But what I have a more serious problem with are the young Earthers that want us to deny what we know from science.

And as a result, they want us to ignore scientists when they tell us things like take a vaccine for the pandemic.

And guess what?

The science, the science supported not getting the vaccine.

Over six minutes later, we heard her say this.

Now you don't want to even talk.

So, you know.

Well, because it's because you've brought up a topic that I was not prepared for.

If I had known that this was.

Going to be the topic, I would have brought facts and figures with me.

But I did not know that this.

Topic would come up.

And so I did not bring any facts and figures with me, and I'm not prepared to defend that position.

But you brought these topics up.

I didn't.

Well, okay, you're right.

I did.

This is Apologetics Live to answer your questions.

Your host from Striving for Eternity Ministries.

Andrew Rapaport, Foreign.

We are live Apologetics Live here to answer your most challenging questions you have about God and the Bible.

I am your host, Andrew Rapaport, the executive director of Striving for Eternity and the Christian podcast community of which this podcast is a proud member.

And just so you know, we are here every week Thursday nights.

Well, not every week, I shouldn't say that because we're not going to be here for the next two.

But most weeks we are here at apologeticslive.com you can go there there to join the discussion anytime that we are live.

We are try to do Thursday nights, 8:00 to 10:00 Eastern Time PM and you can join and ask us any question.

In fact, I tell folks that I can answer any question you have about God and the Bible.

And if you think that sounds a little bit, well, prideful or arrogant, just remember when I say I don't know, that's a perfectly good answer.

I never said I'd give an answer that would be satisfactory to you.

I just said I can answer every question and I don't know is often the answer I give.

So we have a guest backstage.

We're going to be, as we said, we're going to be addressing a sermon from Tony Miano.

Now, a lot of people have asked for an update on the, you know, the church there in Iowa.

Gee, I'm drawing a blank.

But my, my guest will remind me.

But, but we've, we did a series in the past about this church where I was not really sure that it was a cult.

But by listening to many People, I got thoroughly convinced and.

And Kevin said Grace Fellowship.

I was going to say Grace Fellowship, but I wasn't sure if it was Grace Fellowship church or just Grace Fellowship.

But.

But there in Iowa, We.

We talked about this in the past.

We.

We actually did, I think, like, nine or ten episodes on this, and a lot of people asked if we would give an update for.

For years now, and we really didn't feel like doing an update.

We had this sermon.

Oh, I'll have to ask Kevin for.

For two or three years, we have talked about it, and we.

We decided we would do it.

Now we'll explain a little bit why.

Let me first get to some other issues that we have.

Let me.

I'll bring Kevin in so he can say hello, Kevin Yonts.

How are you, sir?

Are you.

Can you hear us?

Hi, Andrew.

I'm doing well.

Thank you.

Appreciate.

Yeah.

Can you hear me all right?

Yeah.

I wonder if there's a delay, but we'll see if there is.

It's going to be interesting.

So first thing I got to do is correct something from last week.

Last week, we had the Roman Catholic in, and I kept referring to the Council of Nicaea in 324, having been the council that addressed the canon.

And I was incorrect.

I was wrong about that.

I was thinking of the wrong council.

And so I was making an argument that was, well, false.

So I just wanted to correct that.

For the record, A couple things that we usually do in the new section before we get into the main subject and let Kevin jump in as well if he wants any of these things.

But just quickly, I want to hit some of these.

There's another new school shooting at a Christian school.

Wouldn't you know, we.

We have.

It seems that conflicting reports.

The sheriff or, you know, or captain, whoever was doing the reporting early on with the school shooting, questions were asked whether the person was a transgender.

And he made the comment to say, that's not an issue that we want to discuss right now, and that shouldn't.

That's not something we want to get into.

You know, so it made it sound as if he was trying to cover up, like all of the other times that you had a shooter in a Christian school, and it tr.

It was a transgender person doing it because of Christians.

And so I did put out a post asking, when will the media and law enforcement call this a hate crime?

Because they're clearly targeting Christian schools.

You know, it was interesting when they.

When a Muslim shot up a homosexual bar, they were quick to say it was a hate Crime done by Christians and then they found out it was a Muslim.

In this case, what we have is some maybe questionable information.

It's going to be hard to know.

We're getting reports now that it wasn't a transgender.

Early on we did get reports that it was a transgender.

Now we're getting reports that it was not.

It makes it hard to know who to believe because, well, who's going to believe the media anymore, you know?

So I don't know if that's the case yet.

It is interesting that this girl, I think, had a plan to end her life because it seems that after the shooting she had a friend who released her manifesto.

Maybe it is because the last shooter had a manifesto on her and it never got replaced to the public.

So that may be it.

I did not get a chance to read that manifesto, so could not address that.

What else in the news I'd like, actually.

Kevin, anything you want to address with that or.

No, let's make sure I'm working first.

Andrew, can you hear me all right?

Yep.

Hear you fine.

Okay, good.

I don't really have anything I could say about it.

I've read a few things, watched a few things, but I don't.

I mean, other than a horrible tragedy.

And I think one of the things that I saw was highlighted was a number of issues with the drugs that kids take and why so many of these suicides are happening, which is a deeper issue.

Probably that's the one thing they never want to look at, and yet that's the one thing that seems to always be in common, that they have these mood altering drugs to keep them calm in school, you know.

Yeah.

The other one I want to address, some may not even know this story.

This is a 18, 19 year old story, but there was a woman who made an accusation at a dog.

She was a stripper.

She went to a party hosted, I guess by the Duke lacrosse team.

She was on drugs at the time, had left the party early.

I guess there were complaints or people insulting her about her.

Her dancing or whatever.

And so she made the claim that she had been gang raped by the Duke lacrosse team.

The.

The only person, three people got named in, in a lawsuit, the only person she was able to identify was a person that was not at the party.

He was.

He.

He had a solid alibi.

He was in another state.

Charges were dropped.

Now almost 20 years later, she's finally come out and admitted that she lied about the whole thing.

Why bring this up, Andrew?

Good question.

Glad you asked.

This was the story that got the media from being, like, objective somewhat to, to just trying to convict people in the court of public opinion.

This is the beginning of the MeToo movement.

This is the beginning of, of all the things that we, we now see so rampant in the media, where they'll completely lie and all that, just to get a news story out.

So that's why this one is so important, because it is something that was the beginning of a lot of this stuff.

It is something where the.

It was a changing point in the media.

And so I think it's important to recognize that those who were on the right that, that said this, this was, you know, something that was not true.

It was.

The woman was making it up.

And for folks who may be too young or don't know the story, they did do a rape kit on her that night.

They did discover that she had had sex with five men, none of which are any of the Duke lacrosse players.

So that's why they ended up throwing the case out.

So one last thing that everyone is asking me my thoughts on this, and I think a lot of people are asking because of my background, having worked for the federal government in the past.

You know, the, the I.

There's a lot of questions and about these drone sightings in New Jersey, it's like this phenomenon.

Let me go through this very briefly, give you my opinions, what it could be.

There's talk of, is it our own government testing, testing things?

That is possible.

I mean, that's what Area 51 was all about.

But they usually try to do that.

Yes, under the COVID of night.

But usually they try to do that in places where no one's going to see them.

And if they, you know, they try to do it sparsely so that it's not every night.

So that would lead me to believe it's probably not that you wouldn't usually do that in an.

A heavily populated area because you don't want to be seen.

They would do it somewhere in the desert.

Now maybe they're doing some testing of something that would go over water.

So therefore it needs to go that way.

But that's not the direction people are seeing.

They're seeing them come across the center of the state, not going out to the water.

It could be foreign actors.

It's hard not to believe that when we had a Chinese air balloon just going across the country and no one wanted to do anything, and it was admitted that, yes, it was a Chinese air balloon, but they don't want it to come down on, on people.

So I, I don't think it's that with the number of them that are up there, I think the government would have done something by now.

So what could it be?

Well, let's give the more serious one.

We did have someone, a mayor in New Jersey, that said that there is a, some stolen or missing uranium and that these are he, in his opinion, drones from the government that are looking for a uranium signal in fear of a, you know, small bomb that could be set off.

Could that be the case?

Well, it's plausible to an extent, but I, I find it hard to believe that there's missing uranium.

That's not the sort of thing that goes just missing.

So what do I think it is?

Very simple.

Here's what I think it is.

It is a distraction.

No different than when they were talking about all the UFO stuff when they didn't want you knowing all the stuff that was going on in the government.

I think this is just a distraction and the more people are paying attention to it, the more they're not paying attention to all the things that are going on right now.

Like the, like 1500 pardons.

More than 1500 pardons is more they think than any president has done, done in their entire, you know, administration.

He does that in a single day he's pardoned.

I think it's up to about 8,000 people.

He's doing a lot of things to make it a nuts not to be a smooth transition of power, but people aren't noticing it because they're so focused on drones.

So I think that's a lot of what it is.

Could I be wrong?

Sure.

But I, I, I, I just think that's what it is.

It's a media playing folks, and, and I think it's some people that are, that were doing it and as a distraction and then more people jumped in and it's just a copycat.

So, so let's look before we get into our topic, I'll put this up.

Jess had a comment that you have grown a serious beard.

Thank you.

I still have it.

It'll be gone probably shortly, but.

So Kevin, for folks who may not have joined, who've not been involved in the past, how about you introduce yourself a bit and let us know what, what you've been up to.

Yeah, thanks, Andrew.

That's, you know, we did, I think you said nine shows.

I didn't go back and count them, but we did a lot of shows on a former church that I been was a part of.

First of all, my name is Kevin Yount.

I lived in Davenport, Iowa, grew up in the Quad Cities, for the most part.

Explain to folks what the Quad Cities are, because if you're not from that.

Area, Quad Cities is.

It's on the Mississippi river, halfway between Des Moines, Iowa, and Chicago, Illinois.

There's two.

Two cities in Iowa, actually three cities in Illinois, but they call it the Quad Cities anyway.

So Davenport, Iowa, Bettendorf, Iowa, Rock Island, Illinois, and Moline, Illinois.

So I grew up there through high school, moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico when I was 18, and went to school in Albuquerque, the University of New Mexico.

Lived there, met my wife.

We got married in 1991 and moved back to Davenport.

Spent 28 years in Davenport.

And that's where we became involved with Grace Fellowship Church, which is the topic of our discussions.

So Jen and I, my wife, we became part of the church in 2008.

ISH, 2009.

ISH.

Were part of it for nine years.

We left in February of 2018, and then we spent a year there and ended up moving back to New Mexico.

So I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico, now.

We moved back here.

My wife's family is from here.

We kind of moved back here to help with her aging mother and that kind of a thing.

So here we are.

We really didn't say anything about Grace Fellowship until a good year and a half.

Almost two years after we left, we came to realize that it was a spiritually abusive church, that the pastors and elders are of an authoritarian nature.

Quite authoritarian.

And so I started writing a few blog articles about a book called Churches that Abused by Ronald M en Roth.

Didn't.

Didn't say anything about GFC in that process, but just wrote a series on that book.

It was a helpful book for me at the time.

It still is a helpful book.

In this interim, we're trying to.

We're still communicating with them a little bit.

We had been excommunicated from the church about three or four days after we left.

But Mike kept reaching out to me even later on and wanting to try to figure out how to reconcile.

You know, I would ask some questions about what that meant, and he wouldn't really answer me.

And so basically we never.

We never did.

They were insistent that we would come back to the church.

We weren't going to put ourselves back in that situation.

Grace Fellowship, and it is called Grace Fellowship Church, but I just call it GFC or Grace Fellowship.

I don't really like to attach church to them.

And so I began to educate myself on what this meant because I really didn't know what we had been through.

I didn't really understand it when we first came out.

And I was ill prepared to actually deal with them in a way that I think would be helpful for us and for them.

Didn't want to put myself back in that situation.

And so the way we left was, we left, we wrote a letter, said we were leaving, wrote some letters back and forth.

They excommunicated us.

We moved on.

Went to, went to a couple different churches before we settled on one in, in Bettendorf.

I wanted to grow in my understanding, so I applied for seminary and was accepted to the Reformed Baptist Seminary and have been going to school.

I've graduated with a degree program and I'm pursuing another program.

And then basically we began to write.

I began to write more articles naming them because I thought it was important to talk about what was really happening at the church and, you know, seek to expose the abuses.

Now if this was just me, if it was just my family, I probably wouldn't have ever said anything.

But everybody that leaves the church that, that is a member is always almost without exception.

And I would say there might be one, possibly two exceptions.

Now the one exception I'm thinking of was later excommunicated.

But they released him and then they said he was talking bad about them.

So they came back and excommunicated them.

But pretty much 100 of the people are excommunicated if they leave.

So I wrote an article called he.

Left the church and yeah, then they excommunicated him when he's no longer part of the church.

That is correct.

They, they released this man and his family from membership.

Did they, when they excommunicated him, did they start with talking to him one on one and then going with others, or was it just boom, your ex communicated?

Yeah, they, they came back and said, you know, we've got all this evidence that said you've been divisive in your speech since you've left.

We had released you on, on good, you know, in good standing.

But then you started saying things about us and you started trying to encourage other people to leave and tell other stories about us.

And so.

But he wasn't a member.

Communicate.

Right.

He wasn't.

He wasn't a member anymore.

He was at the point that they started.

I mean, he was a member when he left and they released him.

They released him.

But, but you're saying this was.

And the only reason I'm bringing this up.

Yeah, just is great.

Matthew 18 is kind of clear.

The, the, the steps.

It would be done within the church.

But the reason this becomes important is if he has left that church.

And yet Mike Reed feels he could speak into this person to, you know, to discipline him and excommunicate him from a church he already left.

I find it interesting because part of Mike's argument is that none of us have that right to speak into his church.

Yeah.

So why would he have the right to speak into someone else's?

It just.

It's interesting.

Yeah, well, you know, I mean, they kind of write their own rules.

A lot of times they'll base them on how they would look at a scripture verse.

So they try to justify it, I'm sure, somehow scripturally.

But, you know, I think if you let a guy go, I mean, do you have the right then to go back and excommunicate him later on?

I don't even think they have the right to excommunicate somebody if they.

If they say, we have a disagreement here, we don't like how you do church, and we're going to leave and we want to be released from membership.

That's never good enough.

That always ends in excommunication.

And so I thought it was important to write about that, to say, I think they're abusing this doctrine that is a biblical doctrine.

Excommunication is the final step of Matthew 18, as you kind of pointed out, which is tell it to the church.

If they don't repent, treat them as a heathen and a tax collector.

And so, you know, what does that mean exactly?

Well, I think it means they're.

There's someone that you would then be willing to still continue to discuss and have conversations with and try to, you know, minister to the gospel.

You're.

You're assuming then that they're unbelievers, though, but they don't.

They shun you.

It's.

It's much like, you know, perhaps Mormonism would shun somebody or, you know, the.

The Amish would shun people.

So, you know, most people, when you leave and you've been excommunicated, you are, you know, Persona non grata.

You're.

You're.

They want nothing to do with you.

They will barely talk to you if they'll talk to you at all.

You know, and the case in point in dealing with Tony is I saw him at the Starbucks that we both used to go to after we had left, after we had exhausted our conversations.

And Tony was sitting there, and I walked in to get my coffee, and he wouldn't look at me.

And I walked up to him and said, tony, I've Been coming to this Starbucks a lot longer than you have.

And I don't care if you come in here or not, but don't act like you've never seen me before.

And he sort of sheepishly looked up at me and he stuck his hand out to shake my hand and grunted at me and I walked out the door.

Yeah.

So, you know, that's how you're treated.

And so I thought it was important to start talking about these things.

And then I did a series, three articles, one on people's testimonies, you know, one on, you know, looking forward to what, what can we do about the future and stuff like that.

I've continued to highlight them for the.

Years for folks that don't know.

What's the blog site?

For folks to go, yeah, the blog.

Site is called uncommon faith.org and I've been writing on that blog since 2012, I guess so, you know, 12 plus years.

And interestingly enough, I was at GFC at the time and asked Mike permission to start a blog.

And you know, he, I think he liked it at the time because I'd run my articles past him and he'd always approve them and, and you know, now he's probably not a big fan, but you know, the blog, you know, it's never really, it's not a big deal.

Right.

It's just me sort of putting down stuff that I think about.

It's become more of a sounding board to highlight abuses at gfc.

When I hear of more stuff going on there, I, I, if I, if I think it's important enough to write about it, I'll write about it like, like the man that committed suicide at gfc.

I thought it was important to write about that and give him, give his family and friends some sort of a better understanding of his life and what they talked about at his funeral.

It was a really disturbing and disgusting way to give a funeral.

Yeah.

So I wanted to tell people, listen, man, this guy was loved.

I mean, we ran into him after we had been excommunicated at a grocery store and he talked to me and he had his daughter and he was friendly and then he told them that we were there and he got a beat down for it.

I'm sure he felt helpless.

I don't know the full nature of his suicide.

I don't want to try to, you know, make speculations or anything like that.

He was a, he was a wonderful man and it was a shame what has happened to him and his family.

And I'm told his wife has left and moved out of state now which I praise the Lord for that.

But that's a, that's a, that's an overview.

Andrew.

You, you know, it's a long story and we could spend a lot of time talking about it but.

Well, we spent many, many hours are on, on this.

In fact what I want to do is I'm gonna, I'm gonna.

So folks could know some of, some of what you have written on Striving for Eternity.

I want to bring up the, the article, the main article for folks to be able to, to find because yeah, the reason I want to do this is if folks want to get all the background, this is the one place to get it.

If you go to striving for eternity.org just do a search for dangerous doctrines.

You'll find a couple of articles that Kevin has written that's at Striving Fraternity and this one is, is the, the really the detailed one.

It's the Dangerous Doctrines of Grace Fellowship Church.

And what you'll see in this as I'm just going to scroll up is these are all the episodes that we covered so you could watch either the video or listen to the audio.

And, and this episode we're doing right now will be on it.

And, and so Anthony had started this.

This is where really we dealt with the issues of oh, where was it?

Is it, was it earlier than that?

Yeah, I think it was all the way at it.

It was in part six before we really started bringing up where, where I kind of came in and we compared what Tony and I and others did when talking about the Church of Wells, which Tony recognized as a cult.

And we compared it and, and Kevin, you were very helpful with that to show the church he's currently in was fitting some of those same things that Tony previously had criticized.

And, and so it's pretty, it's pretty.

Shocking really the comparisons.

All the things mean.

That was a three hour video that he did with some other men.

I don't remember who that was, but it doesn't matter.

It was, it was myself, Kevin, Ken Cook and John Speed.

Oh right, yeah.

That were on there.

Interesting.

So.

So here we have.

We did nine episodes here and so, and then this article will, will explain some of the, the details.

I want to start with the way we started every one of these others.

And, and I just want for the record, you know, we invited Tony in here.

You know, it, it's something where I, I did not want to just make claims.

You're, you're going to hear, I'm going to play a video clip of Tony that I sent to him, you know, because I want him to be here.

I would rather him or Mike Reed.

They've always had the invitation here to join us.

And so I would rather them come in and we have the discussion.

Truthfully, I'd rather we have the discussion behind the scenes, having a fair discussion, you know, and we could do that in private, but unfortunately, that's not the way they have behaved.

I actually did one of the.

Those episodes.

I went back and forth with the emails that Mike Reed was sending me, and it was just kind of.

It was just kind of sad to see that behavior.

But these are the things that we had asked each week, 12 questions that, that we had.

And since I didn't have memorized, I figured I'd bring this up and you guys can read.

Read this.

It is kind of interesting, you know, that I did go and do a search for Tony Miano just to see, because as you and I were talking, Kevin, in prep for this, I.

I was trying to find some.

Some stuff that we had from the past, and I was trying to find something from Tony's own website.

And striving Fraternity was coming up on the first page, unlike every search engine, when you search for Tony Miano.

So, I mean, that is the.

The advantage of having a website that is.

Gets a lot of traffic.

And so as we read this, here's.

Here's what the questions that we asked, and this is the questions we asked every week for, for those of GFC Mike Reed, if they could answer, because these were the concerns that we had.

And this is exactly what Tony and I and Matt Slick did with the Church of Wells.

We came up with questions, we wanted them to answer just yes or no type questions.

Very simple things that can be answered.

So.

So the questions to Mike were, do you meet with women alone on a regular basis?

I mean, that's a yes or no.

Do you ask for details about spousal intimacy?

That's yes or no.

Have you ever said, quote, to trust the elders, unquote, is to quote to trust God, unquote?

Number four, have you ever said whatever the elders would counsel you for, your life is perfect?

Number five, have you ever said that GFC is the only true church in Quad Cities?

That's a yes or no one.

And that's going to become very interesting later in this episode.

So remember that question, whether they claim to be the only true church.

Tony's going to have some words about that, but not what you might think.

Number six, do you Believe the elders have a air quotes, nearly unlimited authority in the lives of their congregants?

Number seven, have you or some have you said if someone owns a gun, is in the military or police, they have premeditated murder in their hearts?

Do you share details about counseling?

This is.

Number eight.

Do you share details about counseling sessions with other members?

Number nine.

Do you ever imply that men and women should be able to kiss someone on the lips that is not his or her own spouse?

Number 10, have you ever shared details of your own sexual intimacy with any of the people in your counseling sessions with members of the opposite sex?

Number 11, do you believe you are infallible against sexual immorality?

And number 12, by name, what specific pastors, theologians and or teachers have condoned the practice of meeting with women alone in counseling sessions?

Now, last one, obviously is not something that is, is a yes or no.

But with that, I just figured we should start asking the same questions we asked the last several, the last nine episodes.

And the reason being is you can see from these questions the seriousness of the accusations, even if this is the first time that you are hearing about this.

Some of the issues that we saw throughout with many people that came in publicly and gave testimony, but also privately is that Mike Reed, the pastor there, would meet regularly with women alone.

He would ask them about their, their sexual intimacy with their husbands, how often they, they have sex, what positions, things like this.

And if they're not comfortable, he would start sharing with what he and his wife do.

It, you know, they're, they were known because they, they believed in kissing on the lips.

That's weird.

And this is what most people say about the church.

Those that know Tony, they go, the church he goes to is weird, but not necessarily sinful.

I agreed with that.

I mean, I, that was my position before Anthony did this investigation.

And if you go back and listen, Anthony called it a cult.

And I went, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Because Anthony didn't run it by me with everything he was doing.

He asked whether he and Kevin could do some discussion on this.

And it was like, wait a minute.

Like, as, as Anthony started bringing in people, I started realizing, no, they do have the control over people.

And they're asking things that no pastor should be asking of anyone now.

Yeah, I want to say up front, I, I, I used to have a good relationship with Tony.

We were friends.

I, I valued that friendship.

One thing that if you talk to anyone who, who knows Tony, every single person that I know that knows Tony has, has pretty much said to me the same Thing that Tony Miano was their best friend.

That should make you wonder how could.

I mean, dozens and dozens of people have said that to me, and I felt it too.

And that is the type of person Tony Miano is.

He makes you feel like you are his best friend.

Even though we have not spoken in years, I'm sure that's still his.

His personality.

He's a very lovable person.

He is someone who just really has a lot to.

As far as encouraging people.

And so when, When I first met Tony at the Shepherd's conference in 2015, I mean, it was just as you said, Andrew.

I mean, he was so kind to me and so engaging.

And, you know, a lot of times, if you have conversations with people and you're in a crowd, you'll see them looking away at other people, at what's going on.

Tony would not do that.

Yeah, he would look at you and he would give you his full attention.

That's an admirable quality.

And he brought me a book that he had written.

I told him my dad was a police officer.

He brought me a book.

He autographed it.

He signed it.

I mean, you're spot on.

And that's why Tony is.

Is.

Is beloved by.

By so many.

Yeah.

Now Melissa's saying this.

It sounds like grooming.

No, I.

I don't think so.

I don't think that.

I, I understand why she would think that, but obviously, I don't know Tony's heart, but I don't think it was any.

I don't think.

Look, Tony had really strong convictions about the barriers between men and women.

So I would find it hard to believe that he would have.

Grooming technique.

Grooming is usually to.

To gain favor, you know, to.

To hold control over people.

One of the things Tony's kind of, you know, like people think of him as this bulldog, as a.

As a leader, and he.

And he has some of those qualities.

But Tony has always been someone who has submitted to others.

When I met him, he was at Living Waters.

He's.

He submitted to the authority of Living Waters very much to the point where he wouldn't talk publicly about some of his views, specifically his Calvinistic views.

He wouldn't speak about that because that was not what Living Waters wanted.

And, and even in private, he would not do that because he, he respected that authority.

When he went and started working after he left Living Waters, he worked for karma for a bit.

It was the same thing.

Then he started working, working with Jeff Rose, and.

And now he's in this.

In this church.

So where a lot of people think of Tony as a, as a leader, he has those qualities.

But Tony's not the guy that is out in front.

Tony's always the guy that is under somebody which, and it's admirable.

He's under somebody and then, you know, leading that way.

So yeah, if, if, and if you listen to that sermon that going to discuss, you will see the obvious love and admiration for Mike Reed and for his eldership, for his pastors.

Now that's a misplaced love.

You know, it's bordered on.

It is cultish and, and he's, he's so far over the top on that by what he says.

It's, it's crazy to me.

But you're, you're, you're exactly right, Andrew.

Yeah.

And I'm trying to see if I can grab, let me, I want to grab some of the comments that people are putting because I look, we're going to say some negative things and I don't want it to be all negative because you know, Tony has really touched a lot of people's lives.

Yeah.

And I mean we wish he would come out of this church.

We think it's bad.

I know he, look, I know people who have contacted Tony trying to reach out to him after we did that series and, and people came back to me and told me just mentioning my name was enough for him to, to just block them.

He canceled them, just delete all relations, even people who were very close to him.

So.

But.

I mean, I think that's a significant sign that you are in a cult when you will just cancel people because they'll bring any sort of question about what you're doing and what you're involved in.

Yeah.

So, so, you know, I'm trying to look for some.

Okay, so here's, here's one.

D is saying I met, I met Tony in person at the Ambassador Academy several years ago.

He, he took my photo when I did my first ever open air sermon while on the 3rd Street Promenade.

Let's see.

Melissa said I never met him in person but he was doing the Bible reading on chat on YouTube, which is, you know, he's been doing that I believe.

I think he's still doing that.

So that's going on for like probably seven, eight years, I think.

Yeah.

Jesse says here, I remember Tony gave out his per.

His personal phone number to everyone at the Ambassadors Academy.

Yeah.

That's who he was or is.

And then this was D said Tony Miano went to gfc.

I had a lot of respect For Tony, especially with his boldness in evangelism, critiques of NAR and seeker sensitive stuff in the broad church.

So, you know, I want to, I wanted to put positive things up so people would see Tony.

It was and is well loved.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Melissa said, I met my pastor, not Tony.

So maybe I pulled that one out.

All right, so.

And it's going to be hard without Drew here to keep up with all the comments.

I'm going to try.

So if you guys keep seeing me looking over that way, that's why.

So you know what you end up seeing, you know.

Well, like Stephen is saying here, Stephen was backstage, but he is, is just watching.

He said Tony has blocked most of the evangelicals here in Iowa, you know, a few of them in Illinois.

And this is the behavior.

And so I'm just saying that to say folks are going to go, well, I want to go reach out to him.

Well, if you do this is, you know, expect to be blocked.

Yeah.

So let me quick add in, you know, Steve Johnson is a friend of mine.

He's still back in the Quad Cities.

He encounters Tony and GFC at community college called Blackhawk.

It's over in Rock Island, Illinois.

And you know, and at another college, Augustana, they can't stand Tony over there.

And it's gotten a lot of traction.

But one of the comments we're going to hear in the, in one of the audio clips is Tony talking about the people being across the street and having the courage.

Let's get into it.

Let's play, play the clips.

Sounds good.

Because we've, we've done a pretty good amount of setup.

And so I want to get to some of these clips.

So let's, let's start.

What I want to do is you had three longer clips and then I had some shorter ones so that some of them are in yours.

So I'm going to play the, the first clip is two, two, almost two and a half minutes.

So this is a longer clip, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna play it in its entirety and then let you comment you through, through the three clips.

So here we go.

For six years now, my church and, and I'm gonna.

Hold on, let me stop this Again, I should mention from the beginning, you're gonna hear poor audio quality on this, and I had no control over that.

I did try to boost it as much as I could, I believe.

Just my guess is that he is speaking at a church with a mic that is stationary and he's turning his head because you're going to hear the volume.

His volume going up and down, up and down.

I'm sorry about that.

I had tried to equalize it as best I could and increase the volume as best I could.

So sorry.

Yeah.

By.

And we may also mention, Andrew, that this was done.

Oh, yeah, 2022.

This was.

So this was done, really, in 2022.

I believe this was in response to.

So.

So what happened was he went out to California, I believe was the case.

He went to.

He was going to a church.

They wanted to do some outreach with.

With Grace Community Church.

But Grace Community Church had concerns after we did, you know, Anthony started doing the podcast series, and they just made the decision not to have him out with them on their Evangelum team.

And they did a response video.

Of course, it was a response video that they sent only to specific people responding to us.

Now you, you know, you were able to get that response video.

We did watch it.

We've talked about whether to respond to the response video.

But the reality is the response video didn't deal with any of the accusations that were made on this shells.

And so we decided there was no reason to.

To respond.

So.

All right, so let's.

Let's play it.

Here we go.

For six years now, my church, my pastor, me and my family have been reviled by a group of wolves who name the name of Christ, who call themselves Christians, who would even probably dare to have the word churchman come out of their mouth.

But they are communicating, right?

To a man and to a woman.

They're coward.

They have publicly excuriated me and my church and my pastor all under the offices of the love of Christ and the love for the church, while doing everything in their limited power and limited reach to try to destroy one of Christ.

But what these people have intended for evil God is used for such great good.

Amen.

The evil that would call my daughter.

Your intelligence, California at work.

So, never having met my daughter, knowing nothing about my daughter, knowing nothing about her own spiritual condition or walk with Christ, knowing nothing about her relationship to her father, and would call her at work and say, your dad's involved in a cult.

The evil.

The evil that after I was arrested this second time outside of an Iowa and in desperate need of legal representation, the evil that would track down who my attorney was, share videos and blog posts and articles with him, and convince that attorney to drop me as a client.

For the glory of Christ, of course.

Right.

For the love of the church.

Of course.

They will know we are Christians by our love, love for one another.

Right.

The.

The evil that would take my own wife's testimony as to how.

Okay, so that.

That was the clip, and we're going to get into more detail with that.

I just want to give a quick overview on.

On three points before you get into this.

And we're going to have to keep it somewhat short with these because there's a lot there.

We're going to break it up into smaller sections later, but.

So we won't say everything now, but first off, you can go back and look at what Tony did with the Church of Wells, the very things that we've done.

I mean, I, And, And Kevin, you could testify to this, that when this whole thing started and Anthony started talking about it and we had a meeting and I said, well, if we're going to do this, I want it to follow the same pattern we did with Church of Wells.

I want questions.

You know, you.

You come up with clear accusations.

Here's some questions that must be answered.

And.

And that's the 12 questions we read.

So Tony's calling us wolves for doing behavior he had done in the past.

The other thing is, and I asked this of you, and I asked this of Anthony because he's saying the wolves that do this podcast.

Have you ever called Tony's daughter or his lawyer or any churches?

No, I've never done that.

I asked it of Anthony.

So let me read exactly what Anthony said so that I get him verbatim with what he had said.

So I asked him the same question.

I asked him, have you ever called any of the churches warning them about Tony or called his lawyer or his daughter?

He said, not once.

I did have one church reach out to me after watching the videos.

It was a church that had hosted Tony one or two times in prior.

Prior years.

The pastor had already heard about Mike Reed and Tony Miano's involvement.

Involvement in the church, and had also watched the videos.

He called me after getting my number from.

I'm just gonna.

A friend.

I'm gonna leave that name out to just verify the information that we gave in the videos.

So it wasn't that Anthony called any of these people.

One.

One church called him.

Okay.

So I, I just want to put that in for the record.

When he said that he's.

He's attributing it to the podcasters, and yet none of us did that.

Yeah, I, I don't know who did that.

I know who called those people.

I'm sure probably somebody did.

I don't think he'd lie about it.

Oh, I don't think so.

But attributing it to us is what I'm saying.

I mean, I wouldn't do that.

I've been very clear, very open in my criticisms.

I've given, you know, we've given opportunities for response to those things, but their response is a private video, not a, not a public video.

So, you know, we could critique that video because I do have a copy of it now, but, you know, not necessary, as you pointed out.

But, you know, why would I, why would I need to do that?

I don't, I don't.

Yeah.

And, and so I just wanted it clear that, you know, we want be accurate and like, look, folks, I, when we put this up, I think, you know, last week, or very, very early this week, if it was Sunday at the latest, I think I, I sent an email to both Tony and the church letting him know we were going to do this and ask him to come on.

And I sent him a clip that I'll play later.

Anthony did want one thing from me to mention.

He, he, he said this.

He said we merely reported findings and had guests on that confirmed them.

When we, when, when you address these things, you can remind people that we have Tony and Mike Reed.

We, we have.

I think he meant given Tony and Mike Reed opportunities to come on the show.

I offered to even pull.

Wait, I, I offered to even pull a liberal media slash karma stunt to give them all a questions ahead of time.

So.

Oh, that.

I know what that's, that's referring.

He was gonna, he was gonna give them all the questions he would ask up front so they'd have time to look at them.

And, and he would.

He.

Anthony agreed that he wouldn't ask anything outside the questions he would send them.

So continue with what Anthony said.

Mike agreed to let me have access to Tony, which he reneged on.

And he also initially agreed to coming on Apologetics live and then also reneged and blamed it on his other elders.

So that was, that's what just Anthony wanted that for the record.

And so, so, yeah, so let me, let me play this second clip.

Unless you had anything you wanted to add on, as just a note, as a high level overview.

No, we'll dive into some of the specifics, I'm sure, as we go.

So, okay, so this is, this is a second clip from that same sermon, and this is about a minute and a half.

And twisted and make it something it wasn't on a podcast and in other conversations and trample underfoot the blood of Christ at the expense of My bride's testimony be evil.

That would be handing out tracts at a fourth of July parade.

And see a lady who's a member of my channel and accuser of being a member of a cult and warning people up and down the grave path that don't take their tracks, they're a cult.

Seeing me across the street, but lacking the spine to come across and talk to me.

That kind of evil, the evil that would abandon the so called brother in arms, you know, a fellow soldier out there on the street and if abandon him and not say a word to him for six years.

I have a fear, I'm sure for some of getting a little bit of the mud on them.

That kind of evil, that kind of evil that brother Paul got a glimpse of briefly.

God has used good amen in my.

Life.

Convincing me all the more of the evangelist biblical responsibility.

Okay, so in that, with that, you know, he calls it evil for the twisting of his wife's testimony was the main part.

I think you want in that.

Is there anything else you wanted?

I mean we'll get into some of this.

He plays the victim of how these people mistreated him, not spoke to him.

Yeah.

Mind you, Tony has had ample opportunity to speak to me and has yet to do that.

He knows my number, he knows my email.

I know for a fact what he says about me because what he doesn't know is someone called me up while on speakerphone with him as he was berating someone about me.

So I know what was said and it's interesting because those are things he never said to me.

Okay, so we'll get that in more detail.

But I did want to put this up for you, Kevin.

This is, I, I had to find this on an archive and I was glad that I finally found this, but this was the important announcement of him going to the church there.

Okay.

And this is the article where he says, you know, people were twisting and, and you know, the evil of, you know, twisting his wife's testimony.

Well, I'll challenge folks to go back and look at what, what we said.

You know, it's, it's in this article, everything that we said.

So he, he ends up saying that his wife questioned her salvation.

Let me see if I could find it.

I should have just had it right up.

But you know, this is the article where he said that his wife, who had been saved for many years, started questioning her salvation, which is what we said.

So I, I, it's hard to know how we twisted his own words.

Now the fact that this on the Website was edited.

Well, that, that's not on us.

And the reason I couldn't have.

I didn't have this article years ago just for people to understand.

There was an article on the website.

I know many people had sent me the article.

They, people were like, you know, concerned because they saw this article and the article was talking about his wife questioning her salvation.

And so maybe this is the, maybe this is the wrong article.

Hold on.

I think.

Well, I'm going to just say something.

It's this one.

I'm sorry.

Yeah, yeah, that's the right one.

But back to the previous one.

You don't have to go back there.

But it mentioned.

Well, we're going to get the language, the language that he used uses referring to his pastors and elders and how their help, they wanted to help him mature.

You know, all this kind of language that he uses in this.

Yeah.

Is the same stuff he's saying today.

And that's, that's what, that's the emphasis of what I want this show to be on is just what you just said.

And that's why I had this one up and I just had it in the wrong order.

So let me do, do this one.

So this is where he talks about that he and his, his wife returned.

He and his wife returned home from Grace Fellowship Church.

Right.

He talks about that they had a week of intimate fellowship.

Right.

It was a good week.

He'll talk about the fact that he, he recognized, you know, while he was there some, some sin in his life.

And, and this gets into why we brought this up.

Like why, why are we discussing this now?

Part of it is because he was on, he's got a new book out and he was on a video here with, with your Calvinist podcast, a friend of mine.

And so talking about that, that brought it back up to light.

Some of the things show that there may he had admitted to.

And this is not, this isn't slander.

He admitted to it on your Calvinist and, and I guess in his book that he had an addiction to prescription drugs.

Maybe that's what was the sin.

I don't know.

I don't know that the full timeline.

But in here he talks about right here his wife Maria's reaction to their time at gfc and she struggled with thoughts.

And this is the reason we talked about her testimony is because here is where he starts to talk about that.

He says here at the bottom, I believe her confession was brought about by a week of being confronted by holiness.

What confession?

That.

That she may not have been saved for 27 years.

Oh my gosh.

I mean, I've read this before.

Okay, but if you scroll up just a touch.

Andrew, I want to read that one paragraph about legalism.

It says, Maria's reaction to our time with the GFC family was more intense.

Maria struggled with thoughts about gfc, which included thoughts of legalism.

While she was blessed each day, yada, yada, yada, she struggled with the thoughts that something was wrong, wasn't right.

Legal, Legalism.

Oh, well.

And then, you know, here's the thing, right?

Women are far more in tune to this type of stuff than men are for someone like Tony.

And I will include myself in that, in that thing, you know, if we have a good connection with another guy and we think, you know, this is a guy that I wouldn't mind, you know, I could be friends with, I could hang out with, we have similar interests, stuff like that.

I'm sure Tony was enamored with, with Mike right off the bat.

You know what?

Maria had it right.

Her initial instinct was spot on.

And what happened is it got.

It got twisted.

And this is what Mike is so good at doing and he is so clever.

And he will have to get you unsaved.

And he can do it by digging up past sins, by.

By prying into your life and exposing things in you that you may not even even thought about for a long time.

Time.

He just knows how to question people and get into them and then he'll get them unsaved so he can re.

Save them.

And he's done that with so many people.

And it's.

Oh, it's.

It's a repeating, repeating pattern.

And listen, I don't.

I don't know Maria very well.

I.

I couldn't tell you for with beyond a shadow of the doubt that she was saved or unsaved or whatever.

I don't know.

But what I know is that's a pattern.

And when she identified it from the get go, something's off with this place.

Boom, she nailed it.

And she.

And if Tony would have been wise.

And this is the lesson that I've learned for my own life with my wife, is she sees things differently than I do.

And you know what?

We're one flesh.

And rather than me having to be above her, we need to be together and we need to be working together for a common cause, which is the good of our family and the love of the Lord.

And I need to trust her instincts in that area.

And that's what they are so good at.

Tearing apart in men.

And women is this authority umbrella, this nonsense that came out of Bill Gothard.

You know, I won't mention other names that, that use this kind of stuff, but it's very fundamentalist, very, very cultish, very holiness movement, very intense shepherding movement, all this kind of garbage.

And you know what?

Maria saw it, so they had to expose her as being unsaved in order to get her saved.

Well, this is the exact thing that Tony criticized with Church of Wells.

This is the same pattern they did, is that they would go.

They would go into people's homes that, you know, as they would travel around doing open air, stay in people's homes.

And their pattern was to try to isolate one of the.

Either one of the children or even a spouse.

And what they would do is they had this pattern of occupying the family while one person was being separated.

And that person that was being separated was being caused to doubt their salvation and question their salvation until they talk to these guys at the Church of Wells and then they get saved.

And, oh, you should really be at Wells, where we're really doing things holy and doing things.

Things right.

And.

And that's what they would do.

So, yeah, that pattern is there, which is.

Which is why they got Tony just to back off of Wells.

Yeah, why don't you tell that?

Yeah, so we discussed it on that Wells podcast.

I think we did two or three parts of it because it was a long three hour video.

I remember clearly that one young man that was experienced, exposed, and, and they, they did all that, you know, they did that to these families.

But long story short, at the time Tony started coming to Davenport, he was still hot on the trail of Church of Wells.

Like, he was gonna go there, he was gonna confront them, he was gonna do all this stuff.

He was writing articles about them.

Imagine that.

He was doing YouTube videos about them.

He was adamant about bringing down maybe Church of Wells.

Well, he moves to Davenport.

I'm having lunch with him.

Mike Reed, Tyler Balcoma, who's one of the other elders there.

They call them pastors now.

They used to call them elders, now they're pastors.

So we're sitting around, we're talking, we're having lunch.

Tyler wasn't an elder at the time.

So kind of me and Tyler are kind of the guys that are being mentored by Mike along the path.

And Tony was there.

And somehow this topic comes up and Mike says something to Tony like, you know, we could be.

We have a lot of similarities of Wells.

We could be accused of being the same as being Church of Wells.

And after that lunch meeting, I never heard a thing again about Church of Wells.

And I have no proof of it.

I have no evidence of anything other than the fact that boom, man, Tony all was sudden stopped talking about Wells.

And you know, if I know Mike Reed, and I know Mike Reed fairly well, they had that conversation, he's like, I think you should back off.

And no evidence of that, but other than the fact that you never heard a thing again again about it from Tony.

Yeah, and, and I, I, the little I know of her, I agree with Kevin McDonald says, Kev, she was a model of humility in our study in 2015, a model of Christian maturity.

I believe it.

She's a kind and sweet woman, I'm sure.

I have no doubt Chuck, Chuck O'Neal is saying, that's right.

Kevin McDonald, she, she was a godly, sweet Christian woman and a member of Grace Community Church until she met Mike Reed.

And so yeah, I, I, I mean I can't speak to Maria because I, I, I met her, I think only once or twice.

I didn't know her well.

She came off very sweet.

But, you know, I have no reason to question that.

So let me play the last of the three longer clips.

This one is over 2 1/2 minutes and then we're going to dig, dig a little bit deeper into them.

So that was the little elephant in the room and I'm not going to spend any more time talking about it.

I hope and pray that some of those wolves, some of those revival, some of those men and women who named the name of Christ while hating segments of his bride and some of his people.

I hope they'll hear this message today.

I'm sure they will because they troll my pages, they contact every church that asks me to preach and discourage the pastor for daring to ask me to come sending them videos and blogs and podcasts.

Pastor Matt has experienced that.

Brother Paul has experienced that.

Other churches have experienced that.

All that kind of evil God has used for good.

And part of that good was to remove me in many ways from this so called community of perseverance, a band of nomads who may or may not have some tacit connection to the local church or no connection at all.

God has set me free from so much amen.

And he's used these last six years under the love and care and shepherding of my pastors and my church family to show me sin in my own life, to show me how much I sin.

So what I'm about to present to you is far Less a sermon than it is.

And I hope it ministers to someone.

I hope it ministers to churchmen.

I hope it ministers to those who think they're churchmen and are not.

And I hope it ministers to those who loud say, I'm not a churchman and I don't need.

Now, considering the topic, I've been assigned the evangelist responsibility to the church, a topic I've addressed many times in different formats.

I thought the best service I could bring to you today, if you see yourself as an evangelist, is to consider almost two decades of mistakes that I've made.

So that's the longer clip.

By the way, he said a topic he has addressed many times.

I think the first time he addressed that topic might have been at Jersey Fire, an event that striving fraternity hosted.

And the term Nomad.

Although he takes credit for the term being created by him, and to an extent, he's right.

We were specifically, Tony and I discussing at the time people that didn't have a church home, traveled around preaching on streets and not going to church.

And Tony and I were discussing that and I said, we need to come up with some sort of name that describes them.

And he called me back and said, I have the name Nomad.

So he takes.

He takes credit for it and he came up with the name.

I agree, but he makes it sound like it was something he did all on his own and that.

Yeah, not exactly, but.

So he says that about people calling up churches.

Now, we've already addressed that.

Kevin, myself and Anthony, who did the podcast that he calls us the wolves.

We did not call up churches.

But Kevin, do you know who actually did call up some churches?

His name is Tony Miano.

Yes, Tony Miano, when he left Living Waters, was working for Carm, writing articles about Mar Cahill, who was what again, a friend.

He, at the time, he has, he just has gone kind of off the rails on Calvinism.

He actually is a Calvinist.

He just doesn't know it because he has a wrong definition of Calvinism.

And he is.

Was blasting Tony for Tony's views on Calvinism.

When Tony went to Carm, he wrote many articles that are still up on karma, I believe, on.

On Marquell and Calvinism.

He then went and called every church that, that, that Mark had on his website, contacted them and said that they should remove him because he's a problem.

Tony did that.

Tony did that to me as well.

For folks who don't know the history, we, you know, it's been several years since we did the first episodes, but the reason I started going to Shepherd's conference is because Tony was Tony.

And this is how, you know, Chuck O'Neill and I got to meet.

Basically what happened was Tony was, was saying things about me.

He was not really wanting to talk to me about it, but talk about it to others.

He was calling churches in different places where I had events and he was contacting them to get me uninvited.

And he succeeded in some.

One that I had was a long standing thing in the super bowl outreach.

I used to lead teams there all the time.

And so I went out there and we, we went out.

I went there for the purpose of reconciliation.

So he wasn't responding to phone, phone calls, emails.

So I flew across the country so that I could see him face to face.

It took me three days to finally find him.

I said, hey brother, can we, can we meet?

He agreed he wanted to have Chuck O'Neill as his accountability pastor or he had an accountability group.

Chuck was on that.

And I said, fine, I'll bring Anthony.

And so the four of us met.

The reality is Chuck ended up apologizing to me for, for siding with his friend at first because he ended up realizing that the things I said were right.

He actually, in the meeting had, had admitted that Tony was wrong with, with judging my motives.

And you know, and then at that point Tony kind of switched gears.

But Tony had done these very things.

But he accuses the three of us of doing it, and we did not do that.

But that is Tony's behavior.

So whether it actually happened or not, I don't know.

But I could picture it being something where Tony is expecting it to happen.

Yeah.

What is interesting about all of that is, you know, you practice Matthew 18 and it was successful to some degree, you know, and what GFC has accused us of is not practicing Matthew 18, not going to them, not talking about these things, not reconciling with the church, which I do want to address, which is just not true.

Yeah, let's.

Let's address that because we have a bit.

Right.

We've.

We've invited both, you know, Mike Reed and Tony Miano on, from, from the.

Anthony did it on the very first episode.

We did it through several times throughout.

We.

I think every episode either Anthony or I would do a public appeal for them to come.

I did.

I sent an email.

You know this because I told you ahead of time, I sent Tony and the church an email inviting them on.

And I'm inviting them on now.

If you would, if you want to address these things.

I Would love to get answers to the 12 questions that Anthony and, and Kevin came up with.

Yeah, it's, it's easy for them to take cover under the fact that, you know, we did it wrong.

We sent him a letter and scurried out the door and, and never talked at all about anything that was going on.

But you know, I, I had four separate meetings with Mike per person, one on one with him and, and those meetings were about what I perceived at the time.

I called it legalism.

I didn't know what else to call it.

I, I've, you know, I've matured a lot in my understanding of this kind of a situation.

I've educated myself and I didn't know we wanted, we wanted to try to be respectful because we were still members in good standing at the time.

I still considered Mike my past pastor, my friend, my mentor on many levels.

So I wanted to approach it in a respectful way.

We always ended with some kind of an agreement about things.

It was always Jen and I's hope that the church would change and move, change directions.

But we could see that after the fourth meeting and then I sent a follow up email on some certain things and we had a discussion in an elder meeting because I was a deacon at the time.

We had, you know, Mike knew things were stirring and going on inside of us and so we had also observed how people had left in the past and it never went very well.

It never went well at all.

In fact, it not only not went well, it went, it went terrible, it went poorly, it went, it, it was, you know, slash and burn.

It was always destructive.

And so we knew from past experiences the only really way to lear leave an authoritarian environment, which is what now we understand it to be, is to leave and just leave and don't look back.

And we've received that counsel from, from so many people that are, that are trusted men, have godly ministries been in ministry a long time?

Just leave and, and that's what we chose to do.

So they will, they will try to try to say that we didn't do that we didn't practice these things.

But, but it's not true.

Yeah.

And you know, let me play this specific clip that, you know, shorter segment of that.

This is the one that I sent to Tony in the email because I figured maybe if he hears him in himself, in his own words, he would come on here for the discussion.

And here it is.

The evil that would be handing out tracks at a Fort 4th of July parade and see a lady who's a Member of my church and accuser of being a member of a cult and warning people up and down the parade path that don't take their tracks.

They're a cult.

Seeing me across the street but lacking the spine to come across and talk to me.

So he says twice that that is an evil.

He considers that an evil.

Well, the challenge is out for Tony Miano.

Do you lack the spine to call me up?

Do you lack the spine to come on here and, and defend your church's positions if the church isn't doing, I mean, those questions that were asked were yes or no.

Tony, you, if you, you're watching you, you know what we chose to do with having yes, no questions for Church of Wells so that there wasn't any way where they could do their, their games of, of using the, the, the, the twisting of words and, and long talking and red herrings and never getting to the topic.

We, that's why we wanted, and I think it was Matt Slick's idea, they had to be yes or no questions.

We did the same thing here.

I, I, that was the thing I said to.

Now granted, there's one or two that aren't yes or no, but I had said the same thing.

There should, there's got to be yes, no questions, not something that needs explanation, just yes, we did this or no, we didn't.

Do you lack the spine to come on here?

These are your own words, Tony.

You call it evil to lack the spine for someone to not come and talk to you when they're willing to talk to others about your church?

Tony Miano has been willing to speak about me.

I know for a fact because I heard it with my own ears.

And yet does he lack the spine to come on here and talk directly to me?

I flew across the country to, for reconciliation, but he won't even pick up a phone.

Yeah, I mean, they do the same thing with me.

I mean, in this, in the private video, I'm the chief reviler and in slander and, and you know, and, and I've had conversations with other people that have left long after we left, and they, they talk about you all the time.

And like I'm sure they do.

And I, that doesn't offend me in the least bit because I know I have, I have been the, the, the leading voice in making noise about them.

It's been effective to some degree because I know it's caused trouble for them and in certain ministries that they were doing in Africa.

I know it's caused some trouble at G3 I know it's, it's caused trouble with other areas.

You know, one, one thing that we have done that, that is if we see comments about the church on Google reviews or whatever.

My wife has contacted some of those people and we've had a lot of conversations with people that stopped going or took their comments down because they have no idea what they're talking about.

You know, they went one time and were love bombed and they think it's the world's greatest place.

So, you know, we haven't been shy about our, our criticism of them and I think that that's a biblical thing to do.

Well, and Tony thought it was a biblical thing to do as well with, with others.

And you know, we're, I want to get into some of the, you know, we talked about his church loving him and exposing some sin and, and things like that.

Yeah.

But first let me, you know, I want to stick with this because so, you know, he talked about lacking the spine.

He also said this in that sermon.

The evil that would abandon the so called brother in arms, you know, a fellow soldier out there on the streets and abandon him and not say a word to him for six years out of fear, I'm sure, for some of getting a little bit of the mud on them.

That kind of evil.

So, that kind of evil.

Well, Tony, it's probably been close to a decade that you haven't reached out to me.

Steven Johnson says it's pretty, pretty tough talk to Tony at a parade when he's blocked everyone and, and you know, so he talks about it being evil to not talk to him.

And yet his response is to block people immediately, to unfriend people.

Right.

And so I'm just, you know, I just, look, have some consistency.

You know, if you're gonna call it evil, then, then recognize the, the behavior you're calling evil is behavior.

You do, Tony.

It's.

And, and he's been doing it for a long time and far before I think I know who that was at that parade.

You know, Tony's been doing it long before that ever happened.

And what I like, if Tony does watch this and he listens to this and he hears me speaking right now, you know what I would ask Tony is, has it been worth the cost that you've paid to be a part of this great community that you're a part of, that this pastor that loves you so much, that is able to point out sin in your life?

Tony, how many friends have you lost that you would have called, that you would have called your best friends.

Chuck O'Neill, the first guy to sound the alarm bell.

Thank you, Chuck.

Yes.

You know, and, and, and how many others?

Countless.

Can you even begin to count all the friends that you've lost?

All the, all the people that were loved and respected you?

I mean, what in the world?

And, and then now that.

Not only that, what about the people that have left GFC since you've been there?

Okay, I.

One of my very best friends from GFC at the time we were there, they left a few years after we did and somehow I don't know how I saw it, found it or whatever it was.

This.

Maybe an Instagram or Facebook post of Tony and this guy on the street, my dear brother Joe.

His name isn't Joe.

Doing ministry.

Sidewalk ministry.

A few days later, the guy leaves and boom, that post is gone like that.

And I'm betting Tony is never.

Oh, wait a minute.

I'll bet you Tony's never said another word to that guy again.

Although when the man's wife drives by him, he yells at her from the street and bullies and intimidates her as she's driving up and down the street.

You know, I mean the hypocrisy.

I mean the.

I mean talk about not being able to see the forest for the trees.

Tony.

I mean, are you serious?

Well, you talk about friends lost.

Let me do this.

So I went to the Wayback Machine.

I wish, I wish I had gotten the dates on this, but let me share this is.

I should make this larger.

This were.

Was the folks that were had endorsed Tony when he had his website.

And so let me shut the banner off so you'll be able to see all the names.

So I want you to be able to see that at the, at the current time when he still had endorsements.

The.

The.

His endorsements are removed altogether.

Okay.

The ones that were still on there that we were at the time the last time was Todd Friel, Saitam Brugen, Kate Jeff Kirkland, George Lawson.

We.

We were told had asked for his name to be removed.

And same with Martha Mack, Emilio Ramos.

I don't know if the others asked for them to be removed.

I know the page is down.

But before we started doing the episodes 10 people had had asked for to be removed from Tony's endorsements.

People who endorsed Tony that removed their endorsements, much of it because he had gone to GFC and, and views.

He.

He had a couple of them are his views with women preaching.

But Phil Johnson, Ray Comfort, Emil Zwayne, Mike Andrews, Paul Yachet, I don't know how.

I'm probably not pronouncing it right.

Bill Adams.

Now that's an important one because Tony's ministry was under Bill when he started.

So you have, you have Phil Johnson, his pastor, removing this is before we even did the episode.

So you can't blame us.

Phil Johnson, his, his previous pastor that, you know, who he was under over there, Grace Community Church, Ray Comfort and ez, the guys he worked for at Living Waters for years.

Bill Adams, the guy that he had, you know, who had, you know, his ministry was under him.

Grant Horner, Mark Spence, again, someone from Living Waters that he, he worked with for years, and then David, Tom.

So I, I don't know.

You know, it is kind of interesting.

I don't see, I don't see Chuck O'Neill's name on here.

So I, you know, I know Chuck is watching, so I'll throw this out to Chuck.

Did you ever endorse him?

And, and it just never got on there or what?

Because I, I'm surprised that Chuck would not have written an endorsement to him.

So let's see.

Chuck says, I just see him putting something up.

Said, oh, oh.

He says Martha Mack graciously and biblically addressed Tony and exhorted him to leave GFC's cultic ministry.

Tony didn't engage at all, just blocked.

Yeah, that's the pattern, isn't it?

He's Chuck O'Neill said, Phil Johnson has called Mike Reed's ministry cultic and morally dangerous.

Actually, I, I don't have the quote up, but I actually have had a quote that Phil Johnson sent when Anthony started doing this, you know, so.

All right, let's, let's get, let's move on to some of these others.

This is where he talks about nomads, because what we're going to start getting into is this pattern that Kevin, you referred to.

Tony talks about how he came to gfc.

And as you hear that, as you already heard it, this is a pattern he has with every church.

Tony has had a pattern.

When he left the first church that I, I don't know the name of it, it was where, when I first met him, he was attending there.

Then he went to Faith Community Church.

When he went to Faith Community Church, he said the same things he, he, he left the church that the other church wasn't really doing evangelism.

This church was going to let him do, do the evangelism they exposed.

You know, there were some things that they, that it was a great community.

There was sin in his Life exposed.

And he just, he really felt community there.

They end up, there's going to be some question with this.

They end up basically they, they vote him in as an evangelist of the church.

We're going to hear later in some clips where he kind of denies some of that a bit.

But I have clips where he says that so, and so they make him evangelist.

He then leaves that church because they weren't comfortable with his open air preaching.

And yet then he goes to Grace Community Church and there he felt the real community, the holiness.

He leaves there, goes to gfc and it's the same story, it's the same thing four times over.

And I mean if you listen, a couple people listen to the full sermon and, and people commented about how it's all victim, playing the victim card.

There is a lot of that that you hear throughout his testimony.

But here's what he talks about.

The nomads.

Now when he speaks of nomads, I'm just going to say this was.

These were a group of people.

It includes Mark Cahill.

In fact, I'll just say publicly, I've never said this before publicly, but the reason that I refuse to go out and speak every single week or even more most weeks I, we have as a ministry, I.

None of our speakers can be out of their local church for more than half the year.

Why?

Because when I met Marill, I remember asking him what church are you a member of?

He goes, he, he goes, whatever one I'm at that week to preach at.

He had no church.

And there were a lot of the sinless perfectionist guys.

They had no church and they were going around just know there was, there was.

I mean, I remember, you know, a guy like Jeff Rose who started a, you know, now he started a, a church network.

But when he was in Jersey he, he left a, a sound church.

And, and he was just on the streets in Camden, New Jersey and he was calling it church, doing open air and he called it church.

That's not church.

Now I don't think Tony had, you know, Jeff Rose in mind with this, but at the time, because he was kind of working with Jeff Rose at the time.

But he's.

That when he talks about nomads, that's what he's talking about.

The way he uses in this sermon though is, is not the same thing.

He's using the term nomads now to refer to people that are in churches.

Yeah.

And are under their church's authority.

So I mean just, just give a listen.

And part of that good was to remove me from, in many ways from this so called community of open air preachers, a band of nomads who may or may not have some tacit connection to the local church or no connection at all.

God has set me free from so much amen.

And he's used these last six years under the love and care and shepherding of my pastors and my church family to show me sin in my own life, show me how much I sin.

So remember, I mean Kevin, he's, he's referring, well to his, his old church, the people he went out with.

Remember, he's saying that Grace Fellowship Church got him out of these nomads that he was with before.

Who was he with before?

Grace Community Church.

That's who he was doing outreach with before.

So when we hear him say this, let me look, let's play him in his own words.

Here he is.

This was an important announcement that he had back in 2014, February 24th of 2014, an important announce announcement that he and his family, he says when he and his family began attending Faith Community church on, on September 11th of 2011, they.

We knew after the first Sunday we had found a new church home.

In a month's time, the five of us completed the membership process and were recognized and affirmed as members.

So this was when he left the church, the first church that I had known he was attending.

I don't know that name.

This is the one before Grace Community Church.

He says here.

I immediately began serving the church as the Lord presented opportunities.

I served the church security team, assisted with the church's outreach events.

So, so he got involved in Awana, did, did all these things.

He says here.

Okay, about 18 months ago I began the process with my elders.

The goal in which was to have my elders commission me through the laying on of hands to serve Faith Community Church as an evangelist.

In keeping with the role of the evangelist delineated in Ephesians 4:11 to 14.

The process includes, includes meeting with the elders, a close examination of my present ministry as an evangelist, and equally closely examination of my character and gifting and the writing and rewriting my ministry proposal.

The process also included an examination of my financial accountability and ministry related funds, which in part resulted in cross Encounters ministry receiving an Eclipse CFA accreditation under the umbrella of Revival usa.

Revival USA is the ministry that does the sports fan outreach and that is Bill Adams.

So you see there was a lot of accountability in his life in this church is what he's saying.

This is why he liked it so much.

And, and they, they eventually make him an evangelist.

He says here I greatly, I.

I benefited greatly from the this process with my elders and learned how seriously thoughtful and prayerfully my elders make important decisions.

I mean does this sound familiar to what he we heard in this sermon?

The the elders extended to me a great deal of love, patience, grace and friendship including the process with one of the elders taking time personally helped me to rewrite my ministry proposal.

The elders were also very helpful by pointing out areas in my life and ministry that needed maturing.

They were always very quick to encourage, quick to listen and to and never afraid to offer their collective and individual wisdom, discernment and when warranted correction.

So we end up seeing that okay, so we see that pattern the same thing we heard with gfc.

Then he says the process drew to a close in December of 2013.

In the end of my elders affirmed they believed that God's call in my life was to serve him as an evangelist.

At the same time they found aspects of my life, of my evangelistic gifting and ministry, namely open air preaching philosophically incompatible with the evangelistic direction of the elders have set forth for Faith Community Church.

Faith Community Church family.

That being the case, the elders determined that I could they could not lay hands on me in the commission of Faith Community Church as an evangelist.

Then he talks about how he went from there to Grace Community Church.

Now I want you to note something in this article that he's writing after he has left Faith Community Church.

He claims they never laid hands on him as an evangelist.

Will have audio evidence to the contrary from Jersey Fire where he said the opposite where he said that he they did lay hands.

I didn't do the time.

There is probably an article where he.

I I know there was an article where he wrote about it and he said that they laid hands on him.

So if anyone wants go go back it's going to be between the time frame of what 2011 and 2023, those years that he did that.

Okay.

He comes to Grace Community Church and he and basically he's an output for the audio podcast.

I'll put the links in the audio podcast but for folks that don't know, you could apologize.

Live is an audio podcast.

You can follow and get it every week downloaded to you.

But he basically is going to say the same things here.

You know how he, he goes to Grace Community Church and, and he had meetings with two of the pastors here.

If you see this line, you know during which they discuss the life and ministry and the these things and under their, their, the Leadership, you know, and after counseling with his, his wife and his daughters in prayer, they came to, to come to Grace Community Church.

Okay, so, so it's a similar thing that we end up seeing.

And, and I'm just, I'm belaboring this to say when he makes these claims, it's nothing new.

It's just.

There's nothing new there.

Kevin, you have thoughts on that?

Well, yeah, man.

I, I mean, what I, what I find fascinating, and we hear it in this, in these audio clips.

He talks so much about this sin in his life, and he says it in those, in those articles.

All this sin in his life, that's being pointed out.

I got sin in my life.

I'm sure you got sin in your life, Andrew.

What?

I don't, I don't dwell on it like, am I saved or not?

Well, if I'm saved, my sin is forgiven, right?

Past, future, present, everything is covered.

It is finished.

And this is a tactic of Grace Fellowship Church.

Like I talked about earlier about they got to unsave you so they can re.

Save you.

The focus on sin and holiness and beating that drum nonstop, it leaves a person with a severe lack of assurance of their salvation.

It leaves it a joyless society.

It leaves you constantly navel gazing, examining your life.

You know, I, I mean, again, I sin, I am a sinner.

I will continue to sin, but simultaneously, I'm a saint.

I've been forgiven.

I repent of my sins when, when I know about them, but I don't spend this massive amount of time being focused on my sin that our church here in Albuquerque, they preach about sin, but they don't beat you over the head about your sin day in and day out.

And that was the destructive tendencies.

And, and now you, you factor in this shepherding movement, the close shepherding.

And even in that, even in that sermon, he talks about the close shepherding that he has always desired.

You know, it's just like you need a, you need a.

You not only need the Holy Spirit and you need the common, ordinary means of grace.

You also need Mike Reed to be on your shoulder telling you where you're wrong and what you're doing wrong and constantly berating you on your sin, man.

Just like this is taking my mind back to all these things, and it's, it's triggering, you know, it really is.

Well, I mean, you know, I'm going to play.

Put this one up.

Stephen.

Stephen Johnson says, how can you leave John MacArthur's church to move to Iowa and join Mike Reeds, who is scary and the leader of an abusive cult.

You can't make this stuff up.

But, you know, Kofi says something that I want to address more, more to the point, Kofi from Deep Dive Discipleship, which was a great podcast when he was doing it.

Kofi, why don't you continue?

All right, I'll get off that soapbox.

I missed that podcast.

He said, Kofi says the irony of calling out nomads, when you bounce from church to church looking for someone to recognize you, that's not healthy.

And honestly, that seems to be a thing in some street preaching circles.

And that is one of the issues that I have real concern with.

And I'm going to play clips of Tony or a clip of Tony.

The fact is, you're.

You saw that he said he left.

He left Faith.

Faith.

I forgot the name of the church now.

Faith Community.

To go to Grace Community Church because they didn't accept his style of evangelism.

And then he's, he's going out to, to this church now where he can do his style of evangelism.

He was, he was doing open air preaching before four at Grace Community Church.

He was, he was, I think he was even leading some teams.

But he will say later, we'll play the clip where he says, you shouldn't leave for those reasons.

You should never leave for those reasons.

But here, here's he's going to talk about.

And I, you know, you talked about his sin.

Let me just play the opening.

And folks, if, first off, if you're not following your Calvinist podcast, I encourage you, Keith Foskey, actually follow the podcast, but also follow the YouTube channel because he puts stuff on YouTube he doesn't do on that.

He doesn't put on to the, the podcast.

But this, this is the beginning of his interview with Tony and you can hear the whole thing where Tony talks about stuff.

But let's just play this beginning.

I thought I was never going to be able to open or preach again.

It was, it was not only my ministry, but it was the way I supported my family.

Family as well.

And I, I panicked.

I went.

I mean, it was.

Yep.

And that's why you should download them almost so we don't have commercials.

All right, I will.

I'm just going to stop that because I don't want to play someone's commercial.

So.

But yeah, so he, he, he panicked.

He talked, he talks about the scene where he panicked.

He, he was, he was on prescription drugs for anxiety.

He had, I guess it was Mike Reed that got him off of that.

And that is a good thing.

Okay.

It seems he went on them or went off him.

When I'm on them, off them.

It is kind of.

I will say this one thing.

The one issue I have with that, that clip we.

That he started out saying he was afraid for his ministry.

The.

The thing I find interesting with it is, you know, let me just give you some what got me with Tony.

For people that supported Tony, Tony would regularly.

At the end of the month, you could expect to see a message.

When Tony was still in California going, hey, I need, you know, like fifteen hundred dollars for basic living.

Now, after his wife was done homeschooling the girls, she went out and got a job.

The wife was the, The.

The earner of the family.

Tony's ministry was doing some evangelism and begging people online for money.

That's why I wouldn't have.

I didn't donate to him.

Okay.

So when he talks about a fear of his, his, you know, this is his livelihood.

It was his wife who was his livelihood.

His wife was the one who, who earned the money.

You know, she had.

She was the one that went out to work.

So it's like, you know, but it's just, he's.

He.

He's.

He's going to say he, you know, these are his sins.

So he was on, you know, and this is what I guess his latest book is about.

And so he wants us to learn from his mistakes.

He's going to say that in this clip.

Now I'm considering the topic.

I've been assigned the evangelist responsibility to the church.

The topic I've addressed many times and in different formats.

I thought the best service I could bring to you today, if you see yourself as an evangelist, is to consider almost two decades of mistakes that I've made and encourage you.

I want to help you with love for you, with love for those who reviled me and my church and my family.

I want to help you avoid telling yourself and others the lies I told myself and others for years.

So he, he.

This is the reason I play that clip is because this is the same thing he said with why he came to, you know, his church before Grace Community Church, why he came to Grace Community Church.

It's the same pattern.

It's over and over again.

Phil is asking this question.

He says, is Keith Foskey still supports Tony, Good coach.

So I don't know if he ever supported him financially, but he, he, he supports.

He at least supported him enough to write an endorsement on the book, have him on the podcast.

So I did I talked to him just to say, you know, are you aware of any of the issues with his church?

You know, and he.

He basically said he doesn't have time.

He knows that there's some strange things he's heard.

That's what everyone says.

It's just weird.

He heard some weird things.

But people want to separate that from Tony because they.

They love Tony.

And I get that.

I just want to say something about that because I think this is a good time to interject it.

One of the things Tony does is he calls us wolves.

Wolves.

And he calls us cowards.

You know, I've written an article or two on the topic of wolves.

What is a wolf?

You know, we have two primary texts in the New Testament that deal with wolves, which is Acts 20, where Paul is exhorting the Ephesian elders that after my departure, savage wolves will come in, not sparing the.

The flock, and they'll rise up from within your own ranks.

Right.

The other primary text is Matthew 7, where Jesus says, beware of false prophets.

Inwardly, they are wolves dressed in sheep's clothing.

And, you know, and they will.

You will recognize them by their fruits.

Okay, so when.

When we're called wolves, first of all, like, we don't really meet that biblical definition of not being like the pastor of a CH Church, which is what Paul is talking about.

But if you want to make an application that we've done damage to them, they might consider that being a wolf.

But what a wolf actually is is a person who's a teacher or a pastor in a church that is doing damage to the flock of God.

And if Mike Reed doesn't fit that definition of a wolf, I don't know who on God's green earth does, because we lined up a cloud of witnesses on this program alone talking about the damage that they've done.

There's.

There's at least a hundred that I tried to put a name to on a piece of paper of the people that have left and been damaged in one way, shape, or form or another.

Mike has scattered the flock.

He's done spiritual, irreparable harm to countless, many people.

And he fits.

He is a total biblical definition of what a wolf is.

And so Tony can refer to me and you and Anthony or whoever he wants to, as a wolf, but the reality is that his pastor is the one who.

Who fits that definition.

Yeah.

And, I mean, look, I think guys like Keith Foskey, myself, before Anthony started this, I just said, okay, having people kiss on the lips, weird, you know, not my thing.

Meeting with women alone on a regular basis, not advisable.

But I wasn't willing to say they were a cult.

I wasn't willing to say they were, you know, that the church was bad.

Why?

Because, you know, me, like many others, just didn't have time to investigate it.

It was only because you and Anthony came on this show and.

Well, because it's my show.

I was.

I was, you know, I was, you know, either watching, you know, the weeks I couldn't be there, or.

Or I was here and realized, wow, there's a lot here.

This is really bad.

And it got.

I think it was the episode when we had all those six or seven people come in and one after another talking about the controlling behavior that I realized, no, this.

This is a cult.

And.

And I ended up, you know, kind of apologizing to Anthony there because he was right and I was wrong.

I.

I said, hey, why?

I wasn't.

Not that I was wrong.

I just said he, you know, you got to be careful calling it a cult unless it really fits the definition.

But you didn't have a full orbed understanding at that time.

And.

And I'm so thankful for Anthony and I mean, the hundred hours or so, whatever.

He put in too much time.

Examine this.

Yeah.

You know, that's unbelievable that he would do that.

And I'm so thankful for it that it was able to expose something and bring it to light.

Now, you know, hey, you know, repent and go back and clean up your mess, Mike.

I wish you would do that.

Yeah.

You know, I don't know whether you're right with God.

I'm not in the business of calling people, telling people whether they're saved or not.

He is, but I'm not.

I mean, we.

We will examine people by their fruit.

And if we examine Mike's fruit, he appears to me to.

To fit the definition that Jesus gave of.

Of a false prophet.

Yeah, I mean, so.

So the.

This is.

And we're going to go a little bit longer tonight just so we can get through this.

But let me play this clip because we're going to get into where he talks about the importance of church for an evangelist.

So allow me to cut to the chase.

If you are not a churchman, you are not an evangelist in any biblical sense of the term.

If you are not a churchman, you are not doing the work of an amazing evangelist.

You might be engaged in evangelism, but you are not an evangelist.

You have a responsibility to the local church.

If you are not called and sent out by the local church.

If you are not serving the local church, then you are not an evangelist.

Here I stand.

Okay?

So there he stands.

Now he says, you know, he went to JFC because there he got that he.

He was under their authority.

That's.

That was the whole thing, right?

He's under their authority.

Yeah.

And.

And that's when, like, this is as if this is the first time he was under the authority of his.

Of a church when he was doing open air.

And.

And so let me just play something else.

And I didn't send this to you, Kevin, but let me just play this.

This is.

Was done by Marcus Pittman many, many years ago, 12 years ago, that he put this together.

Tony Miano, a profile of open air preacher.

Profile of Tony Miano.

All right?

Where he says every evangelist should belong to a church.

Listen how he begins his open air.

And this is how he always would.

He'd start his open air.

Listen.

Good afternoon, folks.

My name is Tony Miano.

I'm a member of Faith Community Church, and I have the prayerful support of my elders and my pastors.

And again, I'm here today to declare to you the son of the living God, the Christ.

My name is Tony Miano, and I'm an evangelist.

I am a member of a church.

I am under the biblical authority of pastors and elders.

And I'm not.

Even if I'm standing on a box all by myself, I'm not out here alone.

I have the coverage of my church family.

More and more, I am seeing men and women out on the streets under the auspices of being evangelists for the Lord Jesus Christ who are out there as nomads.

They're not under the authority of any local church.

They do not submit themselves to the authority of pastors or elders.

They are not held accountable by older, more mature men in the faith.

I see so many street preachers, and I applaud the fact that God seems to be.

Be raising up street preachers.

But some of them, I wish they would quit and work at Lowe's or Home Depot.

They're just angry people who want to hurt other people and call them names and film themselves while they're doing it so they can put it on YouTube.

How I would give to just walk around a corner and see a street preacher who was just telling people about.

How glorious Christ is.

The Lord, the Messiah, God Almighty, lion of the tribe of Judah, who once came as a baby, humble in a stable.

But when he returns, my friend, he will not return as a meek and mild lamb to be Punished by his creation.

No.

He will return as the lion of the tribe of Judah to judge both the living and the dead.

Dead.

God is holy, God is righteous.

God is just.

God is good and God will punish sin.

But God is also not.

Instead of he is also loving, merciful, gracious and kind in that he provided one way and only one way for you to escape the just and holy wrath of Almighty God.

My friends, Muhammad cannot save you.

Muhammad is dead.

Buddha is dead.

Jesus Christ alone is God.

Jesus Christ is risen.

Jesus Christ is alive.

My friends and I worship a living God.

We worship a living savior.

And the only God who can save you is the only God who is alive.

And that is Jesus Christ the Lord.

When people think of the street preacher, they think of someone who is very angry.

They're yelling and screaming at people, they're calling people names.

There's no grace, there's no love.

And more often than not there's no gospel.

And sadly there is that kind of street preaching.

More often than not it's by heretics.

The groups of people that I refer to as nomads.

They're out on the streets, basically a law unto themselves.

And sadly I'm seeing more and more of these groups turn to heresies of long ago, full on Pelagianism.

Denying the imputed righteousness of Christ, denying original sin, believing in sinless perfectionism.

And more often than not, these men and women are out on the streets not bringing the good news of Jesus Christ, but only bringing the condemnation of God's law.

My friends, I am going to heaven not because I'm good, not because I'm standing on a box holding a Bible, not because, not because I go to church, not because I'm less sinful than the next person.

I'm going to heaven entirely on the basis of what Jesus Christ did on the cross.

It is Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ alone.

There is no name given among men under heaven by which we must be saved.

And it is Jesus Christ the Lord.

So I wanted to play that, that full clip because I, you know, it was some good preaching there and, and Chuck says, excellent, compare and contrast Andrew exposing Tony's deception with his own words that that's what we're trying to do here.

Sorry I put, let's see.

Oh, Stephen says, funny how he, he was a nomad at the same time he's railing against nomads.

Well, he was a member of a church but I, I, I wanted that clip just for the sake of, I want you to see the consistent pattern when he says he came to GFC and everything was different.

Right?

No, no, I mean, you know, we.

You know, we're focusing on Tony because Tony is the one that preached a sermon that we.

We had, you know, and he wanted us to hear it.

He said we.

We actually, I think we heard it.

We finally found it, like a year after he preached it.

But.

It'S two and a half years later that we're finally doing something about it.

And the only reason we are is because he's still.

He's still playing the same victim status.

Oh, woe is me.

You know, look, but this church is so good.

It saved me.

Well, then saved me not, but saved him from his.

His.

His drug addiction, you know, so.

So as we look at it, I mean, it's just what we're gonna.

I'm gonna.

I had the clip of his resume, but that's like 45 seconds of.

Or, sorry, 2 minutes and 45 seconds of him just giving his.

All the things he's done.

Let me play this clip where he talks about pastors and support, because this is where I now want to get into.

Not from that sermon, but from the sermon that he gave at our event, Jersey Fire, because here you see, you.

You see, he was.

He was an evangelist of the church.

Now in that blog article, he said that they never laid hands on him.

And because of that, that is why he went to Grace Community Church.

However, they did lay hands on him.

He was an evangelist.

And.

And they did all this investigation, but he said that they didn't like the open air, but they knew he did.

Open air, but let's give a listen.

But while it took my pastor a while to get on board, my pastor never discouraged me from hitting the streets.

And now my pastor is one of my biggest advocates, one of the biggest advocates I know as far as pastors regarding biblical evangelism.

He exhorts our church on a regular basis to step out of their comfort zone and to reach a loss with a gospel.

And he faithfully proclaims the law and the gospel from his pulpit.

And not long ago, the elders of our church laid hands on me and called me to the office of evangelists in our church, which is something that a lot of churches don't do.

So I am in a very good place.

Did you hear his own words?

I could bring the article up again here and we could read his own words and see if they agree in.

In his.

In his blog article after he left.

And remember, that sermon, that is from Jersey Fire, is before he was at Grace Community church he was at, at this church, Faith Community Church, where he says in this article they did not lay hands on him if I can find it.

But on that, as he heard him say at the time that he preached it, they had laid hands on him and they knew he did open air.

They endorsed the open air.

And his pastor not only fully knew it was encouraging him all along.

Right.

So it says here that his pastor's dance.

Ask him to stop.

I want you to.

I'm going to replay that clip, but this is the paragraph I want you to look at that I highlighted.

The elders assured me that they would not ask me to stop open air preaching.

They assured me that my family and I were welcome to continue to be members of the church of Faith Community Church for the rest of our lives.

They repeatedly, repeatedly reassured their love and care for and support for the of the Mayano family.

However, the elders collectively determined the best thing for me and my ministry to which they affirm God had called me to do, would be to find another church where the elders and I would be in a same philosophical on the same page.

Right.

So why did they do that?

Well, because of the fact that, you know, he had said previously they didn't lay hands on him.

It's the sentence right above your highlighted one and that, that being the case, it says the elders determined they could not lay hands on me.

So now I want to replay this clip with the question that I have for you as I replay it.

Does this sound like while he was at Faith Community Church, does it sound like he didn't.

That he was the nomad he said he was?

Does it sound like he was someone who was had?

Well, let me.

I'll bring up the words that, that he has said throughout at different times.

He said it in that sermon.

At one point he says this is a quote from him.

It was my ideas, my desires.

I went wherever I wanted to go.

I did whatever I wanted to do, unquote.

Elsewhere he had said this quote, I answered to no one, not in any real appreciative way.

So I formed and quote advisory board, unquote, groups of well, well intentioned Christian men who had no real, actual authority over my life or over the ministries they advised.

I had to make it at least look like I had some accountability.

These men were not yes men.

Most of them were pastors elders, but they weren't my pastors elders.

They could give me advice, but they could simply take it.

But I could simply take it or leave it, unquote.

Now I'm that's a quote that he says when he comes, why he came to gfc.

He came there because he was going to get all this accountability.

I know Chuck O'Neill was on his board, his accountability board.

I think Phil Johnson is or was.

I mean, Chuck, you're.

You could put it in the chat and we could see if that's true.

I thought he was.

And Phil Johnson was his pastor at the time.

But Chuck O'Neill has testified on the.

On previous episodes here that he did give counsel and advice to Tony and he was the one that just decided to leave it.

So if there was no accountability, it wasn't the accountabilities board.

They did try to speak into his life.

But I want to play that clip again.

And.

And you tell me after hearing this clip, if it sounds like Tony's saying he did have accountability in his life.

He was laid hands on as an evangelist in the Church of Faith Community Church prior to Grace Community Church.

Let's listen again.

But while it took my pastor a while to get on board, my pastor never discouraged me from hitting the street.

And now my pastor is one of my biggest advocates, one of the biggest advocates I know as far as pastors regarding biblical evangelism.

He exhorts our church on a regular basis to step out of their comfort zone and to reach the loss with the gospel.

And he faithfully proclaims the law in the gospel from his pulpit.

And not long ago, the elders of our church laid hands on me and called me to the office of evangelists in our church, which is.

Is something that a lot of churches don't do.

So I am in a very good place.

He is in a very good place.

The same thing he said with when he went to Grace Community Church.

The same thing he said when he went to gfc.

It's a regular pattern.

Chuck said this.

He said Tony met with Phil regularly for accountability.

Both Phil and I exhorted Tony not to subject his family to the ministry beneath Mike Reed.

And so Phil was his pastor at the time.

Phil had said that he encouraged Tony to go out there and check it out.

But then after finding out more about Mike Reed, he told Tony not to go.

But Tony had already made the decision.

So, I mean, Kevin, does.

Does it sound like from that clip that he did at our event at Jersey Fire, does it sound like he was unaccountable, that he was just doing his own thing?

He was a nomad, as he.

He said he was before he went to gfc.

I mean, it doesn't take a lot of discernment to hear that, you know, the language is similar, that he is very proud of the fact that he's got pastors that are accountable to him, hold him accountable.

That, you know, it is.

It's the same language that he's heard now.

You know, I'm, I'm sure it's off the charts accountability at gfc, you know, it's, it'll, it'll be a higher level of that.

And, and what he appears to be pushing for in that 2022 sermon is the fact that every open air preacher needs that level of accountability.

You can't just be in a church.

The pastors are okay with you going out in open air preaching.

No, you can't.

You know, they have to be beating you up every week in order for it to be good shepherding.

Apparently from what Tony's perspective is now.

Yeah, yeah.

So.

So the question is, what was he in a good church?

Well, let's hear him in his own words.

Back to club.

Frustration.

Misery truly loves company.

And I found that the more time I spent on the streets, the more time I spent with other Christians whose frustration I shared, the less time I spent with my church family.

And over time, I found it easy to justify the mindset because of the eternal importance of reaching the lost with the gospel.

No one's going to argue with that.

At least no Christian should.

And I began to see my fellowship with other evangelists on the streets as in some ways a substitute for my fellowship with my brothers and sisters in Christ in my church.

Before long, I was leading a team of evangelists and the work of evangelism became all consuming and I was becoming a nomad.

Some of us talked about forming our own church, one that would emphasize biblical evangelism in ways that other churches don't.

And we would grow the church from those who we saw receive Christ from our street evangelism efforts.

We were going to reinvent the wheel in Southern California.

We were going to show other churches how it's done.

Well, fortunately, by God's grace, all of us realized that we were either already in God glorifying Christ centered churches, or there were such churches nearby we could, could attend.

I cut it off too soon.

So what you end up hearing from there is he acknowledges this is when he's at Faith Community Church.

He, he said that prior, you know, he was, he was struggling with, I guess, whatever church he came to faith from, where he was, he was.

But does that sound familiar to what he said?

I mean, like why he came to gfc?

It's the same pattern.

Yeah.

And I think it.

It's the same with Grace Community Church.

I mean, he clearly said that in that article that he wrote.

And I.

I remember kind of hearing about that.

I didn't know Tony then, but him going there and maybe he was going to be, you know, going to the master's seminary.

I don't remember all the stuff that he was doing, but he might have been in a Bible study, leading a Bible study, but he was fully plugged in, you know, but that's nothing like what he experiences now, according to him.

See, and that's the whole thing is I.

That's why I'm trying to.

I.

And we only have about three more clips.

They're short.

I.

It's.

I, you know, but it's like, why beat the dead horse?

Well, because I want you to see that this is nothing new with him, you know, so when he goes out and he writes a book saying he's had these struggles and this is why this church is.

It made such a difference.

He said that with every church he's gone to.

Right.

He always will do it one more time.

Yeah.

But this time he actually would be leaving a bad church.

So here's Tony talking about.

Was Tony a novice?

Those who fall prey to the lure of nobinism are often young men who by outward appearances, seem to grow very quickly in their faith.

They devour scripture.

They're voracious readers and students.

They often show great promise and seemingly leave older Christians in the dust when it comes to their ability to retain information, and when it comes to their zeal and ability to serve, to preach and to teach.

But before long, the pride and arrogance of the old creature begins to affect the growth of the new creature.

They begin to see themselves as better equipped and more gifted than the older men around them.

And that may very well be true.

But when the novice starts to think about such things, even dwell on such things, they sometimes begin to brood about being held back by other leaders, older leaders, in their mind, they're not being given leadership, responsibility fast enough.

And eventually the frustration can lead to the novice, novice setting out on his own with all too often a few burnt bridges left behind.

I did that many, many years ago.

I did that to a church because I was a novice who was put in leadership too soon.

Okay, so the church he's referring to is the one before Faith Community Church.

Right.

And so he's saying that he left Faith, the one before Faith Community Church, and came to Faith Community Church.

He was a novice before he caused this problem.

Right.

So what we see is he left.

It seems he left the church before Faith Community Church comes to Faith Community Church because of the issue of evangelism.

He leaves Faith Community Church to go to Grace Community Church.

The issue being evangelism, specifically the open air.

He leaves Grace Community Church and as we played earlier, he comes to GFC saying that, you know, he again claiming he was a novice, he did what he wanted.

He, he had no accountability.

Even though in each of these churches he's, when he gets to new one, he says he's got all this great accountability.

I want to play the clip of what he says about a reason for leaving the church because I'm going to ask you.

He said he left the church and specifically he, in his own words, he wrote he left because of the open air evangelism.

They went would not make him an evangelist.

They would not endorse his open air evangelism.

Which you take those words in writing and you take his own sermon while he was still at the church.

I, I don't know how else to reconcile it.

But you.

There's no third option I could think of as the church did not lay hands on him or the church did lay hands on him.

There is no third option.

So one of those has to be false.

And since he was publicly stating at the time that he was ordained as an evangelist and they knew about his open air ministry, I find it hard to believe that the later one where he's explaining why he came to Grace Community Church was because they didn't lay hands on him and they didn't approve of it because you heard him say they did approve of it, they did lay hands on him.

And so, you know, I think it's more he's twisting things to explain why he went to Grace Community Church, but even so, it's about the evangelism.

Should we leave a church because of their evangelism?

Let's ask Tony.

Well, there's no way I can anticipate all the arguments against the position I've put forward.

I can anticipate at least a couple of them.

One is this.

I'm not part of a church because I can't find a church that supports or practices biblical evangelism.

Maybe that's some of you here.

And again, if your church is not preaching the biblical gospel, then it's not a church.

It's nothing more than a social club for professing Christians, both genuine and professing.

And if your church is not preaching the gospel, you are Obligated because of your love for Christ to leave.

You're obligated to leave.

If you're in a church where the gospel is not being preached, you are practicing idolatry because you're hearing something other than the gospel and you're affirming and supporting that false gospel.

By staying, you have to leave.

However, if your church is preaching the biblical gospel, then the fact that your church does not presently support biblical evangelism in the manner you prefer is not a sufficient or biblical reason to leave the church.

It's not.

And Tony admits to leaving two churches for that reason.

I've never heard some interesting thoughts regarding all of this because one, when, when we left, Tony wanted to meet with me.

We met.

I spent probably a couple hours with him.

Could have been an hour and a half, might have been two hours, I don't remember, might have even been longer.

But one of the things that he really stressed to me is that he had left churches the wrong way and he didn't want to see me do that.

And one of you know, well, how did you leave Grace Community Church to come to gfc?

It didn't fall under the parameter of Mike Reed's standards being sent mutual consent, sending death or excommunication.

He didn't.

That wasn't.

He just left.

He just decided, this is where I'm gonna go now.

So he made the decision all on his own.

But I find it incredibly interesting that he said, if they're not preaching a biblical gospel, you, you absolutely should leave.

So our contention, and it wasn't as clear at the time that we left gfc, but it's very clear now, is they're not preaching the biblical gospel.

They're preaching now.

People there know it to some degree, but the emphasis is on the law.

It's flat out legalism in its many different forms.

And it's a performance based society based upon how they view your sanctification.

That's how you're judged in the church is what's your level of sanctification?

And that's why Mike maintains control over people by examining their sin all the time.

And that's why he's, he's probably got his hooks into Tony in one way or another about some kind of sin in his life, that he needs old Pastor Mike to keep him on the straight and narrow.

And, and I mean, I'm hesitant just because you're.

Some of your, your comments are judging motives.

I understand you, you have lots of history and.

No, you know, I'm just, I.

We want to be cautious with it, though.

Right.

But you, you have a lot of history that you've seen.

So you've seen a pattern over and over again.

Yes.

And that's, that's what you're really addressing, is that pattern?

Yes.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's personal experience.

And I think if you, if you polled everybody that's been on this show that is a GFC survivor, they would affirm 100% what I'm saying.

Yeah.

Now, you know, you can, we can call it opinion, we can call it.

And they'll probably say, you know, you're this and that and whatever.

But, you know, that is my experience.

That is what we determined, especially later on, why it was such a drudgery of a place to be.

So let me, let me just put this up.

We're talking about accountability.

And then we have one more clip that we'll, we'll have.

This is from his, his website.

Okay.

About accountability.

And so he says Tony is a member in good standing of Grace Grace Fellowship Church, Davenport, Iowa.

Grace Encounters ministry is overseen by the elders of Grace Fellowship Church, Mike Reed, Nick Rowland, and Tyler Balkema.

These men are actively and regularly engaged in shepherding Tony, providing counsel, overseeing in his local ministry, his travel schedules, monitoring his social media presence, reviewing his blog articles, digital recordings and video prior to posting, and participating with him in various forms of street evangelism.

Now, I, I just put that up to show you.

This is what he has said every time.

There's nothing new there.

So what was different with this accountability they didn't have before?

I mean, because if he, if he thought he had the accountability before and it was rock solid, but now he realizes it wasn't, could he realize that the rock solid counseling he's getting from Mike Read is not so rock solid?

Yeah.

Like the heart is deceitful and desperately wicked.

Who can understand it?

Can we actually understand our own hearts and what we're sometimes being exposed to and where we thought that this was really good and then we learn later on that it wasn't.

I mean, is that what Tony would say?

Oh, I never realized.

I thought it was good at the time, but looking back on it now compared to what I have now, that was, that was terrible.

Yeah.

I mean, those guys weren't accountable to me.

These guys watch all my videos.

They, you know, I have breakfast with Pastor Mike every Wednesday and he beats me up and, you know, we're all good, you know, and, and, and I, I know that program.

I mean, you know, I, I wrote about it in one of the articles regarding the shepherding movement of the 1970s.

I mean, the, it's, you know, even the, the guys that started that movement came to realize how damaging is.

I mean, Mike has to know your business.

He has to be intimately and closely involved in your life.

And, and apparently Tony was, was looking for that.

Yeah, well, Tony always has that kind of relationship.

Tony always, like I said, he puts himself under someone else.

That's just.

That's who Tony is.

You know, the thing that really shocked me when you're talking about the controlling of GFC was the, the one woman who said that because she wasn't married, Mike had said that he was.

And she didn't have a father, that he was her spiritual father.

So her paycheck went into a bank account that he controlled.

They monitor it all and they set up budgets and they help them control their money.

And I mean, well, they say it's.

To control your money, but here this woman wants to spend her own money on new furniture.

And he didn't think it appropriate.

And she had said she realized that when she left the church, she was going to have to lose all her savings because he had control.

She can't, like she couldn't get her own money that she worked for.

That's controlling.

And that's, that's what a cult does.

But, you know, let me ask you, Kevin, would it be nice if, if Tony talked to us back at.

Back long before GFC days, if he told us, like, warned us about cults?

Let's, let's see in his own words again.

Good to know what cults are like, wouldn't it?

This is, this is again, back in.

In Jersey Fire.

So this is back, you know, where he was probably thinking Church of Wells, because that's what we were dealing with at the time.

Let's hear.

And if the drift continues unabated, the Nomad may begin to deny essential Christian doctrines.

And, and we've seen this.

We've seen this from men who once faithfully proclaimed the one true gospel, but now they are denying doctrines like the penal substitutionary atonement of Christ or the imputed righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Evangelists that take this unfortunate and unbiblical step toward Nomanism run the risk of becoming isolationists.

The kind of isolationism may also lead the Nomad to.

To wrongly judge other Christians and assign other Christians to hell because they don't believe exactly as the Nomad believes regarding certain points of doctrine.

And if such behavior remains unchecked, this could lead to the formation of cults like personality cults, or what I call we're the only true church cult.

Cults such as these are.

Are typically led by one or more charismatic leaders who convince their followers that they alone rightly divide, understand, and communicate the word of God.

And every other teacher is therefore in their mind, a false teacher.

Remember two hours ago I said this was going to come up.

One of those questions.

Did Mike Reed say they were the only true church in the.

The Quad City areas?

And the reason that came up is in.

And you remember this more than I, but I know it came up on one of the episodes you and Anthony did, that Mike Reed said there were only a handful of true churches, you know, I think in the world, one being the one they're planting in Africa, their church, Grace Community Church, which I think was removed from that list of true churches.

So this was long before.

I mean, what Tony is referring to is people who are the sinless perfectionists.

But I wanted to, you know, hear in his own words what he says about churches that claim they're the only true church.

He referred to it as a cult.

Yeah.

Now, you didn't know that clip, because I don't think I sent that sermon to you.

I saw your eyes when you heard that.

You went, oh, what are your thoughts?

That's.

That's exactly what he's involved in.

I mean, it is.

It.

It just fits it to a tee.

I mean, you know, those are the things.

I mean, there's a distortion of the gospel.

It's a law.

Gospel distinction that.

That is weighted toward the law and not the gospel.

They, they crush people's joy in their salvation.

They crush their security in their salvation.

They pound home sin.

They talk about authority as if it's, you know, it's.

It's.

It's all we know.

It's all we know to talk about.

Sin, authority, submission.

It's constant, all these things.

And, and they are the.

The authority of the church.

They, you know, I don't know.

They certainly wouldn't.

Wouldn't say it today because enough of this has been exposed.

But they've said it and they.

And they surely believe it, that they are the only game in town, that they're the only ones that truly know the gospel, that they're the only ones that are doing it right.

You know, it's just like that, that clip.

Oh, man, that is amazing.

And if.

Could.

Could Tony hear it now?

Could he receive it?

Could he understand that he's in that.

That he is part of that what.

He spoke against if he doesn't see it with what we did with that's good preaching.

That is good preaching.

You know.

Yeah.

Stephen Johnson said wow from Mike Reed's mouth.

He told me that his church was one of only five in the United States.

That was true.

Yeah.

How does he know that I wonder has he bendo mall?

So let's, let's, I mean let's go to some of the questions that we had before we do we we should give a word to our sponsors that, that sponsor the show and then we'll get to we got about a dozen questions that or comments that you guys have have brought up.

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So let me go through these.

We'll try to get through these quickly.

Just the ones that I had starred.

And I know I missed a ton of them because we have a very active chat and Drew's not here to catch them all.

So d had said early on, I'm wondering how Tony's close friend friends are doing if they're still defending him.

That is an excellent question.

It's one.

I know a couple of them come to mind, but, I mean, I think they've at least one guy.

I know he has sort of.

I, I, I think I don't talk to him hardly ever.

I think he's kind of tried to distance himself, but he won't call him out.

I think he wants to keep the friendship.

You know, if, if they want to keep this friendship, they can't, they can't say anything about it.

And they know that I've, I've spoken to like a half dozen people that contacted me, at least half dozen that contacted me and told me that they knew if they, if they talked to him about his church, they knew they'd lose the friendship.

And the friendship was more to them than getting him out of a cult.

One of those people actually endorsed his, his newest book.

So the Recognize the sin told me, like, this is absolutely, you know, he absolutely needs to leave that church.

That church is a, is, you're right.

It's a cult.

He absolutely has to leave it.

But he endorses the book because the friendship is more.

Now, when you get to that point, I'm just going to ask for all the evangelists who are against friendship evangelism.

What's this friendship sanctification?

Like?

We're just, we want to be friends with you rather than help you sanctify.

I, I don't do this because I, I have any grudges against Tony.

I, I, I do this because a lot of people ask for an update.

We had this.

We, we decided, we just, okay, we'll do an update and, and just lay things out.

But we do it because we want Tony to come to repentance.

We want Mike Reed to come to repentance and just stop the controlling behavior that this church has.

Stop hurting people and go back to the ones you've hurt and apologize to them and seek their forgiveness.

And, you know, he shouldn't be a pastor.

That's the bottom line.

I don't see any hope for that, for the future.

I think he really needs to repent, and he needs to get out of the pulpit because he can't help himself.

It's his.

It's his personality.

But, you know, he's.

He has done so much damage to so many people.

And, and as I've been listening to another popular podcast right now, dealing with spiritual abuse and damages, you know, that it just goes so deep.

And I don't know how people justify their ministries when they've been.

When they've been hurt that bad and hurt that many people.

And then, you know, you have this whole deconstruction of the faith because of.

Of this kind of stuff.

Man.

Listen, I.

We're still in the faith.

We love the Lord.

We love the local church.

We believe in it.

I'm a seminary student.

I love the Word of God.

I love Reformed theology, even though I think a lot of people in Reformed Reform theology needs some reformation in terms of.

Of how they deal with people.

But I, I understand why people deconstruct.

In fact, they've been just.

They've been destroyed by the church.

Kofi agrees with you.

He says the sad things about churches like GFC is that the.

That actual pastoral authority becomes viewed in the same way.

And that's the problem.

So let's.

Let's do these.

Maybe rapid fire.

A bunch of.

These are.

Chuck O'Neill, which I was surprised he.

He didn't come in.

But, you know, let's try to see if we could wrap this up quickly because I know we're a little over time.

This one I was confused with.

Jeremy had said, I.

I'm glad Tony is here.

I love him and very grateful for his ministry.

There are several things I am in agreement with him on.

I'm not sure about his church, but people don't submit to.

To.

To a biblical church.

I think he was confused when maybe when I said that I had a guest backstage.

He thought it was Tony and not you.

If I gave that impression, I'm sorry.

We did invite Tony on.

And I said that in the.

In the description.

We invited Tony on.

I prayed that he would come on.

I was really hoping that he would.

I didn't think he would, but I prayed that he would.

I really was asking that God would do something, his heart, to come in so we could dialogue, talk.

And, and I'll just make this.

I'm saying this publicly.

Tony, I, I know you're listening because you know the.

Because the church will probably respond to it in a private video and.

But listen, you or Mike Reed can give me a call anytime.

I will pick up the phone.

You you won't pick up the phone from me for all these years.

It's been over six years.

I will pick up the phone.

Unless of course, I'm busy and then I'll call you you back.

You know my number.

Let's talk.

I would be happy to talk this.

If there's things that I have said or on any of these episodes that anyone has said that is not accurate, we will correct it.

Yeah.

How did I start the show correcting something I got wrong in last week's show?

We have a history of doing that here.

I will correct the record if there's something.

We have 12 questions for, for Mike Reed.

They're simple.

Yes.

No questions.

They can be easily be answered.

I would love to get the answers to those questions.

All right, so Chuck O'Neill asks these.

And, and I think some of these are not really requiring an answer.

I think they're more, I think the question gives the answer.

Chuck O'Neill says, Does it make you a wolf to say a pastor should, shouldn't meet alone with women to give ex explicit sexual counsel?

Does it make you a wolf to say no safe or sane?

Pastor puts a teenage, a teen girl up in front of men and boys of the church and give her porn use and masturbation testimony and then put it online with her name.

So I, I, I think I, I missed, I think some, I think Tony had, Chuck had some others of, you know, does it call you wolf?

But I think, I think the answer is yet, no.

That, that's, that's not what a wolf would be.

Chuck had said this.

He said Tony, Tony met with Phil regularly.

Oh, I put this one up already.

So we'll go to.

The last comment that we have is from Steve.

Stephen Johnson.

I listened to Tony rail on about nomads at the super bowl outreach in 2012 long before he ended up at Grace Community Church.

So, yeah, it's, it's been a regular theme of his for a long time.

And so, you know, Kevin, I want to let you wrap up.

Is there, you know, are there any, since we've done the episodes, is there any other updates that, that you have with, with the church?

I mean, you, you've, I know when we talked you kind of were like, you were like me, you know, just kind of staying out of it.

I really don't, you know, you know, I'm sure Tony and, and Mike Reed don't believe this, but I really don't follow much of what they do.

We've been asked for years to give an update to do another show.

We.

We said no for years.

In fact, I actually told Anthony enough, like no more gfc and he wanted to do one.

I'm like, no, no.

And I said that for years.

I guess because he was with his new book.

A lot of people start coming to me, asking me, and I just reached out to you and said, hey, maybe we should just deal with the sermon that he said that he had preached and see if there's any updates.

So any updates that you can have for the audience.

Yeah, so we've been, we've been out of there since February of 2018.

So, you know, 15.

What is that?

It'll be eight years or something like that coming up in February.

So, you know, we don't sit around and obsess about them and talk about them and think about them hardly ever anymore.

When things come up, when people reach out and contact me and ask me questions or whatever, I want to do my best to love on them and show them support for understanding their plight or understanding what it's like to be in an abusive church.

We've been recently connected with a couple in our church here that has been an authoritarian, fundamentalist type churches, and we had dinner with them and it was very nice.

So the Lord has used our experience there to minister to others and we're very grateful for that opportunity.

I don't spend a lot of time thinking about them, but on occasion I'll still write an article about them when something comes up.

Probably the thing, the.

The most recent thing that I can mention is I think it's been about a year ago now.

Is.

Is a man there, a friend of mine that was a friend at the time committed suicide.

Side.

There was a lot of allegations of sin in his life from them.

At the funeral sermon, they preached about this guy's sin that I thought was just awful.

So I wanted to write some articles on that, you know, and so that was like the biggest thing.

And I, I've.

I've heard a lot of things, but I can't substantiate anything, so I won't even say it.

But.

But you know, I, I know more about it than I probably should or even want to.

But, you know, there's.

There's that.

I know they've added a new elder, you know, and you know, I.

I don't know.

I don't pay a lot of attention.

But.

But people leave and when they leave, they usually reach out and we usually rekindle a friendship.

If that was the case when we were there or we certainly talk about what's going on.

And, you know, there's a lot of people I know that left when we, like right at about our time frame, and then there's some people that left afterwards, and I know that they're still going through challenges relating to try to understand what the heck happened to them.

It's a form of PTSD because it's spiritual abuse.

And so, you know, we're not.

You know, this is just my opinion, okay?

I'm not against new fetic counseling per se, but I think that there's, you know, certified people that are counselors that can offer therapy to people that have suffered under these things is a good thing.

And I'm not against.

I'm not against secular therapy for.

Especially for people that understand trauma.

This is trauma.

But I know not everybody agrees with me, and that's okay.

You don't have to agree with me.

This is my opinion.

And so I think I want to see people get help, and I want to see people to understand what.

What a.

What a growing issue this is.

Okay.

It's a.

It's a huge concern.

We're seeing a lot more of it.

We've seen Amazing men like Dr.

Michael Krueger write a book called the Bully Pulpit on Spiritual Abuse, where he's a New Testament scholar.

Why is he wasting his time writing about a topic like this?

Well, he's.

He says because he's hearing so much about it.

So we want to expose that.

Tony calls this.

What did he call it?

A circus or something?

A clown.

Clown.

Circus.

Yeah.

Yeah, whatever.

But, you know, a podcast or a blog post.

Well, you know, what.

What's.

He does that.

Why is it wrong for me to do that?

You know, so that.

That's.

There's a lot of stuff going on, Andrew.

But what.

Praise God.

Every day that we're no longer there, we praise God that we're in a good church with good preaching and nice people and.

And not somebody that's asking me about my sin all the time.

And you've been there for a while.

I mean, look, I will admit, you know, it seems I.

I could be wrong, but this seems like it's.

As long as Tony's been in a church, so that.

That would normally be a good thing.

Right.

So.

Right.

You know, it's hard to get out of that place, I can tell you that.

We were there nine years.

Yeah.

So folks, be praying for Tony, Be praying for Mike Reed.

You know, they have a.

Look, this show is open if you want to.

You want to confront me publicly.

I'M here Thursday nights, 8 to 10 Eastern Time.

Apologexlive.com Anyone can come in, ask any questions.

You know, if we have a guest, we usually give the first hour to the guest.

But, you know, look, if, if they come in, I'm, I'm gonna give them the time to speak.

If they can correct the record, go for it.

But, you know, that was the struggle I had was that, you know, that first episode they were blasting Anthony.

Mike Reed was and, and saying, you know, like, I, I, as the authority of the ministry, needed to do something, but he couldn't tell me what Anthony did wrong.

He was, Anthony was slandering him and said, but what, what did he say that was false?

And he wouldn't answer.

Like, yeah, I want to, I want to say that kind of that.

Along that same line, Andrew, there's, I've written a lot of articles.

Right.

There's a lot out there that I have done.

I've been on your show a bunch of times.

I've been on a couple other shows talking about this topic.

If I, if, if you can show me something that I've written that is false, is not true, I, I, please show me.

I have no desire in my being to lie about them.

I don't need to lie or embellish the truth because the truth is stranger than fiction.

You know, so again, I stand by every word I've ever said about them.

Or, you know, that doesn't mean that everything I've said is perfect and it's according to my memory, but I would gladly correct something if it's, if it's slanderous.

And as we know, slander has to, to have the intent of knowing that it's wrong behind it in, in an attempt to damage somebody.

I've never done that to them.

Yeah.

And, and we do know that they have corrected some of their articles and things because they've either removed them.

Chuck O'Neal has, has documentation on that, showing things where they've removed it, you know, and so, yeah, I mean, they, they, they edit the stuff after it gets, you know, pointed out in the public.

So I hope that that's it.

I hope we never bring up this church again.

So, so, you know, I just, I, you know, I don't like doing these things.

I know.

You know, we have someone else that has a church that went through similar things as you went through, and, you know, he's talked about, you know, maybe having us do like, an expose like we did with GFC with that church.

I don't really care to do that, because that's really not what apologetics life should be.

It should be about apologetics.

But in a way, this is about apologetics.

I mean, yeah, I want you to see, you know, how did I handle these things that the accusations Tony made against us, I played them in his own words.

That's what I did.

You know, I let him speak and show him in what he has written, what he has said.

That's a good thing to do in apologetics when you're accused.

So.

And we are to defend the faith once and for all given to the saints.

And we have tried to do that and tried to defend against a church that is doing damage to people.

I stand by the fact that Mike Reed is a wolf because of the fact that he hurts so many people.

So I stand behind that, and Apologetics is defending my position against them on that topic.

Yes.

So thank you for coming on.

You're always an encouragement.

I love talking with you.

Thank you for.

Folks, just as a program note, we will not have a show for the next two weeks.

We'll be back on January 9, 2025, a new year.

So we will be.

We'll be back.

I think the topic for then is immigration.

Fun topic.

We got a bunch of people that were in a Signal group that I'm in, and they were all debating it, and I said, hey, you guys want to just, let's.

Let's do this.

So now I got to go back to the Signal and find which group that was.

On the 18th.

We're going to be having a debate on ghosts, whether ghosts are demonic or not.

So that will be a formal debate that we'll do.

And then on the 23rd, I'm going to have Greg Moore from Dead Man Walking podcast come on.

He recently had a debate on his channel and with someone that I actually used to go to church with.

And so he will be on and we're going to talk about that debate.

So I think that'll be good.

So, Kevin, thanks for coming on again.

It's always a privilege having you on.

You're always welcome to come back anytime.

Thank you.

And so my, my last encouragement is, folks, be praying for Tony, be praying for Mike Reed, and, and I'll do the open appeal again to them.

If you think we, we, we mischaracterized you, that we said something that's wrong, please reach out to me.

You know how to get a hold of me.

Both of you, Both of you know my email.

You've used it.

You have my, my number I'm not hard to, you know, to find, so.

But until next week, remember to strive to make today an eternal day.

For the glory of God.

We'll see you next time.