Hey everyone welcome to the Conversations That Matter Podcast. I'm your host John

Harris for today's travel edition. I am heading to Kendallville, Indiana. I'll be

there tonight to speak to an audience there at a church and then on Sunday, sorry, Saturday, I will be in

Syracuse, Indiana for the Jesus and Politics Conference, looking forward to that.

And I am in Ohio, pulled over on the side of the road here there's a

barbecue place you can kind of see it in the background there and I just had some

lunch which is always good I don't get really good barbecue in New York

and the people are already friendlier.

You just, when you leave New York,

well, if you go south or west,

going north, you don't run into friendlier people as much, but if you go south or west from New York, you immediately run into people that actually talk to you.

It's kind of an interesting experience. So anyway I'm enjoying this and

someone sent me I saw in my messages as I was eating lunch an article from the

Gospel Coalition from today by Brett McCracken called

Stop Throwing Pastors under the bus and I thought perfect I wanted to do a short podcast anyway and so we'll just do this.

We'll read the article, talk about it a little bit and I read the first paragraph and didn't need to read anything else. I haven't read actually anything else.

The first paragraph alone sold me. So here's the first paragraph.

It says, I've noticed an increasingly prevalent genre of online evangelical Christian commentary in which pastors are shamed because they're

Insufficiently vocal about this or that outrage or not militant enough in the

culture war. Increasingly it seems there's a lot of social media mileage and

throwing pastors under the bus.

Now, I've only had like not even 10 minutes to look at articles on the Gospel Coalition.

...