"Discovering the Kingdom" by Daniel Willis

The one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken. Good morning, everyone. Welcome back to Strength to Strength. Our purpose here at Strength to Strength is to advance Jesus' kingdom by tackling thought-provoking topics, by stimulating candid discussions, and by sharing faith-building testimonies.

And that last part, the faith-building testimonies part, I think is one of my favorite parts of Strength to Strength. We've had some really meaningful testimonies shared on here over the last, well, eight months that we've been recording. And even before that, when this call got started back over a year ago and before we were recording, Daniel, you even were on here earlier before this call was recorded, right? That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, it's good to have you back on here again, Daniel, and looking forward to our time this morning.

Yeah. Last week, we had John D. Martin on here talking about the constitution of the kingdom and what a powerful talk. If you haven't listened to that, definitely go back and listen to it. A couple of things he said, a quote or two from him. He said, "Too many times we try to preach the sermon without the demonstration.

Make sure that we are showing before we are telling." And then he kind of backed that up with a quote from his late bishop there at Shippensburg, who said this, "Actions speak louder with words." So that was just a couple of little quotes here from his talk. And that was, yeah, powerful. I've listened to that message at least once in the last week and plan to revisit it again. I think understanding the sermon of the mount and understanding it as our constitution, it's the way we operate, I think, is so integral to following Jesus.

And Daniel, I know that you care deeply about this. I've been challenged with your life here just getting to know you the last two years. We would have met at Kingdom Fellowship Weekend, well, soon two years ago. You came in there as a totally new person, kind of unsure what you were getting yourself into. And it was real neat to meet you there. So looking forward to hearing about your journey and the way God is working in your life.

God is working in everyone's lives, in each one of our lives here today. And His mercies are new again today. So it's, yeah, good to be on here with each one of you. Before we get started, let's just bow our heads for prayer.

Our kind Heavenly Father, thank You that we can be up here this beautiful morning. The birds are singing. The sun is coming up. And it's a beautiful summer morning, Saturday morning. Thank You, Lord, that we can gather here together as brothers and sisters on this call and seek You and hear what You want us to hear today. Father, pray You bless Daniel in a special way as he shares. Thank You for his commitment to truth. Thank You for the way he has pursued You for years. And Father, I pray that You'll bless him in a special way as he shares here this morning. Help him to know what to share, what not to share. Father, yeah, we haven't had much time to even talk about this talk here this morning.

We're just kind of winging it. But Father, I know that You can guide Daniel's thoughts and he can share things that would challenge us to continue to seek first Your kingdom. And so Father, may Your kingdom come and may Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And we ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Amen. So Daniel has a wife and five children. And it's got to be with them. And actually, we're at her place here maybe three weeks ago. His family was a beautiful family. They have adopted a daughter from China as well. So Daniel, the next 40 minutes here is all yours. I'll try to lob some questions at you as we go along here.

But if you could just start kind of back in your childhood or however you want, kind of where you were raised and what that was like, and then kind of what led you to China. Yeah, it's all yours. So you can kind of start where you want.

Great. Well, good morning, everybody. And yeah, my childhood and my raising is probably a lot different than most of yours. But I grew up in a pretty broken home. And my dad was an alcoholic. And because of that, my mom was often at work trying to make things work out financially. And yeah, so I was, let's see, I was a bully.

In third grade, I got sent home or got sent to the principal's office because I made songs out of cuss words that definitely couldn't be repeated here. And I was known as the weird kid just because I wore in the winter swim trunk bottom shorts that were white color and dress-up sweaters on top. And my teachers would ask me if I dressed myself, and I would proudly say, "Yeah." And then one of them one day said, "Well, I can tell." And it was my brothers got into drugs early on, and we got into crimes of breaking into houses and robbing things. And I got a felony when I was 13 for throwing logs in the road and making cars crash on the highway to going through Atlanta, Highway 85.

And it was kind of my wake-up call, my first wake-up call. I didn't have the greatest idea of right and wrong. And I had just fought my way through life, literally getting in fights. And that's just how I related to people. And after the felony, I got community service at a church. And I really didn't get the gospel, any kind of message of God there.

But I realized that I could have killed people and that I could be in jail forever. And something's wrong with my life because as I was doing those actions of throwing logs in the road, making cars crash, I didn't feel bad at all. I didn't have any remorse at the time. And then my football coach told us about Christ a little and then told us to go to this thing called the Starlight Crusade, where they preached a hellfire and brimstone kind of sermon.

And it felt like he was talking about me when he was listing all the sins and how God created us. And I really didn't know at that moment God was real. He created us. And He wants to know me. And I'm this garbage. I'm doing everything that He hates.

But He wanted to still know me. And He wanted to forgive me. And so I went and gave my life to Him. And then they baptized me. But I really couldn't read very well all the way through up to high school. And people asked me, "Why did they keep passing you?" And I think it's just a bad school system. It looks bad if they fail students. So they keep moving you along.

And then when I got to high school, before high school, in between, I got my license and started going to church. And I hadn't really gone to church very much at this point because that church that kind of led me on starting to walk with the Lord, my parents didn't go to church a whole lot. So they just kind of let me. They didn't have any way to contact me as a 13-year-old. So now I'm at 16. And I go to church. And they give me a Bible. And they realize I really can't read it. And I'm struggling. And then they give me an easier Bible, the NLT. And then I told them I can't really understand this either.

And then I got a bunch of CDs.

I always say 100 CDs. I really don't know how many it was, but it was Old New Testament of CDs. And they basically said, "Read it and listen to it." And then during that summer, I learned how to read fairly well. Amazing. God taught me. And I would play Matthew and Mark and Luke and John when I was sleeping. And I know that's weird. And we probably don't get good sleep. But somehow I slept. And then I carried my Bible everywhere and told everybody about God. But I didn't get the non-resistance thing very well. I went from being a bully to a bully of bullies. I thought, "Well, God would want me to beat up these kids who bully people."

And so I still fought. And I kicked people in the face, literally, in the locker room. And because they were bullying other people, I thought, "Well, I can take it out on them." And so there's a lot of the kingdom and the teachings of Jesus that I didn't quite understand. And the church that I went to was a church that prided itself on obedience. And in the area we live, there's churches literally, I guess, everywhere in the world, but more so in Atlanta, Georgia area, just a church every minute down the road or less. And we lived in between—I mean, our church was in between three or four churches. And those churches thought we were kind of cultish because of how much we put emphasis on obedience.

But yet we had lots and lots of sin going on, lots of things that were condoned in that church.

Like an elder who was already divorced. His kids were smoking weed. And I didn't know that till way later. And then he was counseling this couple. One of the—I don't want to say his name. One of the boys was going off to the army. He was 16. And he was wanting to get married to his girlfriend. So he was counseling them. And after they got married, he went off to the army.

And then the elder started having an affair with this girl. And then when he got back from the army, they promptly got a divorce. And then he divorced his second wife and then got remarried. And then now he's an elder of another church. Well, I think he was last time I—and that was a pretty obedient church in our area, in our minds. So I know that once you get into the Anabaptist realm, those kind of stories are unbelievable. And so it's a really good thing that they're unbelievable. But the so-called church is really like that. And when you're a baby Christian, you read the Bible and you think, "Oh, we need to do this and not do this."

And then over time, people just tell you, "Well, you don't really have to do this." And yeah, works are not—if you think works can please the Lord, you're going to go to hell. And then just minimize all the teachings of Jesus. And it's not like it's constant.

There's a lot of obedience and there's a lot of good things. And God's moving in Protestant and evangelical churches. But it's like Satan's allowed in. And Jesus is outside knocking. And there's a few, a remnant of Christians there who are totally about following God. And they're trying to—a lot of times, it's the pastors or whatever.

So there's hope in those circles, but it's diminishing almost done. And anyway, so I went to Bible College. Hey, Daniel. Yep. A couple of questions for you there just before we move on to that. So two questions. Were your parents religious? Were they professed to be Christians? How was that? And then also, in thinking about your journey to Christ there, what instigated that? And you might have alluded to it, maybe even said it, and I just missed it. But what took you to that revival service or wherever you became Christian?

You kind of talked about that a little bit. Yeah. So my mom was very religious. My dad kind of told my mom he was a Christian to marry her and then wasn't really—he just was saying that. And so my mom did want to go to church often.

We didn't very often. Or we went to a church that I remember. It seemed like most of the meetings were about finances or something. As a kid, I didn't really quite understand what church was. And my mom really pushed purity.

And so thankfully, because of that, I knew that once I had never had a sexual relationship. And when I was 13 and I finally gave myself to the Lord, I knew that was one thing I was supposed to not do was just to have one wife. And I knew the drugs were wrong. So God kind of spared me from those things. But yeah, the way I had done all these really bad things, I was on the road to going to prison.

And then when it was just the football coaches were telling us about God, and then it led us to that Starlight Crusade thing where they preached a very scary message, but a message saying that it doesn't have to be scary. And during that, they told me that before they baptized me, that it doesn't really matter how I live, that you're going to be saved, once saved and always saved, and never have to worry about it. And you're assured of your salvation.

But that didn't make sense to me after the message that I just heard.

But yeah, what was the rest of the question you said? No, you got it. Yeah. Yep. Thank you.

And then anyway, I couldn't put my Bible down. And I took it everywhere I went. And I was kind of odd that way at this point. I had become normal in a lot of ways because of the Bible and the church.

And I just told everybody about God that I met. And then a lot of people—and when I say led to the Lord the whole time, it was a different understanding than what I have today of what I do hope that everybody that I helped find God in some way is still on a journey and finds the narrow road and lives the life that Christ wants them to live. But I had led a bunch of people to Christ at public supermarkets.

And some of them had went to Johnson Bible College before me. And so I felt like that would be a great place for me to go. It's now Johnson University. And during that time, I'm not going to go into the whole story, but God called me to China.

And it was very obvious that it was God telling me to go. And

I didn't really know anything about China. I just knew that everybody knew ping pong, kung fu, and everybody was really short and starving because my parents always told me they're starving kids in China. And I got over there. And none of that was true except the ping pong thing. Nobody knew kung fu. Everybody was tall. And nobody was starving.

And I thought I was kind of going to a rural place. And it was very, very modern, big, huge cities.

And my wife followed me over there. And I honestly believe that God took me there for the purpose of finding him to continue to really figure out what the truth was. At first, we were having all these Bible studies. And the same way that I said, led to the Lord, lots of people were led to the Lord. I don't know their walk with Christ now.

But during that time, our organization told us we need to not be so bold. And as I was reading the Bible, it seemed like all the early Christians were very bold. And they were like, "Well, you have too many people meeting in your house. You need to make it small." And then they took us to this training in Cambodia where they basically said that what we had been doing, we need to completely stop. And we need to basically stop reading the Bible and just memorize these few stories and just tell these stories over and over.

And so we went back and we tried it for a year and had absolutely no fruit. And we had 30 and 40 people come into our house multiple times a week before then. And then we had zero people coming because we told them our organization doesn't want you coming. And a lot of the missionaries over there lived on fear.

And one of my professors wrote me a letter when he came over and saw that I started living in fear. And he basically put it to me and said, "You need to not be like this. You need to live this out and do what you're supposed to do." And so we started being bold again. But we wanted to not do it alone. And so I found this Baptist guy who was really, really bold.

And I didn't know a whole lot about the Baptist. But then we started a church together. And as we started it, I realized almost all of my beliefs were very different from his. And it really did seem like almost every Sunday when he preached, he was condemning me to hell because of my beliefs. And he would say, "If you believe baptism does anything or has anything to do with salvation or washing away the sins, you're going to hell. And if you believe that works," he would just go on to all kinds of things. And I would go home and I wouldn't sleep. And my wife can testify to this. And I would just say, "Why are we here?

What are we doing?" But God just kept making it felt like we were compelled to stay there. We had to stay there. And so he had raised up these pastors. And I would train them one day. And then the next day, he would train them. And we were kind of back and forth. And I would just read the Bible with them and try to get a good foundation. And then this other guy, this Baptist guy, would read something called The Firm Foundations, a book that he made. And they would often say, "Well, what you're saying, what he's saying is very different.

They're contrary." And I would often just say, "Well, I'm reading the Bible and he's reading his book. So it's up to you to figure that out." But then I realized over time that he had a lot of things right. He would challenge me in all these subjects. And I would go home and I wouldn't be satisfied until I figured out why I believed what I believed. And then I realized by just searching deeply things about women speaking in church, I would have believed before then that women can preach and teach. And I was completely wrong about that. But then I realized some of the things that I was right about. And then it made me really afraid to teach at that point because I didn't know what I was right and wrong about because every subject I hadn't really dug really deep and tried to figure out where it came from, what the truth was.

And so we started a second church plant. This is maybe after three or four years of the first church plant. And we would walk down the street about—it was 40,000 steps on the way to my job, which I was an English teacher. And I would just meet people on the way. And I would talk to people every day on the way and the way back. And I built all these relationships. And I would just invite them over to eat. And then we would start Bible studies with them. And then as the Bible studies grew, we would just read the Bible and read one book. I don't know if you've heard of David Pawson, but he said one of the best practices is to pick a book of the Bible and read it all in one sitting.

Interesting. And so we would do that as a church. And we started with Luke. And we read Luke all the way through one evening and started at 6:00. And we ended at 1 o'clock. And then the ladies that were there were like, "We want to read Matthew now." And I was like, "Okay. Well, next week." They're like, "No, we want to read it now." I was like, "No.

It's really late. I have work in the morning." But they wanted to know the word of God. And we would just ask questions like, "How do we live this out? And what do we do with—how do we obey God? How do we do these things?" Whatever it was, whatever the chapter and whatever the book was.

And we went through Philippians. And it was the next book we went through. And we went through it many times. And then they started taking very serious, like, "We don't complain about anything. And we don't argue about anything. And we think of what is good." And when people would complain, at least at first, when people would complain or argue, they would be like, "No, we can't do that. We're Christians. We don't do that."

And they just started taking everything very literal. And I often had a feeling to tell them where they were wrong. But at the time, I wasn't even sure if I was right. So I didn't. Except one time after we read the book of Corinthians, two ladies came up and said, "Should we be wearing head coverings?"

And I said, "No, because of the prostitutes and because of the long hairs, the covering, and all the things that I learned in college." And then I always say the next day, but it's how it is in my mind. And very well, it could have been the next day, but it might have been a few days later. But in short order, my wife came out of the room and said, "Should I be wearing a head covering?" And I was like, "Okay. This hit me twice really fast.

I just read the scripture. And when I was reading the scriptures with those Chinese ladies, they were like, 'It doesn't make any sense that it's the hair because it says that if you don't wear it cut off, it's better to have your head shorn or whatever.'" And I was like, "I didn't know what to do with it." And then my wife said the same thing. And I said, "Let me read about it." Then eventually, I just told her, "You do whatever you feel. If God's leading you to do it, you do it." And then she came out with the head covering on. And a few days later, I asked her, "Why are you wearing a head covering?"

And she said, "Because I want to honor my head. And I want to honor you." And it really touched me and affected me deeply. And so then I started studying about the head covering. There's a lot more to this. We had been studying lots of different things and just realizing that it seems like Christianity is very different than we ever thought. But we started looking very different and being very different from the other missionaries and didn't quite see eye to eye anymore. Although we can work together, we didn't see eye to eye.

But we started to feel like, "Well, maybe we're starting something that's not true. Maybe all this other stuff is true. And maybe we just got it wrong." So I started looking up head covering things. And I found David Brousseau's book on it. I mean, yeah, David Brousseau.

And then I found the Followers of the Way and the Kingdom Fellowship Weekend videos. And it was such a refreshing thing because everything you guys taught at Kingdom Fellowship and everything at the Followers of the Way and all the different things that I found is how we saw the Bible. And then we saw this—my YouTube told me to put the debate on Just War debate up.

Watch the Just War debate. And it just made so much sense. I was just like, "This is what the Bible actually says. We're supposed to be people of peace. And we're not supposed to be a war. We're supposed to love our enemies and turn another cheek."

And yeah, so then we just started—we realized that there were Christians who just obeyed the Bible simply and didn't have a complicated interpretation of the Bible. And it was really exciting. But it was kind of scary because we didn't really know anybody. And jumping forward a few years, the police kind of—the police beat the pastors that were over there that we had trained. And they had come to the door of the church.

I was there with my daughter. But they didn't know we were there. And we were able to get out. And then we were told to leave by a bunch of missionaries so that they didn't get in trouble. And so we decided that it was best if we flee.

And then we always planned to go back to China. But because of COVID and other things, we're not going to, at least for now. But anyway, as we left, we got to the States. And reverse culture shock was huge. And the differences and how much we had changed in our practice of following Christ really made it a huge contrast in church. There were just huge differences in the churches we were going to. And I'm not going to go into that. But the churches were teaching really awful things. And my wife realized it pretty shortly. And we realized we had to move.

And so we will not move at this time. We first looked for Mennonite churches in the area. And the first Mennonite church we went to, the lady had really short hair and jewelry. All the ladies did in modest dress. Not real modest, but not real modest either. And my wife was the most modest. And after the Bible study that at the beginning, I guess it was Sunday school, one of the ladies stood up and shook my hand and said, "I'm the head elder." And I was just really confused. And then the next church was a Brethren in Christ church that said that they were Anabaptist. And they were preaching about homosexuality being okay and even in the pulpit.

And then we were like, "Okay. Are these churches really like this? Where are these Anabaptist churches that we've been watching online?" And eventually, I got a hold of Matthew Miliani. And I told him we were planning to go to the Kingdom Fellowship Weekend. But we really wanted to move out to Boston because we didn't know of any other—there wasn't a whole lot of online presence of these churches. And so we knew there was one in Boston. So that's where we were going to go. And then we figured out how much it cost. And it was like, "Whoa, we can't afford that. We're in a camper. And we're having a hard time at the time affording this camper."

And so Matthew just told us to go to the Kingdom Fellowship Weekend and fill it out and see what it's like. And then when we were at the Kingdom Fellowship Weekend, when we first got there, we called Marvin Dolly and said, "My wife doesn't have any head coverings like you guys wear. And our dresses don't look anything like your dresses." And Marvin's like, "No, you come anyway. Just be how you are." And we were really nervous about it.

And when we got there, Marvin could tell we were nervous. And he said, "I have someone you have to meet." And he brought me over to Patrick Matthews. And at the time, he had jeans on and an untucked shirt and some tattoos.

And they were just—I could tell they were just buddies. And I was like, "Okay. Obviously, Patrick came out of the world and is now a Christian in these circles.

But he doesn't completely look at that moment. He's very much so a part of the Anabaptist groups." But he didn't look like I had thought. So it brought our nervous level way down. And then Patrick was huge. He just helped us meet all kinds of people. Otherwise, we would have just probably not met a whole lot of people. He just like, "Oh, you got to meet this guy. And you got to meet this guy and tell him your story."

One of Patrick's gifts. Yeah, very much so. And then we met Kevin, who's our head elder out of our church, and his family. And then we were invited over to Chambersburg. And that's the long—I mean, a short version of the story. But then we decided we were going to move up here.

My wife called me when we were at the Kingdom Fellowship Weekend. And she was in the trailer. And she sounded distraught. And she doesn't get really emotional very often. And I was like, "Oh, no. Something weird happened. This is very extreme compared to our circles, even though we feel like we're kind of extreme sometimes."

And so I got to the camper. And I thought she was going to say, "Let's get out of here." And she said the exact opposite. She said, "We need to move up here." And I was like, "Yes." And she's not the head. But I knew that I needed her to be behind moving up here, not against it. And so it was such a relief.

And so we went back home and told everybody, "Hey, we're going to be moving up to Pennsylvania." And they didn't quite get it. But I think they do now. So what other questions you got, Brian? Sure. Through there.

Yeah, a ton of questions. Well, wow, where do we start? Maybe just a couple of things that I learned about your time in China. Maybe we'll kind of look at that for a little bit and then kind of jump forward. I understood that you had to do language learning for four years. You know Mandarin and Chinese really well, right?

That was—Yeah, I had two years in the States. And actually, I had three and a half to four years in China of language school. Sure.

And then your church that you talk about, that's a whole story of its own. Your church building where you guys met, I understood. I think it was on a second floor. And the windows were all closed in and soundproofing and everything because it was all about keeping a really low-key presence there. We had rented this place in a valley that most businesses didn't want because it was off the beaten path. But it was on the first and second floor.

And it was quite big. I don't remember the square footage. But the first floor, you can see through the windows. But we always kept it looking like it was under construction. So when you look in, it looks like a kind of abandoned building under construction. Although past the first little lobby, I say we always kept it that way. It was that way often.

Eventually, as more and more people came apart of, the ladies ended up making it look a lot nicer in the front. But you could barely see into it. You could only see 10 foot into it. And then it became classrooms. And so we had Sunday school downstairs. But upstairs, we had three and four-layer thick soundproof insulation on all the walls.

We did a lot more evangelical-type singing, speakers, and guitar, and stuff like that. So I don't know. I wouldn't recommend that now, now that I've learned a lot more about that. But that's just how I knew music. That's what we were doing, so.

And we just made it the windows were completely blocked off with those four layers. So you couldn't see in. And that's why when the police were there that day, I think someone had reported that I went in the building. And then they came up and knocked on the window. And two men. And they kept knocking hard over and over. And I knew all the, "Ooh, yeah, the management there." And I'd never seen these guys. And I knew that they weren't just someone in that area. They were out to get someone. And so my daughter and I were upstairs. And I can see right through a little crack in the window the two men. And I kept telling my daughter, "You got to be really quiet."

I think she might have been five at the time.

Even though the lights were on upstairs, I knew they couldn't see it because the windows were blacked out because of the—I mean, there's a wall built in front of them. And so we just had to sit there for a while. And a few hours later, I had a remote start on the Honda Fit we had. And I started the car. And I told my daughter, "I'm going to pick you up. We're going to run. We're going to get in this car. You're not going to worry about getting in your car seat. And we're just going to go."

And we just took off out of there. But yeah, the church we had set up, the building, not the church, we had set up very to where nobody would know. We tried to make it where people would come in at different times. You wouldn't all get there at once. And we made it flexible. We did have a starting time. But people just strolled in. It wasn't like everybody showed up and left at once so that we were less—that's how it was at first. Later, I don't know if we didn't really talk about it. I think people knew that that's what we should do. So they just did it.

But yeah, the church now in China, the one that we have, I don't know how it's going. I do talk to one of the pastors, the elders of the church there. But we rarely talk about spiritual things because he's already been blacklisted. He's watched by the police. And so I can't really just ask him whatever. And even speaking in code is like you really don't get the whole stories of stuff. You just—Right.

Yeah. So for the most part, they've broken up into many little groups. And I don't know how healthy it is. Sure. Yeah. So what would you say—so our congregation here interacts with a lot of Chinese here with Penn State University.

As they go back to China, they might come here secular, go back with a desire to follow Christ, even some as believers.

What would you say to them? What kind of—yeah, what words of wisdom would you have for this kind of folks? Well, I definitely would tell them not to go to the government church. The government church, they can't preach the resurrection of Christ or salvation or the book of Revelations.

And they're not allowed. They have to basically say that they're not going to go tell anybody about Jesus. And they can't invite people to church. And although they do, but they have a lot of rules and things they have to sign. And they rotate pastors every few months. And half of them are government people that aren't even Christians. And they just are teaching the communist thing. And they're making their own Bible right now. I don't know if it's come to flourish or not, where they're adding communism and Buddhist stuff and Marxist stuff into the Bible. So I would definitely say find house churches.

And if they're from the Anabaptist kind of background, they're just going to have to either find a church that they can submit to and then try to help them see some truths that Protestants have neglected when they went in and preached the gospel.

There's a mixed bag. There's all these denominations. But they don't even know it that much. Whenever we started the church with the Baptist guy, his supporters told him they must call it Jin Shin Jia Hui, which is the Baptist church. And because there's not a whole lot of mention of denominations there, thankfully, a lot of people thought of—not thankfully, they thought it was a cult. But thankfully, because of that, they thought, "Well, Jin Shin Jia Hui, is that some kind of church? Because we should just be the church."

They only had the idea of church and then the government church and then Catholic church. But there's so many—you talk to this Christian and this Christian and this Christian. They've had so many different missionaries from so many different types of churches. It's quite confusing. So I would just suggest find a stable church and read the word with them every day and find people, elders you can submit to and get ready to be punished. I mean, don't go thinking that you're just going to—I mean, it's very possible you can be a Christian and not get arrested and not get blacklisted. But you need to go back knowing that that's very possible.

Sure. Wow.

That's sobering. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. So let's come back to this side of the pond and your journey the last two years here stateside. So yeah, I find it just interesting talking with you, Daniel, how it looks really big, kind of scary to come to Kingdom Fellowship Weekend. And you'd watch the videos. And it looked pretty, yeah, rigid. It looked vague for you all to come there when you showed up. And I was just amazed at how you all felt like you fit right in. So I'm just thinking about for other seekers who would love to come to one of our churches or events, yeah, how can we make those kind of folks feel welcome?

Well, it honestly felt like heaven on earth to find so many people completely sold out for Christ. It was hard to be in a conversation. You would have to work at a conversation that wasn't something about God or the Bible or church.

It was just so amazing. But for people who are seekers, definitely don't be afraid if you're watching this. Just go. But for us, I do think that—I don't know. For the Anabaptists in general, when I read history of it, which I haven't read a whole lot, it seems like they were very, very bold. And a lot of times, their persecution came from that. And I think the reason the Anabaptists aren't well known now is because they're not bold in the sense of—I think we're bold amongst our own groups. I don't think that's a problem. But we're not bold out in the world making—I don't know. I don't know. It's going to sound weird. I'm not saying we should go make people feel uncomfortable.

But I'm talking to myself too. I don't know how. But I do know that we need to make a presence because I didn't even know anything. I went to Bible college and had Bible history, church history. And I know it's the Bible college's fault. But I didn't have any—I didn't hear anything about Anabaptists or the first 300 years of Christianity, historic faith, and church history is all anyway. So I think we need to make a presence known and that for seekers, don't be afraid and just be willing to submit to the king and everything. And you'll fit right into Anabaptist churches.

I mean, that's my thought. Sure. Yeah. One of the questions I was going to have for you is, what challenges do you have for us, all right, as Anabaptists, maybe specifically that is about your ethnic Anabaptists? Yeah. Yeah. So you said maybe become kind of the quiet in the land.

Yeah. So thank you for that challenge. I definitely would love to—do you have any more challenges along that line? Laid out clear, brother. The online presence is huge. I think—Online. Yeah. Gotcha. Online. Well, just being online, Shippensburg started posting their messages online. And I think a lot more are posting videos. And I think that's going to be huge to getting the kingdom message out. I mean, letting people know when they're looking up who believes that all of Jesus' teachings are for today. Whenever someone who's a seeker starts believing that way, and then they're in a place where nobody believes that way—well, they say they do. But then they make exceptions for all of the things Jesus says.

Or I shouldn't say all. The vast majority.

Somehow, we need to be present to where people can easily find us, that we're not just in the—I mean, we could be in farmlands. But with technology, there's no need. We need to invite people in, invite people to leave their kingdom, the kingdom of the world, and join the kingdom of God, and be ready to take on people who have some worldly appearance and that need to have lots of changes happen in their life.

And it'll be hard. And I know that a lot of Anabaptists are worried about their churches going off into the world. But we have to be willing to live and even be willing to possibly lose some people to the world. To reach the world. I know that maybe sounds terrible. But I think that the Anabaptists as a whole, their practice and the way—I mean, the ones that I've known, I know that there's so many different forms.

One thing that I would suggest is all of us be united. I think this kind of platform, no matter if there's groups that only drive one color car or have this kind of head covering or do this specific thing or don't have smartphones or are horse and buggy, I feel like that all Anabaptists everywhere should show the unity that Jesus cried for and, I mean, sweated for in the garden.

And Satan wants to attack that at every angle. And that because of our love for each other, people, it says the world will know who are Christians. And our unity is a huge sign of a huge way to evangelize. So just being a bigger presence, being a city on a hill, to be bold. I don't know what that looks like. I don't know how the early Anabaptists were. I know they were bold enough to get martyred left and right.

Yeah. That's all I have is just—but the way people follow Jesus otherwise, I think that there's not a whole lot that needs to be changed, just unity.

I mean, all right. I really appreciate that, brother. Thank you for that challenge. Yeah. There's obviously differences within the Anabaptist world, especially the conservative Anabaptist world. But why build up walls, right? We have so much in common and working together and trying to pull those walls down. I agree with you. Thank you for that challenge. And we need people like you, Daniel, to challenge us, to call us out, to inspire us to—yeah.

So don't step away from your prophetic voice there. Keep sharing. And yeah, really appreciate that. So I'll be opening up for questions here to the rest of you all here right shortly. But coming back, Daniel, thinking about—so one of the realities of advancing the kingdom is engaging with the word of God and with seekers and having Bible studies.

And there's very few Anabaptists who, sadly, very few of us who have really done Bible study with unchurched people. It's just something that we haven't done much of. And I'm excited to see that changing, to see people getting out, to see churches being us moving into urban centers and engaging the world. That's really exciting. But I know that you've done lots of Bible studies.

Do you have—yeah, what methods or—yeah, do you have any thoughts along that line of how we can look at it, how we can study the word of God with a seeker? What have you learned in that area? Yeah. I forget what the method is called that we used.

I just had this printout. It's quite simple. And it just had a bunch of questions on it. And the idea of the method that we kind of adopted, we've made it our own, was to—their idea was to read just a few verses and ask these questions. But we just read a whole book. And I know that in the American world with media and the distractions of the world, it might not be very easy to do something like that. But you read a big section, and then you just ask, "What does this say about God? What does this say about man?

How do we obey this? What do we need to change?" And now you'd ask this to non-believers. And somehow—and believers—but somehow this would make them start to practice it. I don't know how to explain it. But it was like part of their belief was just doing it without even saying, "I believe at first." It was just like, "Okay. Well, I need to not do this. And I need to do this. And I need to—" so whatever the passage was. But one thing that's difficult in the States, and I haven't done it myself, so I maybe shouldn't be saying it like John D. Martin said, is before in China, it was you had everybody looking at you, staring at you all the time.

So you can go make conversations. It was so easy to make conversations. You'd just see them, and you're like, "Hey, how are you?" And then they ask you a bunch of questions like, "Where are you from?" And then you just—it was easy to meet everybody and talk to everybody. And so here, it's a little different. But first, we have to bump shoulders with people. We have to rub shoulders.