Spreading Life in a Culture of Death - Panel Discussion | KFW 2021

This great God, the transcendent, infinite, eternal One that we worship, has continually reminded the human family that there are two ways.

He instructed Adam and Eve this way in the Garden of Eden.

He instructed the children of Israel this way as they stood on the brink of the Jordan ready to enter into the Land of Promise. Later on, years later, hundreds of years later, Jeremiah again re-echoed this refrain. And I am going to quote to you in brief from Deuteronomy chapter 30 where God says it this way: "Behold, I have set before you life and death; therefore choose life." That is what God wants from us. He wants us to choose life. He has always wanted us to choose life. And He has provided the perfect remedy in the Lord Jesus Christ so that you and I, old and young alike, no matter where we come from, no matter what our cultural diversity might be, all of us may have life.

We are here tonight because we want to embrace life. We want to embrace the living Lord Jesus and His kingdom. We want to embrace the ways of God and we want to live those in 2021 for the glory of God.

We encounter as the human family makes the journey, we encounter a diverse set of circumstances and we are living in this time, in this day. And so we are wanting to address in this panel discussion tonight some of the issues that you and I face in this world in 2021.

So we have a panel discussion. Brother Joe Kurtz will be leading this panel and Brother Joe, you and your panel may come forward and we will look forward to being ministered to by you.

Let us pray. Gracious God, Heavenly Father, in the name of Jesus we thank You for the opportunity that lies just immediately ahead of us. We thank You, Father, for the blessing that we anticipate You to pour out upon this assembled throne tonight through the efforts, the inspirations, the instruction of this panel.

Would You bless them each one? If there is anxiety in their hearts, I pray Heavenly Father You would work a mighty calming effect there. If there is uncertainty there, I pray Heavenly Father that You would give them clear direction. I pray Heavenly Father for Brother Joe as he moderates that You would give him wisdom and discernment and that each of us as we participate, as we listen, as we receive, might receive with discernment that which is spoken to us. So use these, dear brothers, tonight, Heavenly Father, for Your glory. Work mightily through them, with them, with this people and may the Lord Jesus and His kingdom be furthered and exalted tonight. In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

Thank you for that prayer, Brother Kurt. Good evening to everyone. Welcome to this panel discussion that we are talking about tonight. The overarching topic, that title that was given to the talk is "Spreading Life in a Culture of Death." My name is Joe Kurtz and I am here with my wife Doreen and six children. We are from Granby, Massachusetts and I will be moderating the panel discussion here tonight.

It is our hope that what we share here is not just ideas or... but rather something that can inspire us to action and can inspire us to have more compassion.

I think what I will do at this time is introduce the panelists. And before I do that, I just want to mention that you can go to the website even now while we are having this discussion and you can submit questions there during this time. We need a couple of you to do that. It would be a blessing if we had a few more questions come in and those will be sent to us.

So each of the panelists... first of all I will tell you about the structure and then I will introduce the panelists. So first of all, each of them will come up here to the podium and they will present the remarks that they have prepared to share with you and I will be giving them about seven minutes to do that. And if they are nervous it is because they are not sure how they are going to do that. I was telling Tim earlier this afternoon that if I knew a little bit about how they make condensed milk that maybe I would know how we can do this panel discussion, how I could get all of this condensed into a tin can.

So they will present for seven minutes and then he will sit down and for the next seven minutes we are going to interact with each other. So it is like we are sitting in the living room asking each other questions and you are all welcome to listen.

And we will go through that four times. There are four topics and four men. We will go through that four times and then we will transition to the last segment of our time and then I will be directing questions to them that have come in from you. So thank you for those that have already presented questions. Again, go to the website kingdomfellowshipweekend.org. Go to the 2021 event. You can scroll down to this evening's event and there should be a link there. Click on that hyperlink and you can submit a question if we have time and it applies we may attempt to answer it.

And with that, the first topic is helping the homeless. We have Patrick Matthews here. He is all the way over on the left and Patrick is from Chambersburg. He is gifted with many ideas and much passion for getting things started. He has lots of ideas of what he would love to see done for the kingdom of God yet and he is... I would say that from what I have seen he is making the best use of the time that God has... that he has. Recently I was driving in the car with him and he says, "You know Joe, I wish I had started on this life a long time ago." And well, he is I think doing a good job at... welcome Patrick.

We are glad that you are here to join us. And he also has a passion for seeing things restored whether it is old buildings or worn furniture that needs new upholstery or broken lives that are in need of restoration and wholeness.

His love for beauty and his attempt to seize the moment is often expressed through his skill in photography which is a favorite hobby. His burden for this talk, helping the homeless, is born out of his own experience living in a car and time spent behind bars. You did not know I was going to say that, did you?

The next topic is Mark Yoder. Mark is seated over here. Mark has spoken a few times already. He is from Costa Rica. He was born in the Shenandoah... just real quick here. He was born in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia when he was eleven years old, when he was a boy. They moved to Costa Rica where he still lives fifty-three years later. And his wife Ruthanna of thirty-six years... him and his wife Ruthanna currently live in Chachagua, Costa Rica where he serves as pastor. They have five children and three grandchildren. Mark's time is divided between pastoral duties and also the publishing house where he does reviewing, writing, and illustrating. They publish a bi-monthly paper. Some of you may be familiar with this one.

I will not try the Spanish but the English version is "The Torch of Truth." And a favorite hobby of Mark's is birding, watching birds and taking pictures of them and collecting all different kinds of pictures of birds. And his burden for this topic, loving the fatherless, arises out of his years of experience working with those who struggle due to a lack of a father. Next we have Wolfgang Mignani. Welcome. Exposing unethical vaccines. He is a small-town emergency room doctor in Ohio. He lives in Holmes County, Ohio with his wife Lori. They have been married for twenty-seven years and have eight children one of whom is with the Lord and also they have a grandchild.

Wolf was raised Catholic and Lori, his wife, was raised Lutheran. They have been among the plain communities now for about twenty-nine years. Dr. Mignani has been writing and speaking for some years already about tainted vaccines. If you would like to read more of what he has written you can go to... I will say this twice... anabaptistmedicalmatters.blogspot.com.

Someday when the practice slows down Wolf hopes to refine his hobby of rebinding classical Christian books and Bibles. Next we have Tim Kipper. Welcome Tim. He is going to be speaking here on fighting addictions. Two years ago he moved from Virginia to Boston where he is currently studying at Sattler College. Him and his wife Gina have three children age five and under. Favorite pastimes for Tim and his family are exploring the coast, doing hikes, and enjoying downtown Boston.

What is ahead for Tim and his family? In the next two years they are planning to move to India along with a couple of other families in a mission effort. I am sure they would appreciate prayer. Tim's burden for this topic, fighting addictions, comes from his own struggles as well as his experiences helping others, realizing that many others struggle with sexual addictions.

So with that, Patrick, would you come up and you can share your remarks. Going to take a selfie, the largest KFC selfie as we can do if I can get it to go. Now everybody say cheeseburger. Okay, I know that is kind of hokey but that is just how it goes sometimes. My name is Patrick Matthews. That was a first here at KFW.

Sorry. I am really nervous. I am not used to doing things like this. I know how to break things. I do not know how to talk to people without a sledgehammer and unfortunately I do not have a sledgehammer.

I have a couple of other things. Anyway, give you a little indication where I came from. I came here nine years ago and I created a stir. Jason Funk and Abner Zuck took me and baptized me out back in the creek.

This was the first year that KFW was here and it caused a bit of a ripple. So if that is any indication of how I do things, I basically do things that are out of the box a bit. Okay. I work... I have a halfway house for sex offenders in Chambersburg. I am a sex offender. I did something that I should not have done. I went to prison and my life changed. Before that I collected debt for motorcycle clubs and I was a horrible individual. Like I said, I had a sledgehammer. I know how to break things. I do not know how to fix things.

The job that I have, I can tear things off quicker than they can put them together so they hired me and they paid me really well. I like breaking things. Okay. That was my form of trying to get rid of this. I came out of prison and I started a ministry called Harkenhouse Ministry. I want to give a shout out to Chambersburg Christian Fellowship because I came out of the streets and I walked into a group of conservative Mennonites that were trying to acclimate to a new form of church, one that we were not used to. We are Swiss Brethren and we were trying to adopt more of an urban mission and it is kind of caught them at a surprise because I am pretty loud and I say what I think and they are trying to love on me and not show it but it causes pains in both directions.

Harkenhouse Ministry, the way it works is men come out of prison and they try to tell me stories. I grew up as a debt collector for motorcycle clubs and so I am used to calling people out and bringing them to accountability and I have the same kind of thing when it comes to homelessness. I hear people in the streets of Chambersburg come up to me and all the time they will ask me, "Can I have this? Can I have that?" You know, I have had people ask me for as little as twenty-five dollars and for as much as fifty-eight thousand dollars which I was impressed when they asked for fifty-eight thousand dollars. I was like, "How do you fathom that?"

But at that point my recovery, Chambersburg Christian Fellowship was mentoring me about my debt load and so I had to tell them, "I owe thirty-eight thousand dollars. If you give me thirty-eight, I will give you fifty-eight." And they went away. Accountability with giving to people in the streets has been my call to arms. I have people constantly come to me and ask me, "Can I have this? Can I have that? Can you pay for a motel room?" And I say, "Excuse me, stop. Let us talk about this. Is this sustainable?" And most times it is not because they only want temporary measures and I am not willing to give a temporary measure. I want a permanent solution which means I want to get down in the dirt with them in their problem and help wrestle them back to a church like this.

My resurrection off the streets came from a Mennonite church. I told you I am a sex offender. Nobody wanted me. My family did not want me. I lost everything and in that pit called prison or the modern-day monastic community as I call it, I sought God and I fell off of my bed and I tapped out and I said, "I can't. You can help." And I wanted to be... I wanted the problem fixed but I did not want to fix me.

And the unfortunate thing when you change with Christ you fix you and then if you have that kind of standard you do not let people push you around or at least I do not. So my whole thing with working with people in the streets who are homeless or helpless is I question their motives.

And I think one of the healthiest things that we can say to people in the street who are like, "You know that guy at Walmart, oh, I just need five dollars for this or that." I always say to him, "No." And I do not have any problem with that. I do not believe that we are supposed to give all the time. I was reading and I am trying to do this quick and off the cuff and I am sure I am going to forget about fifty things and Joe is going to say, "You are done." And I am like, "Ugh, I did not get it all out." Well, that is okay.

Give me a second. I have to pull to it because I wrote about seventy-five minutes' worth of notes and I am probably going to get to two of them if that makes any sense to anybody. Okay. I was reading in Matthew 25 because that is always the call for people when they are dealing with people in the streets. Matthew says, "Oh, we got to help them." But when I read it, I read that the ten virgins took responsibility. Five of them took responsibility for their actions and the other five were trying to manipulate the five that took care of their reaction or their actions. And if you read down the lesson on the ten talents, I believe says, "Invest your money wisely."

And there is a reason he is saying, "Take responsibility and invest." Because at the end of it, they sheep from the goat. And see, sometimes I think people in the street that are coming to us and say, "Give, give, give," with the sad story, put the little, you know, "I need for so much." We have to discern are they manipulating us or do they really need help?

But I found out... this is my summation on that one was people are God's investment so we should take care of God's investment with love. And I am not sounding like I love these people. Unfortunately, I think the best love we can give them is to say, "No."

You know, there are many missions going on in this room right here and if we gave to every homeless person as much as they wanted, there would be nothing for the missions that are doing the work. There is a social response to homelessness. There is a political one and there is a spiritual one. Anything less than a spiritual response to people who are begging or needing assistance on an ongoing thing is probably the only response. That is why I am here because my church, Chambersburg Christian Fellowship, I am putting a plug in for them. I am representing.

Is they pulled me out of apathy by saying no to me and asking me to step up and take care of my problems, my responsibility of financial liabilities. And in that, they did not go for the outside. They did not say, "Suit up and show up." They said, "Show up and eventually your heart will also show up."

Thank you, Patrick.

Questions now from the panelists. Go ahead, Wolf.

I myself am a veteran and I am sure there are some other veterans here in the assembly and I think it is pretty well known that there are a lot of veterans out there that are homeless. Is there any unique approach that you would have? And, you know, I just feel we have so much to offer as a peace church to these veterans that are, you know, spiritually injured and destitute in many ways. In North Carolina there is a place called Raise You Up Ministry. I flew down there to look at it and they deal with people. Because first of all, you are hungry. They feed you. Second of all, they give you clothes. Third, they work with you to build a resume and if you come up missing and you are gone for three weeks, they keep your resume and they follow you over and give you a chance to fill it.

Raise You Up Ministry in North Carolina is trying to completely heal somebody by all aspects. They have job training. They have mentoring. One of the things they do is Operation Hugs. How many of us are willing to walk across the street and grab somebody that stinks and hug them?

There is something that happens when you love on a human being who has been in a war or been on the streets for a long time and you just hug them. And that is what I like about Raise You Up Ministry and I would aspire to do that but I have got too many irons in my fire.

You were saying about saying no when they ask for things. I understand. I agree with that. I do not give any money to drug addicts and things like that. What do you say about offering them a meal? When they come to my house, we feed them sometimes or in the street I buy some for them.

I like that it suggests that is actually one of the best ones. It is hard for them to sell the food that you are giving them especially if they are eating in front of you. One time somebody asked me for money and I said, "Well, all I have is a credit card." They said, "Well, I take credit cards." And I was not prepared for that.

But food is the grease, our social grease. Boston has learned this. State College has learned this that you bring people in for a meal and that is a time when you break bread. Jesus taught us to feed each other. I love to feed people. I am sorry I did not get to it because I was spinning.

Did I answer your question? I have another question. So should we be scared of homeless people? No. Unless they have a knife. No. If they have a knife, run away. If they have a gun, run towards them. You will understand that is a street term because with a gun they cannot get it off as quick as you can tackle them.

I am sorry. It depends because there are different... Now I am going to step into something really weird. Demonic possession and we all see it walking with people in the street. If they are demonically oppressed and Satan does not like what you are doing, you may get attacked. Do we take one for the team? Sometimes we have to discern if we have our family to avoid this.

And I think as we go in towards the end times. Repossession in the name of Christ will be the thing that we need to focus on. I let the cat out of the bag. And then maybe just a follow up. So if I am out on the streets and I see a homeless person, is it good? Like, can I make a change in that person's life just as an individual or should I be directing them to an institution or somebody who is a professional? I think we are called to call each man to Christ and usually if they are truly homeless and they do not want to hear it, they will tell you immediately. They will say, "I want money." "Oh, I do not have money."

And they will tell you to go away. So you are safe in that bet. If they do not want to hear it, they will run away. But if you feel in tune or if you feel you need to, just keep talking to them about Christ. I like the term irritant for Christ. Ask Chambersburg Christian Fellowship. Anybody here from Chambersburg Christian Fellowship, ask them about irritation for Christ because I have been practicing it with them.

You want to know what irritation...

I do not say no and I do not back up. And if I feel adamant about something, I will tell you what I think. And that may seem unchristlike but from the world I came from, anything less than a knife fight or a baseball bat is a peaceful protest. And so what I am doing is I am talking to people in the way I know how to speak.

And there have been many people in State College that I have challenged. We were doing something, me and Brian were having a discussion and I did not like what he said and I got mad and I hung up. And I let the phone go for five minutes and I called back and I imagined him going, "Oh no, not him again." But he answered and I said, "My intention was this and because of the problem, I went around it. I want to continue on and do what I intended to do. I am willing to irritate you if I believe it will help."

So, Patrick, how has the year of COVID with all of that going on, how has that affected the homelessness on our streets and cities in America? Do you have a sense for that? In the last year, I got involved in a food distribution thing which was a Farm the Family program. We handed out 700,000 gallons of milk and seven teams or seven states, we put out 140 million pounds of food that was given to us by the USDA.

But there have been abuses. Anytime the government gets involved in something, it goes awry. It did not impact those locally. You know, it dumped food. Homeless people living in a car can only take so many boxes of 35 pounds of food that needs refrigerated. So it was over the top but people took it. People were afraid.

Raise You Up Ministry is struggling to regain the momentum they had. Kingdom Fellowship Weekend, you guys weren't here last year. They asked me two years ago to sit up on this panel. Do you know what it is like? I am impatient. Two years waiting to be here anyway. Sorry.

But COVID has impacted our society. Right now, I am struggling with something in my chest and it is like an overabundance of stuff and I am not going to get personal but I think everybody has been impacted whether we believe it or not. It is a real situation but I believe that Jesus Christ will protect me from it and I am not going to... I will mask up if I am asked to but I choose not to.

Hopefully, I answered your question. Thank you, Patrick. We will now transition to Mark. If you would go ahead. I am supposed to address the subject of the homeless, loving the homeless. Fatherless. Thank you. Thank you, fatherless. I enjoyed your talk. I was getting carried away with that. The ministering to the fatherless. What is a fatherless person? What is a father supposed to do? A father is... The father directs his children, disciples them, teaches them how to live and then gives them approval.

And that approval from a father is one of... That is a beautiful, wonderful thing. To know that you are approved by your father. But there are thousands. There are millions of people out there that do not have that.

In a crowd like this, I will not even try to guess a percentage that have not had that fatherly love, father care, father direction, and father approval.

When you work with people, you run with this all over. In the beginning of my ministry years ago, there was a young lady who... Her father was alive but he was not a father to her. Her family was dysfunctional and she became a part of the church. And one day I was talking to her, I said, "Nudia, you realize that because you do not have a father in your home, in your life, you are weak towards men. I want to warn you, please be careful."

By then she was crying. She said, "Yes. Yes. Yes." I said, "Be careful. Your need of a father can lead you to the wrong man." Some years later, I tried to be a father to her. We spent many hours together and praying with her. I tried to be a father to her. Some years later, she left the Lord. She left the church for a man, an unmarried man.

And she is not married today. She is still single.

There was another brother in the church, big guy, with a big beard, stands there tears running down his cheek and said, "Mark, why could not I have a father? Why could not I have a father?" His father was... When he was just an infant, his father was killed. His father was drunk and in a bed with another woman when they killed him. He says, "Why my father? And where is my father? Why cannot I have a father?"

When he came to the Lord, asked Arcus, he lived not far from where we did. About every day he would stop by. He would sit on our porch and he wanted to talk to me about the day. After our service, almost every service in the beginning, he said, "Come, Mark. I want to talk to you. Take me out and talk." Some of the brothers struggled a little bit with that but I was okay because he was needing a father.

He was needing a father.

Not too long ago, two years ago, I saw my son build a house and there were two carpenters that were there. They worked with us and Arcus and some of the others went down and helped paint and they sang and they worked and the impact was so on these carpenters that when they left, they had tears in their eyes.

But before they left, a young man said to me, "I want to talk to you." So he went outside and we sat down on the log and he started telling me about his problems, about his life. Tears started coming. I put my arms around him, gave him the love, the acceptance. He ended up almost rolled up in my lap. He came down and just rolled... He just cried and cried and cried because he needed a father.

There was another young man who... His father committed suicide. They found him hanging in a tree. His oldest brother was murdered. We think, we are not sure, probably because of drug-related things, drug trafficking. We are not sure. Another brother was in an accident, was killed. A brother who was not living a Christian life.

After he came to the Lord, I talked to him once about it. He just sat there and just cried and cried and cried.

I prayed for him. You and I might think it is funny but one day we had a church activity where we were eating together and I was sitting on a bench and he was sitting beside me maybe 20 minutes, sitting there beside me with his arm around me like this.

If you had seen it, I even felt a little bit different. Here is this young man. How old is he? 18? I forget. 17, 18, 19. And he is sitting there for the longest time. He is sitting with his arm around me.

But I understood and I did not mind.

And there are many more stories that I could say. How do we help these people? If we only focus... This young man that was... The carpenter that was crying in my lap. I invited him to Bible studies and I invited him to the real Father. That has not happened yet. I am still waiting.

Because just to sit down and listen to his story and hear him crying and giving him love does not take care of the problem. Some of these people have their emotions, their feelings all like feelers out front like this.

Very sensitive to how they are treated because, you know, poor me, I did not have a father. Some of you can relate to this. The solution to this problem is not only focusing on their lack of a father, the lack that they have in their life. It has taken them to Jesus Christ. And there is a point of death on the cross of Jesus where we repent and we die and the only thing that is important is, "My Father loves me. My Father loves me." And our responsibility is to take these people to find the real Father. And if I can be a halfways Father to them and love them and put my arms around them but I am leading them to the real Father.

Psalms 68 says, "A Father to the fatherless and the judge of the widows is God in His holy habitation." Have you noticed how often God addresses this? James it says, "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction and keep Himself unspotted from the world." But the goal is taking these people and finding the real Father. You know, I have come to conclude, you know, God designed the family. God planned who fathers should be. That came from His heart, from who He is.

He has the Father heart for us. And many of us... How many of you? I am not going to ask you to raise your hands. I would say more than half of you felt a lack of your Father, a lack of His love and His approval. How do we solve that? Sit around and cry about it all our lives.

Find the real Father. Our physical Father is only a shadow of the real one. And if we can lead people to find God, this man whose father was murdered, he is in the church and he does not need me as much anymore. He does not call me like he used to call me all the time and always... He does not need me as much anymore. Why?

He found the Father, the real one. And all of us fathers are just an example to lead people to the Father. And if there is someone here tonight who has not found their Father, he is waiting on you, the real one. Not the shadow, the real one.

Thank you. Thank you, Mark. Questions now from up here. Who would like to go... Who would like to be the first? Wolf?

Just this whole idea of people that have had bad relationships with their fathers, the whole gospel message is skewed and distorted because they do not look at God as a Father. That might be a bad thing for them.

Can you give us some insight on how to project the love of the Lord when they have this distorted view of who God is as a Father?

Well, good question, brother.

Like Patrick was saying, we give them love. We give them acceptance but we also say, "Listen, this. You need to change this." A father does that. A father directs and says, "Do this. Hey, what about this? Let's straighten this up. You take responsibility for this." Because what humanity wants to do, what a lot of us want to do is blame people around me and sit around and just feel petty myself and do not get anywhere. We need to help them to be responsible for their own lives.

This young man that I said would set his arm around him, he is in the southern part of the country now teaching school. I hardly have contact with him anymore but I trust him.

God is going to work. But they need to take responsibility.

Not more... Trying to think how to put this. When I came into the churches, they were asking me if I wanted a heavenly Father. I did not like what the earthly guy who wanted to be my Father did to me. I was a little boy on my knees and he did things behind my back that he should not have done. And there were a lot of things that went on. So when they said, "Do you want an earthly Father?" I said, "I do not even like my... Do you want a heavenly Father? I do not even like my earthly Father."

How do we begin to repair them damages done?

I am sorry I threw a big one.

Well, Brother Patrick, maybe you can answer your own question better than I can but...

One thing that I have found in ministering, working with people is I need to be very close to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the Comforter. He is the great healer. It is not me. And so often I say, "Lord, what do I tell Him now? How do I work with this?" But I would like to hear more you say about what happened in your life when it was that way.

First of all, I want to show you something. This is the first thing that helps heal people.

Ask Brother Joel about it. I almost broke his back.

Okay. Another question. I have found this that once a person knows that I really, really love him, he will take about anything that I need to tell him. But I need to first confirm that he is loved and accepted by me.

Another question. So just thinking about the fathers that are here and you mentioned how it is possible to have a father but he is not emotionally present. And so really the person is maybe fatherless. What would you say to fathers... Yeah, to warn them about, yeah, being emotionally absent from their children?

You are talking about... I am talking to the fathers now for their children. That is partially what I was trying to address earlier today and I really, I really put in a plea for that. We men need broken hearts.

We need to feel for our young children. We need to make it important to connect when they have struggles and when they have hard problems. Sit beside them. Walk with them. The Holy Spirit is called the great Comforter.

And if He is in us, we should do that to our children. We need to take time. I say again, please take time that your children feel loved. Even if they blunder and make mistakes and fail, even if they fall, you are going to address that in the pornography or whatever. You show them that they are still loved by their Father.

And then with the help of the Holy Spirit, direct them, lead them. And some of that takes time. Sometimes we would like to have that happen in one session, two sessions. Sometimes it takes quite a few more. Yes, I would say please. And I am not saying this because my daughter is here and she knows.

I was far from a perfect Father but in my working with people, when your children are small, please, please listen to them. They are silly questions. They talk and they talk and they talk. Please, Father, listen, listen, listen to their hearts. When they come home and they say something... I could tell you a story about Arcus but I will not. You know, but there are things that we laugh about. They are not important. They are little minor things. But if it hurts them, take time and listen so that when they get bigger things, more serious things, they come to Dad and say, "Talk to Dad about..." That brings to memory a story I had with my oldest son.

And he was of that age where he kept asking questions. Why this? Why that? And he would ask it over and over and over again.

And, you know, much to my shame, you know, I was exasperated and I said, "Why? Why are you asking this over and over again?" And his response was, "Well, Papa, I love hearing your voice." So, you know, one of the recurrent themes I hear here is you have to take time and, you know, we are at that time. A lot of you people here are young.

You know, on your deathbed, you are not going to be saying, "I wish I spent more time at the office." You know, invest in your relationships now. There is no substitute for time. I know when we are stretched for time, our nerves get stressed.

We get stressed with each other and things go out the window. Family devotions, one-on-one time, these sort of things.

Okay. Thank you. Mark, we will transition now to you, Wolf. So if you take your mic, you can go ahead and present your prepared remarks.

I really appreciate what the brothers here have just presented. And to be honest, I long a little bit for that because oftentimes these are subjects that we can really get behind in a unified voice and spirit. And to be honest, I do not like conflict. I am conflict averse.

So I really appreciate how the Lord used Brother Dr. Finney last night to bring a message of zeal. And so I appreciate that. But what I am going to talk... Going to present now is a complex issue in which I sometimes feel like I am caught in the middle between the Hatfields and the McCoys.

Are you for, again, vaccines? And I get that often, that asked that kind of frequently. Well, I just hope you hold your fire until the question periods where you guys can fire away some questions at me. I would appreciate that. Specifically, if you want to hear about the COVID vaccines, you can ask about that. But today I am going to be talking specifically about tainted vaccines.

And many of you will be happy to know that I am not an anti-vaxxer and others will be feeling ready to get up because of that. On the other hand, still many others of you will be happy to know that I am not a pusher, a vaccine pusher. And yet more will be ready and feeling like they have to get up at least because of that. Even amongst our people here, there is a wide range of views and it just seems like this is a very divisive topic.

So to those that remain, I would like to thank you with the words of our Lord. But blessed are your eyes because they see and your ears because they hear. Matthew 13:16. There have been many great patriarchs. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob quickly come to mind but I cannot recall any of them from being a physician. So I belong to that increasingly endangered species of physicians that believes in not telling you what to do in a patriarchal manner but in providing you with information and a little advice and praying that you make godly decisions from that in a clean conscience with the Holy Spirit.

In this area of COVID vaccines, vaccines are big news but I have specifically been asked to address the issue of the use of fetal tissue in the production of vaccines. To be brief, this is a fact. It is not conjecture. It is not conspiracy theory that aborted fetuses have been used to develop and produce certain, mainly childhood vaccines: rubella, hepatitis A, some of the polio vaccines, and some COVID vaccines. Now, for most of these, there are ethical alternatives.

But it started in the 1960s when a scientist took a previously healthy aborted female fetus. And fetus, by the way, means offspring or little one. So he dissected the lungs out of this little one and started to grow them in a lab. Under these conditions, the tissue can keep growing almost indefinitely, producing a huge amount of tissue. This tissue is then infected with the weakened form of the target virus and the culture is purified and then it is used to produce a vaccine which is injected into patients, stimulating a person to produce their own antibodies to that specific virus.

If a person is then exposed to that virus in the usual manner and just by contact with other people, the antibodies will attack it and so they will prevent infections. Now, to be sure, vaccines are 85 to 95 percent effective but they are not 100 percent effective.

There have been some objections to this objection over using fetal tissue even in our own circles. And so I am going to go over a couple of those briefly. Number one, no further abortions are needed. While it is true that the original abortions happened many years ago, science has developed an insatiable appetite for new lines. The cell lines are not immortal. That means there is only a fixed amount of tissue that you are going to get there and it is actually a huge amount but they are not immortal and they genetically start breaking down after about 40 doublings. If there is no conscientious objection, unbridled science acquires an insatiable appetite for more tissue and more abortions.

There have since been established a number of new cell lines, each requiring many abortions to develop, often by competing companies, since these cell lines of humanity come under copyright laws. It is no different... And number two, second argument is that it is no different than if a homicide victim donated his body to science.

While I would agree that this would not be an ethical problem if he signs his own donor card or if his family agrees to it. But what if the family member ordered the hit? Would that be ethical? This is the case of using aborted fetal tissue where the mother usually signs off on that order.

Proper consent is no problem... Is no small problem today. Christians in China are executed and their body parts harvested without proper consent. This is a real problem and it is... And it is no conspiracy theory either. Lastly, and most problematic, is the spirit of moral relativism in our day.

The Apostle Paul states in Galatians 5:19, "A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump." Of these vaccines, it has been said, "It happened a long time ago. It is done with. There are worse things in life. Let us move on." We have heard these words before and we should carefully consider where this leaven will lead us.

It reminds me of a leadership conference I went to a few years ago, put on by an otherwise staunchly Christian Protestant group. In it, the subject matter somehow migrated to the topic of scrambled eggs. Bear with me here. The minister was actually speaking about divorce and remarriage. "It happened a long time ago. It is done with. There are worse things in life. Just move on." He said, "You cannot unscramble eggs."

Much to my shame, I did not speak up but I know know that I should have said but I know someone who does. So this ultimately leads us back to the theme of this conference. How do we spread life in a culture of death? In regard to vaccines, we know that just like with divorce and remarriage, God can unscramble eggs though the process may involve great hardships and stir up great scorn. Non-resistance does not mean non-conflict. It has been said that in a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. In this day and age of the cancel culture, taking a stand may cost jobs, freedom, and the esteem of our friends and neighbors.