The Nitty Gritty: Is Your Church Declining or Dying? Here is an insider's View of How Church Renewal Happens.

0:00 Somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% of the churches in America are plateaued or declining. They're struggling. And when a church is struggling, it's not always easy to admit that and to know what to do about it. Though some churches just kind of die silently. But Jerry Watson is a member of a church that is going through a renewal process, and he's beginning to see signs of life there. And his encouragement to you, if you're among those 80% of churches that are plateauing and declining is For people out there that feel like your church is declining, don't wait, do something about it.

0:42 Now there's people out there waiting for you to ask them to come in. They are out there. They just don't know it yet. So I want people to actually believe and understand this process right here has been the best thing for us. And resources that work together to build up your local fellowship and the broader kingdom of God. Join hosts, Pastor Chris Cole and Dr. Chase Thompson from the Great Commission Association, led by Dr. Mike Stewart, as they explore the frontiers of ministry and aim for the goal of making every church flourish.

1:31 Hello, everybody, and welcome in to episode number 42 of the Every Church Flourishing podcast. Today, we've got Lisanne and Jerry and Pastor Christopher Cole, and we are talking about church revitalization again from the inside. And we're going to look at the high highs and the low lows and the emotional depths of when the church is dying and the hope that happens when the church is coming alive. And we say goodbye to a special friend today. Well, let's pick up the interview. It's already midway there. Jerry, to you, sometimes when we go through this church renewal process, it produces a tension between what happened in the past, like our good memories of the church we remember, and the church we're looking forward to become, the church in the future.

2:25 And that could be hard, thinking about all the great things of the past and then looking about looking to what we might become in the future. The book of Nehemiah and Ezra kind of addresses that tension when they're rebuilding the temple and thinking about the temple from the past. So how has your congregation, Jerry, wrestled with that tension? Well, you know, as mentioned, we talked about earlier about what this church at one time probably looked like, what, as far as membership. And we had some really heavy, pretty heavy discussions before we ever went down this road when we learned about what we needed to do. And we had to be realistic and real with each other to know what it's going to take to get back to anything like what it looked like at one time.

3:12 And when you do things like this, you have to understand that. And as you had said at the beginning of the podcast, that basically the numbers of church attendance are down quite a bit, and they have been since my childhood, and it's There wasn't anything negative about it. It was a beautifully renovated church. It was just, we went down a lot of roads before we ever went through Renew to try to do what Renew's doing for us. And we simply didn't have either resources or the knowledge of what to do to how to handle it. And we definitely want to honor this church and those that built this church by filling the pews with congregation, with people, with believers, that people understand who God is and his son.

3:52 And, you know, it's been a difficult time at times, but I know that we have each other. It could be three or four people I could sit in a room with and we could discuss this. And there's many times that Chris has been sitting there with us to discuss this. But I just want to reflect on what I've seen in churches before, what I know our church was, what I know it will become at one time. I've gone to Shoreline. That's more than encouraging when i'm gone up and set with those people that are giving what they're giving to us it's just unbelievable to see how unselfish people are and and and and their faith and their belief and and you know i'm so i so much i don't know how to express or either does our church just how much we love them for doing what they're giving us the hope we have along with chris smith along with chris cole it's been a thing to go through but man we're We'll keep praying on it and it's going to move forward.

4:46 Yeah. Amen. I love to hear the enthusiasm in your voice. So Lizanne, same question to you. Looking back to the glories of the past and the church God is calling you to become in the future, how is your church navigating the tension between those two things? Yeah. So I will admit, you know, there definitely has been a genuine grief in accepting that we simply cannot just reproduced an earlier era. You know, Foothill has had a history of planting churches, sharing the campus with other congregations.

5:28 We actually do share our facilities with the Chinese congregation and also a Korean congregation, and just an overall congregation that genuinely cared for each other. And those are things that definitely have remained at Foothill, but it's been a, it was a tough reminder that just keeping the doors open and protecting some of our familiar routines didn't actually equate to us actually being a healthy church at the same time. So, and Pastor Chris Cole knows that, you know, I've always been just this strong advocate of like, you know, we have to respect the legacy, you know, of the people of the church that came before us.

6:12 And it's been challenging trying to find that common ground where we are honoring the past, but moving forward, realizing, because like Chase had mentioned, you know, we, Ourselves also, we were just surviving and we had enough going on to keep the church going every Sunday. But were we actually a healthy church? No. So we, you know, we, and that was part of our struggle, right? We had families, young people that would come to the church on a Sunday and they would probably look around and see that we didn't have children or other young people.

6:55 And so they wouldn't stay, but we could not grow because no one ever stayed. You know, and so it was this vicious circle. So, you know, that was the decline of something that, you know, we saw Sunday after Sunday. Week after week, month after month, year after year, you know, was that we were not growing. So, you know, although Pastor Jim's time with us, you know, he ministered to, I think, like Jerry mentioned, we also had a very, a much older congregation as well. And so at that time, he ministered to the people that I think needed it at that time. But were we healthy? Probably not. We didn't have enough to grow.

7:37 We didn't have the means to grow, the systems in place to do that. We were just merely surviving. So both of you guys have heard me say this spiel before. So my apologies to both of you. But I'm about to say something that I say to a lot of churches that want to talk to us about church renewal. And that is this, that the Holy Spirit of the living God will never lead you away from reality. He's always going to lead you into facing your reality. And some people get this picture like, you know, if I have the Holy Spirit, the Spirit's at work in my life, I sort of can ignore reality.

8:22 And yet, like in Ezekiel 37, when we see the Holy Spirit giving Ezekiel a tour, he's giving a tour of a graveyard. And he says, this graveyard are the children of Israel. He says, you know, you guys are like a bunch of corpses. And that's hard, right? And then in the New Testament, we see the letters that Jesus has written to the churches, conveyed by the Spirit in the divine encounter that John is having. And we hear this phrase, let those who have ears hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches. And Jesus is doing that coaching thing or that medical checkup thing that Chase was talking about.

9:08 So one of the hardest things that any person or church can do is to examine ourselves honestly, right? That's tough. And we do have the help of the indwelling Holy Spirit and the Word of God to be faithful guides. And that's a lot of what we do in the early stages of Renew. And along the way, we try to get churches to have really honest conversations about where they are at. And Lisanne just gave an amazing example of that, of being able to say, hey, there are these beautiful things happening, but...

9:48 Maybe there's some unhealthy things happening too. So I'm curious, and you guys can answer this however you want, what did Renew or just the Renew process help your congregation see about itself, that maybe had been difficult to see before? So, what did Renew help you guys understand about yourselves or see through the work of the Spirit and the Word that had been difficult to see before? Jerry, we'll start with you. Well, first of all, you know, you had mentioned this earlier. We had to recognize that the neighborhood that we kept reaching out to might not necessarily been where we were going to build our congregations.

10:35 And in our situations, it is unique. But we had tried many times. And I think in the back of my mind, I knew it would probably, We needed to go outside of that. We needed help doing that. So that was one of the things that we had to have our eyes open to that. Did we have some stubbornness in our church? Oh, we bet we did. Did we ask for discussions over it? You know we did, you know, and that was sometimes me. That was sometimes my reluctance. It was somebody, another church member where we're not trying to talk somebody into something. We just need to understand the direction we needed to go. And I think for us, I learned a lot of history about our church. When you go through this process, we were well informed of what we have already tried. We thought we had all the answers when we met with you, Chris, and we've already done this and we got this. You already knew that.

11:23 You'd already seen this before. So I think for us, it was, for me personally, I was kind of laughing inside. And it's funny, Lisanne, when you mentioned earlier about having a member coming to church or a kid coming to church. And for me, it was a question of me looking at our congregation sometimes and think we might be a little overwhelming for this person. We might be, there's a kid showing up and we're beyond, we're all huddling around this kid like we've never seen one before. And in fact, because we wanted so desperately to have children and noise and kids running around and disruption and service and all these things that. As a young person, you're told not to do, but we wanted it. But I think we were educated. We had to sit there and we had to sit down and learn and accept some of these things that we necessarily didn't see or didn't believe.

12:11 And it was the best thing for me to see myself, to know that some of these things I felt were in fact probably true and were a reality. And it's funny when you talk about church and all this and how things have changed in our lifetime, we needed to change. It's a different time. I wear shorts in church sometimes. It's different. For our church, it's always, you know, come as you are, and we accept whoever you are. And that's how it has to be. That's what we're taught. But going through this, I learned a lot of history in our church, where it had gone and where it's been, and praise team, and all these things are different. We continue to pray and be patient. But as a group of people, we sit down and many times would have had some arguments over this and eventually didn't want to talk each other into this.

12:56 We felt like when your heart was in the right place and your heart was with God, we would go down this road together. And that's kind of where we've been going now. Yeah, that's so great. It's so true. By the way, Lisanne recently saw me in a suit because we did Pastor Jeff's installation service. And I was telling somebody, I said, you know, I used to wear a suit every Sunday morning and Sunday night or jacket. Times have changed. Lisa Ann, how about for you? Was there anything for you or for the Foothill congregation that you guys realized you heard during the renew process that you were like, we don't want to hear that? You didn't agree with it.

13:39 But you later on realized, yeah, that's probably true. Well, I can't speak for anybody else in the congregation. You know, as you had said, I don't think that there was anybody that's ever, hopefully, ever visited our church and said, that's not a loving congregation. And, you know, I think that's always been our strong point is, you know, especially when we got to the point of where we were when we needed to go through this process, we were probably about 10, 12 people, maybe in our congregation on a good Sunday.

14:20 And so we've all, the core people of Foothill that have been around and stuck it out the longest, we've always been very close. And sure, we were sustaining having a service and doing our usual routines, if you will, from Sunday to the next. But It was not sustainable. I mean, we always said, you know, this is not a matter of if this happens, it's a matter of when. Because sadly people were dying off in our congregation and it was just a matter of time. And so I think we knew that we were at that place where something was going to have to change.

15:04 And one of the things that Renew, I also want to stress too, is that has helped us is getting our processes in check. And I thank you, Pastor Chris Cole, for helping, you know, make sure we have all of our legal ducks in a row, so to speak, and all the documents that, you know, things that we just might've been like, oh, well, you know, maybe we'll deal with that later at some point down the road. And Chris Cole doesn't operate that way. And so, you know, having our, and that's not a bad thing. It's definitely a good thing. You know, I mean, our church obviously needed that because we'd never had anybody to really do that for us and say, this is the way things have to go.

15:50 And, you know, so in terms of processes, that has been really helpful for us to be working alongside the Renew and especially this pastor search process. I mean, I've told people, yes, this is the most complex pastor search process I've ever sat in on it and been a part of. But then again, If we had those processes in place, we might not have made some of the decisions of pastoral leadership in the past that we had that didn't work out, right? So I'm truly grateful for what, and, you know, Pastor Chris Cole has also been there to make sure that we get updates, you know, for the church, you know, face and facade and electrical things that need to be done.

16:39 And that has already been just monumental for the church and the ascetics of it as well. And so I'm truly grateful for that as well. Well, before Chase picks this up, and I know he's going to, I just got to say this. God gifts the church with so many gifts and different people that he sends to his body. And one of the things, if you're listening to this episode and you are a replanter, you're considering being a replanter, you're leading replanters, you know, we're always looking at what church replants don't have. And we need to be looking very often at what they do have.

17:21 And one of the things that I looked around at a very rundown building in Los Altos, and it did not look good. It did not fit with the neighborhood. And I looked around and I, guys, I can't tell the difference between two shades of green. I don't know anything about paint color, but God had placed inside this church, an interior designer with training and gift. And she's on our show, Lisanne, and she did a phenomenal job. And no, if you're listening to the show, Lisanne is not available for free for all of your churches. But she did a phenomenal job helping us re-engage the community well through the physical plant and its presentation.

18:09 And it's a beautiful facility and with beautiful colors and everything else that God's let us do. And I know... But similarly, at Red Oaks Church, that is one of the most beautiful rebuilds on the interior of an auditorium. And it was done largely by Chuck Williams and Jerry Watson and a few other brothers. Bob Goff just dove in there. It's a beautiful rebuild. So there are gifts within the body. I just want to bring that out as well. Yeah. Yeah, well, look, I hate to follow up such a positive, encouraging segment with a sad question, but there's a reason for this sad question.

18:52 I think it's one of our most important questions of today. The purpose of this question is to stimulate people who are listening, who are in churches that are in decline, to recognize it and do something. And sometimes we wait too long or even we wait too late before we start one of these renew processes or revitalization processes. And I think that's a great danger. So with that in mind, Jerry, my question to you is, what does church decline feel like from the pew? What does it feel like when you're in a church that is dying?

19:37 I don't want to be overly dramatic, but is dying. And we've heard from pastors and denominational leaders who talk about that, but from somebody who's invested in there pretty much every Sunday as a member, what does that process feel like? Oh, it's difficult to see a decline in numbers, to see members that, like I mentioned earlier, you definitely notice when somebody's not there, that tells you how many few members you do have coming from a time where you were, you didn't feel like you had a lot of room sitting in a pew because there was somebody next to you on both sides of you. It's hard. It's been hard to see that. It's a decline of what's happening at the church before we had moved, not to the extent that we're dealing with now.

20:22 I think we had to look at each other sometimes and accept that change had to happen. Sometimes pastors might not recognize that. Sometimes they do. We didn't have a consistent pastor to say that we had a problem, but we knew for sure that we did. The average age of our church is it's in all their congregations so along with some of the members when we went through this process like I had mentioned earlier we had to look at each other many times and say this is what we needed to do we had some wonderful pastors coming in but we want a pastor to help us with some of the things Lisanne did I've learned more from Chris Colen than I would have ever known operating a church in the state of California is not an easy thing.

21:04 I'm learning all the time things that need to be done. I had to open a biz file. I'm like, what is a biz file? Chris is like, well, this is how you do it. He sent me every detailed instruction in the world to do this. But the reality is I looked around every Sunday and there were people I didn't see that were once there. And I wouldn't necessarily, these are people that are deceased. Sometimes when a person moved, it was devastating. And we've had people move in our congregation. And a lot of congregations that are healthy and strong, that doesn't matter to them, but it certainly mattered to us. So, you know, you walk a fine line in between wanting to see what you want to see, God being there with you, but not being overwhelming when somebody walks into your church and think you have one more member for that moment.

21:47 And that you want them to come back next week. And there's times where they have, there's many times where they haven't. So for me, it's just a member of my church to see the decline in any church, for that matter, has been extremely hard. And we went, we're doing this for the reason that we don't want it. We want to see more in and not less walking out or less people, really. Yeah. And I think that's one thing that maybe pastors don't always realize. I'm super sensitive to, I don't, we don't take numerical, at least I don't take numerical attendance. That's one of our deacons does. But I know when people are missing. I know when families are gone. We're not a super huge church where you can't tell.

22:31 And I'm really sensitive to that. And I think pastors don't always realize that they're not the only ones sensitive to that. The members know it, they see it, and it would be really demoralizing to see that process happen. So, Lisanne, for you guys at Foothill, what does it feel like? You've probably seen a lot of ups and downs over your years with the church. What does it feel like when you're on a hard decline and hope seems to be fading? You know, every seat there represents somebody that's not there, either who was there previously or just somebody that is not attending church and getting to know God, right?

23:17 And for me personally, I don't look at that decline as... Statistic. It's more like this repeated loss Sunday after Sunday. You know, I certainly relate to what Jerry was saying about when someone new shows up with a child and, you know, everybody descends on them, especially when you're such a small church and there's a visitor. And yes, our church naturally always tries to go approach that person after the service is over to introduce ourselves. But, you know, maybe we were overwhelming because, you know, we wanted so desperately to build our church and then to experience that person, that family, those young people not coming back the following Sunday and clearly Sunday after Sunday, they're probably never coming back.

24:06 It was a repeated loss week after week. I think for so many churches that go through this process, you guys have identified some of the the common experiences, right? That you're feeling and you're struggling. And those are things that are circumstantial. They're circumstantial grief, right? The people leave, people move, people die, people don't come back. Those are things that happen sort of in the circumstances that you find yourself. But change almost always also involves some grief, right?

24:48 So there's the grief, you know, the grief you've been living in. And then there's the idea of, hey, if we're going to survive, if we're going to go beyond survival, we're going to go into flourishing. There's some things we're probably going to have to give up. And that involves a different kind of grief, a different kind of loss. So with sort of that in mind, I'm curious what you guys might identify as something that you've had to grieve or possibility that you've had to surrender. Maybe it was an old dream if your church was actually going to become what God has called it to be.

25:33 And I'll start off while you guys are thinking about this question of what is it that you guys have had to give up in order to get a different picture for the future. In the very first church that I replanted in Orange County, there were no less than five different sets of building plans and models for the church. The church had accelerated out of their birth into this booming growth in the early 1960s. They just exploded. And by the early 1970s, they were one of the largest churches in the California Southern Baptist Convention.

26:15 And they had all these dreams. They had these hopes. And along the years, they kept expressing that hope for the future in different building programs and different plans. And so as the pastor who was showing up in what was technically a megachurch of over 1,100 members, but had less than 60 in attendance, I was going through rooms where there were detailed models and buildings for what the church had once upon a time dreamed. And it was really hard as the present pastor to say to people, we're going to have to give up those dreams. Oops.

26:58 In order to get a new dream from God. So I'm curious, as you guys have been on this church renewal journey so far, what is it that you feel like maybe God's been calling you as an individual or your church, to surrender, to give up in order for your church to have a future and a hope? For, as I mentioned, one was that just the people that live around our church, that I see, that I drive by, that someone that I've met, that that probably wouldn't be the congregation that comes in to our church. That's extremely hard to accept that. To see the church that you see, Chris, that's been, we met in one room with Michael Cook there at one time. We met in one room in there. It was a back room.

27:43 It was the first time we were able to get together after our church had divided and we'd gone through what we'd gone through. The dream is not done. It's not over. but boy, to think that we're going to be in this sanctuary and it's going to be full. And it's not. That's been really hard to deal with. And I could see it full of people. I could see it full of kids. A nursery we worked on. And like I said, it's not a dream that's over. It's not a dream that's not going to become a reality. I know it is. It's just, it's been really hard dealing with this. And it's just been through faith and through prayer to keep going on this thing.

28:23 And when you go through this process, you have to look at your organizational things that you do. Things have to be changed along with that, too, you know, and we were apprehensive to do a lot of these things, you know, and it had to happen. I do know for me, my heart's not completely broken. But boy, when I saw that one room we met in to where we're at now, but it's not full of people. It's extremely hard to see sometimes. That is such a great example of that. Lisanne, what about you guys? What is it that you think, hey, maybe there's some former dreams that we're going to have to surrender in order to get what God has for us in the future?

29:09 Well, we had two kinds of griefs to contend with. We had the grief of multiple people in our congregation that we had lost, which included my father. And my father was a deacon of the church for decades. He was our musician. We played music together during every Sunday. And he was also the church secretary and our treasurer. And so he was a big part of Foothill also. And so him, in addition to Pastor Jim and Wayne and Dan and the other losses, that was one type of loss that we were already struggling with.

29:52 And so with the renew process, I think it was that need to accept that we were going to have to surrender control, right? Accept outside leadership and admit that if, and we didn't have enough to go by to know that this, the renew process was a sure thing. You know so that like in the back of our mind closure is still very real very possible if this doesn't work out You know and so i think we just because of us trying to protect ourselves we're kind of always waiting for the other shoe to drop in any situation and and that that that was a real viable option if the renew process didn't work out for whatever reason so yeah we had to deal with a lot of different types of grief and Absolutely.

30:49 So this will be my last question. And I will ask you, Jerry, to imagine somebody is listening that is part of a church that's declining, church leader, church member, deacon, pastor, whatever. And they realize the church is declining, but it hasn't been addressed yet. And maybe even reaching out and asking for help feels like you're saying, hey, we're a failure. What would you say to a church member or a church leader or even a pastor who's listening, who's part of a declining church, but is not yet willing to undergo a renew, a revitalization kind of process?

31:34 How would you encourage them, Jerry? Well, if you're seeing some of the things that Lisanne and I have seen, don't hesitate. If you're not saying it out loud, somebody needs to in your congregation. You need to be realistic with each other. It's not a pride thing at all. It's simply recognizing your belief and love for the Lord and His Son, Jesus. And you want to share that message. And whether others reach out in your community, no matter how far that community is. For those that are listening, as I mentioned before, we were not sure about this process. We thought we knew the direction we were going. We thought we knew what we were doing. We thought we knew all the above. And we didn't.

32:15 And as we went through this, we understood we didn't. So for people out there that feel like your church is declining, don't wait. Do something about it now. There's people out there waiting for you to ask them to come in. They are out there. They just don't know it yet. So I want people to actually believe and understand this process right here has been the best thing for us. As mentioned earlier, I don't know if the doors will shut, but I'm going to tell you right now, we're going forward with it. Be open to open-minded as a church. When you do this, understand that things will have to change. That's the biggest thing. Stubbornness will get in the way of a lot of things. You have to understand things need to change. What we've done to this point as a church wasn't working.

32:59 And were there members in our church that certainly thought they were? Yeah, for sure. We had to have a long, hard discussion about this to understand that they weren't working, that we needed something like this, like the renewed process to get us through this and help us and find this pastor and to build our congregation. Yeah, great answer. Great answer. Same question to you, Lisanne. Somebody's listening and the church is declining. They're seeing all the signs, but it hasn't been addressed yet. How would you encourage them to proceed? Very similar to what Jerry had said. I would say that to those people, asking for help is not an admission that what you have done so far is a failure or that the church's history was a failure.

33:47 It's honestly, I believe it's an honest act of stewardship to ask for help. And it is hard because it requires wisdom and capacity that we, they don't have alone. And there's difficult truths that come out of that, changes in control, protecting traditions and processes that have been in place for a really long time and I get that. But silence doesn't prevent the church from decline either. And I guess lastly, I would say from my experience is that God's help can come through a lot of different places and a lot of people that you don't know.

34:33 We had no idea what the relationship with Santa Cruz was going to be like. But to have strangers that learned our names, prayed for us, helped us financially. And I don't want to be remiss in pointing out the other multiple churches out there that have supported us, especially financially, which we're truly grateful. You know, every Sunday that Pastor Chris Cole would, or Pastor Chris Sansano would come up to the pulpit and tell us about another church that has donated thousands of dollars to our church, I would be there sitting there crying. Because I would say, why do these people who don't even know us do this for us?

35:15 Just so incredibly grateful that they have left our church and saw something in us worth saving has been just, it's meant so much to us. That would probably be a great segue to lead into my last question of the day, which is just going to be this. So we've talked a lot about grief. We've talked about the challenges. We've talked about what we see from the pews, and your churches are at different stages in this Renew process. But here's the question. So far, what has been some of or the most encouraging aspects of the Renew process to you? What has given you hope that, hey, genuine renewal is beginning, it's happening now?

36:02 What is it that you've seen that has led you to just be encouraged and go, yes, God is at work here amongst us? And Lisanne, how about you guys at Piddle? What's been the most encouraging to you through the renew process or what signs of genuine renewal or hope have you guys already seen? Chris, I don't know if I could say that there's just one thing. Like I said, I think I've touched a lot about what Santa Cruz has done for us and what they've meant to us and what the GCA team and I do. I want to call out everybody that is on our Renew Board that also included Harrison Chang, who was part of our Renew Board at that time as well.

36:45 So everybody with the GCA team and our board and the numerous churches that have donated to us financially and now having Pastor Jeff in place. You know, we have seen visitors come and many have actually stayed. We have had a family with three young children along the same ages of the pastor's children that have been coming for quite some time now. And so we have been seeing visitors that are coming and actually staying and that has been really encouraging. Okay. Well, hey, I would like to say thank you so much to both of you for your time and for not just your time for this podcast, but Your faithfulness as church members to stay in the boat and not abandon ship when things look rocky, when things look dangerous.

37:42 In the body of Christ right now, we are lacking that kind of steadfastness and courage that the Word of God calls us to. And I think it's greatly needed. It is greatly needed. We're too quick, I think, in this day and age to abandon ship. And you guys have given us some real in the trenches insights to what this process of renewal looks like, but also what the process and the pain of decline is like. And I think this would be very instructive for pastors, leaders, even denominational leaders to listen to what you have to say and get a flesh and blood experience of what most of the time they see in accounting numbers and black and white and that sort of thing.

38:35 So thank you for your time. Thank you for your faithfulness. Thank you for your words and your encouragements. And just keep persevering. And may the Lord bless your churches and give you fruitfulness and prosperity, growth and strength and leadership and numbers and a greater and greater capacity to glorify Christ in the coming seasons. Chase, may I say one last thing? Please do, yes. I saw this quote at one point, and it said, renewal is built through ordinary acts of faithfulness repeated over time. And I really feel like that kind of speaks to what you were just saying.

39:17 And yes, it involves a level of faith to go through this process. But it's so, so worth it. Amen to that. Amen to that. All right. Well, thank you guys. And thank you all for listening. Well, no soda review today. More important than that, we bid farewell to the founding host of this show, Pastor Christopher Cole. Thank you for all you have meant to us, brother. We will miss you. May the Lord bless you and keep you. And friends, I do want to point you to our website, GCASBC.org. You can find out everything about the Great Commission Association there. Please check it out.

40:02 Good day to you and Godspeed.