Welcome to the Conversations That Matter Podcast.

I'm your host, John Harris.

We have a special guest today, Aaron Wren.

He has been on the podcast before, but we haven't talked about this particular subject,

which is evangelical elites and the future of evangelical organizations. I think Aaron is very

smart on this topic. He knows managerial elitism. He knows localism. He knows institutions.

And hopefully we'll talk about all those things a little bit today.

If you want to know more about Aaron Wren, you can go to Aaronren.com and check out his book, Life in the Negative World, Confronting Challenges in an anti-Christian culture.

With that, Aaron, thanks for coming on. It's good to see you. Thanks for having me on again.

So you wrote an article about this topic, which sparked some thoughts in my mind about

evangelical elites and the institutions that they've governed. And I know I've asked you before

we even started doing this podcast, where you think this is all going, like what kind of credibility will evangelicals have in the future?

And you haven't had the most positive things to say.

So I think it's important for us to hear the truth from you.

But also to know if there is something we could do differently to regain or maybe gain in the

first place some cultural capital, as it were, and some influence, which is something evangelicals,

especially new evangelicals have wanted for a long time. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on

this. I mean, do you think that evangelicals are just

suffering from what every other institution has suffered from, which is a credibility crisis? Or is

there something uniquely or different going on with denominations and missions, organizations,

and so forth that are evangelicals. Yeah. So evangelicals are about a quarter of the American population. I think maybe it was

Ryan Burge who just published a survey 23%. So this is a lot of people. And yet, there are no

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