You were listening to The Battery Podcast. My name is Aaron McManus and I'm joined with my dad, Irwin Rafael McManus. How you doing today? I'm doing well. How are you? I'm doing so good. So good. Today, I just got off of a Zoom meeting. Okay. Some of our guys in Seattle, some of our guys in Mexico City.

Atlanta, LA, I'll over LA. I wanted to maybe bring this up today and have a conversation about a new initiative we are starting called mosaic houses, which we go back and forth on things that we talk about whether it's politics, whether it's movies, sports, faith, freedom of speech, being American, being international, all the things that we talk about. But today I wanted to kind of break down. Maybe you just ask you a few questions from like someone who's a part of mosaic. You can give some

answers or give us some long stories. I'm not sure what you prefer, but just kind of pick your brain a little bit. Is that okay? Okay. All right, let's go. So excited about it. You had kind of in like such mosaic fashion and ERM fashion, which is our our respectful title for you. It's Irwin Rafael McManus, ERM, you leaked our most recent initiative called mosaic houses on Instagram. And you had, and this is what happened. We're sitting in the office together and you're like, hey, I'm thinking about posting an Instagram

story, like on a post, an Instagram post. Awesome. And I think I just talked to you like, hey, you need to be posting more people want to hear from you post more, then you

would take a long break during COVID. You're not really social media based. You like basketball highlights. And we sense each other, stuff like that. But you decided to, we were planning this new thing called mosaic houses. And I didn't know that the

post you were going to make was like a five minute post on, but we were still talking about it. We're still in constant stage. It was still in constant. We only had the name and the idea. We

didn't really have what it was yet. So then, you know, you post it, then we get up and we were bombarded with people around the world going, I

want to be a mosaic house, I want to be a mosaic house, I want to be a mosaic house. And I'm like, okay, great, but we don't know exactly what that is yet. Now we've kind of

figured it out. That was my zoom call this morning. Been working on the infrastructure for the last couple of months. We are

launching at March 7th, which is pretty incredible. Yes, it is. And so I want to pick your brain, because some people might ask the question, so do you

don't think we're going back to church for a while for doing this mosaic house initiative. Well, that is a good question. I get that all the time from people or I get it from

more extreme levels of why aren't you worshipping? Yeah, you know, defy the government, defy freedom of religion, freedom to worship, you know, people get mad at

going, why are you a coward? Why, you know, don't you have the courage to worship? And yeah, I think it's so interesting. And it's always interesting that people question people who start churches when they never

have. And anyone knows me would probably know that call you a coward. Yeah, I would say that I've lived long enough to

have my own credibility on these things. But there's several issues for us. One is we're in the middle of Hollywood, at least this campus here. And LA is a very liberal city. And you can see there's a clear spectrum across America. The more progress to the more liberal. An area is the more concerned they are about COVID, the more concerned they are about the spread of the pandemic and of not meeting together.

And the more conservative areas are the less concerned they have about COVID and the less concern they have about mass and six feet of distancing and say what you will, that's just, that's just the reality across our nation. And so I know people across the country that are meeting every week right now and some people even in Orange County that are meeting at Orange County tends to be far more conservative than Los Angeles County. And you can, you can just map out the nation. And from right the left based on how the responding to COVID. And most may, in most states with big cities.

You know, from the cities of the suburbs are massively different drastically different. And, you know, on a personal level, I'm not concerned about it. I'm, I'm certainly not worried about my own personal health or well being in that regard, but mosaic has never been just about creating a place for Christians or a place for people who already believe to come together. And so we would never do anything that would actually hinder or hurt our ability to help people find

Jesus in LA. So our, our approach is still the same. We're looking at the situation, just like we did before the pandemic and asked the question, how do we do things in a way that creates a genuine authentic expression of who Jesus is in a world of people that don't believe in him and are not inclined to believe in him. And so it doesn't make sense for us to violate, I don't, I'm not making my decisions based on the government.

I'm making my decisions based on what's the most healthy response to our city and helping people as much as possible connect to who Jesus is.

So it's going to be a while before we can probably meet every single week. It could be a while before we're able to have corporate worship and you can tell politicians do not understand the church and understand faith when they say, oh, you can meet back together, but you can only meet 25% capacity and you have to wear a mask and you can't sing.

So the moment it tells, well, you can't come together in worship, unless you're maybe, I don't know, Catholic or Anglican or Church of Christ or something or Church of Christ. Oh, no, they sing, but they sing with without instruments.

They don't understand why we come together.

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