Welcome once again everyone of the conversations that now our podcast. I'm your host John Harris and we're going to talk about a an organization that I haven't mentioned at least often. I may have in passing mentioned the evangelicalical Free Church before, but we're actually talk about the

Evangelical Free Church today. And I have had emails and questions about whether or not this particular

organization or some some considered a

denomination has whether it's gone woke social justice all of that and I haven't

known how to answer that because I haven't researched it deeply but today we have with us

Pastor Craig Chambers who is the pastor at the peak evangelical free church in Pueblo West

Colorado and he recently returned his ordination. He's been in the evangelical free church for about three decades and as a working in that particular organization and so this is kind of a big deal. He has researched it and he has extensive notes and sources if you want to reach out to him, his emails in the info section and you can do that and you can get a hold of all of those sources and notes. But I just like to start off by thanking you,

Pastor Chambers for being brave enough to, and gracious enough to answer the invitation that I extended to you to be on the show today.

Thank you, I appreciate it, Tom.

So let's start with just your story a little bit. You just returned your ordination and after being in the

church for decades I would think that would be a difficult thing to do and probably not a decision that you took lightly I would imagine.

No it wasn't in fact it took me nine months from the time I really understood some things were going on with the

the Jelp teachers till the time I actually returned more

of nation because I wanted to take my time I wanted to look at what the

evidence was I don't want to have any kind of false things said. And I will say from the outset, I consider the leadership of the EFCA to be brothers and so therefore I am, I deal with them as brothers. But I, by necessity, wrote a, it had to be a strongly worded kind of document to say here's what is wrong and what you need to repent of.

And so this is something that just came about because I ran up into what was happening in our country, what was happening

in the believing world. And so I just finally figured out I needed to explore all these things.

Yeah, I'm glad you did.

Man, it's, there's so much information and I'm sure there's even more than you uncover that could be talked about and I'm sure we'll just hit the high points today.

What was the first thing though for you that you that made you question whether or not the

the evangelical free church was going in the right direction.

It's been a long kind of process in terms of understanding what was happening with EFCA because I've always met with all my brothers is, you know, in terms of pastors.

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