Well, welcome everyone, once again, to the Conversations That Matter Podcast. I'm your host, John Harris as always, and I am very excited actually to have the guests we have with us today. We have Pastor James Coates from Grace Life Church in

Edmonton, which is in Alberta, Canada. And he actually has a new book out. We're going to talk about

this book and he tells some of his story and what he's learned and what he like other

Christians to know in a book called God versus government. And I just read this recently. It's also

on audible. I like to do my reading my listening I guess on audible as much as I can it was it was very well done but there's a lot of really good stuff in here so So, Pastor, Coates, thank you for joining me and being willing to discuss this with everyone.

Yeah, John, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

So I want to just ask you first of all the book.

What was, we want to get into your story and everything,

but what was the thinking behind writing this down?

Did you just think that others, did you sense the church was ill-equipped to handle the COVID scenario and that for the future you wanted to give, here's some biblical principles, was that the thinking or what motivated you?

Well, Nathan Boosniz was the one that the I mean number one the story of Grace Community Church and all they went through plus our story and all we went through those were stories that that needed to be told because they really do provide a wonderful example of gospel courage.

Uh, so there was that. In addition, I think the COVID 19 situation clearly exposed

the church's weakness in the area of ecclesiology as well as even our

relationship to the governing authorities. Romans 13 was just kind of quoted

as it was sort of matter of fact obvious that given what it says there we have to comply with

the governing authorities as it relates to their reaching inside the walls of the church and

dictating the terms of worship.

So it was clear that we needed to address this.

And so when I was asked by Nathan to be involved in it,

it was an easy project to be involved in for sure.

Yeah, and you, most of this, I think,

so it was you and Nathan, most of it though,

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