and resolution buried by the desire to hold up the public image of someone in open rebellion against God is bad. But when you see your friends, your brothers and sisters that you love, they abandon you in mass as a result of this, as a result of the fact that you were a victim. That's a brand new level of hurt. Comparatively, you know, I was canceled because I had enough influence to initiate some real change, and I figured out a lot of what we were selling wasn't truth but tradition. Really, I was a threat to the status quo. These people got canceled because they had been attacked without cause, and they didn't want people to keep getting hurt. They were trying to protect the community from the wolves in sheep's clothing, honestly, and they were deserted as a result. And another thing that you'll see as a result of being canceled is a feeling of disillusionment. And this one's really scary because it can lead to deconstruction. At the risk of leaving people behind, I want to define disillusionment because we never know who might be listening. The Oxford Dictionary defines disillusionment as a feeling of disappointment resulting from the discovery that something is not as good as one believed it to be. So when we realize that we've been shunned, shut out, deplatformed, dismissed, or whatever other synonym you want to use for canceled, it causes you to question everything you've ever believed. You know, if somebody's listening and they're waking up to the dangers of legalism, they're probably living in this battle right now. And I definitely want to say that it's a spiritual battle. The devil wants nothing more than to convince us that everything we've ever believed is false and that we should deconstruct our faith. But instead of deconstructing it, we can ask ourselves, what is it made of? The statement comes to mind, what you win them with is what you win them to. And that speaks volumes in this moment. In the IFB, they love to say that we're saved by grace through faith, not of orcs, lest any man should boast. They're right as well. But then as soon as someone disagrees with them on some secondary or tertiary issue, their response is either they're not right with God or they never were a believer to begin with. That's because what they were won with is what they were won to. The tradition, the way granddad practiced this faith, the old hymns, the old paths, the old-fashioned fundamentalist faith. And dare I even say the authority of the King James Version of the Bible and not the authority of the God who authored it. And yeah, that's a challenging statement, but there are cases in which it's true. What you win them with is what you win them to. I wasn't saved in an IFB church, but I was discipled in one, and that left me with a whole lot of unlearning to do when I finally woke up. I definitely felt disillusioned. So one of the things that used to get me in trouble in the IFB was this statement, a faith that cannot be tested and cannot be trusted. My perspective as a Bible teacher is that it's my job to help people think about Scripture and ask questions, not to lay out my truth and expect them to blindly believe me. The problem is that my truth has to align with God's truth, or it isn't truth at all. And this is where legalism starts falling apart. And this is why cancel culture is a necessary part of legalism. It just can't survive without it. So in the end, cancel culture, it leaves us disenfranchised. That's a fancy way of saying that we're stripped of our rights. My friend I mentioned earlier was asked to leave his church and deprived of the ability to fulfill God's will for his life as a result of coming out of legalism. If that's not disenfranchisement, I don't know what is. I'm still a Baptist. I still believe in the priesthood of the believer, which means that it's all of our jobs to voice our faith into a world that needs to hear it. Not only that, but me as somebody who's specifically called into ministry, it's all the more important for me to share God's truth and God's love with the world, and cancel culture robs us of the ability to do that. So one more example, someone who used to be a friend of mine. We shared meals together, went on trips together. I taught their kids in Sunday school. They taught mine. They literally told their children that my family was dead to their family because I left an IFB church. We live in a small community. You know, there's been times I've seen them in public places, and I see their faces wanting to talk to me but knowing that they're not allowed to. They're teenagers trying to figure out how to follow God in this mixed-up world, and cancel culture from the IFB is destroying their developing perspective on Christian behavior. And personally, that's the most heartbreaking example of cancel culture that I've seen, is forced cancellation from somebody else who doesn't agree with it. You know, that happened to me, Joe, when you're talking about that. We were in Idaho and Arkansas for eight years, so we were away from the people here. And when we had moved back about eight or nine years ago, I was walking through the Statesville Walmart, and I saw my former pastor's wife and her daughter who I'd been on a mission trip with, and we had done ministry together, and I knew they saw me because I saw them, and they sort of like 90 degree down the first aisle they could see. And so I was like, well, maybe they didn't see me. And so I like took off and sort of was going to cut them off, and I cut them off. Hey, guys, you know, I'm that bubbly guy. And that you could just tell the distraught, like, what are we going to say to this guy? We don't associate with him anymore. I gave them hugs. Like, I told Allie, though, afterwards, I said I could just feel that they were trying to avoid me at all costs. Someone had told them we don't associate with him. We don't. And someone who would have been less mature would have taken that and would have really been hurt and, like you said, deconstructed or even got bitter, got mad, got angry, and sort of turned from where they were at. Oftentimes that's what happens, right? We get shunned, we get turned, we deconstruct, or we get bitter. What are some ways that maybe that you've seen through talking to different people and as you went through your different transition, what are some ways we can respond where the deconstruction, the bitterness, the hurt can sort of be alleviated when we are canceled? Yeah, that's a great question, James. And I kind of, when I was thinking about it before the meeting, I kind of looked at it as how we personally can do it. But it applies to other people just as the same as it does us. You know, one of my mom's go-to sayings when I was a kid, she was a single mother of three ridiculous kids. We were awful. But she would always say two wrongs don't make her right. And it's oversimplification for sure, but it's easy to forget when we find ourselves resentful. I don't know who said it, but I once heard somebody say that resentment is when you punish yourself for somebody else's wrongdoings. I'll tell you that when I heard that, it kicked me square in the mouth. So I've kind of talked through in my head three different ways to prevent that resentment, the bitterness that is so easy to latch onto when we've been hurt. So the first thing we want to do when we find ourselves canceled is find a place to be loved and to grow in our faith. It's not popular preaching, but Hebrews 10.25 tells us not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together. And a big part of what that's telling us is that God ordained this assembling that we call a church gathering or service. We ought to take it seriously. There's an aspect of corporate worship that you can't fulfill on your own. But with that said, church isn't necessarily a building with a steeple and a pulpit. Church can occur within that type of building, but the distinction is really the people, right? The church is the assembled body of believers gathered together to worship and to praise and to be challenged by God's word. So if anybody's listening and they're leaving legalism, please don't miss this. A Christian without a church is like a saddle without a horse. It is exactly what it's designed to be, but there's no mode of action for it to do what it was designed to do. We're created to worship. We're commanded with the great commandment. We're called to follow Christ. And if we're doing that, we should be committed to reaching people. And the church, the gathered body of believers in whatever type of space that you have, that's God's vehicle for this work. So the second thing that I found helpful is to keep the main thing the main thing. We have to stay focused on the God who rescued us, not the people who tried to destroy us. I made the statement earlier, what you win them with is what you win them to. If I had been won to a tradition or a translation instead of the truth, I would have spiritually perished. I would have deconstructed my faith. I would have reasoned it all down the tubes. And I would be going about my life instead of fighting to reach people with the truth. God rescued me with his son's sacrifice, no matter what value other humans place on me. And that's what leads me to number three, which is probably the most important thing that I've realized in the past two years. We have to realize that God is the one who places value on people, not us. It sounds basic, but it's a game changer. I don't think I could live without this principle in the forefront of my mind every single day. So to break that down, if we say that we have the truth and the truth that we have says that God loves us so much that he sent Jesus to die for our redemption, what right do we have to place a different value on someone no matter what they've done? Our flesh wants to affix value to people based on what they can do for our benefit, but that's not a biblical approach. Instead, we have to realize that the ground is level at the foot of the cross. It's really challenging to think of someone who tried to destroy your ability to impact people with God's truth, especially while they were claiming to be protecting God's truth as someone God values just as much as he values us, but it's true. For an example, we can look at Saul on the road to Damascus. That's pretty much what I just described. Did you ever wonder how the Apostle Paul was stoned at Lystra and left for dead, and then he got back up and he walked right back into that city to glorify God? It's because Paul never forgot the Saul that God rescued him from. I'll say that again. Paul never forgot the Saul that God rescued him from. And if we can keep that type of an attitude, I think that's going to get us a long way in being bitter against the people who have hurt us. That's good stuff, bro. That's really, really good. I know that, you know, when we do this, we have this tendency when we're canceled or when we leave legalism, we have this tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We have this tendency. We talked about this with Olivia, too. We have this tendency to swing so far in the other direction that we forget all the things that you mentioned. And, you know, like you said, finding community and keeping the gospel first and knowing that God places value on us. James put those in the show notes. And so we tend to forget those things. I think we all agree that one of the best examples of how to handle these situations correctly is Jesus. We look at Jesus in the gospels. And if anyone was put on blast, it was Christ. If anyone come after Jesus and tried to cancel Jesus, and if anybody experienced that, it was the Lord. And he just had this grace and compassion, even for other people that, you know, were trying to cancel. Now, he still held them accountable. And he still told them the truth. But at the same time, he did show them a level of grace and compassion. And so we have to try to learn from that example. So one of the last questions we want to ask you is how, when we are canceled, do we not blast others or try to cancel them in return? How hard is it to, you know, not take vengeance ourselves? Yeah, that's awesome, Brett. And I want to leave with this statement. I have not always mastered this. I want to tell you that I have learned from mistakes just as much as I have from wisdom. So I don't want anybody to listen to this and think, well, he got it all figured out on day one. No, it takes time. You're going to mess up. You're going to reach out to people in ways that you'll later regret. I'm not saying you should. I'm saying expect it because we're all humans. But we can start when we talk about not how do we keep from destroying others when we're canceled. We can start by keeping the three things that we just talked about in mind. You know, God called us to a purpose. God's truth transcends. And God is the one who determines the worth of a person. So that's a great place to start because it keeps us focused on what's important. If we can submit to God's place value on these people, the ones who legitimately hurt us, if we can understand that God sets that value and not us, we will understand that they don't deserve to be hurt any more than we did. And that brings me right back to what we led with. Mom was pretty smart when she said two wrongs don't make her right. So to say that differently, if I love people, if I say that I love people and that I believe the Bible, yet I live my life in such a way that I leave them to their own devices without both showing them what I believe and offering them a place in it, one or two things must be true. Either I do not actually believe what I claim to believe, or I don't actually love them. If the worldview that I previously stated is my worldview and I believe that it is, how can I cut people down the way that I was cut down? Now, I'm not saying this is easy. It's supremely challenging. The same people that we've been dancing around throughout this discussion, they're dangerous. They're dangerous to people. They're dangerous to the gospel. They're willing to distort truth. They're willing to destroy people to protect their glass houses of tradition over truth. One of the people actually went out to groups of people telling them that they should disregard me and call me off or drop me off as a false teacher simply because I was willing to take the position on the King James that the translation team took themselves. And because I was willing to look at hate and corruption down the nose and address it both inside the church and out, that made me a false teacher. And it's hard to look at those situations, to watch people break the rules they set as a pulpit committee in order to stack the deck for pastoral candidates and to see the corruption, to see the hate, see the anger, and to not want to go out and go after people. So I'm not telling you that it's easy because it's not. So how do we know where to draw the line between destroying someone in vengeance and honestly exposing corruption to protect people? Well, I'm not sure that I know. The best way that I could do it here is by withholding the names of people and the places. I think another good indicator is spend time in prayer. We don't need to react. We need to respond to hate and legalism within the church. And to react is to act out of emotion, whereas to respond is to act calculatedly out of passion. But we have to be able to build the boldness in people to be willing to face corruption where it exists. We can't just shut down and say we're not addressing this because that's what's happened historically. And if we don't address it, we're allowing more people to get hurt, more people to become victims, and ultimately more people to never truly accept Christ as their Lord, at which point we've failed in our direction. So we're called to bring people to Christ, and if we're not doing that or protecting that, we're out of line. There's a good indicator. If what we're doing doesn't bring glory to God or protect the gospel, then we're probably out of line. So we just have to choose our battles, do our best to address the things that we can. And when we can't, remember that God will not be mocked. These false prophets, these wolves in sheep's clothing, Jesus said, Verily I say unto you, they have their reward. So there's some thoughts on how to keep from destroying the people who try to destroy us. Yeah, I think that's great. And as you were talking, my mind immediately, I put my phone out because I wanted to find exactly where it was at so I could quote it. Went to a passage of scripture, because oftentimes, you know, we don't want to hurt people. It's never our intention, but Paul in the book of Romans was dealing with people who were causing divisions. And as you mentioned that, where they're purposely going out and sowing seeds of doubt and division, Paul gives us some really important words here in Romans 16, 17, and 18. He says, I think oftentimes we, the pendulum, as we talk about, we don't want to swing toward bitterness and anger, but we also, we swing to the point where we don't want to hurt people either. But Paul says here, listen, if they're serving their own stomachs, if they're serving their own flattery with smooth talk to build their own agenda, then there needs to be a time where we come out and we talk about it. I'm not saying that it's right now and right here, but we don't want to not talk about it and cause another church struggle and harm because we didn't talk about it. One practical example was there's a church down the road from where I was serving at. The pastor embezzled thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars, left the church broke, sold the school out from underneath them, and picked up his family and moved to Texas because a church out there was looking for a pastor, a larger church. And the deacons called the church that he had just left from and all this had happened from and asked them a reference. And they told him flat out, this is what he did. He embezzled money to his own 501c3. He took money out of the church. He sold the school out from underneath us. The church looked at him and said, we really like this guy. Thanks for the reference. We're still going to hire him. It's crazy. So all that to say, sometimes we can warn and tell people, and they're still liable for their own mistakes and their own decisions. So I think grace and truth have to be there. Sometimes the truth has to come in with grace and address some of these issues, not necessarily trying to cancel them, just exposing truth and exposing the nature of what it is when situations like that happen. Yeah, I agree. And it's funny, that exact scripture was quoted to people to tell them that I was that false teacher. It's as good as you picked that. I love it. I love it. Well, Joe, any closing remarks or thoughts for us? We've got maybe five minutes left to talk through anything that you may have. But I've thoroughly enjoyed so far what we've talked about. Yeah, I've had it. I'll tell you first, this is healing. This has been supremely therapeutic for me. Just to sit through and think about all this after we talked and then to sit down with you two, you know, men of God, and just talk through it, get your reflections. I have enjoyed this vastly, and I think this is going to be supremely helpful. I don't have a lot in closing, just a little bit of a summary statement. Sometimes we like to think about cancel culture as if it's some novel thing that the woke community came up with, but it's really nothing new. Now, they've taken it to another level, but it's a problem that crosses every segment of society. We can trace it all the way back to the era of the kings when someone who stood up against the ruling power would be executed, the ultimate cancellation. And, you know, the Romans and the Pharisees, and you kind of alluded to this as well, they even tried to cancel Jesus. But, boy, I'm thankful that that was to no lasting effect. And as we think through all this, and I love this series that you all are working on about woke culture in the church, and it's brought a lot of—it's been very educational, things like CRT that I really didn't know anything about. It's been helpful, and I can see that creeping in in different places since you've helped me to see it. But we've got to keep the gospel first. We've got to stay focused. Like I said earlier, keep the main thing the main thing. And I think this podcast does a great job of that, and I'm very thankful for the opportunity to have been in here. And I just want to name that. Joe, the part of your story that sticks in my mind so much is the music part where, you know, you went to sing the songs and the pastor, the evangelist said, you don't have a pastor, I'll pastor you. And I just—oh, just that feeling you must have had, you know, going through that. I've experienced that, and so many of our listeners have experienced that. And so I think you're right. It is healing for us to come together, to share our stories, say, hey, I've been there. I know what it's like. I've gotten out. I've found peace. I've found comfort, you know, going into a new church after that can be like a breath of fresh air. And we're just so thankful to you coming on here and sharing your story. And we'll never know, maybe until we get to eternity, the people that you helped share your story. But there are people out there listening right now who are going through the same things that you've been through, that we've been through, that's being helped by this, and we just appreciate your time. Yeah. Yeah, I definitely appreciate it. And if I had the opportunity to plug the music ministry, if anybody's interested in it, check it out. Love This Life on Facebook. We don't really do much on Instagram or TikTok or any of the other apps because I'm old. I'm almost 40. But yeah, please check us out. If there's anything that I can do to anybody to be a blessing, you know, mention my podcast at the beginning. Our church is in Sutton, West Virginia. And you reach out to me if you're in the area and you're escaping legalism and you need a place to land. By all means, please, you know, we're here. All three of us are here for that mission to help people who don't know where to go. Absolutely. Thanks, Joe, for coming. Again, his podcast is 99 for one. And we'll try to link that in our show notes as well. Hopefully, you will go and check that out. And Brett, any last thoughts from you? Yeah, before we close out, let's give it the old outro. I think this calls for the old one. I love it. Well, until next time, to God. Not the pastor. Be the glory. I found my new name. I found that good grace. I found that healing. And the tears fell down my face. When I found my beginning. That has no ending. I found that second chance. I found my best friend. I found my forgiveness. I found my happiness. I've been singing ever since. I found my freedom in you. Thanks for listening to the For Freedom Podcast. If you enjoyed our content, do us a favor by liking, subscribing, or sharing our podcast on whichever podcast platform you use. Be sure to join us next time for the For Freedom Podcast. For Freedom Podcast. . Thank you.

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