Why Pastors Must Address the Culture Wars

The following program is recorded content created by The Truth Network. My friends, it is so imperative for pastors and leaders to talk about the pressing cultural issues of the day in church. Welcome, welcome to The Line of Fire.

Michael Brown thrilled to be back in our studio in North Carolina. We've got a lot of crucially important ground to cover. I want to address yet again how imperative it is and I want to encourage and strengthen pastors and leaders how imperative it is to speak to and speak about the relevant cultural issues we are facing as a church, as a society, as a church. As a people today, as families, as individuals, as young people, as old people.

I want to do that and I want to do my best to help equip. I also want to talk to you about more significant pushback. We've told you for years that there was a pushback coming. That there would be a gospel-based moral and cultural revolution that would push back against some of the craziness and the godlessness of the society. It's not primarily a political thing. It's not a spiritual and moral and cultural thing. However, it's broader than just gospel-based.

It's happening in many other aspects of the culture, quite apart from the gospel. We're going to talk about that today. Take your calls. I'm going to be responding to different questions on Friday, but not by phone. I'm going to pre-record that broadcast.

It's going to be a fun broadcast you do not want to miss. I'm going to be talking to you on Friday, like I normally do on Friday. So, anything you want to talk to me about, anything you want to ask me about, phone lines are open.

It can be theology, it can be culture, it can be politics, or you could be someone who does not like me at all and you want to give me a piece of your mind. So, we'll pay for the airtime and you get to do that. 866-342-866-348-7884. So, I will get to the calls a little later in the show, but now is a good time to call us here. So, you can get through and we can make sure that we get to your call. Okay. I want to say at the outset that I'm here as a friend, supporter, helper of pastors and Christian leaders.

Not a basher, not an attacker, not one here to say, you're doing this wrong, you're doing this wrong, you're doing that wrong. Unless you have pastor to congregation, you have no idea what's involved with it. Just like, unless you've had kids of your own, you still don't understand everything that's involved with having kids of your own.

There are lots of things, unless you've lived through it, unless you've been in the army and been in the midst of military conflict, you can talk about it, but a lot of things have to be lived out. So, it's the same thing with pastoring a congregation. The difference with pastoring a congregation is that everybody thinks they know better. I have shepherd's hearts.

Yes, that's true. And I've served as a congregation elder for years and I seek to be a spiritual father and mentor to people, right, caring about them and helping them grow in the Lord, helping disciple, mentor, et cetera. But there are gifts that a real pastor has that are not my gifts. I pastored for a few months. We had to remove a colleague because of adultery and now we were bringing in someone new and there was an interim and I threw myself in. And God really sensitized my heart instead of bringing in these strong, like, wake up prophetic, shake up words, much more caring, compassionate and tender.

But boy, did I realize it's just a lot I didn't see and a lot I didn't understand. So, you're a pastor in a congregation, maybe even a smaller one, where you don't have as much staff and help, there's a lot that falls into your thinking, okay, do I just want to teach through a book of the Bible and do that? Or do I want to just have a long series that's really helping to strengthen families? Or how can we better equip young people living today? Or, you know, we need to deepen our prayer lives.

Or, boy, people just don't have their finances ordered. I want to help teach on financial principle. Okay, and, you know, we want to deepen people's spiritual devotion. We want to strengthen marriage and family.

We want to stand with singles. We want to do outreach in our community. We want to have a missions mentality. We want to help the poor.

There's a lot going on. So, my desire here, my purpose here is not to throw something else out and say, you got to do this, but to say, okay, we have plenty of resources, there are plenty of others out there that can help. It is imperative, pastors and leaders, that from the pulpit or whatever settings you have, Bible study setting, small group setting, however you disseminate the word best, that you address depressing moral and cultural issues. You know, I was just talking to a pastor of a multi-ethnic church and he was saying that with the killing of George Floyd, it was very difficult to say things that would seem satisfactory to everybody. Because each side had certain sensitivities and pain and, you know, one pastor was telling me in Texas, he said, my church is basically one-third Hispanic, one-third black and one-third white. And he said, and we lost people from all sides after the George Floyd killing because whatever I said either offended one group or didn't satisfy the other group. So, it's not a matter of pleasing everybody, but this pastor said to me that he sat down with black leaders in his church, with black brothers and sisters, and said, I just want to hear your story. And it was quite overwhelming for him to hear person after person after person with stories of discrimination and mistreatment over the years. Not just imagined, but literal experience they didn't even know about for years and years and years and years. You know, we all have blind spots, but I can share things from my life experience as a follower of Jesus or as a Jewish follower of Jesus or as someone that does debates and whatever it is, I can share things that would shock you that I've gone.

I mean, they're minor overall, but you just don't know because you don't live in my skin. So, you have to have the conversations. If I'm more familiar with one part of the body or one part of the world, let's say as an American that is an international conflict, well, I know the American perspective, I live here. I lived here my whole life, and I've been overseas several years total of my life, but I'm not an international.

That's when you need to say, hey, what does it look like from where you are, from your country, and just to understand better. So, this week, this past week, Sunday morning did three services, then Sunday night, then Monday night, then a leadership meeting Tuesday morning. So, I was in Valley Stream, Long Island, Bethlehem Assembly of God.

My dear friend, Pastor Steve Malazzo, we've known each other now for 40 years. He came as a student in the ministry school, Christ for the Nations, that used to be on Long Island when I was teaching there. He came as a ministry school student. He was 23. Our oldest granddaughter in a few days turns 23.

Okay, so we've known each other a long time. I first preached in that church to the youth 50 years ago. Yeah, I was 18, 19, and I preached to the youth 50 years ago. Pastor Steve has been there all these years versus just attending, then as a youth pastor, then as associate pastor, then as senior pastor. And the church has grown dramatically, planted other churches, doing so much in the community. I'm so thankful for God's faithfulness through Pastor Steve and the team there and what's happened over the years.

Absolutely wonderful. And he doesn't pull back from the cultural issues, but again, he's not talking about that every week. That's at his major point. And this is the pastor I was talking about that sat with his congregants after the killing of George Floyd to hear a perspective that he might miss. And it's so important we do that that we sit in the same room. And you say to someone from the heart, hey, tell me your story.

Tell me what it was like growing up here. Tell me what you experienced. And we may agree or disagree with their conclusions, but at least it broadens our perspective and sensitizes our hearts. So if you go through membership there at Bethlehem, you will be confronted with what the Bible says about marriage and God's intent with sexuality. So if you're in a same sex relationship, you'll know, remember this church, I can't be in a same sex relationship.

It's displeasing in God's sight. And when you walk in the building, there are signs. There's someone standing there with a sign saying, come as you are. Literally a greeter with a sign, come as you are. Whoever you are, whatever your background, you're welcome here. We're going to love you and we're going to share the love of God with you. All right.

You want to go further, come into membership. Here's where we stand. There's no ambiguity.

Right. So when I was there Sunday morning, I was talking about the state of the of the nation. And I said, that reflects the state of the church. So I spoke very openly, very plainly about different things, including trans activism, saying explicitly, we need to pray for these individuals.

We need to pray for this drag queen story hour. We need to pray for these people, you know, talking about those. Maybe a gay activist pushing an agenda. I said, that's someone for whom Jesus died. That someone created an image of God. I'm not demonizing people.

I need to pray. My issue has been an agenda. So we were clear, we were compassionate. But we talked about these things very openly, about 13-year-old kids, girls having their breasts removed, and 10-year-old boys putting on sterilizing hormone from puberty blockers and things like that. We talked about all that, just about, look at where we are today. And I quoted warnings back from 1944 about the state of America, from 1959. And then even things explicitly talk about where we're at today with transgenderism and the blurring of male-female distinctions from 1968 to say, hey, it's past wake-up time. But that was all to say, that's because we, the church, have not been doing what we're called to do.

And then at night, the whole, not I'm worried about any of this, just recovering our first love and strengthening our consecration to serve the Lord by life or by death. After one of the night's services, a woman came up to me, maybe in her late 40s, thereabouts. She's a widow. She works in the school system department of education in New York, which is extremely liberal.

She said, just out of the blue, her 60-year-old son says that he's now a girl, identifies as a girl, because she's not accepting it. She's under pressure. She's getting persecuted from various sides, and it's very intense. Thankfully, she has the support of the pastor and church there, but she just wanted to thank me for speaking out publicly. When I was there, this was a good time to do it, speaking out publicly about these things, because it was so helpful for her to hear it again. She knows where her pastor stands. She knows where the church stands, but to just hear it in a Sunday message with that clarity. Then on the way to the airport, talking to the youth pastor and young adult pastor, one of them mentioned to me how helpful it was for the kids.

There was a Christian school with about 700 kids, and many of the kids in the services, middle school, high school, how helpful it was for them to hear me talk about these things, because they see it. It's the world they live in 24-7. I don't mean they're talking about this every single moment, but maybe not in Christian school every day, but all around them, friends, family members, colleagues. It's just, this is the world we live in, and it's not a political issue. It's a spiritual issue. It's a moral issue, and it's not even like, how could we live during the days of slavery and not address slavery? We all think that's reprehensible, that churches didn't address it more still, that churches supported it.

It's not even that. It's just, this is what our kids are dealing with all the time. As I said over these days of meetings in New York, TikTok has done a better job of discipling our young people than many of the churches have. So it's a pastoral responsibility to say, I'm stretched out already. I don't know where to go. Reach out to us. We've got all kinds of resources. We can recommend you to others. We can recommend you your videos to watch. There's school curricula that we can refer you to. There's speakers that can come in.

You can play some of our videos. There are all kinds of ways that we can help equip you, but people are hurting. People have need. To not speak is to be negligent in a critically important moment in our history when so many, especially young people and families, are hurting and confused and under pressure.

They need the help of the shepherds. I remember at times feeling so hopeless that our marriage could ever be good. Guess what? I felt the exact same thing. This is Real Family Life with Dave and Ann Wilson. But the thing that you can never forget that saved us and I think will save any marriage is this fact. Jesus rose from the dead. God raised the dead man back to life and he can do it again. He raised our dead marriage back to life.

So let's get real. Nothing is impossible with God. Don't quit. Hang on to Jesus. Ask him to help you and he will meet you right where you are.

Cry out to him. Help us, God. We're Ann and Dave Wilson and that's Real Family Life.

Get more at familylife.com slash real. You are, you are, still the goodness in my life. This is Michael Brown, your voice of moral, cultural and spiritual revolution. Join me for our next broadcast here on The Line of Fire. We'll dig into the Word of God together. We'll tackle some theological and biblical controversies. We'll take your calls and we'll do our best to set the record straight according to the Word of God.

This is how we rise up. It's The Line of Fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown. Get on The Line of Fire by calling 866-34-TRUTH. Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Yes, so I'm opening the phone lines today, all subjects, because I won't be taking live calls on Friday.

So anything you want to talk to me about, 866-348-7884. So everybody say out loud with me, if you don't mind, supplements are not substitutes. Supplements are not substitutes, but supplements can help.

So, you know, before the meetings getting up early Sunday morning, I guess picked up a few minutes after 8 in the morning, getting back to the hotel around 2. So the number one thing that empowers me to be full of energy is when you're 69 years old, full of energy, vision, faith, vitality, literally jumping for joy in the services, that's the healthy diet. That's number one. Then exercise, that's important too. And I'm trying, I'm doing my best to change sleep habits to get even better sleep than I've gotten before. And then these Triveda supplements are a real blessing as well. And some of you aren't doing the diet or the exercise. All right, well you at least do the supplements and maybe that'll give you a little motivation to work in those or they'll still help in other ways. You add it in with other good steps.

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Or you can go online, triveda.com and use the code BROWN25. All right. Let us go to the phones.

We'll start with Brian in Louisville, Kentucky. Welcome to the Line of Fire. Hey, I appreciate you having me on. It's a pleasure to be with you. I was just wondering, because I know that when you've given your testimony before, you talked about in the early 70s going through substance abuse issues before you came to Christ. And I feel like there might be a connection between the left wing or far left wing side of the culture wars and people turning to substances. Because when you preach that either there's no God at all or that there is a God, but he hasn't revealed himself through the scriptures so you can make your own version of God, that maybe when people get to college and they're young, maybe that makes for a happy life.