All Are Yours Conference?

Philip I’m hearing of a few individuals talking about these sorts of things on the sidelines, whispers of it. Well, can we bring some of those individuals together and talk about it together, louder? This podcast, hosting some guests, is one of those opportunities. Can we host more people together to talk more about that sort of All Are Yours worldview? What does that look like? What does that mean?

Hello and welcome to All Are Yours. Both of us are back. We’re ready. We are ready to talk.

Sean I have been waiting for this opportunity. I have basically not even used any words since we last recorded.

Philip Storing them up. All that kinetic energy is getting built up and it’s got to go somewhere. So here we go. Get ready, people.

Sean It’s like new wine in old wineskins — it’s going to burst.

Philip There you go. That’s right. All right. Well, teaser-wise: something we’ve been thinking about, and even the whole idea of the All Are Yours podcast. We did talk a little bit about this when we came out on video. Why are we doing that?

Sean We’re like all over YouTube at this point.

Philip Yeah. Viral. There you go.

Sean I have subscribed to our YouTube channel in Readwise.

Philip Okay.

Sean And so it shows me every time a new short comes out — and obviously the big episode as well.

Philip Yeah.

Sean Because I want to know what the robots are selecting and posting on our behalf for those little clips that come out in between the massive hour-long specials that we do.

Philip That’s right.

Sean But that’s kind of it. So yeah, I’ve been seeing how prolific our YouTube channel really is, thanks to the robots.

Philip It’s busy. We have a person who’s managing the robots and releasing the shorts and the clips, getting the stuff out there. So if you’re not subscribed, subscribe. There’s us following the advice that the YouTube masters say: like and subscribe. It’ll help the robots do their work.

Sean Yeah.

Philip There you go.

Sean But yeah, so we’ve come out on video — that’s your point.

Philip Correct.

Sean When we came out on video, that’s where we were at until I rudely interrupted us.

Philip Yeah. And one of the things we talked about when we came out on video is that one of the things we’re trying to do is make more friends. We’d like more people to play with in that way. I do think we have overlap across different spheres — spheres of thought, maybe — with different sorts of people. Sometimes it’s hard to find people we agree with in all the areas, so we end up having to agree and disagree and live in that kind of tension with all sorts of people. Which is the only way to live.

Sean Yeah. We could actually take a step up for a second, from the 5,000-foot view to the 10,000-foot view here. The All Are Yours podcast is not the Trinity Evangel Church podcast — though both you and I are pastors at Trinity Evangel Church, and we worship at Trinity Evangel Church, and the doctrine, the theology that we understand and that we teach, that we’re trying to make disciples of, is that Jesus is Lord and therefore all are yours, because we are Christ’s and Christ is God’s. That is the passage.

The podcast, though — while primarily we thought it would be an encouragement to our church people — well, one of the options for trying to make more friends would be for our church to try to find a denomination to join. That would be a way to make connections. And one of our challenges is that we’re not necessarily convinced as a church that denominations are the way to go. We’re obviously not capital-P Presbyterian, so we’re not part of a presbytery that then has different regional connections or a national connection.

So yeah, we want to make more friends. But that’s not just on the church side. We’re also concerned with the educational institutions — all are yours. We talk about Comeford College, or Evangel Classical School. We’ve talked about homeschooling and private Christian schooling in previous episodes. We’ve talked about Comeford College in previous episodes. These are also very particular interests that we have. Let alone the Kuyperian business things. We’ve tried on purpose to talk about different spheres.

On the church sphere, we could join a denomination. There’s not really one that I’d be super excited about participating in that I know about, at least at the moment. But we’d love to have more friendships with other churches, to the degree that we could even partner with them in some things. Schools: Evangel Classical School is part of the Association of Classical Christian Schools, and we do have some sister schools in Western Washington that our headmaster has connections with at different events, and our teachers get training with them at some events. Comeford College is its own kind of animal.

So in some ways it’s almost like this particular avenue — not just the podcast, but this idea — is maybe one of the things that could actually help us make some of those network connections, as opposed to depending on the church to make the connections, or the schools to make the connections, or the business owners, or your business trying to make those connections. Not that this podcast or our glorious YouTube channel is the hub, but some of the broad interests of All Are Yours could actually be a great excuse to reach out to other kinds of people who don’t have to overlap with us 100% in any given sphere. But when it comes to some particulars, we could make our friends.

Philip And this way, if we sabotage our own reputation, we could still protect the institutions that we like. It’s just mine — my name that’s on the line there. No big deal.

Sean This is like the firewall. This whole thing could burn down, but everything else is safe. I like that.

Philip That’s right. And there are a lot of benefits, for sure, to playing with more people. Even your point about not being a part of a denomination — that in itself probably lost a bunch of viewers right there. There are people who hold on to being part of a denomination very — I mean, religiously. It is of utmost importance, a priority, even to the point of saying that the reason there are so many problems in the church today is because churches are independent. And yeah, there are some good points on that side as well.

Even the discussion of Presbyterianism, that model versus an independent model — those kinds of debates were going on with the Westminster divines at the Westminster Assembly. There was a group of the divines who were independent and who wanted autonomy at the level of the local congregation, and then there were those who were Presbyterians, a lot of them coming out of Scotland, having that sort of approach. So this is not just some kind of non-denominational megachurch new thing, even that question. It was birthed right out of the Protestant Reformation. If you’re coming out of that one capital-C Catholic Church, what does the model look like? So when they were trying to figure out what the national church for England would look like, they had these kinds of questions as well.

Sean One of our favorite Presbyterian churches in Tacoma is an independent Presbyterian church.

Philip Look at that.

Sean And they’ve been independent — I forget exactly how long, but it could actually be ten or twenty years, if I remember correctly. That is funny. It’s the same kind of funny to certain people online. People online fuss or fight about whatever. But just like there are people who say dispensationalists cannot be Reformed in any meaningful sense whatsoever — that being Reformed, capital R, means something distinct from dispensationalism, whatever — they would also say you can’t be a Presbyterian church and be independent. And yet we know of one.

Philip Yeah, it exists.

Sean We’ve been there multiple times. We like them a lot.

Philip Exactly right. So the worldview that we expound, promote, believe in could maybe be taglined with that “all are yours,” if there was some kind of tagline for it. And what we mean by that, we’ve talked about here as well. But we’ve called it different things too — something like Kuyperian dispensationalists. What does that even mean? What does that look like? Does that kind of creature exist out there?

Well, we have found others like us. There are not many. And we would like to find more. We’d like to encourage those who do have that kind of understanding when it comes to both Scripture, the word, and the world — and how to live out the word in the world. What does that look like? We do actually think our views are consistent from the position we’re looking at it. So encouraging others with those views of how to answer certain questions, or how to work it out for yourself, is some of the stuff that we like to talk about and want to talk about more.

Sean And not trying to be pokey whatsoever, but we’re talking about worldview, doing different things in the world — not as postmillennialists. And I can’t remember, and I’m hoping that you do: have we put the ball up on the tee for you to hit the parable of the minas on the All Are Yours podcast?

Philip I don’t think so.

Sean Because that parable is another specific way to talk about why this is important for us even though we’re dispensationalists — anticipating that all the things in the world are not going to get made right until Jesus returns first, and then he starts establishing righteousness on earth in his kingdom. Not that we are doing that first, before he comes back. So the parable of the minas is another doorway into understanding why we can care and still think we need Jesus to come back before we’re going to see some of the successes that are actually promised to people who confess that Jesus is Lord.

So, do you want to rant about the parable for us?

Philip Oh, I love it. It’s my favorite one.

Sean Yeah.

Philip Recently somebody said that I could probably draw anything back to the parable of the minas. So there you go.

Sean This is not going to steal any of your thunder, but I think — even in reading The Good of Affluence — I think that’s the last parable before Passion Week. That’s the last teaching parable that Jesus gives before the final week and before his death and resurrection. So the parable itself has a lot of great things in it, which you can rant about, but even its placement is intended to get us to think a particular way, with this kind of mindset you’re going to describe, right before Jesus died and was raised.

Philip So, Luke 19. Hit us.

I talk to different productivity-type people, or read productivity books, or listen to podcasts — I’ve had some opportunity to talk to some productivity coaches. A lot of them start with: you want to start with the end in mind, and think about the legacy you’re going to leave, and how people after you are going to think about you and what you did, what you were able to accomplish, what you did for them with the relationships you left.

Sean When you are done.

Philip That’s right. When you’re done. So write your own obituary and then live that out. That’s kind of the starting point.

I have no interest in approaching it that way. I get what they’re saying, but I want to approach it like a Christian and live this life out not by looking in the rearview mirror, seeing what’s behind me — I want to live this life for the next life. The parable of the minas presents our life here as a training ground, a probation period, to be able to bring a return to the master while he is conquering his kingdom, and then to be set up to rule with the authority the master gives us. I’m after those —

Sean Yeah, when he returns.

Philip When he returns.

Sean When he comes back to find out what we’ve done with what he’s given us in this time, and then gives us the rewards of work to do in his kingdom. What we have done now will be in some measure related to what responsibility he gives us going forward. So it’s not that we’re done.

Philip Exactly right. It’s similar to the parable of the talents, but one of the key differences is that in the talents, each servant received a different measure — one, two, five — and they brought back the same percentage return. They all either 2x’d, or, in the case of the one who didn’t bring anything back, didn’t. Whereas in the minas, each servant got one mina and they brought back a different level of return. One 4x’d, one 10x’d.

So: to be able to use the resources, opportunities, gifts, and abilities at your disposal to bring the greatest return back to the master, so that he can set you up for as much blessing and as much authority and rule in the new heavens and new earth after his return — that is the kind of life we want to live. That’s a sort of life that is heavenly minded for the earth’s good. You’re thinking about the future, you’re thinking about what’s next, and in that thought process you’re applying yourself here and now. You’re not just rearranging furniture on the Titanic. You are trying to bring a real, legitimate return in whatever sphere you’re in — in business, in your family, with your wife, with your kids, in your church. Maybe not as a business owner but as a worker in a business, you’re still involved in that work. Whether you’re in some kind of institution, an educational institution, in science, in art — whatever that return is, is what you’re after.

And that all-are-yours mindset, because all of those spheres belong to Christ and Christ is Lord over them all, means we don’t have to use them as just a means to an end, like we’ve talked about here before. The return there is actually being productive in those spheres, bringing the return that is relevant to whatever area you’re involved in. That’s some of the mindset coming out of that parable of the minas.

Sean Yeah, so the persons are not done when their life on earth in this current age is done. That person is not done.

Sometimes dispensationalists get tagged as saying things like, “It’s all gonna burn.” And that’s their justification, their excuse for why the only thing that matters right now is evangelism — trying to get as many souls saved as possible so they can go to heaven, because it’s all gonna burn. But the parable of the minas in particular — and there are other passages that get us to the same purpose of living here — says, okay, even if the work you were doing that brought about the 10x on your mina, even if that particular system or structure or business does burn or get destroyed, shaken and not the same, well, the person still continues. And the person’s responsibility can actually increase. With glorified bodies we’ll be even more capable of honoring the Lord and seeing all that is his that he gives us to work with.

So even if a bunch of the things in the current world system break down or burn or are destroyed, the persons and their capabilities are going to get rewarded going forward. The persons are going to last. I’ve tried to emphasize that persons are not done when this current life that they have is done.

That should really connect with lots of other people who feel like — it’s a dualistic kind of lie that a lot of people get sucked into, for a variety of reasons, probably. But this is the kind of worldview that is fitting for Christians of any millennial position, including the Christians who already have more of a dispensational premillennial view, even historic premill to some extent. This is actually something worth sharing, and there’s a lot of overlap in how our lives then look, what we invest in — our time, our energy, let alone our money — that we’re actually trying to honor the Lord here, not just get out of here.

Philip Right.

Sean “All are yours” really is intended to hook us into that kind of mindset.

Philip Right.

Sean And the minas definitely should encourage that even more.

Philip Yeah. In 1 Corinthians 15, when Paul is talking about the resurrection and the future glory, some of the examples or metaphors he brings in are like a seed that is planted and dies and then is reborn, is resurrected into a different type of glory. But it’s still all rooted in that seed. He talks about the different lights of glory as well in that way.

So even in that death and resurrection, I want to be as potent a seed being put into the ground as I can be, as God would allow me to be, so that I could have as much glory in the life to come as God would give me. I don’t want to be a weak, unhealthy seed that is lukewarm — mixing my analogies. I want to be a seed that ran by faith, that is potent, that is as ready as can be for the work that is to come in the next life. And even the reward, it seems, is connected to, is relevant to, the work we were doing here in some way, in some capacity.

Even the work that we have — you’re talking about it burning. Well, burning isn’t always destructive. Burning is also cleansing. It’s purifying. The Bible does talk about fire that way as well. We are refined in it, and our work in this world can also be refined through that fire, so that the thorns and thistles and weeds burn away and what’s left is only what is productive, only what is fruitful. And then we don’t escape the earth; we return with Christ and build and rule and reign and be as productive as can be in the new heavens and new earth.

So this kind of mindset for the future, even within a dispensational framework, does not make this life here and now irrelevant. It makes it more relevant. It will be cleansed, it will be purified, I will be resurrected, and all of those things will be put together for me to then bring the greatest return I could bring in the new heavens and earth. That’s not disconnected from what I’m doing here and now.

Sean Yeah. So this work is not useless. It’s not vain — if the end of 1 Corinthians 15 is also correct: your labor in the Lord is not in vain. That does not seem to require — I don’t think that’s saying your labor is not in vain only when you’re a full-time vocational missionary, or when you spend forty hours a week leading Bible studies. It seems like it’d be whatever your labor is, as long as you’re doing it in the Lord. Then it’s not in vain. It’s not limited to a particular vocation.

And the group of Christians we most initially overlap with tend to have not been taught that. They tend to have been more of the “we’re trying to just get out of here, we’re waiting for the rapture” sort. I think it was in one of the earlier episodes of All Are Yours where we picked on the idea of dispensationalist Bible colleges not building any of their buildings in brick, because it’s not gonna last.

We are intentionally trying to fight against that mindset — that these things are useless — and to say that they not only can be and are honoring to the Lord, but they’re part of preparing us to do even more, like you said, when our lives here are done, before our resurrection. So we’re trying to encourage more Christians who are currently still in positions like we have been in, and make some more friends who can continue to extend that.

And — I forget the first person I ever heard ask it this way — Christians so often only know how to lose. But what if we did actually make some progress, succeed in some spheres, make profits in some way? Like in the parable of the minas, there was actually some temporal success that increased the muscles, so to speak, of those servants, so that they could carry more in the resurrection.

Philip Right.

Sean And we’re actually trying to succeed and turn a profit, even if that profit doesn’t always look like the world would define it. And who says it wouldn’t look like the world would define it sometimes? So there are a lot of discouraged Christians who feel like their labor is in vain, and we’re trying to get this message out.

Philip Right. I think there are maybe three groupings of overlap that we have with other types of believers.

The first is the sort of dispensationalists who we share a hermeneutic with, who we share an eschatology with — we share this idea of how to approach the Bible, we share that Israel and the church are distinct. There is distinction there. And a lot of that is coming out of — within the dispensational camp it’s very broad, but maybe more so the TMS type of dispensationalist, as opposed to, if I could say it loosely, the non-Bible-reading dispensationalist, the more nominal one, where that’s just all they know. But the dispy who is coming out of that John MacArthur type of camp loves the Bible, reads the Bible; the Bible is the foundation for a lot of what they do, a lot of what they believe and say and think. We want to encourage that type of Christian to then apply the Bible in these different areas. What does the Bible actually say for us to do, for how we are to live? When the Bible says, in a way, get out of just the Bible and go live it out.

Sean Yeah. So I know you’re still on category number one, but we’ve talked before about the epistolary evangelicals, who are taking the Bible seriously — but the parts of the Bible they take functionally more seriously are the letters from the apostles. Which are good letters. They’re valuable, they’re crucial, obviously inspired.

Philip We like them.

Sean Yes, we’re not trying to get rid of them. However, the apostles had a lot of assumptions that they didn’t need to rewrite, because of what they understood from Old Testament things — think Psalms, or even the early parts of Genesis. They weren’t rewriting some of those things, because what they were writing to was a new situation with churches, which was not in the Old Testament. I get that that’s fighting words for different groups of people, to say the church was not in the Old Testament.

Philip We’re trying to make friends, John.

Sean Yeah. That said, the epistles are great. They are aimed at how you behave in the church, which is good. But how we behave in the church is not the only sphere in which we’re to behave on the earth. And again, like you’re saying, the people who take the Bible seriously need to take all of the Bible seriously. That includes recognizing what God takes seriously about the blessings he gives temporally. Those aren’t the only kind of blessings he gives — the epistles are much more concerned with the spiritual blessings, which are also amazing in Christ. But part of what those spiritual blessings enable us to do is genuinely appreciate and use the temporal blessings. So dispies have been bad at that, again at least in function. They wouldn’t state it that way in the confession of their hermeneutic, but they’ve actually been bad at reading the other good things that God says are there.

Philip Right. And a maybe younger generation of dispies coming out of the TMS circles see that something is missing, that something is not fully there. Unfortunately, a lot of the time they think that to get what’s missing they have to stop being dispensationalists — they have to stop reading the Bible that way and become typologists or covenantalists.

So maybe the second group of our overlap is a certain kind of Kuyperian covey who is interested in living out this all-are-yours worldview with the things of earth and everything happening here and now. A lot of times those people are postmills; sometimes they’re amils. But they’re trying to apply and live out this kind of blessing mindset, and that is something we like about that circle, that group, that type of Christian.

But we also want that approach, that worldview, to be able to be passed on to the next generation, and the next generation after that, and so forth. And we think what you need for that is a foundational consistency with the actual doctrine and how you live it out. So if your ultimate foundation is typology — and we’ve talked about this here before — typology in the sense that the thing itself is just pointing to a spiritual thing, then we have allegory. A lot of what we read in the Bible, a lot of what we see in the world, a lot of how we interpret history, is read typologically or allegorically, and then it’s played out in a spiritual realm. Well, consistency-wise, you wouldn’t be able to live that out here and now, where the physical things are just types of a spiritual reality. We don’t want to fall into that trap either.

So maybe those are two types of circles we have overlap with. But in neither circle do we have that full consistency that we’re after, and we want to have more unity in that way.

Sean And then was there a third group as well?

Philip Right. The third group is people who maybe aren’t even thinking about any of those things. Dispy, covey, postmill, amill, premill, whatever. “I’m just a practical evangelical. I care about cultural transformation. I care about public theology. I want to apply the lordship of Christ in whatever way I understand that, but I see people who are in need. I think that business is run better when there are Christian morals involved. I’m not even sure about all the underlying foundations, doctrines, theology. I have more of a practical approach.”

We like that. We like people who are doing things and are maybe even effective in some ways. But again, we’d like that to be more undergirded and strapped on for the long run. So those are the three groups we find overlap with: dispies, Kuyperian coveys, and these kinds of cultural or practical evangelicals.

Sean Yeah, I think that’s good. And, you know, how much creed does a Christian need to be a disciple? On one hand, they don’t need very much at all. They just need to confess with their mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in their heart that God has raised him from the dead, and they’ll be saved. So, boom. The super-practical Christians who are actually just trying to live it out and are less doctrinally or propositionally interested — there are strengths to some of that.

But it is harder in the third generation for them to know why they’re doing it. It’s not that example is useless. Example is a powerful part of passing on to the next generation how to live. Our kids in particular learn a lot of what to do by just watching us, regardless of what we say. That said, in the Old Testament, multiple times, some of the practices that were required of Israel were intended to provoke questions from the kids. And then the instructions are: in the day when your kids ask you, “Why do we do this?” — well, you are supposed to have an answer for that. You’re supposed to be able to explain it.

That doesn’t mean every person needs to read thousand-page theology books and have those definitions ready to go at a moment’s notice. But we are also word people, and for as much overlap as we have with the faithful Christians you’re describing who are trying to be salt and light — good — to be able to pass that on, especially to a second, third, or later generation, there needs to be some outline, some statements that explain how it goes. Not exactly the same, but Scripture explains how to read creation. Can you learn a lot about God from creation? Absolutely. Do you need the Bible to explain some more specifics? Yes. So we’re actually supposed to understand and then pass on the teaching, not just understand and live out the practical obedience options. It is both. Truth and obedience.

And part of the thing we’re trying to do is get people to — I mean, for both you and me, it is funny when you started by saying we’re looking for some more friends, because that is completely true, and also kind of funny in another way to talk about it like that. Our social needs are not necessarily the same bucket size as various other people’s.

Philip Exactly right.

Sean Still, in terms of the coordinated work, we want more friends, not just co-belligerents. We want more allies. And we want to be able to share some language about it as well. That’s part of why this podcast. Maybe there are other ways we could also try to get that language out there.

Philip Yes, that’s right — to communicate that sort of vision. So again, when we’re talking about looking for friends: maybe Sean and I particularly are, or are not. But our us, our people, the people who are with us — we have other people who like friends even more than we do. So we’re thinking about all of that, and about being able to make more connections and get more of this intertwining web of relationships. That’s what we’re trying to build more and more.

And yes, clearly communicating that vision, what it looks like, what that All Are Yours vision is — that’s what we want to do more of. So one of the ideas that we’re toying with, playing with, exploring, is being able to host an All Are Yours conference.

Sean A conference. Boom.

Philip Yes. Because we don’t think there are enough. We think there are not enough conferences.

Sean Because when Jesus told the eleven — Judas had already hung himself — when Jesus gave the Great Commission to the rest of the eleven, he was thinking about flying in celebrity pastors on an annual basis and charging exorbitant ticket prices so that the speakers could ride around in black SUVs.

Philip Maybe you could pay more to have dinner with the speakers, so that the VIP discipleship — exactly right.

Sean Or — that’s not exactly it. Again: are our conferences valuable? I have actually really benefited from time spent with men in particular. For about a ten-year period I’d try to take one, two, ten other guys down to the Shepherds Conference. The sessions themselves at the time were fine. We got orthodoxy. Nobody was slaying other people in the spirit at a Grace Community Church John MacArthur Shepherds Conference. So we got Bible, good theology, and something to talk about with the other guys. But in some ways it was just an excuse to go be together for a few days. And then the messages gave us things we could either complain about, or constructively criticize, or speak about how we were edified.

So in some ways the liturgy of the conference is more important than any given particular talk. The talks get recorded, and they can be used in an ongoing way, or shared even further than the people who could be there. But there’s something about seeing other people and participating with them and getting that sort of encouragement, that the talks and the sessions themselves are just a small part of.

Church, obviously, we’re doing that with a local body on a weekly basis, and the words that are said are part of the food God gives his people, even though they can be reading the Bible for themselves throughout the week. But a conference is intended to be some more of that sort of sharing, but more broadly — like we’ve been trying to talk about in this episode.

Philip Right.

Sean Where we are trying to open up our surface area to see if there can be some more connections, some more docking together, so to speak, in trying to do the work. Whether that’s Western Washington specific — obviously that’s our geographical location, and there’s some intent to make that more awesome because that’s where we live. But we’re also not opposed to making it more awesome as a kind of retreat destination: Marysville as a “come for a weekend” kind of thing, and get filled up and excited and encouraged to go back to your home and do it as well.

Is that a required thing? Is there a verse that requires it? No. Is it a spiritual, worldview opportunity to encourage other people like that? Seems like it.

And the Shepherds Conference — that sort of dispensationalist group went in your group number one that we have overlap with. But Shepherds Conference was intended more for pastors, so it was intended to encourage pastors for the work in the church. Good. But that meant there wasn’t encouragement for business owners. So there’s a business makers network — are you actually a member of that, or at least you’ve participated in some? That’s also good, but that would be more of the Kuyperian covey group. So you’re probably not getting a lot of dispensationalists going to that.

So to have something that would overlap all those categories you described —

Philip Right.

Sean — is not a thing that we currently know is happening somewhere. It’s not like we’re just trying to replicate something we think is good. We’re actually talking about something where nobody else is making those connections together.

Philip Right. I’m hearing of a few individuals talking about these sorts of things on the sidelines, whispers of it. Well, can we bring some of those individuals together and talk about it together, louder? So again, this podcast, hosting some guests, is one of those opportunities. Can we host more people together to talk more about that sort of All Are Yours worldview? What does that look like? What does that mean?

Another phrase we’ve used at TEC is having a kind of jealousability — even a jealousable mood, so to speak. That has to do with flavor, with taste, with beauty, with hospitality. How do we communicate and promote that more as well? How do we care enough about things that other people also want to care about these things?

Sean We can’t do that just in two dimensions. Or — what do they even count as? If you’re listening to this podcast just via audio, what dimension is that? Just one?

Philip That’s just the digital. That’s the ones and zeros.

Sean Yeah, because video is two dimensions.

Philip Right. I don’t know.

Sean But it’s harder — as good-looking as we are.

Philip That’s right.

Sean And as much fun as we make talking about these things sound. Our embodied jealousability is very limited in this format. Is it a useful format? Absolutely. All are yours. But potentially having a thing where you’ve actually got the three dimensions involved — the taste, the beauty — and depending on where we host our conference, and if we pull something like this off, you’ve got to start somewhere before you can iterate to make it even more jealousable and more hospitable and more beautiful.

Our current people, at TEC or ECS in particular, actually do a pretty good job — depending on who we can get to help us set a thing like this up, they actually do a great job of making it as tasty and as adorned as it can be. But that’s part of the thing. Baptisty dispensationalists are known for potlucks. They’re not necessarily known for beauty.

Philip Yeah, not good.

Sean And jealousability comes from Romans chapter 11, where God is blessing his people, and in particular blessing Gentiles, in such a way that the Jews would then be provoked to jealousy. And probably that works until the fullness of the Gentiles comes in, on the way to God using the blessings to Gentiles to provoke Israel to repentance at the right time.

But that jealousability is not because we have really good two-dimensional Bible studies. It’s because we can live it out. Some kind of planned path-crossing time where we could share in an embodied way some of these ideas. Talks are an orienting thing, talks are part of it, but there’s more we could potentially do than just talk. Because if it was just talking — okay, well, we just keep doing this. Actually getting more than an audience, getting some like-minded people to overlap even in their lunchtime or whatever, is a kind of thing that this format can’t do.

Philip Exactly right. Even God’s instituted feasts had that idea as well, where he would command men to pilgrimage together in order to have celebrations, to have something happening that people are coming to, traveling for. So there is that kind of idea. It’s not all bad — God didn’t think so.

Sean Right.

Philip Then, maybe a fuller explanation of some of the worldview — and these are also words we’ve talked about before — of what we mean by this kind of all-are-yours worldview, or maybe even Kuyper-dispy foundations, that I think we’ve addressed but haven’t fleshed out. These are the sorts of topics we want to invite others to discuss with us, and even help promote, help talk about.

The first one is that we want the foundation of confidence: being full of faith.

Sean Viva Fide.

Philip Correct. Viva Fide. That’s the banner. That’s right — live by faith. Even that kind of foundation, that kind of fuel for everything we do. The mindset that a lot of dispies have, frankly, lacks a lot of faith. Having the starting point be “we lose down here,” or “it’s all gonna burn anyway,” or “we’re just rearranging furniture on the Titanic” — that lacks faith, that lacks pursuit. That’s not what we want. We want more confidence — and faith looks like confidence. Con-fide: with faith. So we want to promote more of that with our people.

Sean Yeah, and that is a thing that includes words, but it also includes presence. Confidence can be shared communally, as opposed to you just reading a rousing story. Faith is individual, yes — in fact, unless an individual has faith himself, herself, whatever, they can’t be saved. But there is a kind of group, corporate, body-like faith, a kind of presence of that courage, boldness, heart, nerve, that happens together, not just individually. And it happens not just from words; it happens from relationship. So that is shared.

Think of the illustration of the individual charcoal briquette. You can light an individual charcoal. You could probably cook something small over one teeny Kingsford brick. But when you’ve got a group of them together, it lasts longer, gets hotter. There’s not just a protection that the center briquettes experience; there’s actually more cooking happening when they’re all combined together.

So that confidence is not just me reading a great poem and being excited for the day. It’s actually something we want to see shared — progress and joy of faith. That confidence is strangely lacking among Christians, whose very label is “believers.”

Philip Right.

Sean And we have a hard time continuing to live out the believing.

Philip Yeah. The next part we want to promote is for people to be consistent. Again, same with the three groups we talked about — dispies, Kuyperian coveys, or even just practical evangelicals. We want consistency with words and actions. We want the words to mean what they say, and then for people actually to mean what they say by going and doing it. Where we see inconsistency, we think that’s not good. Not all inconsistency is equally bad — I would rather have one type of inconsistency than another type. But I would even more have consistency that is good all around.

Sean Yeah, and more than just consistent with the Westminster Confession.

Philip Correct. That’s right.

Sean As much as I can get edified from so much of Westminstery things, functionally that becomes the authority sometimes. In discussions with certain Kuyperian covey groups who would criticize dispensationalists for not being consistent — it’s hard sometimes not to think that the standard for defining consistency there is Westminsterian instead of the Bible.

And I get that those are fighting words, but we are happy talking about it, and want to be consistent wherever that leads us. Whatever the conclusion is of what is right, what is true — that’s what we want. We happen to think there are some labels that more accurately describe those conclusions than others. But we’re not trying to immediately eliminate certain groups of people. We’re trying to get everybody to be honest about how they’re coming to their understanding, and to be as consistent as possible — not just, like you said, in the sentences, the words, but in how we live out the words we’ve come to.

And a dualistic dispy is, we think, massively inconsistent.

Philip Right.

Sean Even if their understanding of Old Testament and New Testament fits the right way, their behavior is not consistent with that hermeneutic. So, all kinds of ways to be inconsistent.

Philip Right.

Sean Just a passion to try to get consistent, for us.

Philip Yeah. The third one is to be comprehensive. Again, all the things Christ cares about on earth and for eternity. All are yours — and we want Christians to have that kind of approach, that kind of mindset, that kind of palette. For it to be comprehensive, covering a lot of ground.

Sean So you’re saying not just my quiet time in the morning before —

Philip Correct. Yes. More than just Bible verse memorization. Not less. Not less, correct.

Sean But more.

Philip More. Yes. We want to care about more than that.

The fourth one is conspicuous: manifest blessings.

Sean It’s like a preacher came up with these, since so far they’re all alliterated.

Philip Correct. These are not mine. These are actually Sean’s. I’m just reading them off.

Sean Yeah, I was mocking that preacher person who feels like you need to start all the letters the same.

Philip That’s right. So: conspicuous, manifest blessings. We want them visible. We want them demonstrated. They’re not just the secret joys in our heart. The blessings ought to be put out there and seen.

Sean Yeah. I can’t remember if I’ve gotten up on my exegetical soapbox on the podcast about Jesus saying that we’re the salt of the earth. Almost every time you hear somebody talk about being salt of the earth, they say Christians are a preservative — because they didn’t have refrigeration, blah blah blah, so they’d put salt on meat and that would help it not go rancid so quickly. And so culturally, Christians are a kind of cultural preservative that keeps things from being as wicked as they possibly could be.

That sounds good, and I don’t even deny that that was a typical use of salt. Except that in the passage itself, Jesus said what the problem with the salt is: that when the salt has become tasteless, it’s good for nothing and should be thrown out. So — tasty. Christians are to live in a tasty way, which is a conspicuous way. You can’t avoid it. If you put salt on your yogurt, you could not avoid it. If you put salt in your coffee, you wouldn’t like that. Generally we’re talking about putting salt on something to make it more savory, more flavorful, to bring out, to pull out the flavor.

So we are to be living in a way that is more provocative, in a way that makes others thirsty — but again, more the taste, and it’s supposed to taste good. And that is not just me and my quiet time.

Philip Right.

Sean Me in private. Me and Jesus.

Philip Right. And again, even in talking about preserving culture — well, you have to have a culture to preserve. You have to have built some sort of culture, to have founded it. And a culture is much more than just the quiet Bible time. That is the start, the foundation, but it covers all the ground: how families interact with one another, how kids and parents interact — even the John the Baptist thing of turning the fathers’ hearts to the children and the children’s hearts to the fathers — parenting, marriage, business, all of these different aspects. Again, it ought to be conspicuous, ought to be manifest, ought to be tasty, salty.

And then the fifth C is for it all to be compelling. For it to be jealousable and jealousably provocative, to pull people in, for people to want more of that. When it’s conspicuous, it ought to lead to it being compelling.

Sean And it seems like we’d have a lot of overlap with people who would find what we’ve just described compelling. “Hey, I want to be with a group of people that are pursuing those kinds of things. So forget whatever label.” We do think there are some nicknames that can help describe it in a quick way. But this kind of worldview, this Weltanschauung, this kind of life operating system — these are the lines of code we want to see running inside the application of our lives, that produce a certain kind of person and household and church and even city, location, those kinds of things. And we think that it does require a lot of work, and also that it’s really good. That’s the place of blessing.

Philip Right. Even for people who are experiencing a kind of theological homelessness, so to speak — “I’m kind of here, I’m kind of not here. Are there others like me?” That’s what we’re trying to say: yes. And we want to promote that more, and figure that out more, and live it out further.

Sean Yeah.

Philip So: an All Are Yours conference. This is us exploring it. This is us teasing it. The potential idea is for a year from now for us to be able to have put something together. And we would love to hear people’s feedback. So whatever you’re listening to this on, give us a comment. Or if you see us in person, talk to us in person: “That is a stupid idea. Do not do that. We don’t need more conferences.” So next time you see us, tell us. Or tell us you think it’s a great idea, or that you have some ways to make it even better, or to keep it out of the ditch.

Sean Or you want to sponsor it so that nobody has to pay for anything.

Philip There you go. Yes, absolutely.

Sean Yeah.

Philip But feedback is what we want. We don’t want to get too far and then find out it was all much stupider than we thought — or maybe much better than we thought.

Sean It is interesting that “conference” also starts with C, just like those other five C’s. So maybe that’s a sign.

Philip Oh man. Yes. There you go.

Sean So does “crap.” So it’s not necessarily only one obvious way the alliteration can go. But hey, if we’re looking for allegory, we could make it mean whatever we want. So this is definitely true.

Philip All right. So yes, give us feedback. Or not.

Sean Either way, we’re going to do something. Or we won’t. That’s comprehensive.

Philip There you go. That’s right.

Sean All right. That’s it.