"Behind the Scenes: Kingdom Connect, Seeker’s Café, Church Index, Caleb Summit..." by S2S admin team

The one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Welcome to Strength to Strength, and we're together here with the admin team of S2S for another roundtable. And here we are at the end of 2025, and we have a lot to be thankful for here at S2S. One of the things we were just reminiscing here a little bit before the recording is that we've all been together here on this platform as an admin team with S2S now for close to five years, or some of those five years. Glenn, actually the longest one, and then Justin, maybe a little less than five.

So we have a lot to be thankful for. It's been a really good time. We've had a lot of good times together as an admin team, and we probably don't want to record some of the fun we were having even before the call here.

But it's been a blessing. It's good times and serious times together. So Strength to Strength, our vision here is to inspire flourishing communities of faithful Jesus followers around the world. And a vision is that he knows that big destination, and that's our vision by God's grace. We want to do that, and we anticipate more ways that we're going to do that here in the future, Lord willing. Also, our mission is to advance Jesus' kingdom by assisting the church in earnestly contending for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. So we're tackling thought-provoking topics, stimulating candid discussions, and by sharing faith-building testimonies.

And I believe it was this year, excuse me, that we had Luke Toroli on from California, and that was one of those faith-building testimonies. And if you haven't had a chance to listen to that, do go back and listen to that. I believe that was like in June or July. And one little interesting behind-the-scene tidbit about that recording, Luke Toroli, is my internet was bad that day, and I was moderating. It was one of those days where they were having all these solar flares, and we used wireless internet, and it was knocking it out. It was terrible, but if you go back and listen to that recording, you'd never know it. And I mentioned in my prayer at the beginning that God would give us good connectivity.

And well, we did lose connection numerous times, but I'd always come back on, and he was still talking, and I would just hop in. I would sometimes have to kind of guess where he was heading. I had heard a story before a little bit, so I had a little bit of an idea where we were going.

But that's a little behind-the-scene tidbit of that. So anyhow, if you haven't listened to Luke Toroli's talk, please go listen to that. That's one of those faith-building testimonies for sure. And then finally, our action point with Strength to Strength is this: we do this by providing multimedia resources, including podcasts, videos, books, and by pointing people to local communities of believers. And if you hang around the whole way to the end of this recording, we're going to talk about something that we're adding here at S2S, and we're calling that Caleb Summit. So we need to add in there conference or summits or something like that. Anyhow, more on that later. We're really excited to introduce that here in this call.

So we're going to go ahead and jump right in. We have a number of things we want to talk about, a little bit of reminiscing, so I'm looking forward. Sam is going to be talking about the Europe conference that he was part of with Strength to Strength. We helped work with some other organizations in putting that on in Europe. And then he's also going to be talking about another big initiative that they're launching into in their church in their city. It has to do with good coffee and good food.

All right. And then Glenn's talking to us about books and all the books he's writing, all the books he's selling. I don't know if he's writing another book right now or not. Any other books in the mix there? Nothing to announce tonight. Okay. All right. Okay. We'll keep working on him.

Sounds hopeful, yes. And then we're going to have Wendell talking to us about Church Index, an index of Anabaptists and similar churches all around the world, a thousand and counting, I believe. Talk about that a little bit. And then Justin's talking to us about several things that have to do with our talks. And then I already told you I'll be talking about a gathering for men that we are planning in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. So we're excited about that, and we can't wait to tell you about that. But you have to wait the whole way to the end to get that. All right. So let's turn to Sam.

Sam, go ahead and tell us about Europe and then Canada. For sure. No, it's great to be here with you all again tonight. So my wife and I and our family, we traveled to Switzerland in August for a conference. So I was representing Strength to Strength with that. And our goal with the conference in Europe was to provide a place for believers from all over Europe to come together and make real connections with other believers. And that vision came out of platforms like Strength to Strength and Anabaptist perspectives and online content like this, people reaching out and saying, "Who are you? Where are you? Where do we find people that live and believe like this?"

And so we had a conference. It was a smashing success. We had about 140 people attend, 13 different countries represented there, 13 different European countries, that's not counting US and Canada. And had some incredible teaching sessions by Paula Masella, Alan Roth, Melvin Lehman.

I was richly blessed hearing some of the testimonies that we heard, people coming out of the Occult to become followers of Jesus Christ, a young man from Germany that was a police officer and laid aside his uniform because he realized that to follow Christ and wear that uniform was conflicting missions. And so he laid that aside. Praise God. It was beautiful to sense the kindred spirits, have conversation with a brother from Albania who couldn't speak English. We're talking through an interpreter.

And the work of God in his life, the work of God in my life, the similarities of conviction and the blessing of God, I mean, it was a phenomenal experience. So it was great. Actually, I'll show you a few pictures from the event.

Like I said, my wife and I, this is my family, and my mother-in-law came along. She's not a follower of Jesus, and this was very impactful for her and was a blessing to see her faith grow a little bit. So we had lots of time of connection. That was a goal when we set up the schedule to leave a lot of time for people to have meaningful conversations and make some real connections. So it wasn't a jam-packed schedule. We had some decent chunks. This is in the evening, I don't know, probably 10 o'clock, people hanging out, visiting, lots of passionate discussions and testimony sharing, brothers praying together. And this was our meeting hall. It was usually filled.

There was about 120 seats in there. And just I have to say, even just being in Switzerland, such a beautiful place, it felt like we were in God's country for sure. There's the whole group, the whole clan that was there. And just a couple snapshots of the beauty that we saw around us there. Switzerland is a beautiful place, so it seemed a little surreal to be there for this conference. But after the whole thing, I mean. What turn is it to go next time, Sam? Yeah.

We'll have to draw straws.

Okay. So the question after all of that is what now? You hear from people, "This is encouraging. We love it. We're spending time with believers we've never met before, seeing the work of God going on, hearing the teaching about the kingdom of God. Praise the Lord. This is good." But now we go back to a community where there is no church or where we're just attending the local best congregation that we can find. And so we definitely came away with a feeling of great need for biblical churches to be planted in Europe and even to provide some more encouragement and teaching and discipleship on church planting and church leadership and things like that. So that's kind of the direction we would like to go with the next conference.

We don't have any hard plans in place for next year. I actually have a meeting tomorrow to talk about those plans, so there's a possibility. I can't announce that there's a KC Kingdom Connect 2026 tonight, but there is something in the works, and it could possibly be next year. But 2027, we have the same location that we had 2025 booked for 2027 already because in Europe, you got to book two years in advance in order to get it because things fill up really fast. So it was a fantastic location, so we'd love to use it again in 2027. So that's a bit of an update on Kingdom Connect.

Neat. So there was obviously a couple of organizations working together there with an interest in church planting for that part of the world. For the people that were coming there, the Europeans that were coming there, did you sense in them a real interest in seeing and working together in church planting, or was this where a lot of these people were just so new to kingdom Christianity? They were just putting their toe in the water, like, "Who are these people?"

Or was there a blend of people there in that? Yeah. I would say there was a spectrum of that, some that were ready to jump in with both feet and see churches planted and leadership set up, and then others, quite a few that would have been fairly new on their journey in kingdom Christianity and just excited to see other people and communicate, spend time with other people who are discovering some of the same things. And it was uncanny how many times their journey, "How did you end up here?" "Well, we found Scroll Publishing or David started reading David Brissot or went online and found Followers of the Way and Strength to Strength and all of these platforms, Anabaptist perspectives."

And it was uncanny how many times that that was the trajectory. So to those of you who work in any of these organizations or to David Brissot especially, so much fruit out of that work coming out of Europe. So it's really encouraging to see. Praise the Lord.

We do have a brother from Albania speaking here at the last talk for 2025. And that's done intentionally because his title is Conditions and Responses for a Kingdom Renewal. And thinking about 2025, 500-year anniversary of Anabaptism, and this kind of a groundswell of interest in kingdom Christianity there. So that's going to be his talk.

So don't miss it, dear brother, with quite a vibrant church there in, I'm forgetting the city, in Albania. The capital, the capital of Albania. I can't remember the name of it. Yeah. Okay. I think it starts with an A because it sounds like another name I know, but I can't remember how it was pronounced. So okay. So thank you, Sam. Any questions from the other brothers here?

Okay. Well, thanks for sharing that. And yeah, I'm serious. We'll have to really think about who goes next time over there. All right. So Sam, you have some big stuff happening in Calgary. They're right where your church is located in Brentwood. So tell us about that.

Yeah. So today, we closed a deal on a location to open up a cafe here in Calgary. That'll be about one minute from my house here in Brentwood. So we're a small church plant here, and we're looking for ways to increase the exposure in the community around us, live our lives in a glass house so people can see that Christ is alive and he really does change the hearts of men. Amen. So big move for us to close a deal on a location. We've been working on just finding a location for almost a year now. And so we got the deal signed today.

And there's a picture of it right there where CRU3, and that's an office complex above us there as well. So built-in client base right there. And so it's a clean slate. It's a new building. And so we're going to build that out, working on the design and things like that. We actually have room out front. We're allowed a 300-square-foot outdoor patio, which is a big drawing factor here in Calgary. So our vision behind this is to have a place that can become a hub here in the community. We want to open it up one evening a week for student study, open it up, use it for the church, the local congregation here, use it for prayer meetings, brothers' meetings.

And the sky's the limit for what we can use a space like this for. And it is Seekers Cafe.

We're looking forward to seeing what God can do with something like this here in our community. We're working with Extend Cafes, which has been an incredible journey so far. So this is on the Extend website. If you want to read more about who we are and what our mission and vision is, you can go to Extend and see that there.

Tell us about the demographics there of Calgary. What size of city? And then also, you're close to a college as well. Yeah, that's right. So Calgary's about it's over one and a half million right now, I believe. So it's a decent-sized city. And we're in Brentwood, actually very close to the University of Calgary.

Brentwood is just the community of Brentwood has about 6,500 people in it. Some of them are the originals from when the community was built in the '60s and '70s. And then there's a lot of young families who want to live inner cities. So we're a short train ride from downtown. So we have lots of young families. We have lots of immigrants right in our community and a lot of student housing, a lot of houses that rent out to multiple students scattered through the community. So we have quite a broad demographic of people within less than a mile of the cafe.

And what was your other question? Yeah, it was just like the demographics there. So yeah. Yeah. And the University of Calgary is the next train stop from where we are. And we're a five-minute walk from the train station.

So yeah. Nice. When do you project you'll be opening that, Sam? Probably toward the end of April. So we take possession in the middle of January, and we're hoping to be open middle to end of April sometime. Nice.

So Sam, tell us, you're taking a faith of this is a step of faith here. And my journey with our cafe and other cafes is always the same way because you sign a lease. That's not cheap. And you're not open yet. And there's no other Extend Cafe in Calgary. So this is a new cafe in that part of the world.

So yeah, what are some of your needs there? I would love to get that out here. This is your chance to tell us what your needs are. Sure. It's a long list. Do you want to see a printed version or?

Give us a top three. Yeah. No. What I'm offering to say for you is capital investors. So stepping into that, there's always need for capital in getting the cafe to break even point, which can be a year, year and a half, just depending on the area. And depending on how good your coffee is that you serve.

So it's just one of those things. Real quick, yeah. So capital investors, if anyone is interested in investing in this initiative, please talk to Sam or Extend Cafes. We would love to connect. Real quick, what's your menu?

Rice bowls. We want to go healthy. So we're going to do they're often called power bowls. So you do your rice and veggies, and then you choose your protein, choose your meat, and breakfast and lunch. So we'll have omelets and breakfast sandwiches. And speaking of coffee, we'll probably have the best coffee in Calgary.

It'll definitely be the best once we've served it. Better than Tim Hortons? That's not hard to do. That's not hard to do. That's not hard. Picking on your Canadians there. No, for sure. Yeah. Better than Starbucks. Better than Tim Hortons, for sure. I mean, there are some coffee shops here that have really good coffee that'll be good competition, but. Sure. Yep. Yeah. Well, those will just be a servant to the greater cause.

Coffee and food, a servant to a place of hospitality and connection and where Jesus can be incarnated there. I'm so excited to see you all moving forward with that. Yes. Yeah, we are as well. Okay. Well, thank you, Sam, for sharing that with us. And thank you for joining us in praying for this project in Calgary and also the upcoming Europe conference, Leroy Willing in 2027, right, Sam?

So yeah. And then next on our list. Yeah, it's on 26, but 27 for sure. Sure. Yeah. Okay. And then next here on our agenda is to have Glenn tell us a little bit about S2S Books. So that's been quite busy.

I get to see the emails and the orders coming in, and that's something I do enjoy snooping at and seeing all these orders. And Glenn and his wife, they ship them, and they do an amazing job. I think if your order gets in by, what, 3 o'clock, Glenn, it's getting in the mail that day. That's right. Sure.

You've gotten to know your post office really well. Yeah. Because you come rolling in right at closing time with a big cart of books. Right.

A big cart of boxes. We've been selling books for about two years now. Strength to Strength started that by introducing two books initially of our own publishing and then continued to expand our offering of books. So yeah, we have well over 100 books on our website, which you can find at strengthtostrength.org. And yeah, so we focus on books that are solid content. We're not taking all the books that are available out there, but we try to be selective. And oftentimes, we're choosing books that are going to go well with the podcast that we produce. And so it's been working out quite well. And like I mentioned, that's been going about two years, about a year ago, a little bit less than a year ago.

We also partnered with Christian Aid Ministries, their SALT program. And so the SALT and Light team has compiled a financial stewardship course. And so we are in partnership with them to make that available. And you can find that at saltbooks.org, saltbooks.org. And that's something for you to check out as well. And then we expanded a little bit further more recently. Only about two months ago, we partnered with Carillon Press and brought on their selection of books as well. And their website is carillonpress.com. I'll show you all of these just momentarily. So altogether, we have about 250 titles that we have available. And yeah, that's been working out quite well. So as far as the ones from Strength to Strength, let me just share my screen here.

This is strengthtostrength.org's website. And you can see some of the books that we published ourselves. Here's just a little banner about Salt and Light, which will take you to their website. Then here you can see some of the various categories: books on Bible study. We have some on business. Some of these are written by Gary Miller, who is a well-recognized author.

Books on church and church history. And some of these are very relevant right now, considering that we're in the 500th anniversary of Anabaptism. Right here, we have several books on 16th-century Anabaptism. And then also there's a series here on classics of the Radical Reformation. That's a series of 14 books of Anabaptist writings.

Yeah. Then other church history. We have some, yeah, variety of titles. So as you can see, the list is pretty long there. Then let me also show you the SALT website. One second.

So if you go to saltbooks.org, there you can check out what SALT and Light has to offer. Right here is their website. And SALT and Light offers financial training through a variety of different tracks, as they're called. Depending on your audience, you could have a class where you teach and provide discipleship to a class of participants who want to learn about better financial methods and training. And yeah. So anyway, we offer their course. Just as an example, you could do this together as your local church. And if we take a look there, there is a participant guide and facilitator guide. This is true for all the different ones. There's also bundles that you can purchase for a class setting that will give you some discounts there as well.

And then finally, let me show you also the website here for Carillon Press. And I have that right here on the screen. Carillon Press has been in business for quite a while, but they are continuing to produce new books. Here's two of their newest titles.

And we've had quite good success selling for them. And they have a lot of books that are for family and children. So if you have a family, it's something that you could check out there as well. So that's been working out. Like I said, we started selling books about two years ago. We're also warehousing most of these in Ontario with Justin. So Justin is able to provide shipping for our Canadian customers, which makes it both less expensive if you live in Canada and also faster to ship from Canada to Canada. So if you are a Canadian customer, you can just place your order like usual, and Canadian shipments will ship out of his place automatically.

So yeah, like Brian already said, I think it's around 98% of our orders that are received by 3 o'clock ship out the same day. We offer free shipping on orders over $45 within the United States. And this month, in the month of December, we're offering 10% off. And that is true for Strength to Strength and SALT and Light course, as well as the Carillon Press books. So for the remainder of this month, that's the benefit that you can take advantage of. Yeah, I think that pretty much covers it unless there's some questions here from the team.

Glenn, what is your top seller? Yeah, so the top seller oftentimes varies by what is the newest book at the time. Most recently, the top seller has been a book by Carillon Press, which is the one that I had up here just a moment ago. Let me show you here. And that is the book there on the left. This is a book by Gina Martin called She Shall Be Praised.

And I think that book came out about two months ago, perhaps. And I think we've sold roughly 800 copies or so in the last two months. So most recently, that has been the top seller.

Fantastic.

Yeah, well, thank you to our listeners who buy books from Strength to Strength. We appreciate that. It helps us achieve our mission of engaging the world with the faith once we're all delivered to the saints. And then also, it helps us fund the mission here at Strength to Strength. So thank you.

And Glenn, thank you for all your hard work there in shipping those books. We've had a lot of orders coming in, and so we're thankful for that. I have a question. Thank you. Go ahead. So we publish books as well.

Can you let us know how many books are in the pipeline right now for publishing? Yep. So we have two books presently in the pipeline. Yep. That's great. Yeah. I guess if there's any aspiring authors out there, get writing. So if you're a writer and maybe you're writing something already or looking for a publisher, no promises here, but certainly reach out and we'll definitely consider if there's something that we'd want to take on for you.

Yeah, that's a good point, Sam. I want to mention that as well. And even if you're not a writer, you can become one, right, Glenn? Yeah. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. Love to talk with you about your idea.

Yeah. The book side is definitely something we're working on developing because there's just so much opportunity there. So yeah. Okay. All right. Well, thank you, Glenn, for that update. And next is Wendell with Church Index.

Yeah. So I've been enjoying hearing everyone's updates. And I want to give a little update on Church Index. Church Index has been around for about a year and a half. And one of our goals here at Strength to Strength is to encourage flourishing communities of Jesus followers. And so Church Index fits into that well because it is a way of connecting people, maybe who don't have communities, or also a way of, if you're traveling, maybe you can find communities, churches, you can see what's around.

Yeah. It was started about a year and a half ago.

But in the past year, it has come under Strength to Strength, under S2S, for the reasons of funding and oversight. So that is one of S2S's projects currently is on Church Index is somewhere under it.

Glenn is the one here that wears two hats that helps on both of those. So thank you, Glenn, for all your work you do in that. Yeah. You can check Church Index out and see it. Would you bring up a page for me, Glenn? We can look at how this works so people can see. Okay. So I think if you want to investigate who is on it, there's an About page, Contact. But there's also, yeah, you can look. He's bringing up Europe.

The churches we have listed on the site in Europe. Thank you. Do you want to do a search? Can we do a specific search? Let's try Amherst, Massachusetts.

So we've got a 100-mile radius, and that brings up a list of churches that are on here. So this is not specific denomination. We would say kingdom churches mostly. So that includes a lot of Anabaptist churches, probably a few that are not as much, but that are kingdom churches, Jesus following. So let's look for a place that maybe doesn't have many churches. How about New Orleans, Louisiana?

Okay. So what do you got? A 100-mile radius? Yeah. So we got two that are just so showing up there.

There's one in Mississippi, Kokomo, Mississippi. Yeah. So actually, the closest one is 91 miles from New Orleans. Right. So yeah.

And then 95 miles. Yeah. Darwin and Smithdale. So anyhow, for people who are dreaming and have a vision for planting churches, there's a place that needs some more in the US.

So yeah, I'm really grateful for everyone who's been deeply involved in this, especially. And I'm hoping this can be a good way of connecting believers and especially seekers, as I think this can be really useful for. So it's just a little update on that. Thank you.

Any questions, anyone? So people are able to submit their churches if you look on there. And your church kind of falls into there's like a on the About Us section, there's a section there that kind of talks about the criteria to be on this Church Index. And Glenn, I think there's like 1,100 churches, I believe, at this point. But yeah, you can submit your church on there, and the team will look at it.

So Glenn, I was going to ask you a question, but I'm forgetting it right now.

Yeah. Can't think of it. Yeah. So right along with what you mentioned there about submitting your church, you can also check if your church is listed. And if the correct information is there, we list the membership, the meeting time, of course, the address, phone number, website, YouTube if you have that, email. So you can check your contact information. And if there's anything incorrect, you can submit for corrections.

How much traffic are you getting to that site? Are you able to see that at all, or? Yes. We do have that. I don't have that in front of me. Sorry about that. But yes, it's certainly getting traffic from unexpected parts of the world. So it's interesting.

It is being found.

And like you mentioned, if you're traveling, you can certainly use it to find your church. That wasn't necessarily the motivation for it. The motivation was for seekers to be able to find a church. And we occasionally hear stories of people who are locating churches in that way. And so that's always a blessing.

Yeah, for sure.

There's also some churches that have reached out to us inquiring about where areas are that don't have churches. So very similar there to what Wendell just mentioned about looking up New Orleans. If you are a church looking to do a church plant, you can certainly use this to find the areas where there's population without churches there, so.

Yeah.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Wendell, for that. Any other questions here for Wendell?

You are able to actually get a plug-in for your website. Let's say you want to have it on your church. You have people coming here. Let's say you have traffic coming to your church website from other parts of the United States.

And you want to help those people find churches in their area. You can actually put this on your website. There's a plug-in that actually looks like it's on your site, but Church Index title isn't even visible, but it's on there. So there's ways to actually do that as well if anyone has interest that you can make that happen. As an example of that, right here is Kingdom Fellowship Weekend. And it's possible there to locate it. And here is the Church Index while you're still on the Kingdom Fellowship Weekend site. So if you have a church and you want to put this into your church website, we can also customize it if there are certain affiliations that you wish to display or not.

Sure. Yeah. Yeah, that sounds good. So on churchindex.org, there is a place to contact the team there that runs it. So feel free to reach out for that. So thank you. All right. Justin, talk to us about some of the talks that we've been having and your plan to have.

Yeah. So this past year and the end of last year, we've been digging into this series called Sacred Roots. And I'll just take you to that right now to show you. And so this theme here, Sacred Roots, was chosen because we were looking at 500 years since the beginning of Anabaptism. And this past year has been really rich for me because I've been able to enjoy these talks and dig into this history. And I also even was able to take an in-person class by one of our speakers that we had quite a bit here on our Sacred Roots series. And that was Stephen Russell. So I was very privileged to be part of his Anabaptist history class at Faith Builders.

And of course, that supersedes any online content. But anyway, that aside, this series has been very rich to help produce and engage in and listen to and learn from. So we started way back at November of 2024. And our first talk was actually this one here, talk four, Sacred Roots, Why Study the Early Christians by David Burso. And then we went on to other talks. But we've separated them here, organized them by era. So we have 0 to 100, 100 to 300, and so on. And then David Anderson had done quite a bit of work on the early years, the Anti-Nicene era, as well as the early medieval era.

And as well as Stephen Russell, he talked about church in that time and era. And that is very good history to understand and develop and grow in our knowledge and grasp of because it helps make sense of what happened then at the time of the Reformation. It was sort of an outworking of what was taking place for many years leading up until that time. So that was good history to go over and a lot of things that we can learn from those early and medieval era Christians. So we have 24 talks so far on the list here.

We have a few more coming up. And then there'll probably be even about three more yet after those that we will engage in yet and then wrap up this series. So we're going to bring it to a close here in the new year here.

And it'll probably end up being almost a year and a half, not quite, of looking at this series. It's been very interesting for me, and I hope others have been blessed as well. And we're bringing it right up until looking at today. For example, January 10th, we're looking at Sacred Roots, Martyrs Only in the Past. What about us? So that helps us to connect to our history, to our roots, and just taking an inward look of where we are today. How are we doing and engaging in our time? Are we still radical in our approach to Christianity? And then on the back of that, we're going to start our new series after that. And it's going to be about engaging in the 21st century, just the topic of 21st century radical Christianity and how we can do this better in engaging in the world today.

So yeah, that's a brief overview of what we've looked at. And yeah, is there anything else you wanted to discuss or ask about on that? Yeah. Justin, could you pop that back up again? Sure. And I would love to hear around the circle, which was your favorite talk of the Sacred Roots so far? As you said, we have a couple more to go yet. And Justin, did you say which was your favorite one?

So I don't think I did. And that's actually a good question to think about. I actually would probably jump to David Bursot's talk on why study the early Christians because it helps answer some of those questions of why it's important to know our roots as the Christian church. And then it helps even engage in the topic of early Anabaptism and why that's important as well. So that'd be the one I'd pick. But there's lots of them that were really good.

Sure. Okay. All right. Let's go then. Let's go Sam, Glenn, Wendell, and myself. Sam. Sure. That's a tough question, Bryant. I found talk two and three to be quite useful. I enjoyed them a lot. And I think I've listened to talks 11 and 12 two or three times.

Oh, wow. I found them extremely informative and very helpful and worshipful to talk about the Trinity and learn about the historic perspective. So those two talks have been quite impactful for me. Yeah. Yep. So Phinney's two talks on the Book of Acts and then, yeah, Trinity and Christology by David Anderson. Yep.

Good. Fantastic. I said just give one.

All right, Glenn. Yep. One second.

Can you end your screen share there, Justin? Yes.

Yeah. There we go. Yeah. So the one that I would identify is also the one that Sam mentioned there, the one by David Anderson. On the thumbnail, it says, "Behold the man." And that wasn't actually the title of that talk, but I thought that was an incredible presentation.

And yeah, I would suggest checking that out in the Christology series there by David Anderson. It was the second one. Sam had moderated that one. And I always thought that Trinity is maybe a little bit of a boring or abstract or something like that. But that blew me away. So yeah, that's definitely my favorite. Nice.

Nice. Could you pop that back up again, Justin? Yes. Thanks.

Wendell. Yeah. I know. I'm struggling a bit here because, well, for it, yeah, there was a lot of good stuff. I think the one that's popping out to me that I'm remembering well is David Anderson's talk on monasticism in the late medieval era. So I'm a bit of a history nerdy about history. And that's a time of history that I know very little about. And I thought it was just that was good. And it was inspiring to actually see and hear about the monastic movement and how Christians were faithfully being radical about following Jesus in a time when we often think of dark ages.

It's just nothing good happening. So that one was good. Also, of course, the most recently. I said just one. Yeah, I know. But I want to I'm going to take you unless you cut me off. Dean Taylor's talk on the sacraments was just really good. In fact, we're having a Q&A on that here coming up right shortly. So looking forward to that.

Good. Okay.

Glenn, yes, you gave yours, right, Glenn? Yes. So my turn. Okay. Let's see here. So my favorite, I went back to listening to this several times, is number eight, Sacred Roots, Practical Distinctives of the Early Church. That was powerful.

And if we can, by God's grace, live that out in our day, not only as followers individually, but with our churches, that could be powerful. So Lord help us. And he gets into some of the sacramental understandings of baptism, communion, hospitality, helping the poor, just amazing.

Really, really powerful. So definitely one that I listened to a couple of times. Okay. Anything else, Justin? Yeah. Well, I just really like what you brothers brought out there. What was your favorite? And I just want to reiterate how much of a blessing it was to have David Anderson on and do so many of these talks.

He did so well. He dug in real deep. He just patiently went through his stuff and explained it so nicely. And I learned a lot from him. He's an excellent teacher. And it helped me understand even, yeah, my connotation too was that Christianity kind of was half dead through those times. And he brought Christianity back to life in that era. And that was really great and helpful for me.

Fantastic. Okay. And so, Justin, did you kind of talk about upcoming, yeah, radical 21st-century Christian living or kind of like the idea of how should we then live? And so we're thinking and praying about that. And we'll start putting it together here in the beginning of the year.

Yes. Okay. Anything else? All right. So let's turn now to the last part here. And that's the part I've been assigned to. And that is talking about a gathering for men. And this vision has been brewing here at Strength to Strength the last year. And so the idea of a conference, it wasn't that new of an idea for us. It's something that we've talked about in the past.

But the idea of more of just a place for men, for men to be challenged. Okay. So not a retreat necessarily, but a place to be engaged, especially in light of our times. And I thought of this verse this evening here in chapter 2 Timothy 3. But know this, difficult times will come in the last days.

And I won't take the time to go on through those verses of what it's all the descriptors of what those people are going to be like. But it sounds like state college when I read that. Sometimes maybe even sounds like my heart. And so we have a challenge and an opportunity on our hands. And so we feel that God is leading us here. We've been discussing, like I said, with our admin team here, with our advisors, and with several other brothers who are real interested in this. And so I'm going to go ahead and share my screen here and talk about Caleb Summit. So Lord willing, we will be doing this here in the fall of in October 2026 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

And as you can see there, our logo is quite graphic. It is a dragon with a sword. And this logo has really caught the attention of my children. And we've got to talk about what that dragon means.

This is a type. This is parabolic.

Who wouldn't want to kill a dragon, right? But this is a type. This is a picture of the church and what we're involved in. And that is, and our text verse or kind of our theme verse or our guiding verse for Caleb Summit is this verse out of Revelation 12:17. And the dragon was enraged with the woman, and he went to make war with the rest of her offspring who keep the commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.

And so this verse signifies the final and intense persecution by Satan against God's faithful people who remain obedient and steadfast to Jesus. And so there's a sense in our world that we are in dark times. There's a lot of people who would acknowledge that whether you're a Christian or not, we're in dark times. And so with Caleb Summit, it is our desire to really engage and inspire and equip men for this battle that is on our hands.

We don't wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in heavenly places. And so moving on down through right here, the three words that kind of capture our vision for Caleb Summit is confidence, clarity, and courage.

And of course, drawing on Caleb, who at like 85 is like, "Give me the hardest part of the promised land, Joshua. Give it to me. I was here 45 years ago, and I want it now and again." This older man who's ready to step forward in faith. When those guys his age are retiring and stepping back, he's stepping forward. And that is what we want to do with Caleb Summit, is challenge ourselves and others, men, to step forward. So the purpose of Caleb Summit is a gathering built to activate and align young men, ages 18 to 35 approximately, with the historic Christian faith to ignite church planting, evangelism, and movement growth. This is not a retreat or recovery meeting.

It is a forward-leaning rally for men who want to carry the historic faith with confidence, clarity, and courage. Our core inspiration is our model is Caleb at 80. Still fierce, still faithful, refusing retirement, insisting, "Give me this mountain." Caleb Summit calls men into the same triumphant spirit, holy ambition, joyful strength, and bold masculine initiative.

Our core message is this: most men's conference are defensive, focusing on failure, guilt, and what men need to stop doing. Caleb Summit is the opposite. We take a joyful, offensive stance. Men were created to build. Men were created to lead. Men were created to advance a kingdom.

And so evangelistic momentum requires male initiative and courage. And we believe every man, intellectual or redneck, scholar or tradesman, is responsible for promoting, defending, and expanding the historic faith. Shoulder to shoulder, these men will pray, worship, debate, and evangelize as brothers, referring to our time together, those two days in Pittsburgh, Lord willing.

So the next page here is the framework that we're orienting Caleb Summit around is the acronym RISC. So R is rooted, anchored in the historic faith and early Christian witness. I is irreproachable, lives without vice or theological compromise.

S is supernatural, dependent on the Holy Spirit's power and gifts. K is kingdom, advancing the rival nation of King Jesus. And then kind of breaking it down a bit farther. So we'll have some core topics that we're going to be then kind of unpacking in those seven days and in coming years. I'm sorry, those two days and those coming years.

Extreme prayer, church planting, business as a witness, theology, historic faith, masculine guardianship, and physical discipline. Some of the unique features maybe or features of Caleb Summit is this: 15-minute lightning talks with live Q&A. So not long, droning topics that get stuffy and people clock out. So we want to be very intentional. Men who have put a lot of time into and boiled their message down. So it's very engaging. Again, we're thinking also young men, really engaging them. So 15-minute lightning talks with a live Q&A, breakout discussions and prayer groups, walk-run lunches for energy and brotherhood, evangelism teams, getting out into the streets, singing public witness, serving there maybe at a homeless shelter, that type of thing.

Push-up sessions to keep the room masculine and alert. All right. So get ready to be not only worked out physically, but I'm sorry, spiritually, but also physically. And then finally, a memory passage as well. And our outcome is that we pray that men will leave with courage, clarity, confidence, brotherhood, and a living vision for building the rival kingdom of King Jesus.