Welcome back to culture and Christianity. I have grown to look forward to these conversations. It's like an opportunity to have a cup of coffee and visit with some friends in a format that's not as structured as a sanctuary and certainly not as produced as a television show.

So I hope it's a blessing to you.

If it is, share it with a friend.

Like it, share it.

That helps us in many ways.

As I sat down to do this or thought about doing this today, we are just a few days into a war

with Iran.

And the president, I think, is now calling it a war and not just an action.

And every day I have multiple requests, inquiries, questions about the appropriateness of it or the inappropriateness of it,

or Israel, or the Jewish people, or the Middle East.

So I wanted to take a few minutes with you and see if we could respond to that and put it in a bit of a context.

You know, I think that there has been a passivity from Christianity for a few decades.

Now, really corresponding pretty much with my adult life and certainly with my ministry life,

I think it goes back to seminaries and how we were trained.

I think it goes back to the way we have looked at the world.

Our emphasis on personal salvation, and really anything beyond personal salvation hasn't been discussed.

We have very little obligation to the world.

Things like evangelism and certainly missional evangelism have been so downplayed in recent decades.

They've been labeled and lumped in by secular historians with

colonialism and colonial attitudes. So there hasn't been an emphasis amongst evangelical Christians

for quite a season now to do serious, missional work. I mean, there's some exceptions to that,

some notable exceptions to that. But as a general attitude that has prevailed amongst the Christians,

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