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You can’t claim to be a Christian if you don't go to church. Likewise, you can't claim to be a member of Christ's Body if you don't read your Bible. Just call yourself a "pagan," have a coke, and smile.

In this episode, Peter, Pastor Nate, and Kyle discuss the political importance of the local church. Specifically, we dive into the topic of membership and what it has to become in Negative World.

The bar for membership has gotten so low it’s like we’re playing Limbo. Anyone and everyone can become a member. All you have to do is say “Jesus” a couple of times and read your Bible once a quarter.

We say “no.”

You wouldn’t sip kerosene or eat wood chips, would you? You wouldn’t willingly put something in your body that is poisonous or harmful, would you? The same goes with the church.

We have to raise the bar of membership. We have to rescue it from its plummet. For the sake of the Body. In the same way that we fence the table, we have to vet our members more rigorously.

For starters, members have to be Christians. They have to believe that the Holy Spirit is a divine person, not just a ghost. They have to believe that babies are sinners and need to be baptized in Christ.

Stuff like that.

Welcome to Season Two of The Parrhesians Podcast!

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It's been 18 months since the Presbytery of the Alleghenies formed an Administrative Commission to "help" our church secure the peace, unity, and purity of the congregation. But instead of help, our congregation experienced conflict, lawfare, and abuse of power at the hands of EPC leadership.

On Sunday, January 26, 2025, the church voted to disaffiliate with the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. The vote passed 106 in favor, 13 opposed, with 89% approval. The conflict is over.

Join Nate, Peter, and Kyle in Part Two of this special edition of The Parrhesian Podcast, as they share how it all ended.

Remember, the truth is bold!

https://theparrhesians.com/

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It's been 18 months since the Presbytery of the Alleghenies formed an Administrative Commission to "help" our church secure the peace, unity, and purity of the congregation. But instead of help, our congregation experienced conflict, lawfare, and abuse of power at the hands of EPC leadership.

On Sunday, January 26, 2025, the church voted to disaffiliate with the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. The vote passed 106 in favor, 13 opposed, with 89% approval. The conflict is over.

Join Nate, Peter, and Kyle in Part One of this special edition of The Parrhesian Podcast, as they share how it's all been going.

Remember, the truth is bold!

https://theparrhesians.com/

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In this special edition of the Parhessian Podcast, Peter, Kyle, and Nate take on the mantle of The Layman as they discuss the recent Presbytery of the Alleghenies meeting held on Saturday, September 21, 2024. Sadly, there are many concerning issues to report.

The POA not only continued its abuse of power, but there is evidence of evangelical dark money flowing into the denomination, sympathy for open borders, erosion of ordinational standards, continued disregard for constitutional fidelity, and more.

In fact, the situation has become so bad, that it appears as though the EPC is now functioning more like a tyranny than a denomination. But in the face of tyranny, we remember the courageous words of John Knox who said, “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.” And so, we obey God.

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Baptizing babies in the church always leads to the necessity for confirmation. Confirmation is a process by which young men and women learn what it means to be a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ and what it means to be a member of the church.

This time-honored approach to training and confirming our youth in the faith is known as catechesis. Catechesis (a biblical word that simply means “to teach”) is the church’s ministry of grounding and growing all the people of God in the great doctrines of our faith and its implications for membership in the local church and life as a Christian in the world.

But conformation is something a little different, and it’s not just a program for older children in the church.

Historically, the church has engaged in confirmation through its educational ministry. Learning the great articles of the faith is vitally important, but conformation requires more than just information. Conformation means getting in spiritual shape. Being a Christian means being conformed to the image of Christ, and we can’t be conformed unless we are confronted by just how badly we are out of shape. Sometimes God has to carve things away in our lives so that we start to look more like Jesus.

God loves his people, which means He is willing to pursue us, confront us, and require righteousness from us. God’s confrontation is a grace, and the resistance we feel as we go through conformation is actually a relief.

So join Nate, Peter, and Kyle as we discuss why conformation is so important, and how avoiding conformity puts us, and our children, in real spiritual danger.

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In this episode of The Parrhedsian Podcast, Peter, Kyle and Nate discuss how a return to the practice of infant baptism may actually be the key to Christian revival, not only in America, but also in the church and in the home.

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As Coach Herm Edwards once said (famously)...“You play to win the game.” But you can’t win the game (with all due respect to Allen Iverson) if you don’t practice.

Practice is important, it’s important for sports, it’s important for music, it’s important for almost every endeavor in life, including our life in Christ.

Christians must practice their faith, and that means engaging in any number of spiritual activities, including the practice of spiritual disciplines. But practices and disciplines are not necessarily the same thing. Why is that important and what does it matter?

Well, in this episode of the Parrhesian Podcast, we talk with our own Kyle Bennett, who wrote a book called Practices of Love, that explores Christian practices and spiritual disciplines, how they are connected, how they are different, and why they are so important for Christian living. (I’ll give you a hint, they help you win the game!)

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When it comes to the church today there is too much sameness. Sameness is a real problem. But what does that mean? What is too much sameness? First, we need to clarify that sameness is not the same as conformity. Conformity isn’t a problem; the problem resides in the pattern after which the church is being conformed. Is the church today being conformed to Christ or to the pattern of this world?

The Bible commands us to not conform to the pattern of this world but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds (Romans 12:2). But sadly, the church too often looks pretty much the same as the world.

Dr. Robert Gagnon, professor of New Testament, and former professor at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, has been incredibly helpful in identifying the sin of sameness in his writing on Christian sexual ethics, homosexuality, and the Bible. Gagnon writes,

The foundation of all sexual ethics according to Jesus is “male and female [God] made them” (Gen 1:27) and “For this reason a man … will become joined to his woman, and they [later: the two] shall become one flesh” (Gen 2:24). According to Jesus, the male-female prerequisite for marriage (and thus for all sexual relations) is the foundation upon which all other sexual-ethical standards are predicated, including the prohibitions of incest and homosexuality. (Incest and homosexuality are a violation of the [biblical] rejection of excessive familial and structural sameness.)

Why is incest wrong? Why is homosexuality wrong? Too much sameness. They are not God’s pattern for the world. But the world has rejected God’s pattern, and so we end up with the opening ceremony of the 2024 Summer Olympics.

It’s one thing for the world to reject God’s pattern, but its even worse when the church does. The church today is suffering from too much sameness, produced by following a worldly design. But we must remember Paul’s warning in 1 Corinthians 6, that if we look too much like the rest of the world, we will not inherit the kingdom of God.

Conformity to the pattern of this world is a serious problem in the church today and so in this episode of The Parrhesian Podcast, Kyle, Peter, and Nate discuss the problem of excessive sameness in the church and how the church might break free from this destructive pattern.

https://theparrhesians.com/