The King's Hall - The Feminization of the Biblical Counseling World (And How to Fix It)

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00:00:56.600 In 1963, Jay Adams, a 32-year-old pastor in New Jersey, had just been asked to teach part-time at Westminster Theological Seminary,

00:01:10.420 the school Jay Gresham Machen founded in 1929 after walking out of Princeton rather than letting liberal theology anywhere near the pulpit.

00:01:19.520 For Adams, this was a huge honor. At the time, he was assigned to teach homiletics,

00:01:25.620 a theological subject he knew very well. Then someone handed him a second course nobody else

00:01:31.960 wanted, pastoral counseling. Adams didn't have material of his own yet, so he decided to do the

00:01:38.300 responsible thing. He began by reviewing the previous professor's notes. What he found disturbed

00:01:44.520 him. Page after page of Freud and Rogers dressed up in a seminary syllabus. No doctrine of sin,

00:01:52.360 no theology of biblical sanctification or change, barely a verse of scripture worth mentioning.

00:01:58.780 This was what future pastors at one of the most conservative reformed schools in the country

00:02:04.200 were being taught about the care of souls inside the very walls that Machen built to keep liberal

00:02:11.060 theology out. Until then, nobody had thought to check what was already sitting comfortably

00:02:16.780 in the counseling curriculum. Adam started digging and didn't stop for the better part

00:02:22.500 of a decade. He read Clyde Narramore and the early evangelical psychologist, and he wrestled

00:02:28.520 seriously with O. Hubbert Moyer, a secular psychologist whose integrity therapy at least

00:02:34.400 took moral responsibility seriously. The longer he dug, the more one question wouldn't leave him

00:02:40.860 alone? What if the entire framework was wrong? Not just the methods, but also the assumptions

00:02:47.680 underneath them. What if the assumption that man's fundamental problem was sickness was flawed and

00:02:54.540 the Bible was correct when it identified the core problem as sin? What if the cure wasn't insight or

00:03:01.480 self-esteem or self-acceptance, but what the church historic had always claimed, truth applied by the

00:03:08.880 Spirit, through the Word, and obeyed to the glory of God. In 1970, Adams put it all into a book,

00:03:15.900 and the title itself, Competent to Counsel, was something of a shot fired. Because by 1970,

00:03:22.480 the operating assumption in American church life was that pastors were not competent,

00:03:27.580 that real problems should be referred out to therapists and psychologists,

00:03:31.780 passed off to men with the right degrees. Adams said no. He named his answer Neuthetic Counseling

00:03:38.460 from the Greek, nuthedio, to confront, admonish, and instruct someone towards change,

00:03:44.660 because he actually believed change was possible. It was an approach that never separated

00:03:49.400 counseling from obedience or obedience from church discipline. In 1976, he and others

00:03:55.660 formalized this counseling approach into what is now known as the Association of Certified

00:04:01.020 Biblical Counselors, or ACBC. The organization's goal is to train pastors and laymen to do the

00:04:07.300 ministry of the word that the church had quietly handed away. That was the first wave of reformation

00:04:13.060 within biblical counseling, direct, unapologetic, biblical, and it recovered something that the

00:04:19.360 church had nearly lost, the conviction that the Bible actually is sufficient for the deepest

00:04:24.740 struggles of the soul. But recovery does have a way of turning into industry. This is when biblical

00:04:32.240 counseling stopped being one book and one association and became a movement with real

00:04:37.720 infrastructure, training centers and seminary degree programs multiplying across the country

00:04:43.700 through the 80s to today. It's the same window, not coincidentally, in which women began enrolling

00:04:50.400 in American seminaries in numbers nobody in 1970 would have predicted. A climb the Association of

00:04:57.480 theological schools has tracked for decades, and one that hasn't reversed in the least.

00:05:03.460 Into that world stepped David Pallison, an intern at CCEF in 1978, shaped by Adams' teaching,

00:05:11.400 who quickly went on to become one of biblical counseling's leading voices.

00:05:15.860 Pallison had a distinctly different voice than Adams, and was known for a more nuanced

00:05:20.440 relational approach to human suffering and motivation, and a deeper exploration of the

00:05:26.000 heart beneath outward behavior. He gave the movement new language for the idolatry of the

00:05:31.520 heart, and many would say a fuller account of how scripture addresses both the sinner and the

00:05:37.000 sufferer. Most would call this period the refining of the movement. Adams himself had his doubts.

00:05:43.940 Here's the fair criticism that Adams warned about. As wave two developed, it became clear this wasn't

00:05:50.160 just a refining, it was a directional change. Adams feared that by focusing so heavily on

00:05:56.220 internal motivations, second-generation counselors were making counseling overly complicated, soft,

00:06:03.440 and painfully slow, moving away from the sharp, immediate call to biblical repentance that had

00:06:09.500 characterized early New Thetic counseling. A civil war developed within the camp, and a great deal of

00:06:15.680 energy was spent arguing from both sides. With decades of hindsight, we can finally see the

00:06:21.480 fruit of that shift. In the pursuit of greater compassion and nuance, the practice of church

00:06:27.220 discipline nearly disappeared. The institutions created to restore confidence in scripture

00:06:33.480 increasingly moved counseling out of the church and into counseling centers and certification

00:06:39.060 programs. The result wasn't merely organizational. It separated counseling from the very

00:06:45.420 authority Christ gave his church. Now, we could stop here and continue the argument biblical

00:06:51.080 counseling has been having for decades, but we think that stops short of the bigger picture. 0.96

00:06:56.740 See, Paulison and Adam spent their whole careers fighting integrationists, men trying to smuggle

00:07:02.500 secular categories back into biblical counseling under a Christian label, and they never let up, 0.73

00:07:08.860 not for a single day. They also fought relentlessly over the direction of the movement itself.

00:07:14.580 But a military general fighting hard on one front must be vigilant to guard his flank against the surprise attack.

00:07:22.460 While that whole generation held the line on the sufficiency of scripture and argued over internal direction,

00:07:28.720 seminary enrollment kept tilting further female every year,

00:07:33.100 and counseling classrooms and degree programs kept filling with women,

00:07:37.860 quietly training them towards leadership rather than the home.

00:07:41.760 At the same time, the word patriarchy was abandoned in December of 1988

00:07:46.460 for a more palatable word, complementarian,

00:07:50.060 or as David Edgington, a 30-year ACBC counselor and pastor, calls it, feminism light.

00:07:56.720 Little attention was given to that front, and hundreds of small concessions were made.

00:08:01.480 The movement, and indeed the broader church, was experiencing death by a thousand cuts,

00:08:07.040 and in many ways, it embraced and even welcomed it.

00:08:10.840 Where were the stalwart voices on that front?

00:08:13.840 Where was the passion and the zeal for the truth of sex piety

00:08:17.660 and the authority structures contained in the scriptures we endlessly argued were sufficient?

00:08:24.420 We had conference after conference, book after book, resource after resource,

00:08:30.340 all beating the drum of sufficiency.

00:08:33.260 But nobody stopped to ask why the same argument kept resurfacing generation after generation

00:08:40.040 as if it had never been settled at all. It wasn't because the case for sufficiency was weak.

00:08:46.540 It was because the enemy had shifted focus and we never caught on. Adams and Pallison were as

00:08:52.360 blind to that flank as anyone else in their generation, but blind men occasionally recover

00:08:57.280 their sight given enough time and enough reason. Both ran out of time. Pallison died suddenly in

00:09:04.300 2019 at 69 of pancreatic cancer. Adams followed the next year. Make of that timing what you will,

00:09:11.600 but one thing is certain. We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against spiritual

00:09:16.280 principalities and powers. And an enemy like that doesn't storm a front gate when a flank

00:09:21.580 is standing wide open. For years, it had been positioning subversives inside the camp,

00:09:27.420 letting them look and sound faithful for a generation and waiting. It was not exactly

00:09:32.520 grieved to find the garden suddenly leaderless, the movement rudderless. What came next never got

00:09:40.240 a name. People called it the third wave, but there was no leader to point to, only the same fight

00:09:46.500 Powelson's generation was already fighting, integrationist. Men like Heath Lambert, who once

00:09:52.840 ran ACBC itself before stepping down in 2018 to focus on his church, were sounding the alarm that

00:09:59.600 something had gone terribly wrong. In May of 2024, Lambert put words to it. An essay called

00:10:06.680 Priests in the Garden, Zombies in the Wilderness, and Prophets on the Wall. A garden meant to be

00:10:13.120 safe ground, biblical counseling, soul care done right. A wilderness beyond it, crawling with

00:10:19.880 secular psychology. But the real threat, in his telling, was never the zombies storming the gate.

00:10:25.620 It was the priest who wandered out to engage the zombies on their own terms,

00:10:30.880 got bitten, and walked back through the gate, still wearing the robe.

00:10:35.300 In the follow-up that summer, six crucial confusions of the new integrationist,

00:10:40.200 he named the counseling faculty at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary directly,

00:10:45.860 professor by professor, while going out of his way to say he wasn't questioning their character or salvation.

00:10:53.140 Now, Charity was doing a lot of heavy lifting there, but regardless of his nuance, feathers

00:10:57.840 were ruffled, pearls were clutched, and the level of concern went soul deep.

00:11:02.880 That took real nerve, and the silence that followed from men who agreed with him privately

00:11:08.060 was its own indictment.

00:11:10.060 That was cowardice wearing a robe.

00:11:12.740 But here's the question almost nobody in that fight was asking.

00:11:16.440 Why couldn't we win that battle?

00:11:18.580 The honest answer was that we already did.

00:11:20.880 More than once, Adams won it, Pallison kept winning it, generation after generation of

00:11:27.640 careful men defended sufficiency and won the argument outright. And yet there we were again,

00:11:34.700 watching most of the major biblical counseling associations become some version of integrationist

00:11:40.320 anyway. That was not what a genuinely settled argument looked like coming unsettled on its own.

00:11:46.400 That was what a multifaceted attack looked like succeeding on the front that nobody bothered to guard.

00:11:54.620 Enough noise was made contesting sufficiency to keep every eye locked on that one fight,

00:12:00.180 while the real work happened somewhere else entirely, stripping the church of its own authority,

00:12:05.960 replacing it with corporate HR policies, and filling its institutions with egalitarians.

00:12:12.540 Eventually, you didn't even need to fight the sufficiency argument at the front gate

00:12:16.840 because the entire garden was already filled with zombies.

00:12:20.800 And the infection wasn't isolated to secular psychology anymore.

00:12:24.420 It was the entire liberal order.

00:12:27.820 The truth was, that flank wasn't only open in someone else's seminary faculty or association.

00:12:34.660 It was open in our own churches too.

00:12:37.640 Every time we sent our own daughters through the same programs,

00:12:40.980 put them behind the desk in the counseling room and in positions of leadership in our organizations,

00:12:47.380 handed them the pen for books written to the whole church,

00:12:50.900 and called all of it good, faithful, even necessary.

00:12:55.880 We can apparently spot a zombie the moment he shows up wearing someone else's collar.

00:13:01.180 We're still blind to him in the mirror.

00:13:04.080 And that blindness has a track record.

00:13:06.840 It took Machen's Westminster less than four decades to end up teaching the very thing it founded to keep out.

00:13:13.740 Not 400 years, four decades.

00:13:17.580 That's how fast this moves when nobody stays vigilant.

00:13:21.360 And it should terrify us that we're still surprised by it every single time.

00:13:26.180 So here's where we want to spend our time.

00:13:28.920 Not on the corpse, on the cure.

00:13:31.740 The solution is simple.

00:13:33.500 It's just not going to be cheap.

00:13:35.940 See, Adams didn't need a task force to fix this in 1970.

00:13:40.040 He needed a Bible, a backbone, and the willingness to say what everyone else was too polite to say.

00:13:46.360 That part is still simple, and it's still the only thing that's ever mattered.

00:13:51.760 What's costly is telling the truth plainly.

00:13:54.920 The current biblical counseling movement isn't carrying a little bad material in one corrupted course anymore.

00:14:01.760 No, instead it represents a serious institutional rot and it has infected our seminaries, our denominations, and our own churches. 0.85

00:14:11.580 The answer is still simple.

00:14:14.900 The question is whether we have the spine to say the hard word and actually make the changes it requires.

00:14:21.620 At Refuge, we're done waiting around for the alphabet organizations to sort themselves out.

00:14:27.120 We have a real church full of real people living in a culture desperate for truth and

00:14:32.780 transformation, and we're blue-collar enough to believe that Christ left his bride with

00:14:38.060 every tool she needs to do the job.

00:14:41.240 Let's talk about what recovering real soul care actually looks like, starting now. 0.98

00:14:47.000 The King's Hall Podcast exists to make self-ruled men who rule well and win the world.

00:14:57.120 well welcome to this episode of the king's hall podcast i'm one of your hosts eric khan and i'm

00:15:03.380 joined today by probably my favorite co-host of all time wow mr kevin michael griffin what an

00:15:12.140 honor people probably aren't going to get the inside joke here kevin that's true uh but we

00:15:17.120 recently discovered that we have so we have two kevin's on the elder staff and i don't know how

00:15:22.160 we didn't know this but both of your middle name is michael so what we decided to do and by we i

00:15:28.720 mean me mainly is beat to death the use of the middle name yep that does a lot of heavy lifting

00:15:36.120 it does a lot of heavy lifting we played in a golf scramble the three of us so i told everyone

00:15:41.160 that i played with kevin michael which is true because you're both on my team both elite golfers

00:15:47.500 wow thank you yes i mean not every shot was elite from any of us but as a unit

00:15:56.920 elite yes kevin speaking of elite uh this episode backwards planning financial brought to you by joe

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00:16:13.680 plan backwards. No, but it's really good. You know, we talk a lot about the like legacy building

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00:16:43.680 so really helpful i appreciate joe's insight he's great yeah love joe and very very thankful

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00:19:03.500 uh the other thing that uh kevin i want to talk about we got seat of abraham coming out

00:19:08.300 so new book by andrew isker it's in pre-order as we speak and i think by the time this episode

00:19:14.080 comes out you can even order and receive like we'll be shipping the seat of abraham so who are

00:19:19.840 the people of god also maybe pertains to the financial questions we have in our world today

00:19:25.220 like where does the u.s tax dollar money go maybe so should it should it go to the places it goes to

00:19:31.240 uh, Andrew tackles that. Have you read the book yet? I haven't. Oh man, you're in for a pleasant

00:19:37.480 surprise. It's great. I can't wait. Yes. It's going to be a really exciting book. So we encourage

00:19:41.880 people to check that out. And of course you can, again, you can pre-order now. So very exciting.

00:19:48.220 Kevin, we're going to jump into the conversation now about biblical counseling. I know you've been

00:19:51.840 doing a lot of heavy lifting in this arena for our listeners who maybe don't know some of your

00:19:57.920 story. Just maybe explain that. How did you get into biblical counseling, ACBC? It's probably a

00:20:03.740 lot of stuff you address in the cold open. That was probably part of this discovery process for

00:20:09.480 you, I'm guessing. Yeah, absolutely. I've been at the church for a really long time. I think I'm

00:20:14.180 probably the oldest member attendee of Refuge Church at this point. So it's been many, many,

00:20:20.120 many years. I mean, it's like 15, 17. Were you here before Brian was lead pastor? Yes.

00:20:27.680 okay so you've been here you've been at the ogs what yes absolutely and all and all the og that's

00:20:34.540 right that's right uh so it's been here a long time gotten to see a lot of changes of the church

00:20:41.680 um brian taking um the leadership position head pastor position that was a huge change and even

00:20:50.400 seeing him changing theology and starting to direct the church in a new uh in a new way more

00:20:56.600 in the reform tradition. Awesome to see. It's, it is actually what I grew up with, uh, coming from

00:21:02.000 Florida, um, and being around Ligonier Ministries and R.C. Sproul and all those guys. So it was a

00:21:07.660 welcome change and he's done an excellent job of that. Um, but through that time, I always was

00:21:12.520 involved with, uh, Bible study and kids ministry. And by that really all it was, was we did catechism

00:21:19.660 classes mostly. So I taught those for a really long time. I mean, helped in the nursery.

00:21:25.480 parish well before it was like house church that's right yeah i did house church uh house

00:21:31.260 church for years and years and years uh and then got called up to step into um the elder candidacy

00:21:39.040 process and and it was kind of at that point through house church and stepping into candidacy

00:21:44.400 that i just um it it was it was very obvious in which way i was directed um and that was

00:21:52.240 definitely towards caring for people and walking them through issues. Uh, if there was ever a

00:21:58.280 problem within the house church or, uh, within my circle, uh, kind of the first one to run into the

00:22:04.340 fire and, and, and grab buckets of water on the way. And so that has since developed for many

00:22:11.780 years, I was just a lay elder. Um, and then again, kind of got called into full-time ministry as the

00:22:16.940 church was continuing to grow. And right out the gates, I did what I think anyone would do,

00:22:23.220 stepping into going from part-time to full-time, which was, okay, well, I'm going to pursue

00:22:27.460 additional certification. And that's when I looked at, okay, well, what's out there? What

00:22:34.100 should I, what organizations should I enter into? And I found ACBC, it seemed as though it was the

00:22:40.740 most reformed of the, uh, of the existing organizations. Um, we also had a local pastor

00:22:48.220 friend who was, well, he's like, uh, like he can do the certifications. Is that right? Yeah,

00:22:53.580 that's right. Yeah. So we sort of had a, somebody who did experience that world and this person

00:22:59.100 like thinks like we do in terms of like what stuff we'll get into. Exactly. Um, so it seemed

00:23:04.400 like a good avenue at the time. Yeah, it did. And I had concerns going into it. But I talked with

00:23:11.560 this man you're mentioning, and he was really helpful in going out, well, I think things can

00:23:18.160 still be righted. I think it is trying to steer back in a particular direction. So yeah, come and

00:23:23.800 be involved. And so I did start the certification process. But it was pretty quickly on that get

00:23:30.360 just kind of getting a behind the scenes picture. And the more I investigated and got into the

00:23:34.920 world, because I knew nothing about the biblical counseling world outside of that. I mean,

00:23:39.000 other than reading Jay Adams, I felt like I had a pretty good picture, but then I was a little

00:23:43.380 surprised when I got in and was like, but this isn't what Adams was after. Like this was not

00:23:50.440 what he was pursuing. And so it was a little jarring. Um, but I continued the process. And

00:23:55.560 And then at some point, I think it was after conversations with you and some of the other pastors where I just came to the conviction that I couldn't continue any longer, that it was a waste of time, the church's resources for me to keep going in the organization.

00:24:11.420 Yeah, I remember one of the things that we talked about early on as you were going through that, because obviously one of the things we focused on at Refuge Church is biblical sexuality.

00:24:21.760 like really trying to return to like a westminsterian view of sex piety yeah uh what

00:24:27.580 are the roles of men and women in society church family you know what does that all look like

00:24:32.080 and one of the things that kept coming up um i know i i started listening you got into it i

00:24:38.540 started listening to like dale johnson um in the podcast and don't get me wrong there's a lot of

00:24:43.480 good podcast episodes on there there's a lot of good content but more and more it seemed to be

00:24:48.680 that it was like women on the show talking about trauma like even going back to my experience

00:24:56.760 at Southern Seminary I did for a couple years the biblical counseling program actually took

00:25:02.480 courses under David Powelson who was great but one of the things that I had noticed even then

00:25:08.080 you'd go to a like a pastoral biblical counseling course and take several of them and I'd look

00:25:13.000 around the classroom and it was like over half women yeah and i remember thinking but i'm in a

00:25:19.060 pastoral track this seems problematic this seems problematic and then fast forward as we've sort

00:25:26.240 of refined and continued to develop um our understanding of sex piety it becomes even

00:25:32.540 more of a problem yeah um so i guess let's get into some of that the you you kind of talked

00:25:39.200 about that in the history section of the cold open jay adams comes in and they're seeing the

00:25:45.160 main problem it seems like that they're addressing is the amount of psychotherapeutic stuff that's

00:25:50.480 infiltrated biblical counseling world past really a function of pastoral ministry so they were good

00:25:56.280 at seeing that problem but then later i think especially in the 80s with complementarianism

00:26:02.640 and the real softening of sex roles that it really wasn't like people didn't have on their

00:26:11.300 radar that like, Hey, this is a problem that the majority of biblical counselors, just like 0.90

00:26:16.340 mirroring the psychotherapeutic world, they're all women. Yeah. And this is going to create a 1.00

00:26:22.340 real problem, especially later as we get into this, that biblical counseling is a function

00:26:28.320 of the pastoral office. And so anybody doing that work in the church, ideally, and whether you like

00:26:34.720 it or not, has this sort of authority. And so if we're delegating that authority, pastoral authority

00:26:40.880 to women, eventually, as Brian and I have kind of argued in our book, you'll get an ecclesiastical 0.99

00:26:46.920 longhouse. Yes. So is that what you see? Do you agree with that? Yeah, absolutely. It's hugely 1.00

00:26:53.480 tied up in it. There's a lot of things that are involved. And I think if you look at biblical

00:26:58.300 counseling, even some of the arguments and things that they've worked through, like this isn't as

00:27:02.360 though they never spoke of what position does a woman have in counseling. There was many good

00:27:09.900 articles that were posted and put in journals and things that were addressing the issue of

00:27:16.380 should women counsel. But a lot of the focus was should women counsel men. But we never stopped

00:27:23.000 to say, well, hold on, but how much counseling should women be doing in the first place?

00:27:28.800 And you just see how so much is wrapped up in this conversation when you really take a step back.

00:27:35.640 And I think that's the hard thing to do when you're really involved deeply in the organization.

00:27:40.500 You're trying to be faithful. And even as you said, talking about Dale Johnson and Truth and

00:27:46.420 Love podcast, there's so many good things that are on that podcast. There's so many truths.

00:27:51.280 but but you start to see where so much loosening up happens and so much liberalization creeps its

00:27:58.460 way in and it just becomes a bigger problem that I think anyone wants to recognize where when you

00:28:04.420 have a hundred voices in a room why did you choose the woman to speak about it why is it the lady who

00:28:11.420 must write on abuse why is it a lady who can only speak to another woman who's going through abuse 0.97

00:28:17.980 in her marriage, uh, who's gone through sexual trauma. Why must it be a woman? And where are we 1.00

00:28:24.100 getting that biblically? Cause I just don't, I don't see it. Yeah. It's something I think you

00:28:28.960 brought up years ago. Uh, it was when I was new to the team and I think I had been, uh, an elder

00:28:35.080 at this point, but I remember you even encouraging the guys like, Hey, we're male pastors, but we

00:28:41.460 pastor women too. Like we're scripture has called us, uh, the Lord has called us. It's been verified

00:28:48.760 in the call of the local church here, but we're equipped to minister to women. And so you, you

00:28:55.500 had mentioned at the time, even on Sunday mornings, like pastor, the women, you know, um, it's a good

00:29:00.780 thing to do that. Make sure you talk to the ladies. Cause you could see in a lot of the like 1.00

00:29:04.840 early patriarchy movements where it was like, almost the men were like afraid to talk to women. 0.84

00:29:09.600 yeah which is like really really dumb now that you think about it uh but i also think too um

00:29:15.540 like jen wilkins this was a big movement in a lot of the young restless and reformed 0.65

00:29:20.600 was like only a woman can counsel a woman and i can think of even times uh we've had ladies like

00:29:27.680 in my parish where uh they had a miscarriage and they're going through the grieving process

00:29:33.360 and i said great you know you and your husband let's meet let's talk through this 0.73

00:29:37.300 and i remember at least one of the ladies said i'd really prefer it if a woman did that

00:29:42.280 and sort of as a mercy i was like okay you know what like i'll have my wife sit in this is very

00:29:49.520 rare exception we almost never do this but she she was just a very tender gal and so i said i'll

00:29:56.460 have my wife sit in we we did the first one and you know by the grace of god she was like this was

00:30:03.000 great it was super helpful she realized like she wasn't gonna get like twitter eric or something

00:30:08.400 like that or the perception of like twitter eric and uh and then you know later we had that my wife

00:30:15.320 one time uh she she met with us my wife was even joking afterwards she's like i literally didn't

00:30:21.860 say a word it was just helping that that young lady experience and understand like no male pastors

00:30:28.700 can pastor you and your husband that's yeah totally normal feature of uh biblical christianity

00:30:35.020 but i think you're right somewhere along the lines this crept in this notion

00:30:39.520 that only women especially in the categories of like trauma i know i know we would take issue 0.99

00:30:46.000 with that but trauma abuse um leslie vernick was a big like you need this woman to be able

00:30:53.020 to understand the plight of women uh in order to counsel them well um so as you think through that

00:30:58.620 i'm just curious um in acbc land it's very prevalent now do you think it's at like uh

00:31:07.400 haven't thought through the main presuppositions level like people are just doing it because that's

00:31:11.840 what they've experienced or do you think it's more intentional they understand what they're doing

00:31:18.600 uh do you have any sense about that i i feel like it's probably multiple things i i i would hate to

00:31:25.760 just say absolutely like this is men's hearts in this. So in all fairness, I think, I think part

00:31:34.460 of it is like, this is the world that everyone just grew up in and this is the water everyone

00:31:39.660 swam in. We've had feminism and egalitarianism for, you know, 60 plus years. Yes, exactly. And

00:31:46.180 even the word complementarian, like the softening of that word, why did we do that? Why on earth

00:31:52.040 did we do that? It's the most silly thing when patriarchy just means father rule. It's just such 0.98

00:31:59.200 a distinctly biblical principle. And giving up of that, you just see more and more the giving up

00:32:06.360 of authority. And I think what it is, is really, and it goes back to the sufficiency argument.

00:32:13.040 Yeah. Like that's downstream. But what is really at the heart of the sufficiency argument? Well,

00:32:18.320 it's having a confidence in the word of God. That's all it is. It's that simple. Well,

00:32:23.460 if you back up, you also see that we need to have confidence in God's good design for marriage, 0.51

00:32:30.500 for sex piety. Like he's established these orders in the world and they're good for us. And we have

00:32:37.220 to actually be confident in them. One of the big problems with this counseling world is that we've

00:32:43.660 given up the familial relations and given way to the clinical. We've destroyed the family and now

00:32:51.980 we're trying to pick up all the pieces that are way further down problems when really what we

00:32:58.620 must restore is the God-ordered family. Because this even goes to the question about men counseling

00:33:08.480 women. We are spiritual as men, spiritual authorities of our wives. They're in our care.

00:33:17.520 We have to do that job. So you're telling me that I have this job and I'm supposed to be doing it

00:33:23.600 with my wife, but then I can't speak to these issues with another woman. I'm supposed to know 1.00

00:33:30.440 the frame of my wife. Yes, she's very different than me. And I have to understand that. And I 0.98

00:33:36.560 have to be able to speak to that and counsel her. And every time I reach a problem that is a feminine 1.00

00:33:42.580 problem, I don't go looking for some other woman. I go to the scriptures and say, what does it say? 0.99

00:33:49.160 How does it address this issue? And of course, there's Titus 2. Of course, there's older women

00:33:55.660 who speak into, and sisters in Christ, who speak into ladies' lives. Absolutely. But the notion 0.82

00:34:02.240 that a man can't speak into these, these issues, even deep issues is, is just silly. 0.80

00:34:08.140 Yeah. I think, uh, I w I was talking to pastor Scott Brown about this, uh, a while ago and we

00:34:14.460 were talking about the family integrated movement and it was a lot of that trying to restore like

00:34:20.340 the authority of fathers, family worship, fathers should be the family shepherds as Votie Bauckham

00:34:26.060 had kind of put it. And of course we agree with all that. Um, but part of it was, he said, you

00:34:31.120 know like in the 1950s what happened is the church copied the secular public school model and that

00:34:37.480 became youth groups right so we're copying these secular models i think you could make the argument

00:34:42.420 that the church also copied the secular therapy model definitely and so um even in a tv show i

00:34:50.620 think i watched like two episodes so like if you're like you didn't watch the whole thing no

00:34:54.960 i didn't i couldn't quite stomach it but there was a show i think it was called mad men and in

00:35:00.020 like episode two he's like this philandering man whore in the advertising world yeah which is why

00:35:06.860 i couldn't stomach the show um but it's really interesting because his wife like starts going 0.97

00:35:11.720 to see a therapist right away and then she gets all these like crazy feminist notions in her mind

00:35:17.520 psychotherapy oh yeah and you actually see in like two episodes i don't know what happens in the rest 0.78

00:35:21.840 of the show but it becomes this way of like undermining the husband's authority because

00:35:26.780 she's actually being catechized and indoctrinated by these secular psychotherapists the other

00:35:33.240 interesting thing about that if you read a book like abigail schreier's book bad therapy great

00:35:38.000 book yeah it's very helpful and this is like uh i think she's a wall street journal writer i think

00:35:44.200 so yeah a jewish woman but could see the problem very very clearly that really psychotherapy has

00:35:51.260 been detrimental yeah to everybody that experiences it yes and so she brings up this term of i

00:35:56.700 diatrogenesis which is basically the healer is doing the harm right the unintended consequences

00:36:03.500 you teach people to focus on their emotions and to ruminate on their past and to constantly think

00:36:10.600 about what their mom or their dad did to fail them and people actually get more mentally unwell yeah

00:36:17.200 and so but you look at this and she says look it like everything in our society has been touched

00:36:22.360 by therapy and it's bad. Like even a non-Christian can look at that world and say, just look at the

00:36:29.400 results of it. I remember one of the first classes we had with Dr. Pallison, David Pallison. 0.58

00:36:37.420 He was really trying to address this notion that the scripture wasn't sufficient to deal with

00:36:41.640 problems. And in that class, even I realized, wow, we just do think that like, well, the professionals

00:36:48.100 at the clinic they're the ones who really know how to handle this and i remember him saying like

00:36:53.340 the failure rate in most counseling secular therapy counseling was like the failure rate

00:36:58.800 was like 85 yeah and you stop and you say wait a minute but but it's literally not working

00:37:06.620 then you flip the script and you look at jay adams and what they were doing with just very

00:37:12.000 simple exhortation, like new thetic counseling, just exhortation, admonition, helping people

00:37:19.860 work toward habit change, confessing their sins, repenting.

00:37:23.480 Is it actually very straightforward?

00:37:25.120 Very simple.

00:37:26.040 And then you, we started examining all the case studies on it. 0.64

00:37:29.880 And Dr. Paulson was like, it's almost reverse, like, especially among Christians, like 80% 0.86

00:37:35.840 of the time it works. 0.98

00:37:37.300 You know what I mean?

00:37:38.200 Like you're still going to have unrepentant sinners, but believe it or not, it seems simple, but the scriptures are sufficient.

00:37:45.340 But, and that's actually, even when we say it's unsuccessful, that's actually a feature of biblical counseling.

00:37:52.360 Yes.

00:37:52.620 It's a feature of Matthew 18.

00:37:55.000 Yeah, we're, everyone is not going to be helped.

00:37:57.840 Some people will be proved to be outside of the church, not Christians.

00:38:02.160 And they need something very different than biblical admonition to specific duties,

00:38:08.480 repenting of certain sins.

00:38:09.840 They need a new heart.

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00:39:33.020 Yeah, some of it too, Kevin, I think I can understand pastorally the lure.

00:39:38.920 I know a lot of churches, even locally, that do this.

00:39:42.640 For the pastor, it can be an extreme temptation because you say to yourself,

00:39:46.420 well, I can just hire this clinic.

00:39:48.620 And a lot of times they'll even say Christian counseling, but it's like psychotherapy.

00:39:52.700 and let's even say it was acbc if a church outsources the pastoral care it does something

00:40:01.040 to the authority structure absolutely now again i can see why it's a temptation because for the

00:40:06.060 pastor it's like oh great i don't have to deal with the problems because it's one of the least

00:40:10.480 sexy things about the ministry but you also lose a lot of authority and effectiveness yeah um so i

00:40:16.980 guess your argument like why would why would you encourage a pastor not to farm that out yes okay

00:40:23.560 so to the pastor and and here's the thing we just did the new christian press conference recently

00:40:29.080 and we did a pastor's breakfast and i had a great time talking with guys from all kinds of

00:40:34.500 denominations not just totally like-minded guys but guys from all over and one of the things that

00:40:41.560 came up quite often when we were talking about counseling was how difficult it is to actually

00:40:47.300 do what the Bible requires in the world in which we live, which is to confront people in their sin.

00:40:53.720 What I would say to that guy is, again, you need to have a confidence in the tools that God has

00:41:01.300 given you. And just with all courage and with all faithfulness, use those tools. And those are the

00:41:08.000 tools of instruction and admonition through the scriptures, confronting the sin, and then taking

00:41:14.280 Matthew 18 all the way to the end. And you do that with great patience, with great kindness,

00:41:20.040 but you need to do it with authority. And again, confidence plays a huge piece in it. And so many

00:41:26.180 of the guys I talked to, one of the things, the side effects, if you will, of outsourcing the

00:41:32.040 counseling is, the more counseling is outside of the church, the less confidence the pastor is in

00:41:38.240 handling the issues. And when you start to recover these things, the confidence is shaky. And also

00:41:47.180 you get people who are really mad that you're telling them, as it turns out, like telling

00:41:52.480 people to stop sinning, like, hey, you just, what you're doing, all of this radically wicked,

00:41:59.340 and you have to stop. That is not always received well. Well, no, even in our context, especially

00:42:05.620 for new people, when they come here, like their idea of what's going to happen with pastoral care

00:42:11.680 is often shaped by psychotherapeutic language and the way that model works, right? So they think

00:42:18.040 we're going to meet for 27 weeks every week. I'm going to talk about the trauma of my childhood.

00:42:24.400 um i think a lot of times they're frustrated and shocked when it's like we're going to help you

00:42:30.880 identify the sin we're going to help you repent of that we're going to help you take responsibility

00:42:35.760 for the things that you've sinned in doing yes we're also going to acknowledge hey i this person

00:42:41.140 sinned against you that's real here's here's how we work through reconciliation but i think there

00:42:45.840 are oftentimes pride is really stricken oh yeah when it's like it doesn't usually take 27 meetings

00:42:54.040 to figure out what the problems are and then to start working through them i've noticed a lot of

00:42:59.580 people in those situations they don't like doing homework meaning they don't want to go to the

00:43:04.420 scriptures for themselves read the passages answer questions about them apply it to their own life

00:43:09.060 and then work on habitual change yeah they just want to talk because they have this talk therapy

00:43:14.420 yeah view of what is about to happen so i think in the early on stages there can be a lot of

00:43:20.040 resistance to that. Yeah. Because quite frankly, it's a lot easier to just pay a therapist who's

00:43:24.780 like, Oh honey, I know you need to, you need to cut the toxic people out of your life. And we

00:43:29.300 might say something like, listen, honey, the most toxic person in your life is you. Yeah. 0.72

00:43:36.720 Especially like it coincides with this other issue where women are not used to having their

00:43:42.040 sins confronted not at all and so when we do that lovingly gently firmly directly um the kind of two

00:43:50.820 things happen one a person could be in revolt and they could just you know be very frustrated

00:43:55.900 um there's i've called them sort of like you can have your toddler in a grocery store aisle type

00:44:03.340 fits in the beginning but what's funny is eventually for a lot of the women it becomes 1.00

00:44:09.520 a refreshment. It's the first time in their life somebody just said, hey, you sinned. Absolutely.

00:44:14.340 Like, this is really egregious, and here's how you need to walk in repentance. That can actually be,

00:44:19.720 I think because it's more simple and clear, it can actually be freeing and refreshing for these

00:44:24.340 people. I don't know if you've seen kind of the same pattern. Oh, absolutely. It's a constant

00:44:29.320 thing. And in fact, to that point, there's been so many times where, yes, that maybe is the initial

00:44:34.960 reaction like, oh, wow, I don't like this. But the thing is, is that so many times people come back

00:44:41.600 and they're like, you know, after thinking about that, I realized that I have never had someone in

00:44:46.700 my entire life, including all the years of biblical counseling and all the therapy and

00:44:53.320 anywhere. I have never had someone tell me, this is a sin and you have to stop.

00:45:00.160 and and the way you laid it out was just so simple like so you're saying i can just stop

00:45:09.460 i it really it's that easy i i can i can quit walking in this sin and i can actually put on

00:45:18.100 righteousness i can actually start walking but with the fruit of the spirit that that's crazy 0.71

00:45:24.560 and this sounds like the stupidest thing you've ever heard saying it out loud but i'm telling you 0.91

00:45:29.340 It's the thing that comes up time and time again. 0.99

00:45:32.240 And that's the glory of the biblical answer, is that oftentimes it really is that simple.

00:45:38.620 It's that obedience is hard.

00:45:40.320 It's not that the truth is hard or complicated.

00:45:43.840 It's that walking it out, the actual discipline, is difficult.

00:45:49.660 It is hard.

00:45:50.920 You're warring against your flesh, the devil, every temptation you can imagine, all sorts of disordered desires.

00:45:59.340 But at the end of the day, the answer is, is really quite simple. And that's the thing that I think when, when someone is humbled, they see so clearly and it is so at, to your point, refreshing. Yeah. Like I can actually change this and, and I could, this could actually be changed in my life within a matter of weeks.

00:46:19.980 like my life could make a fundamental and radical change overnight and you look at them and you go

00:46:28.240 yes 100 yeah and you don't need drugs and you don't need methods you can just repent of your

00:46:35.700 sin you can you can go to the lord with this sorrow you can cry out to him you there it's not

00:46:42.700 that complicated and that's what i would want every pastor listening to hear is it is that simple

00:46:48.460 don't let the world convince you that it's more complicated than that god has given us tools

00:46:53.660 and they're quite simple tools yeah a lot of this um is we were talking about before the show

00:47:00.800 in preparation but a lot of this is economically driven so a and abigail schreier even talks about

00:47:08.240 this but it can be true of the biblical counseling world too where you have job security if you have

00:47:15.680 somebody who comes back for therapy like every week. Yeah. Like indefinitely. Right. Um, for the

00:47:21.880 pastor, it's very different because, um, we're looking at it and we're saying, I actually don't

00:47:28.420 want to meet with you for every week for the rest of the year to fix this problem. Um, we, number

00:47:35.340 one, can't do that based on pastoral load. Yeah. Um, even if you're a single pastor in a church of

00:47:41.880 70 you literally cannot meet with every person every week it's impossible so it's actually a

00:47:47.340 bad model yeah to try and try and do that um but it is interesting to me that like so much of this

00:47:55.300 we get into like the move away from helping and equipping families and fathers to deal with

00:48:01.080 problems in their midst to a clinical approach you know the minute we say to them like hey women 0.80

00:48:07.380 ought not to be in all these seminaries women ought not to be in all these biblical counseling 0.84

00:48:11.620 programs it does not befit their sex or their station or their godly vocation they should be

00:48:17.120 mothers in the home like there's all these things that they should be doing but the minute you talk

00:48:22.640 about that it's sort of like in the book of acts with the silversmiths paul's preaching and they're

00:48:28.360 like wait a minute this is jeopardizing an entire industry like so i think that's a lot of the

00:48:34.060 pushback that people would have is you're disrupting the economic situation these institutions

00:48:41.700 get a lot of money uh seminaries uh i think what's keeping them afloat right now you've mentioned it 0.95

00:48:47.300 in the cold open but then the the rates of women that are participating in them it's astounding 0.91

00:48:51.860 and if they were to say like if al moeller was to say no more female seminary students

00:48:57.040 what happens to his budget uh statistically it goes down by over half at this point right so it

00:49:06.440 it has an economic and to them in the immediacy like a deleterious effect on them so you look at

00:49:13.600 that and you say okay that's going to be something that we have to address oh i was thinking about

00:49:18.480 this the other day because somebody had mentioned this but um you know with the girl boss babe

00:49:23.420 podcaster thing, you know, somebody like Allie Best Stuckey, she makes, uh, when she speaks for 0.99

00:49:27.780 an hour at a public event, she makes about $50,000. Where do I sign up for this? Yeah. Where do I sign

00:49:32.180 up for this? Well, you have to be a blonde woman. First of all, I'm sorry. Okay. Um, you're just not 1.00

00:49:37.300 that big of a selling item, I guess. Yeah. Um, but, but you look at that and you go, okay,

00:49:42.300 well, it makes sense. Her husband, I think is her agent works for her. Um, and so you have an

00:49:47.740 economic reason not to understand the principle or to disagree with the principle of biblical

00:49:52.880 sex piety and so that becomes a real thing so i guess my question to you is obviously it still

00:50:00.080 has to be addressed it's what the word of god says even though it's affecting industries we

00:50:04.500 still have to address uh this problem but what would you say to kind of maybe maybe one of these

00:50:10.460 guys running an institution or a pastor thinking through this and going you know we could address 1.00

00:50:15.700 this but we're going to catch heat especially from the ladies who's they built their a career 1.00

00:50:20.900 on this. Um, but, but I guess, how would you encourage that guy just to say like, well, no, 1.00

00:50:25.860 but like you have to do the right thing. Yeah. The Lord calls us to faithfulness and history

00:50:30.860 writes about men who are courageous. It does not, it completely forgets or anathematizes the man who,

00:50:37.380 uh, is just eat up with, uh, insecurities and indecision and who goes along with everyone.

00:50:47.380 um who gives into the long house the long house yes yeah see an upcoming book by someone i know

00:50:54.160 yes um we need we need courage guys like we need courage it is going to be hard and you are going

00:51:03.000 to get a tremendous amount of pushback but one of the things that i'm always encouraged by is

00:51:07.540 is the men of history who have made these hard changes and and i mentioned in the cold open but

00:51:12.600 machin is a great example he saw liberalism that i mean today he would be appalled like i mean he

00:51:20.740 just would it's hard to imagine his reaction to today well now even in the pca like uh you know

00:51:28.900 we're deposing guys from office for holding to biblical sexuality as taught in titus 2 yeah

00:51:35.760 like that like the simplest thing in the world you can be a same-sex attracted pastor you're fine 0.93

00:51:41.020 think about this but then if you if you address this issue of like what ladies ought to do 0.94

00:51:46.940 yeah like in in their station vocation biblically and you and you just carry the line that are

00:51:53.200 reformed forefathers these denominations that claim to hold to westminster but if you oppose

00:51:59.280 egalitarianism which is a you know tied very closely it's like a heartbeat of liberalism

00:52:04.560 you're going to have the the cross you're going to be in the crosshairs yeah they're going to

00:52:09.920 point the guns at you but i think to your point um yeah i mean this is kind of the ethos here in

00:52:17.320 ogden is we're like okay history remembers the faithful and courageous well so we'll build a

00:52:23.000 non-longhouse institution it's one of the things brian and i talk about in the book too is uh one 0.97

00:52:28.820 of the principles uh for building in a longhouse world is whatever you build don't put women in

00:52:34.360 charge of it and brian said something in there like whatever caveat or exception you think that

00:52:40.740 you're that you personally have delete it yeah there isn't one there just isn't one it's not

00:52:47.940 women's ministry it's not the children's program it's not any of that certainly not biblical

00:52:54.140 counseling um i want to ask you about some of the newer wave stuff uh that's been going on

00:53:00.080 one of the i think it was an essay but i watched it as like a youtube video from heath lambert

00:53:04.840 yeah um he was actually i think he was the ta at southern when i was there okay um don't don't know

00:53:12.100 him but had some exposure seemed like he was writing good stuff but i really like the essay

00:53:18.200 yeah um remind me the title of it but it's the oh it's like zombies in the garden priest

00:53:24.800 in the i'm gonna forget it priest in the kit yes i'd have to pull it up but i guess just if you

00:53:34.820 oh yeah here we go jamie pulled it up for us what a guy oh jamie priest in the garden zombies in the

00:53:41.400 wilderness prophets on the wall so just give me like a basic rundown i guess of what he was talking

00:53:46.440 about what was the issue that he saw yeah the issue he sees is that the that every organization

00:53:51.060 that he's been a part of is falling to integrationist and so much time and energy is 0.59

00:53:57.060 getting spent on really stupid stuff like grounding and breathing techniques and seriously 0.85

00:54:03.120 oh yeah it's being shot through with that stuff and we're having these same arguments that we've 0.97

00:54:09.200 all always had and like i said in the cold open why are we not asking the question of why do we 0.78

00:54:14.700 keep having this same argument over and over and over again it's it's just completely ridiculous

00:54:20.740 So kind of the big thing right now is we're fighting over,

00:54:24.900 is biblical counseling going to be integrationist or not?

00:54:28.960 And basically, if I'm not mistaken from my memory,

00:54:32.240 it's been a while since I listened to this,

00:54:34.720 but basically the priests leave the walls of like a castled fortress or whatever.

00:54:40.460 They go out and minister among the world.

00:54:42.440 They become bitten and they become zombified.

00:54:45.380 Then they come back into the camp

00:54:48.560 and they're spreading around like all these cool integrationist things that they learned in the

00:54:53.000 in the secular space yeah so palison had his six r's which were like you know reclaim uh redeem

00:55:01.320 and and his point was like hey we can we can interact with some of the secular stuff and see

00:55:08.360 if there's any if they hit on any truths i i sort of think about this like jordan peterson

00:55:13.920 Jordan Peterson said some true things. Okay, great. The issue is when the priests go out

00:55:21.140 into the world to interact with those zombies, they get bitten by this secular

00:55:27.720 psychology, categories, methods, and then they come back in and they think they're going and

00:55:39.020 they're going to redeem and they're going to refine and tweak and all of those things.

00:55:43.640 but what they end up doing is just believing it this is sort of like the tim keller thing like

00:55:50.200 we're you know in the city for the city and we're going to interact with people on the

00:55:55.000 really center left to far left and we're going to change them that's exactly that what ends up

00:56:01.360 happening was that they got changed by the world yeah you know keller ends up being like a registered

00:56:06.020 democrat and he has all these reasons for why he strategically was doing it but it's like

00:56:10.740 at the end of the day it changed his pastoral ministry absolutely think about this like you

00:56:16.520 have a church full of singles in new york city and so he's going to talk a lot about the gift

00:56:21.620 of singleness well why well because if he starts preaching on traditional westminsterian

00:56:29.180 um you know content around marriage and that marriage is actually the ideal for most people

00:56:35.200 what what's going to happen those people in his congregation are going to get married

00:56:38.800 they're going to move out of new york city because it's you you've been there um it's not a good

00:56:43.560 place to raise a family financially or otherwise so he's looking at that and i think you know they

00:56:50.220 make a calculus and they say no we're going to elevate all these women and like he wrote a

00:56:55.340 marriage book uh with a woman who's like a boss babe and um you know they don't talk about like

00:57:01.600 motherhood at all yeah as as an option for women so you're like okay well to me you're you're a

00:57:07.460 priest who got bit by a zombie in the wilderness and now you're coming back into the church

00:57:12.540 and you know even things like i would say uh was it rick appleton am i getting that right

00:57:18.180 the pca pastor who got deposed i think he was a bit like a prophet on the wall

00:57:22.560 he was calling out the sins in the camp and then the zombies attacked him before keller died he

00:57:29.980 published a manifesto where he basically said we need to separate from the conservatives

00:57:33.980 so when you see appleton getting attacked this was part of the tim keller dying manifesto playbook

00:57:40.900 actually yeah like anti-vaxxers people who believe in like sex piety like we would talk about we got

00:57:47.540 to get rid of them he did say and and this is where like total zombie in in the in the garden

00:57:53.480 he would say things like in that manifesto uh we need to partner with the same sex attracted 0.94

00:57:59.320 We need to listen to the gay voices in our midst to see what we can learn from them.

00:58:03.720 Yeah.

00:58:03.980 They have wisdom to teach us.

00:58:06.120 I mean, this is like, it'd be like if I came to Refuge Church and I said, hey, I've got

00:58:12.960 this thing I want to put in our water supply.

00:58:14.500 It's called arsenic.

00:58:17.620 Like, no, Eric, no, don't do it.

00:58:20.300 But I think that kind of gets to the point.

00:58:22.880 And what's really hard, so Heath is not part of ACBC anymore.

00:58:27.120 No, he stepped down to just focus on pastoring his church. And he's kind of from now the background, if you will, saying, hey, guys, I've been a part of this stuff for a long time. There's some big problems. And he's absolutely right. And I really love his analogy he used. The thing is, is I think it's almost too narrow in its focus. It's looking at just the biblical counseling world, right? That's the garden, just the biblical counseling world.

00:58:54.280 Well, we could take this analogy and it's way better and I think more clear when we look at it as the church is the garden.

00:59:02.740 And the zombies are things like feminism, liberalism, like it's much broader than just biblical counseling.

00:59:08.620 Yeah, absolutely.

00:59:09.580 So this is how wokeness got in.

00:59:11.100 You could think about Westminster. The zombie, the bitten zombie is sort of like J. Adams finding that really bad material within the biblical counseling curriculum.

00:59:27.040 Okay, but again, let's go broader than that. The issue's a lot bigger than just guys going out and getting bitten with secular psychology.

00:59:37.040 We have literally, I mean, there's people being bitten in lots of areas and coming back

00:59:40.600 into the church and infected.

00:59:42.760 But meanwhile, again, we have opened the door and just flooded the garden.

00:59:48.000 We have flooded the church with every number of liberal, horrible issues in the church

00:59:54.220 today, like feminism being a huge one. 0.95

00:59:57.100 There's countless. 1.00

00:59:58.620 The femininity with men. 1.00

01:00:00.080 I mean, you go down the line.

01:00:01.220 And I even think of somebody early on that, uh, I was going to take a class, didn't end

01:00:05.920 taking a J term with him, but Paul David Tripp was one of the guys who was doing stuff with

01:00:09.760 Southern.

01:00:10.940 And, uh, yeah, you go from like Timothy Lane and Paul David Tripp on how people change

01:00:15.800 and you're like, oh, you know, there's some good material here.

01:00:18.520 Um, instruments in the Redeemer's hands, uh, changed a lot of how I thought about, um,

01:00:24.340 you know, biblical counseling from a pastoral perspective, but then you fast forward and

01:00:29.500 it's like paul is promoting like eric mason woke church going to his church whatever um even his

01:00:36.500 tim bailey pointed this out but like even his his clothing became very effeminate yeah like pink

01:00:43.180 scarves and skinny jeans and whatever and it's like this new york hot couture culture whatever

01:00:49.360 it's like it's actually a real problem yeah and we have to stop acting like the issue is just

01:00:56.080 some infected some infected priest getting back into the garden we need to see that this is no

01:01:02.560 longer again jay adams finding the bad curriculum this is princeton this is institutional rot and

01:01:09.900 it's broken containment oh hugely yeah the doors are wide the gates are wide open and we just have

01:01:17.660 to call it what it is and that takes courage and that's something that's significantly lacking as

01:01:23.060 we're seeing across denominations organizations associations a significant lack of courage

01:01:30.420 and and um i also think you need kevin i think you need christian burroughs this is our you know

01:01:39.180 stealing from king alfred but you need like an outpost of sanity you need an outpost that's not

01:01:45.380 longhouse from which to wage a counterinsurgency yeah um we're actually not in a place of i think

01:01:51.420 Karen Ren is right about this.

01:01:52.560 We're not in a place to do culture war in the old traditional sense because we

01:01:56.640 hold none of the institutions.

01:01:58.140 Yeah.

01:01:58.580 The concert,

01:01:59.100 like I think your best estimate is that the PCA is maybe 25% conservative.

01:02:04.000 If that,

01:02:05.060 yeah,

01:02:05.760 you don't control that institution.

01:02:08.320 You're a prisoner in your own denomination if you're a conservative.

01:02:11.780 So I think you look at that and,

01:02:13.380 and just to give people practical things that you could build like at refuge,

01:02:18.680 we obviously have no female deacons female pastors no women's ministry leaders no women running

01:02:24.620 um you know children's programs or anything like that um but because of that this is what a lot of

01:02:34.240 guys like they're experiencing the heat in the pca but we're not i mean yeah we have people on

01:02:39.280 the outside who don't like us but it's like you're not going to lose your job because you told a

01:02:44.700 woman to repent nope in fact we're gonna be like great job kevin yeah keep doing that so i think

01:02:50.700 what you have to do is start building counter institutions um one of the things that was very

01:02:55.380 telling for me when um david edgington released his first book the only person who would endorse

01:03:02.600 it he got rejected by all the main publishers yep he got rejected by all the acbc people they were

01:03:08.540 like women sinning this is not an issue i think more likely it's like we cannot sell this to our

01:03:14.500 audience they were probably pretty smart about that one person was willing to endorse that book

01:03:20.680 and it was jay adams our guy known our guy jay adams let's flip and go jay adams yeah he's going

01:03:27.500 to be with the lord now but i would think that he saw some of this yeah yeah i i think he did

01:03:35.020 see a lot of this i think his focus it's kind of that thing you get down the specialist train you

01:03:41.580 get to be a known voice in an organization and you spend so much of your time focusing on the

01:03:47.160 issues within that thing and within that lane. But it is important to be able to take a step

01:03:53.560 back from time to time and go, let me look at this whole thing. And that's actually a point

01:03:58.500 that I think we all need to do right now as we look at the church is just to pull back and go,

01:04:05.200 okay well looking at history like all of history is the church today more or less healthy than it

01:04:12.800 was in the past and by every measure it's worse it's sort of the same question you have to ask

01:04:19.600 with youth group um i think this is kind of what it means to be a trailblazer by the way

01:04:26.260 um and and i don't mean this in a haughty way but like an important man historically who's

01:04:33.340 actually going to work for real change. Yeah. So, so many of my friends, like we, we got out

01:04:38.640 of seminary, we saw the rates of apostasy among the youth. Many of us served as youth leaders in

01:04:44.420 some capacity, but I would say 99% of the guys were like, yeah, the system's broken. It's not

01:04:49.820 good. I think I have a new curriculum for youth group to fix that. Yeah. Now a very small percentage

01:04:56.960 of us were like got into Votie Bauckham and Scott Brown. And we were like, what if youth group

01:05:03.360 itself, what if the foundation of that ideology is the problem? Yep. What if the whole point is

01:05:10.420 that fathers is going to be radical. Fathers are the main person responsible for discipling their

01:05:16.140 kids. Like some of us were willing to ask that question. And then also it was like, damn the

01:05:24.540 torpedoes. Cause you know, like you just lost your job at the local SBC church. Cause grandma and 0.99

01:05:30.700 everybody else grew up with youth group culture. And so it was like the sacred cow you couldn't

01:05:35.180 touch, but you know, we just said, okay, yeah, people hate us. And we'll have to find a totally

01:05:40.100 alternate way to do church among guys who agree with us, but we could do that. We could build

01:05:44.720 that sort of thing. Same would apply to biblical counseling. We're sort of in this boat now where

01:05:49.980 we've said as a church yeah i don't like all the females running the show i don't like that every 0.95

01:05:56.200 other podcast is a woman talking about trauma you hear the stories about some of these ladies

01:06:01.380 behind the scenes and they're like pretty brash yeah and mouthy ladies and i'm like yep nope we're

01:06:08.480 not doing that i don't care about a certification the institutions are corrupted we're gonna have

01:06:13.340 to build something else yeah so we're kind of moving down that track um but i do think like

01:06:20.380 it's the same thing like what if you have to question the whole model yes this whole like

01:06:25.600 farming things out but also we're going to take it and this is kind of why we're going to go now

01:06:30.620 with like the solutions some of the specifics of what we're building local where we say

01:06:34.820 we're going to train local pastors uh there isn't an office in the church that is exempt from

01:06:41.320 pastoral counsel. Yeah. Every pastor should be competent to counsel. It means that you have

01:06:48.000 wisdom. It means you know how to draw out the deep waters of the human heart. There's skill

01:06:52.880 involved. There's all these things. We're going to train that locally. We don't have any women

01:06:58.420 involved in that process. Certainly to your point, we're encouraging women in a Titus II way, 1.00

01:07:04.380 teach older women who are wise, teach the younger women how to love their husbands and care for

01:07:09.200 their children and keep home and all those things there's a place for women in that absolutely but 0.61

01:07:14.340 that's happening within hospitality in the home it's not an official teaching function of the

01:07:19.580 church yes uh what else like just just walk me through like what are we building local what are

01:07:25.280 we trying to do here i don't think you lose any sleep about not having an acbc certification

01:07:31.060 i i sure don't yeah i sure don't other things we're doing here though uh we really try to focus

01:07:38.320 especially if there's something going on with a wife, for instance, like let's go right at

01:07:44.740 one of the biggest areas that people fight, push back on when it comes to women counseling 0.97

01:07:51.380 is when we get a woman in the church who needs some help with a particular thing,

01:07:56.980 we are almost right out the gates going to try and involve her husband more. So some of the

01:08:04.440 counseling is going to look like, sure, let's come, let's come together. We, we, we always try

01:08:09.740 to have the husband there. Um, but there's just as much coaching for the husband and how to handle 0.77

01:08:15.340 this. Cause that's the ultimate goal, right? That's the ultimate goal. Yeah. Yeah. He's supposed

01:08:19.040 to be doing that in his home. And sometimes again, the Lord's given his church, right? He's given

01:08:24.780 the pastors. Matthew 18 does not stay with one person. It, it escalates. And so of course there's

01:08:31.600 a place for the pastor, but ultimately we want to equip the husbands to be able to handle these

01:08:36.800 things. And that's going to look like them becoming better students of the word, sharper in the way

01:08:41.920 they think through things, applying a lot of wisdom. That's a huge one for men and how to

01:08:47.440 apply these scriptures, not ham fistedly, but, but applying those scriptures to the female frame, 0.92

01:08:55.720 right. And helping your wife think through these things. That's a huge part of it. 0.97

01:08:59.980 I feel like that is actually, it's at least my goal in a lot of counseling is I'm trying to model and coach the husband how to shepherd his wife.

01:09:11.980 Yeah.

01:09:12.700 Like the goal isn't, because we have this a lot with, especially new people, but people will come and just be like, fix my wife.

01:09:19.720 And you're like, oh, buddy.

01:09:21.600 Yeah.

01:09:22.160 That's not how this works.

01:09:23.640 Like, we're certainly going to minister to her.

01:09:25.780 we're going to exhort her but we're going to coach and exhort and admonish you because generally

01:09:33.300 what's happening is like uh he's not doing that he doesn't know brian gave a really good

01:09:39.620 explanation of this at a recent town hall which is like a we gather as a church and do q a and

01:09:45.440 talk through like practical issues we're seeing in the church people ask questions really good time

01:09:49.220 but he gave a really good explanation of like you need to become like a student of the female frame

01:09:54.220 Yeah. Like how do women think they process things very emotionally? How do you comfort them? How do you exhort them? How do you encourage them in their daily work? You can't be aloof to their problems. Yeah. And same with your kids. You know, you need to know how to shepherd well in that context. We're actually doing a lot to that would be like the main goal is not to start a clinical practice. Yeah. It would actually be to train the fathers to do this job really well. 0.63

01:10:22.980 Yeah. So that most of that correction, again, if the problem is we've destroyed the familial and we've gone to the clinical, well, we need to destroy and work our way. And again, it's a process of destroying the clinical and getting back to the familial.

01:10:38.480 We need to have strong and robust families. 0.97

01:10:42.600 And that looks like male leadership.

01:10:44.380 That looks like men taking seriously their job of being a spiritual authority to their wife and instructing them and counseling them and their children.

01:10:53.200 If I hear one more biblical counselor, a male, say, oh, the female mind just blow. 0.89

01:11:00.560 I just don't know what to do with it. 1.00

01:11:02.560 It makes me want to vomit.

01:11:04.240 It's so bad.

01:11:05.900 It's your job to do this.

01:11:07.840 It is your job. And God has made you, he's given you the mind to be able to do that. So stop being

01:11:16.080 ignorant. That's a huge thing we're always telling our men is you cannot be aloof. Don't be the 0.99

01:11:22.840 caricature guy on every commercial that's just the absolute nincompoop. You need to be a smart

01:11:30.640 and well-thought, well-intentioned man that sees problems and says, hmm, I might not know how to

01:11:39.020 fix that problem right now, but you better believe I'm going to figure out how. Yeah. Even, you know,

01:11:43.980 I've often been told in counseling, there's kind of this idea that we somehow neglect like the

01:11:50.600 physical realities. Well, you wouldn't know what a woman is going through, through childbirth and

01:11:56.160 labor and postpartum you know that's one example it's like any man worth his salt is going to have

01:12:04.260 to learn the the seasons of life his wife's hormonal states and and actually as you get

01:12:10.620 into it like you'll go watch a secular thing about that and it's like a man talking about it

01:12:15.000 a male doctor and i'm like well that guy figured it out yeah i mean clearly it's it's possible to

01:12:21.340 do that you can become actually very skillful um and understanding the female frame uh but yeah

01:12:27.280 to your point it's just ludicrous that that guys would actually say there's there's no way a man

01:12:31.800 could ever figure that out yeah uh it's mind-boggling yeah yeah and i also think too with

01:12:38.560 the um getting to this familial uh structure i think part of the fight against the long housing

01:12:46.360 of the ecclesiastical space in the church, which would include biblical counseling.

01:12:50.840 I think a big push is we have to stop thinking that some bloated bureaucratic thing

01:12:56.420 is going to fix all of our problems. Yeah. Um, actually God's order is really clear. Titus one

01:13:03.300 five, you know, okay. You have Crete. We all know about the Cretans like crazy bunch, right? Maybe

01:13:10.940 this is like people from Atlanta. I don't know, you know, sorry, Atlanta, but you know what I'm

01:13:14.460 talking about you got a crazy bunch of people yeah and paul says to them what is the solution

01:13:19.920 he didn't say go start a new institution with all this overhead and a 501c3 and you know get

01:13:27.740 all the ladies riled up no no he said listen i want you titus to find and appoint godly men

01:13:34.280 so wise fathers you go through the list of qualifications who know how to create order

01:13:39.360 out of chaos. So fathers, like, I want you to be thinking of it in that way. Is it like God has

01:13:45.540 instituted me as an agent for bringing order to chaos? Yeah. And so when you look at a teenage

01:13:52.240 son, you don't throw your hands up and in your struggles and say, I don't know, I need an expert

01:13:57.620 kids these days. Yeah. No, you, you actually, you go to the word of God and yeah, get, you know,

01:14:03.380 consultation from your pastors and stuff like that if you're not equipped, but you go to the

01:14:08.140 word of God, you start having conversations and it's amazing. Even I've done this a lot with my

01:14:14.280 kids. Like, yeah, we all have situations where you're like, I don't know. I don't fully know

01:14:18.500 how to handle this. You just start having a conversation and working through issues.

01:14:22.060 You'll see things along the way. You're reading books, you're wrestling through it.

01:14:25.640 And then before you know it, you're like, okay, we've actually figured out how to solve this

01:14:30.360 issue. Yeah. It's not rocket surgery. No. But a lot of it is just, I think it's that first step,

01:14:36.860 kevin of saying as a father i'm responsible i am the responsible person over my wife and my kids

01:14:45.320 and my household and then pastorally it would be an extension that i'm i'm an authority over these

01:14:50.420 families and so you should think the same thing we have to provide solutions and actually we turn to

01:14:57.460 the word of god to do that we we don't ship people out we don't by the way like most of it is like

01:15:04.320 the stuff makes people insane oh yeah i mean we've like the uh it's like a general rule but

01:15:09.900 if somebody comes into counseling for the first time and you hear a lot of psycho talk oh no if i

01:15:16.040 start hearing the the buzzwords oh no like if i hear you know a husband or wife start talking

01:15:20.920 about gaslighting and narcissism i'm just like oh my goodness this is gonna be we gotta help me

01:15:27.100 we got some deprogramming uh that we we need to do because you actually a lot of those categories

01:15:32.020 don't align with how scripture talks about the human condition no not at all so so we've got

01:15:36.740 to deal with that um so as you think about solutions look at the church in america and acbc

01:15:44.300 and you think about counseling institutions and all those things if we had healthy situation in

01:15:50.640 the churches in america like in your idea what would it look like yeah so i think there's still

01:15:57.000 a need. And I think I like what Jay Adams saw in picking up the pastoral counseling

01:16:04.080 class. I really do think we should be teaching our pastors, our male pastors,

01:16:11.860 biblical counseling. We're living in this crazy psychotherapeutic age. It is important for some,

01:16:21.800 some men to understand what the world is out there teaching. But that is not for all men. 0.63

01:16:30.260 And what is more important is that we're teaching our pastors confidence in the word of God and to

01:16:36.800 remind them that this is the part of the job. It's a huge part of the job. Shepherding people

01:16:42.440 is a huge, huge part of the job. And so I always think about kind of pulling everything in. We

01:16:49.260 talk about it a lot with guild we talk a lot about with um what like the guild kind of being

01:16:54.900 our answer to seminary how are we going to train up men because we think that it's really important

01:17:00.180 and so i do think there's lots that can be done there biblical counseling within seminary but i

01:17:06.180 just think we have to be very careful not to make it its own separate industry its own separate

01:17:14.300 thing. It is intricately involved and woven into the fabric of a local body. And so is the pastor

01:17:22.640 and we have to stop this thing where we export all of our men and we train them up to go out there

01:17:29.300 somewhere, but that we are building up our men within local community and knowing that the things

01:17:37.160 that I'm learning now are going to be for the people that I'm sitting next to in the pew,

01:17:42.460 real people. And part of my training is not just going to be knowledge. It's going to be wisdom

01:17:49.800 in applying that knowledge. That is one of the biggest gaps that we talk about all the time.

01:17:54.840 So I do think there is a lane for biblical counseling to be taught within our seminaries,

01:18:01.580 but I do think we need to be very careful with how far we push that. What do you think about

01:18:08.680 about that yeah i think i i think what you're kind of seeing at least from us and maybe some

01:18:14.180 other people are catching on to this but but when you have the culture of the institutions being

01:18:21.040 rotted through i think there's a low degree of trust in those institutions and there should be

01:18:27.020 a low degree of trust in those institutions yes um the more that i i went to southern seminary

01:18:32.960 because at the time it was sort of like the most conservative option.

01:18:38.240 And it was good in a lot of ways.

01:18:41.080 But since being there, seeing how, you know,

01:18:44.480 Matthew Hall and wokeness was allowed to be tolerated.

01:18:47.840 Russell Moore was there.

01:18:49.660 He was actually teaching about patriarchy at the time.

01:18:53.580 Now he's like, Beth Moore is great.

01:18:55.120 And he works for a lady reverend at Christianity today and all that stuff.

01:18:59.960 I look at that and I say, would I send my sons to that institution?

01:19:04.640 1000% no, I would not give them my money.

01:19:08.260 If you're an SBC church, you really need to think through why you're even funding this

01:19:11.840 in the first place.

01:19:13.720 So I think there's like different people in those organizations will address those problems.

01:19:19.040 But for me, I'm looking at it and I'm saying the immediate is we need to train pastors,

01:19:25.080 deacons, elders, and even churchmen locally.

01:19:27.540 So we started a guild program.

01:19:31.960 It's sort of like that.

01:19:33.160 We have the recipes like we have the curriculums, you know, like as a as a pastoral group.

01:19:40.120 Just think about this because we've taught through it.

01:19:41.880 We've researched a lot of it, even for the school where I think I've read through at least six different versions of church history from different authors.

01:19:50.280 You know, for example, we settled on kind of Needham being the best one.

01:19:54.820 And so it's like, OK, we figured that out.

01:19:56.940 And so we're going to do a guild program. There's going to be the educational side. You know, we're going to address that. But character formation. We're going to be able to, and seminaries try this, God bless them. They try to do this.

01:20:14.040 So I was required my first year to take like a shepherd class and we would meet like, I

01:20:21.320 don't know, once a quarter, maybe with like an aloof seminary professor who like, didn't

01:20:28.680 really know you and didn't intend to know you, but was like, come into my home, let's

01:20:32.360 have dinner.

01:20:34.300 It was still like, you don't know this person and they don't know you.

01:20:38.280 um i remember in one of those shepherding cohorts or whatever they called them

01:20:42.380 one student said he was kind of running his mouth about something about how much he hated dealing

01:20:47.780 with people but loved preaching and the shepherding guy was like well i mean why are you here if you

01:20:53.920 like hate shepherding people and he was like oh like the lord's called me to preach he didn't call

01:20:59.700 me to like pastor people and the guy was like oh interesting okay and then like left it there yeah

01:21:05.080 and and now i look back on that and i think well we would have kicked that guy out of go home the

01:21:10.060 guild program um he that like that would be a serious red flag and we would address it right

01:21:14.840 there on the spot you can do that when things are smaller and at a local level um so again i think

01:21:21.800 it's just the guild program so we're just so people get a view for this like we're looking

01:21:26.480 out at the congregation we're asking uh who first of all who is qualified um according to the

01:21:32.660 scriptural standards. So we're actually looking at the family. Yep. And we're saying, how's his

01:21:36.960 wife? How are his kids? What's the order of the home? Is he leading in godly daily piety? Is he

01:21:42.360 leading in family worship? Are his children kept in order, meaning he knows how to father well and

01:21:48.760 create discipline structures and healthy routines in the family life? Again, that would apply to

01:21:53.540 the questions about the wife. It really means that in a congregation of, you know, 500 people,

01:22:00.380 you have like one or maybe two qualified men in any given time period where

01:22:06.860 you're looking out and, and sometimes none.

01:22:10.260 It requires you to be much more thoughtful about that process.

01:22:17.300 Once a guy goes through that whole, there's a questionnaire.

01:22:20.460 We sit down with them. We have pastoral meetings. We talk to the wife,

01:22:23.880 we go through all this.

01:22:24.660 And we usually have seen this person also in daily life context of the church

01:22:29.240 for at least a year before we'd even invite somebody to enter the process um and then the

01:22:36.220 process is it depends on the guy but it it's one to two years but this is what i love let's just

01:22:42.380 take the pastoral where you are meeting with pastor sen pastor garrett regularly they're doing

01:22:49.040 regular check-ins um you've got reading that you have to do um but we can also pace that for like

01:22:56.120 a man with a family. The running joke at seminary was that, you know, buckle up for the next four

01:23:02.400 years. You're not going to see your family, just rent an apartment at the library. And I think,

01:23:07.240 well, that's wickedly sinful actually to even encourage that. So it's a slower process for us

01:23:13.120 oftentimes. But then we can take that guy and we can walk with him through biblical counseling.

01:23:19.260 We can have him sit in on member meetings and we can bounce back and forth. Like,

01:23:23.420 what would you do in this issue, uh, with this couple? What, what would you, uh, how would you

01:23:27.820 counsel them? And then they get some hacks eventually doing, uh, counseling of their own,

01:23:33.240 uh, but then preaching, um, you know, we, we've, we've, believe it or not, we, we have guys who

01:23:39.020 are experienced at preaching, have been to seminary, many of us taking preaching courses,

01:23:42.780 but also know the needs of our people in our time and place. Yeah. And so a guy will present his

01:23:49.340 first second third sermon whatever to the elders uh he delivers that and we give feedback and you

01:23:54.580 can kind of see like it really speeds up this process of he they get a lot better a lot quicker

01:24:00.660 yeah um because we're like hey there you know remember like the sermon is shepherding right

01:24:07.260 it's not a theological discourse it's not a lecture series it's an authoritative proclamation

01:24:13.120 of the gospel with application through the holy spirit to the actual people that god put in front

01:24:18.500 of you yeah and i think also by the way i think their preaching gets a lot better because they're

01:24:23.300 doing all the pastoral work like you know what the issues of the church and congregation are

01:24:28.100 because you see them on a daily weekly basis so i think for my money i think that is more of the

01:24:34.640 model yeah for the future uh we had this at the conference where a lot of young men came to us

01:24:40.040 and they were like i'm 18 years old just got married i want to go to seminary and be a pastor

01:24:45.820 and we're sort of like, incorrect, we would want you to work a vocation, provide well for your

01:24:54.320 family, start raising children, lead in family worship, be a man of repute in the community,

01:25:00.780 be established in those things, have a good sort of gravitas among the other qualified

01:25:06.520 pastors and the good men of the church. They should have a high level of respect for you.

01:25:12.080 um i just don't think you can do that in seminaries louisville was a great city i know

01:25:18.040 the people at the seminary were doing some of them were doing the best job that they possibly could

01:25:22.080 but like you go to seminary and there's like 10 seminary seminary churches that you can choose

01:25:29.040 from there's nowhere to serve because there's so many people there um and you just kind of float

01:25:35.920 and nobody knows you your local congregation doesn't know you i would much rather that

01:25:40.760 somebody here we train them locally um we continue to do hospitality with their families you get to

01:25:46.340 know them your wife gets to know her wife you spot issues you correct issues uh whatever but i think

01:25:51.760 that's the way forward yeah i think in a healthier christian society like i'm not against institutions

01:25:57.600 you know we hope to build our own but uh again you don't hold the spc guys like the conservatives do

01:26:06.500 not hold southern seminary no like and all the other ones in the spc like if you talk to the

01:26:12.260 people on the inside like they spend an egregious amount of money on youth programs and women

01:26:17.980 doing stuff uh at the end of my time it was very much um it was a debate like because we had you

01:26:27.140 know there was you were seeing this more in reform seminaries with like females teaching 0.89

01:26:30.580 and and this is just the idiocy of the whole thing they would say like well yeah i mean she 0.99

01:26:35.540 can't be a pastor but she can train pastors again like you got to be kidding this is insanity 0.96

01:26:43.760 so i think that's part of the solution i also think that i don't know i mean in the acbc world

01:26:52.280 i'd love to see guys you know we'd love to connect with you if you're one of these guys who also sees

01:26:56.540 these problems yeah uh maybe other things could be built that would be really helpful or even just

01:27:01.320 conversations with you or us or the pastoral team. There's a lot of good guys out there who

01:27:05.800 see these problems. Absolutely. But I think what happens is they get stuck in this track.

01:27:11.800 They're like, well, I went to seminary. I got my certification. I'm part of ACBC.

01:27:17.020 There's kind of one way to go up the chain in that organization, which is certainly not being

01:27:22.200 a prophet on the wall confronting the problems. But things need to change and stuff needs to be

01:27:27.900 done about it yeah one thing that we've talked about you and i specifically many times when it

01:27:34.120 comes to this whole mentality of of look here's the deal it is the way that it is however i'm

01:27:41.480 different i hold these convictions so what i'm going to do is go up through the organization

01:27:48.260 i'm going to get the certifications i'm going to position myself there and i'm going to wait

01:27:53.020 for the old guard to die well here's the problem men if you will not be courageous now you will

01:28:03.240 not be a good ruler no you simply will not you need to be courageous now you need to be practicing

01:28:10.740 and and building that muscle now or you will be a horrible leader you will repeat all the mistakes

01:28:16.980 of your fathers because you did not do the hard thing when it was when it when it was really

01:28:23.220 hardest to do yeah i mean you just think about this again we have talked about this a lot because

01:28:29.880 we've talked to a lot of guys who are kind of like team ogden but positioned somewhere in one

01:28:36.880 of these like problematic it could be a denomination it could be an institution

01:28:40.700 and their calculus is i'll lay low i'll hide my beliefs i'll put my flags in the closet i won't

01:28:49.180 fly them out front and one day i'll have power and then i will start to be courageous and experience

01:28:56.680 is at least a good teacher in this way i've never seen it happen nope because if you again if you

01:29:03.440 won't rock the boat today if you won't stand on your principle today you who are given something

01:29:08.160 small, why would God give you more? First of all, absolutely. If you can't be courageous in the

01:29:12.560 small things, why would you be courageous in the big things? And a lot of it, believe it or not,

01:29:17.600 I hear Kevin, I hear this all the time. Cause I talked to a lot of these guys. You say, Hey,

01:29:21.600 really love what you do. I'll say something like, Hey, we'd love to, you know, you wrote a book,

01:29:25.380 whatever. I'd love to get you on the heart or the hard man podcast, Kings hall podcast. And, uh,

01:29:30.920 you know, that'd be really cool. We could talk about it. Well, you know, the thing is, uh, if I,

01:29:36.780 it's the gif of homer simpson slowly sinking into the bush yeah yeah and they're like if i associate

01:29:44.060 with you publicly it will cause problems in my institution or denomination i'm like okay well

01:29:48.600 people do have to run that calculus sure that's important however then you get deeper into the

01:29:54.000 conversation well you know we're in an area where you know my wife's family's there and so like

01:30:00.380 they know if they were courageous and said what they believed they would be fired from whatever

01:30:04.960 position they have and it would mean likely that they have to move or find a different job

01:30:10.160 ah so you have a fear of man problem that's exactly what it is and it's like it's not

01:30:16.380 actually because you're making a strategic calculus to be courageous one day it is because

01:30:22.260 you are trying not to get fired canceled potentially doxed whatever it is you know

01:30:27.740 what i mean yeah like that's what they're actually afraid of the problem is you like this is the

01:30:35.320 edmund burke quote right all that it takes for the proliferation of evil is for a few good men to do

01:30:40.360 nothing somewhere somehow you've got to read the book of acts you've got to look at the early

01:30:47.120 apostles they were all killed for what they believed they were persecuted they were lied

01:30:53.120 about propaganda machines were waged against them uh they were just like mob violence you name it

01:31:01.620 like paul's description of it in corinthians is insane i was beaten i was shipwrecked i was nearly

01:31:07.320 stoned to death like people hate you and paul says that like repeatedly throughout his letters

01:31:14.880 like you're gonna have affliction like we told you acts 14 22 like through many trials and

01:31:21.440 persecutions you're going to enter the kingdom like especially in our day and age this is not

01:31:26.740 neutral world it's not positive world the world is not pro-christianity and for my money i say 0.98

01:31:33.540 praise god what what an opportunity to win glory absolutely but you're not going to do it as a

01:31:38.140 coward if you're the guy on the elder team who's like yeah i know that you know there's a lot of

01:31:43.360 sin around me and people have done some evil things but let's play the long game which 0.99

01:31:50.380 fundamentally means shutting your mouth, being a coward and doing nothing about the evil that you

01:31:56.080 see right before your eyes. And if I could just give like one plug, one plug, this is one of the

01:32:03.420 things I've seen in my life. I think you could say that about all the pastors here. I've been

01:32:08.420 politely asked to not return to churches for talking about the things that we've talked about

01:32:13.340 on this podcast in this very podcast so what it's not as scary as you think like there are other men

01:32:21.080 who are willing to fight and be valiant and courageous find them and go build a tribe it it

01:32:26.780 not only is it not the end of the world the thing that you're holding on to and your your denomination

01:32:32.520 that hates you you're literally holding the bars to your own prison gate shut you're like no i don't

01:32:38.860 want to escape because i have a cot in three squares a day and what i'm trying to tell you

01:32:43.560 is like you could actually be free of all of that like believe it or not you can exist in a church

01:32:48.500 and among a community like ogden and refuge is so great to me kevin because on the rare occasions

01:32:55.480 where i was like you know antifa's protesting i don't know maybe we've been pretty bold

01:33:00.640 i had guys in the congregation who were like are you are you scared right now 0.73

01:33:06.100 don't be a coward. I need you to double down. I need you to triple down. I need you to hold

01:33:11.220 the line. That's our people. The expectation is that you would be courageous. I just want to

01:33:18.440 encourage guys, you can actually escape this longhouse matrix. It will take courage. There

01:33:23.360 will be an initial cost of doing that, especially because it means change, but there's a wide world

01:33:29.700 out there. There's open seas to sail. You can do that. And make no mistake, we didn't just stumble

01:33:35.620 into this. We didn't just get lucky. No, we built this. We built this. And it was through faithfulness

01:33:42.280 to the Lord and his word. And it's that simple. And through it, we earn the respect of other

01:33:46.800 really good men and the respect of really wonderful women. And these people now have

01:33:52.400 our back relentlessly. And it is so encouraging to have that kind of community. It is a family.

01:33:59.740 It's a deeply familial experience to be here at the church and have brothers and sisters in Christ, to have older men, younger men, and know that we are all rowing, we are all pushing in the same direction.

01:34:15.660 And there's not this like crazy politics within the church that I hear about near constantly.

01:34:22.440 And it just seems exhausting to live in that world.

01:34:25.620 Yeah, I think one of the chief temptations for reformed pastors and reformed men in general is the craving for respectability.

01:34:39.180 They just want to be respected by their own institutions.

01:34:44.120 It seems like a death to them.

01:34:46.720 Like, oh man, I'm in the PCA.

01:34:48.960 If the PCA kicked me out, I would lose my identity.

01:34:52.900 Yeah.

01:34:53.080 Like, what would I even be if I didn't have the PCA?

01:34:57.420 It's funny now because we're on the other side of those things.

01:34:59.880 I'm like, I literally don't care.

01:35:02.320 Who cares?

01:35:04.120 Like, why do you care so much about the opinions of people who hate you and your way of life and the God of the Bible?

01:35:12.400 Like, yeah, again, you don't have to be beholden to these longhouse school marms and you could actually be free of it.

01:35:20.620 But it does take courage.

01:35:21.660 my hope kevin and we can kind of close down with this my hope is that we it'd be cool to network

01:35:28.060 with more people definitely who see things this way um it'd be cool to see and encourage we would

01:35:34.040 love to be an encouragement to other pastors who are trying to build these things locally

01:35:38.100 yeah um if you so reach out if you have comments if you have questions certainly if you're on

01:35:44.140 patreon it's really easy you can comment you can message us on there love to respond to those also

01:35:49.700 through the podcast feeds um you can send us a it actually shows up in email but it's like a text

01:35:55.640 message where people can comment or ask questions would encourage you to do that yeah um and i know

01:36:01.420 i have it on his good authority that kevin eichel griffin will spend every waking hour thinking

01:36:07.800 about your questions that's not true but not at all uh he will i do care we do care and we want

01:36:13.620 to help yeah uh i think it's a cool thing like we there's an opportunity for real reformation in

01:36:19.440 the church and this is sort of the white pill is that the worst things get the more people realize

01:36:25.460 like what do i have to lose actually because how many guys have been churchmen too have been

01:36:32.100 kicked out of churches and they're like i mean it stung in the beginning yeah but now you're like

01:36:38.400 well the one dude in texas i forget his name he got kicked out of his church because he said i

01:36:44.120 don't think the church should be like aiding and abetting illegal immigrant relocation to america

01:36:49.680 no yeah and they were like that's racist okay and after a while though you're like okay

01:36:56.600 all right i don't really care so final thoughts kevin i'm sure you feel the same way about

01:37:03.920 seeing reformation in the broader church on these issues yeah i i just think the time we're living

01:37:09.300 in, it's easy to black pill. And I just, I'm just constantly finding myself in exactly the opposite

01:37:15.160 boat of just white pilling so hard where I'm just excited about, I think about some of our kids and

01:37:23.380 like even Gen Z and some of the just shift in, in ways of thinking that are happening in the church. 0.76

01:37:30.300 And I've been so encouraged to see this new round of young men coming up who are taking their life

01:37:36.620 seriously and they and they see their the need to step into leadership in their homes and do a

01:37:43.260 better job there the the time could not be more ripe uh to win great glory and and for the lord

01:37:51.360 um and and rebuilding the a church that is just in absolute ashes right now yeah um but again

01:37:59.500 stop waiting around, like just get to work, get after it and, and enjoy it. Like learn to enjoy

01:38:07.540 the fight. Like men just need to recover that so badly. And I see, and the encouraging thing is I

01:38:13.700 see guys doing it. They're getting fired up about it. I know our guys are definitely fired up about

01:38:18.840 it. And, and there's so many men in the church who have come from a very different place. And

01:38:23.760 now they're like, let's go. Well, I love the, it's like the chesty puller, like the greatest

01:38:28.700 marine in history and his unit is like completely surrounded by the enemy and he's like boys we got

01:38:34.780 him right where we want him you can literally shoot in any direction yeah like we can't miss

01:38:39.940 so many targets yeah that's awesome well kevin i appreciate you uh joining me for this episode

01:38:47.560 of the king's hall podcast it's been phenomenal it's been a pleasure to be here the best kevin

01:38:52.360 michael that's been in the studio today oh wow thank you kevin michael love will be in the next

01:38:58.040 episode and then i'll tell him the same thing you know you gotta you gotta work a crowd uh is what

01:39:03.400 you gotta do we we do appreciate the listeners uh we're gonna have patreon after hours so encourage

01:39:09.040 people to check that out uh kevin we vibe i don't know you're not are you have you been on an after

01:39:14.520 hours i have never been on an after hours it's a trip oh we play music really we vibe hard we go

01:39:22.660 more into detail on the issues of the day is there beer there can be well here's the deal

01:39:31.440 we used in the early days we would always do like a toast yeah and then brian went on a cut

01:39:36.100 oh and so after our like we need listener feedback but honestly cut brian is like the no fun zone

01:39:43.700 it's less fun it's less fun like the most fun you'll have is like a ghost energy

01:39:48.680 Yeah

01:39:49.220 But that's not the same

01:39:50.580 It isn't

01:39:51.920 It's not the pub feel

01:39:53.440 Yeah

01:39:54.280 That's true

01:39:55.000 So we gotta

01:39:55.440 You're gonna help us bring that back

01:39:57.080 Okay

01:39:57.280 Glad to do it

01:39:58.840 Glad to do it

01:39:59.500 I'm the man for the job

01:40:00.600 You are

01:40:01.080 I believe in you

01:40:01.860 And we believe in the listener

01:40:03.380 Thank you guys so much for supporting this show

01:40:05.320 And we will catch you in the next episode

01:40:18.680 We'll be right back.

01:40:48.680 If you'd like to support the show and get some extra content.

The King's Hall - August 14, 2026

The Feminization of the Biblical Counseling World (And How to Fix It)

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