This podcast is sponsored by PNR Publishing.

Stay tuned at the end of the podcast to hear about Leland Rikin's highly anticipated new book,

40 favorite hymns for the Christian Year, available now at PRPBooks.com. Welcome to Mortification of Spin, a casual conversation about things that count with Carl Truman and Todd Pruitt. Mortification of Spin is a weekly

podcast from the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. Let's join this week's conversation.

Welcome. Welcome to Mortification of Spin.

I'm Todd Pruitt.

I'm your host as always and always joined by my co-host, Carl Truman.

And it's good to be with you all today.

We're so happy that you chose to join us. We want to talk about a subject that is quite inflammatory in a lot of ways. It is connected directly to our

current COVID crisis that we've been living with here, more or less daily since early March.

And we've talked about different aspects of this in terms of the church's ministry and

the challenge for fellowship and discipleship.

But one thing that we want to kind of really zero in on today in this discussion has to do with the controversy that

is swirling around Grace Community Church in Southern California. It's Pastor John

MacArthur and the state of California. Now let me just say that as we record this, it is August

17th. And so this is very much a live issue that is going on right now in the state

of California and just to give you a brief description of what has been happening it's kind of gone

like this back in March when states across the the union were announcing various mandates and guidelines for what groups can

meet and how small your group needs to be, et cetera, et cetera. Most states, if not all states,

had certain restrictions that they placed on gatherings of churches, and not just churches,

but gatherings everywhere.

And so the vast majority of churches at that stage were, I think, more or less happy to comply,

...