The Dialog

An older woman at our church once told me we didn't have anything for elderly singles. I said, "Yeah, you're right." She said, "Well, y'all need to do something about that." I told her I was so glad she was here, because that meant she wanted to start the ministry. She didn't want to. She just thought we should have it.

When you say what the church should do, you're usually revealing what you should be doing at church.

Jesus made the vision of the church clear. Then He didn't tell us how to do it. My co-host Nick Surface and I pick up where Episode 40 left off: what the church is for, how to tell a principle from a method, and the one choice every follower of Jesus has to make about church.

What is the church for?
Scripture and history point to four key roles. Gather: ἐκκλησία (ekklēsia) means gathering (Hebrews 10:25). Worship: the tabernacle, מִשְׁכָּן (mishkan) in Hebrew, was the dwelling place of God's presence. Equip: like the synagogue, the church is where people are taught to live (Ephesians 4:11-12). Sacrifice: like the temple, it's where you give your time, talent and treasure the most (Romans 12:1). If a church does those four things, the rest is methodology.

What's the difference between a method and a principle?
My dad says it this way: methods are many, principles are few, methods always change, but principles never do. It's okay to reject a method. Rejecting the principle with it is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Can you follow Jesus without a church?
Not according to Scripture. It's not biblical Christianity for it to be just you and your family and call that a church.

What if you can't find a church you like?
Shop around and pick one. If you can't find one, start one. There's no third option where you just critique the church.

Scriptures
Philippians 2:12 · Romans 12:1 · Acts 15:36-39 · Mark 7:1-13 · Deuteronomy 31:12 · Hebrews 10:25 · John 4:23-24 · Luke 4:16-21 · Deuteronomy 11:19 · Ephesians 4:11-12

Words and people
ἐκκλησία (ekklēsia): a gathering
מִשְׁכָּן (mishkan): the dwelling place of God's presence
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves: God chooses our friends for us
Josh's dad: methods are many, principles are few

Chapters
0:00 Cold open and show intro
0:53 Jesus gave the vision, not the how
2:33 Love your enemy: whose interpretation is right?
3:33 Are house churches more biblical?
5:52 Three ways to govern a church
7:17 Why God left the method to us
8:19 ORU chapel and the ice cream shop
10:21 Every person is one of one
12:57 What are the must-haves of a church?
13:26 Can you follow Jesus without a church?
14:38 Methods are many, principles are few
15:17 There's no singles ministry in the Bible
16:18 Role 1: gather
17:27 Role 2: worship
18:36 Tabernacle, temple and synagogue
21:41 Role 3: equip
23:04 Role 4: sacrifice
24:30 What counts as sacrifice?
25:55 "Y'all need to do something about that"
27:20 Find a church or start one
28:14 Principles vs. methods

Previous: 1.40 / How should a church be run?
Next: 1.42 / Is manifesting biblical?

New episodes most weeks.
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What is The Dialog?

Ancient philosophers used the dialog to find answers to life’s greatest questions. The Dialog is a search for truth in modern life through the lens of ancient philosophy, history, and theology. This podcast will challenge your assumptions, change your thinking and show you how to master modern living.

No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world. I'm interested in one thing, Neil the future, and believe me, I know the only way. To get there is together. What we've got here is failure, milk cake. You may think you know what tribu, but believe me, you don't what the truth. You can't handle the truth. For centuries, philosophers have used the dialogue to search for truth, because it's through conversation, through the logos that we find it. This is the dialogue where ancient philosophy, history and theology meet modern life. Together, we'll wrestle with big questions and give our answers to the way we live. Let's start the conversation. But the thing that's interesting, that's a unique It's like I see this pattern. This is like the pattern I see the principle of church. Jesus establishes the vision of the church. The vision of the church is clear, right right, Jesus establishes the vision of this environment that's about life and spiritual transformation and discipleship and fulfilling the Great Commission and fulfilling the Great Commandment. Right, all that, and then he doesn't tell us how to do it right. He says, here's what he's here's what you guys are going to go do. Here's what I've here's what I want you to do. I mean with the disciples, he could have sat down with them and said, look, vision strategies, vision structure, strategy, here's what the here's the why behind the church. Here's all you guys are going to have different roles, and then here's what you're gonna do. Right. I think there's a lot of reasons why God didn't do it that way. He did do it that way in the Old Testament. Then the New Testament church comes along and God's like, hey, here's and this is kind of how principles are in our life. Figure out how to apply what I'm saying. Mm hmm. You know, like you read about love, you read about love and the will like something like love. Right, you have to figure out in your own life how to how to be how to apply love? Well, you work out your your salvation with fear and trembling. Well, you have to work whoa whoa whoa whoa? Yeah, come on, man, Like you know you make yourself a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. Wait a minute, what is it. Yeah, Well, and then saying what does it mean for me to be a living sacrifice? Like I don't even know. I got to figure that out. I think the fact that you're breathing means you check that box. The holy part is where I think we really have a lot of working out to do. And what does it mean for me to practice like sacrificial love with my wife or sacrificial love with my kids, or what does it mean for me to turn the other cheek and love my enemy? That's that's a heart. No one has the right answer, right, so everyone has an answer because like some people will say, and I can't remember if we talked about this on the podcast, or you and me just had this conversation, or maybe I had this conversation with somebody else. Like there's a lot of people who say, you know, uh, it's the Bible says love your love your enemies, but we got to kill all the Muslims, right, And then they can come up with really great biblical proof for why we should we should as Christians want to eradicate our enemies from the earth. Whoever our enemies happen to be right right, whoever we deem our enemies. Right, is that right or wrong? I don't know. I can say, person, that's not my interpretation, that's not how I see it. And this is where people get off or people get off as they say, my interpretation is the right one. Right. So back to the house church thing. People go, oh, well, the only kind of good, God, God fearing gospel church is like a house church because there's less corruption, there's more accountability. That's not necessarily true. You're dealing with a different level of issues, but you're gonna have Wherever people go, there's gonna be issues. There's gonna be hypocrisy, there's gonna be misunderstandings, there's gonna be disagreements. I mean, in the Bible, it talks about Paul and Barnabas were like best buddies, did a lot of life together, traveled the world together, preaching the gospel. We don't know what happened. The Bible says that they had a sharp disagreement and they never were together again. Yeah, and both of them went and built the church. They both went and built the church separately from each other, even though there were partners for a long time. Right, So I think that's actually a cool thing. Like, it's not a bug, it's a feature in that. This is where I feel like the Catholic Church doesn't have it right in that you know, this word Catholic means universal, and they think that they have they think that all churches should be Catholic in their expression of what Catholic means. Right. So we've interpreted a lot of Catholic dogmas are not built on scripture. They're built on people's interpretation. Right. So in Catholicism, uh, you're you're saved by following the by by grace, but also by all your obedience to the sacraments, which is kind of kind of what the Pharisees said. It was like they went to Jesus and in uh in the book of Mark and Mark seven I think, and they said, you know, your disciples, they violated the transgress the trends that they violated the traditions of the elders by Washington hands before they ate. And why why were the traditions of the elders so important? Because to the Pharisees, obeying the traditions was just important, just as important as obeying the laws. Right. So that's where we get sideways, where we get sideways is turning our our traditions into truth. So hence hints where we're at. Like in the current modern church world, there's principles to church. So the principles to church, you have to have a governance model, and there's three that the Bible based in. First, none of these, none of these are what the Bible says this is the way to governing church. But it's pretty clear in scripture that you can have and you can have an episcopal model, which is a run by an individual leader or hierarchy of individual leaders. You can have a congregational model, which is run by the whole congregation everybody votes, or you can have kind of a mix of that, which is the elder model. Yeah, you know what's so wonderful about that? Josh. I'm sorry interrupt you, man, but it's kind of dawning on me as we're talking about this, because on the one hand, I can kind of like, I think you and I can get along well because I think we're both prone to a little bit of cynicism and darkness. Like in our friendship, Like we've both experienced that. Like I remember our first conversation. I realized I was like, oh, this guy has seen some dark like, has thought some dark thoughts, and I was like, I've been there too, Like that was one of our first conversations dark thoughts. Man, Well, yeah, because I feel what I've said to you is like you're able to manage a high level of cynicism without letting it overcome you. Where's a lot of people if they had your level of cynicism, every day would be like the worst day of their lives. And you're still like, ah, it's all good, man, I'll be there tomorrow. And you're like, dude, you think this is gonna fail, Like, yeah, but I'll be there anyways. That's a complete side note to you. But as I'm sitting here listening to you, I'm like, man, the thing that I would like to get as a human is that it's like God wants you to do X, Y and Z and then you're going to get this outcome. But instead everything's good. Yeah. Yeah, But isn't it such a picture of God's grace that he goes like, hey, look here's what it's for. How you work your way to that is completely up to you. Like that's a god who's gonna have diversity, And I'm not like a you know, diversity has become, especially in conservative circles, like a bad word, because it's like it's become a way to almost reverse racism. I don't mean it like that. I mean it like when you look at what God creates. God loves diversity. There's no way you can say that he spoke a word. And we have like fifty thousand different types of plants. You know, humans don't all look the same. Like God love. God is vast in his expression. So wouldn't it not make sense that the church would be the same way, Because what is the actual point of the church, Like you said, go and make disciples, it's that we would be in relationship together, that there would be a gathering of believers that can work out salvation with fear and trumpling, that can point out you know, blind spots that can be accountability. That we could walk through life together and be the family of God and reflect Him as the body. Now how you do that? Oh? Man, that's where like, that's where there's so much grace. And I think that that's actually kind of an amazing thing. Man, it's just dawned on mean while we're doing this. I mean, I remember I remember, and you know, I'm so grateful for my dad. My dad helped me, Uh learn this like early and my I like, there's a lot of the school I went to. I went to RU. I went to or Robert's University. Shout out RU, I'm the worst alumni in history. My mom actually might I'd never seen my diploma right and my mind, Yeah, my mom found it. They were moving, they were moving houses and my mom found it brought over to my house. So I graduated in uh two thousand and nine or whatever, and uh, shout out o RU. I'm a put on the wall. Bro, Come on, it's somewhere. It's somewhere, sitting here on the table. I haven't even looked. It's it's like underneath your dog's bed. It's like. But I remember going to RU, and I didn't like. I didn't like their expression of Christianity. I just didn't like it. There's a lot I didn't like it, and I can get into that, but it's this isn't really about that. So a lot of I remember calling my dad and going, this sucks, man. I don't like they make us go to Chapel Chapel sucks, like this is their worship. Isn't this that, this isn't that blah blah blah, And my dad goes. My dad goes, okay, Well, imagine something. I go, okay, he goes, Imagine that we go to an ice cream store. They go buy ice cream, and you like strawberry, I like vanilla. But then you talk to the you talk to the guy that runs the ice cream story. You're like, look, I don't like strawberry or I don't like vanilla. Next time I come in here better, I'll be strawberry. Right. He's like, no, Like, you can get. The thing about an ice cream store like Baskin Robbins or whatever. Right, the thing about an ice cream shop is you can get whatever flavor you want. And just because you have a flavor doesn't mean that this other person flavor is like a bad flavor. Right. I'm like, that's that's life. Like, that's one of the coolest things, Like varieties, the spice of life is the same. What makes America great is that we're a mixing, a melting pot of cultures. We're not like monolithic in our culture, right. And I think I think that's God's intention with the church, is he he knows the unique. And this is back to even where we started with like unique giftings and the glory of God and stuff. He knows the unique gifting that's in each individual person. Right. And then I love what C. S. Lewis said about friendship. What he said about friendship was that we think that we pick our friends, but God actually divinely ordains our friends for us because he knows what we need. Right. Same thing for marriage, man, geez. So how much of a difference would it make in your life if you saw your friends as like a divine gift? Right? Like if I saw the people God brought me in my relationship, my spouse, my my siblings, my my parents, who ever, as some kind of gift from God, how would that change my relationship to them? Right? And so every individual this is like the cool thing to me. Every individual is singular. We're one of one and we all have this unique expression that is a part of who God is in the earth. Right. And then we get together and we form something that's a gathering of people that agree on the principles, on the ideas, on the visions of what the church can be. Right, and then we come together and we mix all of our unique DNA in there and that forms like this really super unique expression of a church. And the church, to me, what the church can be is based on the individual potential of each person in the church coming together and forming something better together than they could separate. But you have to actually make room for them, right. Like the problem that I have with with churches like the Catholic Church is that they've built out so much. So there was a lot of room early on for Tom a Quintas or Augustine or these these theologians to like build the doctrines of the church. Right, Well, now there's no more room because that guy was already here, right right, So, but there's always like a new thing, Like how come those guys get to establish how it is? How come those guys that were lived a thousand years ago get to say how this should function? You know? And how come how come the and this is like my whole thought, right, how come the model of the church is just what it is and that's just how it has to be? Right? How Come? How come how come the mega how come mega churches have to be a thing? But also how come house churches have to be a thing. How Come that's got to be that way, right, that's just proof that it's my flavor. Right. It's like, well, let let me ask you this then, because I hear what you're saying about about like the ice cream store analogy is a great one. And I know I interrupted you. Mid flow, so forget I think this is I think this is the right question to kind of tie a bow on this. So what are the must because like, because like there's clearly it's not like Jesus just said, because with this could be like the Hey, you know what, Josh, I listened to your podcast and I decided to start church with my wife, and like me and my family go to that church and like we meet every Sunday at my house as like and that's our church, you know what I mean. Like, there's clearly some must haves, So what are what are the essentials that it's like, you know, we've seen that there's a lot of grace in the actual methodology of working out the gathering of believers, But what are the essentials? Yeah, and well, this is where I think I diverged a lot from deconstructionists like viewpoints, right, Okay, regardless of a church leadership style or what happens in a church. One thing in Scripture is really clear is that we have to be a part of a church, right. We have to be a part of the universal Church. We can't follow Jesus on our own and think that that's truly biblical Christianity. It's not biblical Christianity for it to just be you and your family and call that a church. Right. He established a church for the reason for a reason, and despite like to me, despite a structural and leadership differences, all church leaders and mature Christians know this to be true. Right, So the main thing is figuring out my flavor and then finding a church that aligns with my flavor. But what can't be missing is the fact that we're all gonna eat ice cream. If you come to the ice cream shop and you want putting, we don't. That's not what this is, right, And that's kind of what can tend to happen with people is they reject they reject the principles because they reject methodology. So what we have to see, like my dad says it this way, Methods are many, principles are few. Methods always change, but principles never do. So it's okay to reject methodology, but you can't reject principles. It's like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. So I have to be able to clearly, distinctively see And this has been my own personal journey. It's why I go to the level of depth I go to like historically and stuff, because I want to see what the actual principles are. I want to see what the patterns are throughout scripture so that I can know where to delineate a preference from a principle or a method from a principle, correct, right, So, and most people don't do that. They just get hung up on their their their methodologies and their preferences. Like like, for instance, you said this before we started. There's people that come and they go, you know, we got to do a better job for singles in this church. Mm hmm, we got we got Why No, there's no there's no singles ministry in the Bible. That might be a unique heart thing that you have, but the church itself doesn't have a mandate from God to have a singles ministry. The church that also doesn't have a mandate from God to have a kids ministry or a youth ministry or any other version of ministry that we've created, like we we're the ones that have created all these breakdowns of Okay, here's the marriage ministry, here's the men's ministry, here's the here's the youth ministry. That's not in the Bible anywhere. That's just I'm not saying it's wrong. I'm just saying those are like ideas that people had that now have become the methodologies. But the scary thing is when we turn our methodologies into principles, because eventually methodologies don't work. So then what is a church for? Right to your question? Right, Yeah, I know there's a lot of implications for what I just said, but there what is a church for? Okay? So what you see throughout history and throughout scripture is there's really four key roles that God gives to the church. And some of this is clear and some of this is kind of implicit, right based on the organizations, because the church isn't the only organization mentioned in scripture. Okay. The first thing is this ecclasea. This word ecclasea, okay, means gathering. So the first key role of the church, let's say, is to gather. It's a place for everybody who's a part of God's family to gather together. Right, and this is probably bigger than your family. Like in the Book of Deuteronomy, okay, and the Book of Deuteronomy, the Bible says, assemble all the people, men, women, children, foreigners living in your town, so that they may hear the Book of Instruction and learn to fear the Lord. Right In the New Testament, Hebrews ten says, don't let don't let us neglect meeting together like some people do, but encourage each other. So there's this idea in scripture that the church needs to represent that the church is a gathering place for all people who follow Jesus to come together. Right. Then the second thing is to worship right right, Where do we get this idea from. There's a there was a building in the or a gathering or an organization whatever we're gonna call it, called the tabernacle in the ancient world. In the Old Testament, the tabernacle means tabernacle in Hebrew means mishkhan. Mishcon means the dwelling place for the presence of God. So there's a place, there's actually a place on the earth that represents the dwelling place of God's presence in a spiritual sense. I know that can be like heart for us. But really, the building of the church and the place where people gather isn't just a place for gathering. It's a place where we worship together. Right, Right, and John four the Bible says we're gonna worship the Father and Spirit in truth. Right. Leviticus ten talks about how God displays the glory of God displays his glory through people who come near to him, right, So a part of drawing near to God is drawing near to the people of God. So that's tabernacle. It's a place for us to worship. That's why we worship every time we gather as a church. Right, then a synagogue, So then there's a synagogue. Synagogues are mentioned throughout scripture in the way a lot of people think is that the synagogue. Well, I'll say it this way. The synagogue, the Tabernacle, and the temple are three separate buildings in scripture. They're not the same thing. So people think that the Tabernacle was the temple, and that the that the temple was also the synagogue. So when the New Testament talks about synagogue that was just the temple. That's not true to this day, there's there's Jewish synagogue. I'm just thinking about how how deep I kind of want to go on that this is what you need to go too deep. But the delineate between synagogue and temple, because the tabernacle was what they set up it like, that's more old Testament. They said that the tabernacle was the tent, that the temple was what Solomon built, what was the synagogue. So the the Jews created what's called the synagogue or the bait kanesse, and that is a place is a community gathering place where people gather to do business, promote the welfare of the Jewish community in the In the ancient world, during Jesus' time, there were synagogues and the temple. So you only had one temple in the ancient was the temple in Jerusalem. You didn't have temples throughout cities, but you had synagogue throughout cities, so synagogues, but synagogues were mostly secular, so they would still like read scripture and stuff, but they would teach more. They would teach more about scripture and how to conduct business. So when when Jesus in his story, at the beginning of his ministry, he goes to the synagogue and he reads from the scroll of Isaiah. They would read scripture, but then they would do a lot of business together, and they would meet and they would talk. Right, So, synagogues were places where Jews were taught to be Jews. This is not just our approach to Judaism as it relates to religious practice. This is how we do money. This is how we do business in this community. The synagogue was where business deals were done and negotiated. After the temple was destroyed, and that's where I was deciding how deep I want to go because the temple doesn't exist anymore. So the Bible, especially the Old Testament, commands Jews to sacrifice and worship to God at the Temple. They can't do that anymore. So it's actually technically okay, technically legally, like according to the law, you can't practice Judaism anymore. It's not possible, right, It's almost like what Jesus said was correct. Yeah, So the prophecy that Jesus gave when he went into Jerusalem, which true. Right. In seventy AD, Emperor Trajan siege Jerusalem and destroy the temple, and through you can go to Jerusalem and see where they threw the foundations of the temple down still and there's mosques that are built on top of the Temple mountain. Now so wild. So rabbis, this is kind of to our conversation. Rabbis created a new tradition where they said, oh, the Temple of God is in your heart. Now, that's where you make sacrifices to God. God never said that, that's just that's just where they made allowances. So when the Temple was destroyed, what the Jews did was they converted their synagogues to places of worship. But there were places of worship and places where people were equipped. Okay, so people look at churches like ours, or churches that teach a lot of practical stuff like churches like Stephen Ferdick's church, like Elevation or who whatever else, and like, you know, the churches just got to all be about worship and God and all that. It's like, no, actually, the church also represents the synagogue, which is the place where people are taught to realize their potent in every area of life. Right, very good. So Deuteronomy eleven says, teach, teach what God is teaching you to your children, talk about them when you're at home, when you're on the road, when you're going to bed, when you're getting up. That's like people go, oh, man, like Jews, you know that, Like Jews have always been hated on the level because Jews have always been successful to go back to greatness. Like people have a real problem with Jews because they're like, oh, they control the world. There's a reason why they control the world. The reason why they control the world, or the reason why there's so much wealth in Jewish people is because they're taught from a young age this is how we do what we do. So that's kind of what the purpose of the church should be, right. So Ephesians so you said you said, first, sorry, first two things to gather and to worship, like to worship. To gather to worship. The third thing is to equip right, Okay, so very good, so Ephesians four. The Bible says God gave gifts to the church the fivefold ministry, apostles, prophets, teachers, evangelists, pastors, right, and their responsibility is to equip God's people to do his work and build up the church right, right, So there's an it's you know, my dad calls it the equipping station. Then the last thing, the fourth thing, is the place to sacrifice. So it's the temple. That's that's what hekal, which is the Hebrew word for temple, means God's palace. And in the ancient world, the temple was where the sacrifice was made. Right, so they would go literally sacrifice animals and all that, well, Paul says in the New Testament. Paul says in Romans twelve, he says, present your bodies as a living sacrifice. H right. And there's truth to this idea that to present my body as a living sacrifice is to kind of live my life in this roughly sacrificial way. But there's also truth to the fact that the church is the place where you give your time, talent, and treasure the most. The church is the place where you live the most sacrificial life. The church is the place that you serve. The church is the place that you give. The churches you the place where you develop people the most, and you speak the most into their life, and you build them up and you disciple them. And you do that because God's commanded you to do it. So to me, if a church is fulfilling those four key roles, whatever the other aspects of the church are, that's just methodology. So if we're creating an environment where God's being worshiped, people are learning how to live, there's sacrifices that are being made, and we're gathering together, we're fulfilling the biblical role of the church. Let me clarify on sacrifice, because obviously we're not sacrificing the animals. Would you count that as tithe as an offering as well as serving in the church or like what else? Would you count the sacrifice one hundred percent? I mean, I think the way we talk about it is time, talent, treasure, temple. Yeah, I have time. My job is to live sacrificially with my time towards God. Right, And I can kind of say, well, you know, I serve in the community and I serve at homeless shelters and stuff. That's not the church right right, as a church you could go do that. You doing that as an individual is not the church going and doing it. This is this is like where we have to understand the principle here, so we gather together, Yeah, we gather together and we go sacrifice together as a family of God and the earth. So this is the place where we serve. It's the place where we give, where we live on mission with our money, where we put God first. All that stuff, right, and so so what we get hung up on, you know, is methodology, and we go, well, churches have to run this way, or churches have to be structured this way, or this is how a church service needs to look. And that's okay, Like it's okay to have that opinion, you know, Like would always tell people about you know, there's two things that I usually tell people a lot. Is Number one if someone comes to me and like, I'm a pastor at our church, and so people come to me and they go, hey, we need to do more for single people, or we need to have a ministry. Like one time, I'll tell a story. One time I had a lady come up to me, and she's an older lady and she goes, you know, we really don't have any thing in this church for elder elderly singles. And I said, yeah, you're right, you know, and she's like, well, y'all need to do something about that. And I said, well, I'm so glad that you're here, because that means you want to start the ministry, right She goes, No, I don't. I don't want to do it. I just I just think we should have it. It's like, that's like kind of what the average person does when they approach church. They're very critical and they say, well, here's what all the church, here's what the church should do, when really the thing the thing to me is if you're saying here's what the church should do, what you're kind of revealing to yourself is what you should be doing at church. It's like saying it's like we come over to your house, Like, dude, wouldn't it be so good to have some chocolate chip cookies right now? Yeah? You're like, yeah, bro, that'd be gad Like, hey, why don't you go make them? You're like, I'm to come to your house and tell you what to make them? Yeah, you know it would be awesome. Man, would be if if if you guys had like hot chocolate when I came over here, it's like, well, we don't. I don't have the ingredients. Nick, like you you on the way here, you could have gotten. It, but say, it would be better I'm gonna watch your TV and you go get it. Bro. Yeah. Yeah, So if you live on mission, you understand, like I've role in actually building the church. Right. So that's the first thing is there's you have a decision to make, okay, and this is really I think it's a little bit bying area of a decision. And that's number one. The first choice is what church are you going to be a part of? So go shop around, go church hop go see every church in the world, every church in America. Figure out which church you're going to go to. If you can't find one, there's only there's only one other option, and that's you got to start a church, right, can't. You can't. There's not a third option of critiquing the church destroying the church. And this is where I'm saying I deviate a lot from like this idea of deconstructionism, because like, we're gonna break We're gonna break the church down, but there's not gonna be anything, you know, It'll just be a break down for the sake of it. It'll just be this spiritual dimension of following Jesus. And that's not that's not biblical, right, You're destroying you're not just destroying the methodologies, which I always feel like should be destroyed, Like we should always move away from methodologies that don't work or aren't going to work, But we can't destroy the principles at the same time. So the second thing is, so the first thing is that you should understand the role that you play in being a part of being a part of the church, and what you bring to the church in terms of your gifts and talents and abilities. And the second thing is, which is kind of what I mentioned a second ago, The second thing is you have to learn in order to do that effectively. You've got to learn how to distinguish the differences between principles and methodologies. And if we can do that, we're not going to get hung up on showing up to a church service and the flavor being vanilla instead of strawberry. Thank you for listening to the dialogue. 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