Welcome once again to the end of the conversations that matter podcast on your host John Harris. I'm gonna jump right to it because I don't have a

lot of time today and I have a lot of material to get through regarding the Church of the Nazarene.

I don't think I've ever talked about the Church of the Nazarene before.

At least I haven't dedicated an episode to that particular denomination, but they have, it's

estimated, over two and a half million members worldwide

so they are smaller than something like the Southern Baptists but they still are

significant in fact the seminary one of them that people go to if they want to serve in the Church of the Nazarene is about an hour and 15 minutes, hour and a half south of where I am.

And that means that even though there's a small evangelical presence in the area that I'm living now, there are a few Nazarene

churches around and different parts of the country have more or less. I remember even when I was in

Lynchburg there was a local Nazarene

church so and it was a conservative one from what I understand but this is an

evangelical denomination it is a denomination though that's like the other denominations that we've talked about on this podcast

has undergone in the last few years some of the same challenges and so you have the social justice

stuff we're not going to focus on BLM and race stuff

race-related fractures that the social justice thinking causes but from what I understand from the limited research I did do

those fractures are there in the Church of the Nazarene but I want to focus on something that I

think goes even deeper and is probably the thing just like what we see happening right

now at the United Methodist it is going to be the thing that probably truly

divides the denomination and so of course what I'm talking about is the LGBT-plus issue, affirming homosexual weddings, sanctioning them, that kind of thing is tearing the denomination apart.

It's not even the revoys same-sex attracted Christian stuff.

In fact, I suspect that that's already somewhat accepted even by some of the

conservatives in the denomination, but it is more this more very aggressive posture that some have taken. And I'm going to give you some names I'm going to take you through some things but I want to start

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