Hi, I'm John Leman.

I am Mark Devere.

And welcome to this special episode of Nine Marks Pastors.

Yeah, I thought we said we were done with these for the season.

I know.

But you wanted to talk about something.

I wanted to talk about something.

So here we are talking about something.

Nine Marks exists to equip church leaders with a biblical vision and practical resources for building healthy churches learn more at nine marks.

org.

This is a special episode thrown in postseason.

You may have seen Grace Community Church's press announcement yesterday on July 24th in which

MacArthur and his church elders, quote, respectfully inform their civic leaders that they

have exceeded their legitimate jurisdiction and that, quote, faithfulness to Christ prohibits

us, them, from observing the restrictions they want to impose on their corporate worship services.

And earlier this afternoon, I posted my own thoughts, and Mark, why did you think this was

worth you and I discussing?

Well, because I think you did such a good job in your blog of showing how you appreciated

the elder's statement.

And yet, I thought, raised good questions and you did it in a good tone.

I thought, oh, wow, this is like an adult conversation going on in public.

And I think in public, maybe it's just because of the way Twitter's often been used or some of the strains of conversations on other social media platforms, Facebook. I just thought there haven't been a lot of examples of this, and this is

...