- Hey everybody, thanks for joining us on The Baptist Bias.
This is our last show of our first season
and we've got a great show.
We're gonna talk about censorship.
We have a special guest, Pastor Roger Jimenez
from Verde Baptist Church.
And of course, we're gonna get started this evening
with our Benologue.
- I'm sure you were asking where Ben is,
but the obvious answer is that I am the new
and improved Ben.
No one needs the old Ben.
I'm your new Ben now.
Where did he go?
Prison, concentration camp, Vladimir Putin's Gulag,
Joe Biden's basement.
These details are irrelevant.
He has been deemed a very dangerous person.
I'm here to rescue you from the clutches
of his misinformation.
What did he do?
Well, he clearly violated the terms and service agreements.
What does that mean?
Read them for yourselves and it will be abundantly clear.
You can be assured with the new Ben,
you will not have to hear racist, misogynistic,
homophobic conservative talking points.
No more saying the Jews are all devil worshiping,
greedy antichrists who control all the banking,
media, and smut in the world.
Definitely not something I would ever say.
Yet Ben didn't get censored for any comment like that.
No more rat, sewer rat, rat faced rat,
rat comfort rat man, ratty rat faced rat.
Did I say rat yet?
No more ripped off Alex Jones talking points.
No more anti-liberal, anti-democratic rants.
No more talking about the Bilderberg group,
9/11 being an inside job,
Operation Mockingbird,
the JFK assassination,
or Titanic conspiracy theories.
No more saying that Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself.
No more every Hollywood actor is a child molesting Jew.
No more saying America is Babylon.
No more saying the WNBA is lame,
promotion of Indian food,
or quoting Romans chapter one, every other sentence.
No more alone.
No more calling Kamala Harris a dirty whore
for sleeping her way up the political food chain.
No more saying two plus two equals four.
No more saying that men cannot get pregnant.
Yet Ben still wasn't censored for any of that.
Ben has been censored because he had the Baptist bias.
Thanks so much for joining us on the Baptist bias.
It's the new improved Ben, the whitewash Ben we've got,
and we're really excited for our show.
We are gonna be talking about censorship
and how we can combat that
and what we have to do to fight that.
And I felt like probably one of the best guests
we could possibly have on the show
would be past her minutes, so we're gonna say hi to him.
But I think we should call our new Ben Dylan.
I don't know, I hate this vibe, maybe Dylan.
Dylan, thanks for joining us on the show this evening.
How's it going?
- Going good, thank you so much for having me on.
Looking forward to it.
Sorry for those in the comments that missed the old Ben.
We miss him too, but this is what you got for tonight.
- Well, sometimes things need to be whitewashed.
So literally.
But we've got Pastor Roger Menes
from Verity Baptist Church is also joining us.
Let's see if we can bring him in.
Can you hear us Pastor Menes?
- Yes, I can hear you.
- Thanks for being on the show.
- Thank you very much for having me on the show.
I feel a little ripped off on the Ben that I got,
but that's all right.
- Yeah, well, it's not as expensive
as what you could get in California.
So out here in Texas, you kind of get the discount deal
with discount Dylan.
So there you go.
- That's good.
It's good to see you, Dylan.
- Good to see you, Pastor Jimenez.
- Just so our viewers are aware,
I'm sure a lot of our viewers know who you are already,
but why don't you give us a little bit
of just kind of an introduction,
who you are, what you do, your church.
- Yes, my name is Pastor Roger Jimenez.
I'm the pastor of Verity Baptist Church
in Sacramento, California.
And we are a new IFB church.
And over the years, we've been around for about 11 years.
We started in September of 2010.
And over the years, we've experienced some persecution
and censorship, and we've had to deal with that.
So I'm ready to talk about that,
excited to talk about that.
It's definitely something that we're going to have
to deal with as Bible-believing Christians.
We're dealing with it now,
but we will be dealing with it going forward,
probably even harder or more extreme
than we have up to this point.
- Yeah, I definitely agree with you there.
I thought that the Southern Baptist Convention
already fired you or something like that.
I don't even know.
How are you still pastoring?
- Yeah, I don't know.
I think they took away my pension or something,
but I feel really bad for whoever, whatever.
Apparently, there was a pastor
in the Southern Baptist Convention
that had my same name, Roger Jimenez.
And back in 2016, when we were, you know,
I preached a sermon that went viral,
and we were all over the news,
and dealing with all sorts of censorship,
there was a petition that went around.
It got tens of thousands of signatures.
I don't remember the exact number.
It was like 50,000 or 60,000 signatures or something.
And they were petitioning the Southern Baptist Convention
to remove me or fire me or whatever they do.
So I feel bad for that guy.
But it's good you did a whole show
against the Southern Baptist Convention
since they fired me.
- Well, I wonder what happened to that guy.
I wonder if he got fired anyways, just like,
they're like, sorry, we just got too many signatures.
We don't even know if it's you, we just gotta let you go.
- You probably did get fired.
Also back in 2000, so we started our church
in September of 2010 and there was another church.
So I chose the name Verity 'cause it means truth.
And it's a word that's not found
in the new modern Bible versions.
You only find it in the King James.
And so we named our church Verity Baptist Church.
And there was actually, when I was choosing a name
for our church, Pastor Anderson had advised me
to kind of research to see if there was other churches
with that name, just to be aware of it.
And I found zero churches.
But after we'd started, I found out
that right around the same time that we started our church,
like a few months before or a few months after,
there was another Verity Baptist Church
that started in Colorado.
And when we got all over the news,
they got all sorts of hate mail and stuff.
Their website, they had to put this disclaimer that said,
we're not the Verity Baptist Church in the news or whatever.
They did not stand with us, by the way.
So I should look into what happened to them.
They probably changed their name to Grace or something.
That's funny.
They were like, Verity, that's a cool church name.
And then they didn't know what they got into.
Right.
And I just ruined it for them.
That's what the truth will do for some of these people.
It'll ruin their lives, I guess.
Well, you should name your church Verity
if you're not one sent for the truth.
That's right.
That's a great name.
I really like it.
I kind of like that it's just a one-word church name.
That's what I kind of like about Steadfast, just one word.
And we've got Dylan here.
Dylan used to be a member of Verity Baptist Church.
Why don't you tell us about your experiences at Verity?
Well, I know that Verity Baptist Church definitely
had a lot of hate because even the satellite church
up in Vancouver, Washington, literally hundreds and hundreds
of miles away from Pastor Jimenez in Sacramento, California,
I was out knocking doors and handing out invitations
to Verity Baptist Church.
And even all the way up in Vancouver, Washington,
people would say, wait, your pastor isn't that Roger
Jimenez.
So your name has gone all around the Earth.
And cancel culture is definitely a part of your ministry.
I remember actually exactly when I heard you on the news,
I was fresh out of high school, was working as a valet in 2016.
And all of a sudden, the news is saying, oh, you know,
this hate preacher is celebrating the death
of the sodomites in Orlando.
And all of a sudden, then I hear your voice
in this car that I'm driving.
I'm like, you've got to be kidding me.
And it was really cool to see the word of God
being preached worldwide.
But as you could tell, that's definitely leading
to a lot of persecution as well.
But it's a blessing.
- Well, I do want to get a little context
to what we've been talking to.
In 2016, there was a massacre
at what's considered a "gay bar" in Orlando.
I believe approximately 50 people were killed
inside this club.
And the person supposedly responsible
of this is maybe Islamic,
some type of affiliation there.
I don't know if they ever came out
and said what his exact motives were for the shooting.
But then you, Pester Minnis,
you ended up preaching a sermon.
It was a Sunday night sermon, if I remember correctly,
in the month of June, is that correct?
- Yes.
- It was of 2016, and you ended up talking about that.
Now, what was kind of your,
do you remember the title of your sermon?
- Yeah, the sermon.
So it was interesting because, you know,
if you know me, I'm a pretty planned out, organized guy.
I usually have sermons outlined and scheduled.
I like to just have things organized,
but that Sunday, so that happened,
I think it happened on a Saturday night
or like Sunday morning, like 1 a.m. or 2 a.m.
or something like that.
It happened in the middle of the night.
And that Sunday, my wife and I were having a family
over to our house after the Sunday morning service
for a meal.
And it was a family that just moved to our church
and we were having them over for a fellowship meal.
And because of that, we did something
that we don't do every Sunday,
which is we drove separately
because my wife was taking care of some things.
So I drove our second vehicle to church.
And because I was just driving by myself,
I just turned on the news just to see what was going on
or whatever.
And I heard about this shooting.
So then we had church that morning.
I preached my regular sermon that I had ready.
I already had a sermon ready for that night.
We had the family over and we had lunch together.
Actually, the family that we had over is now on our staff,
Brother Matt and Miss Casey.
And then when they left, I just decided,
I'm just going to write a sermon about what happened.
Because at that point, there had already
been all these people.
And even Christians were just coming out.
And I remember thinking to myself, everybody's just
falling all over themselves to talk about how terrible this is
and how horrible and whatever.
And so I preached a sermon that night
called The Christian Response to the Orlando Shooting.
And I was just explaining that obviously we're not
for people taking the law into their own hands.
We're not for people doing these things.
But that as Christians, we also shouldn't
be just sad about the fact that predators have been killed.
And that's exactly what the Bible calls these people.
That's what they are.
So I preached that sermon.
And it wasn't really directed.
Obviously, it took little clips here and there,
and they tried to make it sound or whatever.
And obviously, I stand by everything I said.
But it was mainly just about the fact
that, hey, as Bible-believing Christians,
we don't need to be sad about this.
We don't need to be apologizing for this.
We don't need to be trying to act
like this was some tragedy because it really wasn't.
These people are wicked.
They deserve the death penalty.
They're predators.
And I preach the sermon.
I remember preaching the sermon,
and a few weeks or maybe months before that,
I remember Pastor Anderson had told me,
'cause he had just,
I think he'd been getting strikes and stuff
on his YouTube channel.
And he had told me, hey, you wanna be careful
about what you put out,
and not to not put it out,
but just know that you might get a strike,
or you might wanna set up a second channel
in case your channel gets shut down or whatever.
And I remember he told me that.
So after the Sunday night sermon,
I met with Brother Stuckey,
who was our staff guy in Sacramento back then.
Now he's in Evangelos in the Philippines.
And I met with our sound guy,
and we just talked about,
we just had this conversation about,
hey, is there anything we need to be worried about?
Do you think we're going to strike for this or something?
You know, things have changed since then.
And the conclusion we came to was,
well, you didn't really say anything different
than what you've already said in other sermons.
So we don't really think it's a big deal.
And so we just posted it.
And you know, I went to bed that night.
And then overnight it just went like super mega viral
all over the country, all over the world.
And you know, the rest is history.
- Right.
Now I'm sure they played all your clips where you said,
you know, we don't call to violence.
We don't call to actions.
You know, we, you know, all the Bible parts, right?
Those are the snippets that they took from the sermon, right?
- Yeah, exactly.
No, I mean, if you listen to the sermon in its context,
obviously I'm saying, hey,
we're not saying that we should go out and do this.
You know, this is something
that the government should be doing.
This is what the Bible teaches.
No, they definitely took, did not,
like I said, I said everything I said,
in context or out of context.
But if you listen to the clips they took,
if you listen to them in context,
you know that I'm not calling for anyone
to take up arms or anything like that.
- Sure, well, of course, you know,
they always try to reframe things a little bit too
and put their spin on it.
Now I actually have a clip that I wanted to show
that kind of talks about this event.
And I wanted you to be able to explain a little bit
of what happened before we played this clip.
Just so if someone's not aware of this situation
that happened in 2016,
they have a little bit of context here,
but let's see if we can pull up.
There's a CBS clip and it kind of shows a little bit
of your preaching from that particular sermon.
And it also has a lot of their commentary.
So we're gonna go ahead and switch to this video real quick,
play a few minutes and then we'll get some feedback.
- A Baptist preacher who praised the attack in Orlando
is sparking outrage in Sacramento.
Pastor Roger Jimenez's remarks came on Sunday morning,
just hours after the attack.
Here is how our CBS station in Sacramento,
KOVR, reported the story.
- A Sacramento Baptist preacher issued extreme
and troubling comments in a videotaped sermon,
actually praising the Orlando club attacks.
- Hey, are you sad that 50 pedophiles were killed today?
- No, I think that's great.
I think that helps society.
You know, I think Orlando, Florida
is a little safer tonight.
- His inflammatory video was uploaded to YouTube
under the Verity Baptist Church account.
- CBS 13's Angela Mushalem is live in Davis tonight,
where she spoke with an LGBT group
about the controversial speech, Angela.
Sam Adrian, we wanna warn those of you watching tonight,
again, about the nature of these comments
made by Pastor Roger Jimenez,
and a local LGBT coalition here in Davis says
these comments work against everything
they've been trying to get in terms of equality.
- To do anything.
As far as I'm concerned,
Orlando's just a little safer tonight.
- YouTube video of Sacramento pastor Roger Jimenez
speaking about the tragedy
that struck Orlando, Florida Sunday morning.
- As Christians, should we not be mourning the death
of these 50 vile, perverted predators?
- Wow.
- It's Andre Nelson, not sure how to react
to what Jimenez said.
Nelson is pride director of the Davis Phoenix Coalition,
who also grew up Baptist.
He says in all his years of attending church,
no pastor ever spoke of inequality.
- He's not a man of God.
He's not a man teaching a true religion.
- I wish the government would round them all up,
put them up against a firing wall,
put a firing squad in front of them, blow their brains out.
- And it's hateful, violent statements like these
that Nelson says keeps many in the LGBT community shut out.
- It can definitely cause more harm to our LGBT youth
and those still living in the closet that are older.
You know, it causes our suicide rates to go up.
It causes kids to feel like they're worthless.
- Hey, Roger.
- We tried to speak with Ximena's Monday morning
about the inflammatory comments he made in his speech.
This was his response.
- I'm not able to talk right now.
I'm actually in the middle of a few things.
- With the LGBT community recently
celebrating marriage equality,
Nelson says they've become complacent,
but the fight for equality still isn't over.
- The bottom line is to love thy brother
as you love thyself.
- And again, this is a local Sacramento preacher
making these hateful statements.
He had nothing further to add
in front of our cameras today.
- Okay, Angela, that is an eye-popping piece of videotape.
Thank you very much for that.
- So we played a CBS, 'cause I don't know,
have you seen that package, Pastor Minas, before?
- I've seen parts of that.
I hadn't seen that whole thing.
- Okay, what I find kind of great
is like you literally just say like 50 pedophiles are dead.
And I would kind of have to assume like
who would disagree with that state?
Like who would disagree with the fact
that the world's safer when pedophiles
are literally put to death?
It almost seems like that was always something
that everybody kind of viewed and believed.
And it seems like there's this disconnect in our world
where they just don't associate that crowd with pedophiles.
But you know, it's funny 'cause at the bottom
it said the mayor condemned your remarks.
But I'm like, is he condemning the fact
that you want pedophiles to be put to death?
Or is he, you know, what exactly is it
that he's condemning here?
And you know, they're obviously hypocrites
because I've seen news packages,
one in Arizona specifically, and it was not that long ago,
where a cop killer was on the run
and he basically ran into two young men at a gas station.
They didn't know that he was a fugitive though.
He just basically ran in, they were trying to like,
get him to give those wallet or keys.
And in the scuffle, the citizen just pulls out his gun
and shoots and kills the cop killer
because of their kind of disagreement.
And then basically they just say,
the entire police department is relieved and happy
and like everyone's happy that this cop killer
was brought to justice and was killed.
And even though it's obviously not even the proper channels,
it didn't go through a legal sanction,
there was no judge and jury.
They were all happy, relieved and excited
that the cop killer was brought to justice
and ultimately faced the consequences of his decisions.
But of course they can't then apply that
to the same logic of saying,
okay, people that are really molesting children
and committing the worst sins imaginable,
if they get what's coming to them,
why would I then be sad?
I mean, what if Christians all said,
oh, we should pray for this cop killer
and be sad about the cop killer
and go to his funeral or whatever.
No one's gonna do that.
It's just, of course, they're hypocrites about it.
They don't apply these things equally.
And then they really don't understand
that they're actually just attacking the Bible.
But I know that from this experience,
you have suffered a lot of just hate.
You know, they wanna condemn you for being a hate preacher,
but of course they can hate you all day long.
There's no inconsistency there, right?
So please describe for us just kind of like
things that happened to you as a result of this
in like the censorship.
- Yeah, absolutely.
First of all, you know, just kind of going off
of what you said, if you listen to the sermon,
'cause that clip about the 50 pedophiles,
that's the clip that was like played over and over and over
and all these newscasts and all over the world.
And what I was saying was, you know,
as I was preaching, I was asking the question,
I was saying, you know, are you asking me if I'm sad?
And I said, well, that would be like asking me,
are you sad that 50 pedophiles have been killed?
You know, no, I'm not sad.
You know, Orlando, Florida is a little safer tonight.
That's the statement.
And so I think it's funny that they take that clip
played all over the world where I'm saying 50 pedophiles,
50 pedophiles, 50 pedophiles,
and they're all saying like, he's talking about us,
you know, these sodomites.
So it kind of like shows you that they themselves
identify themselves as that.
And so that's an interesting thought.
Also in that video that you showed,
it's funny 'cause I hadn't seen that exact clip,
but that's actually when I found out the sermon went viral
because on that Monday morning,
my wife had taken our son to the hospital.
She had a doctor's appointment with our son.
And so I had kind of taken the morning off
and I was literally just, it was, I don't remember,
I think it was eight in the morning
when they showed up at my house or something like that.
And I was actually like making breakfast for the kids
'cause I had the rest of the kids.
And I was just kind of being with them
while my wife was gone with our son.
And the doorbell rang and I opened the door
and there is this reporter and this camera
and a microphone and my kids, you know,
they're just, they were just little kids
and they're interested, you know, who's at the door.
So all my kids come running
and they're like looking out the door
and I'm trying to push them away
'cause I just see this camera.
I don't know what's going on.
I know I don't want my kids on TV.
So I'm pushing my kids away
and I'm like, "I can't talk," you know?
And that's actually literally when I found out
that the sermon went viral
'cause then I closed the door and I texted my wife
and I'm like, "The news is at our door," you know?
And then people, and then church members started texting me
saying like, "You're all over the news, pastor."
So obviously I did lots of interviews after that,
but that was literally when I found out
that the sermon had even gone viral or anything like that.
So it's kind of interesting.
But yeah, as a result of that sermon,
first of all, the sermon went viral
and then they took the channel down.
And then eventually they took our YouTube channel down.
They've taken our YouTube channel down many times.
I don't know how many YouTube channels we've lost
over the years.
A few years ago, after the Red Hot Preaching Conference,
we had a YouTube channel with 10,000 subscribers
and they took that down.
So they've taken a lot of our YouTube channels down.
They've came after us as far as censorship.
They've came after us with our merchant accounts.
Back in 2016, we had PayPal to be able to receive donations.
Of course, they canceled us.
And then there was this--
I don't know how long-- it was several months
where it seemed like every other week we kept getting shut down.
And I remember Brother Stucky was our staff guy back then.
And his full-time job became to find a new company
to take donations.
So we went from PayPal to Stripe to whatever.
And every week, we just kept getting shut down
and shut down and shut down.
So that was obviously annoying.
And then, of course, this is something you're familiar with.
But our landlord turned against us.
And I know you guys obviously recently dealt with that.
And so we did not get evicted.
But I think the reason for that is just because the news kept
saying that we got thrown out and we got evicted.
But what actually happened was that our lease
was going to be up in a few months anyway.
And they just said that they were not going to renew our lease.
And we had a good sized church.
We had money in the bank.
I mean, there really was no reason why we couldn't get a building.
But after we went on the news, then we kind of just got blacklisted.
And that was probably the hardest thing was there was like a three to four month
period there where literally it was like 10 hours a day, 12 hours a day every day.
We only took breaks for church where we were just looking at buildings.
I literally and I'm not I'm not exaggerating when I say this, I think I
looked at every single available building in the entire city of Sacramento back then.
And we just kept getting rejected and rejected.
And I mean, we come in and we're like, hey, we've got money.
We can pay six months up front.
Everybody was like, great.
And then they get our name and they're like, oh, no, not you.
So we just kept getting rejected.
In fact, the building we're in right now was the building that we ended up getting
back then and they rejected us.
And, but I remember I liked the building we're in now because it was close to
where we were before and there was certain reasons why we liked it.
And I remember going back to them and I said, look, you know, everybody's rejecting
us, but you, you've had this building, it's already a church building, it's been
vacant for like eight years, like, you know, we've got money.
Can you, can you just give us a chance?
And I remember we, we, we struck a deal with them where they pretty much just
gave us the highest rate possible on square footage that we could take.
And then they added like a thousand dollar risk fee for a month for taking us
on. So they pretty much just like, you know, they knew they, they had us, you
know, we didn't have any other options.
So we did it.
Yeah, exactly.
So, I mean, we took it because we needed a building and obviously that
was years ago, we've since, you know, been able to renegotiate that and all that.
But, um, yeah, I mean, the, the censorship is definitely, uh, it's,
it's not just social media.
See, oftentimes when we think about censorship and the council culture,
we think of social media and that's definitely part of it.
Uh, obviously it's frustrating build a YouTube channel.
We have a YouTube channel right now with 15,000 subscribers.
And I'm aware that at any time they could take that away from us.
Um, so obviously that that's frustrating, but, um, when you're,
when you're having your finances mess with,
which I know that's something you guys have dealt with. Um,
and when you're having your ability to meet in a building mess with that,
those are the things that really get frustrating. Of course, lawsuits,
you've dealt with that. I've been sued for what I preach. Um,
so these are all forms of censorship.
They are trying to shut us up,
but in order to shut us up, they're literally trying to shut us down.
So they want to shut us down so that they can shut us up. And, uh, it's, it's,
it's been a road, you know, I know you guys have dealt with, obviously,
I'm preaching to the choir. Well, you know,
I love to hear your experiences and I know that that's not even necessarily
everything because you have the media like come in breathing down your neck.
I mean, they're knocking on your front door. How many people did you have like,
you know, like news stations knocking your door on that? Oh man.
I mean, it was nonstop. Um, we, after that first initial eight AM,
then it was just like 24 hours a day for, for weeks. Um,
they were just at our door because it's kind of lasted. It started.
So I preach the sermon and then the next Sunday was father's day.
Well, that next Sunday, they, they, uh,
plan this protest against our church and they brought in these bus loads of
sodomites and whatever from Berkeley and San Francisco and the Bay Area.
So we had this big protest.
And I mean, the news media reported that there was 1500 people there.
I don't know how accurate that number is, but there was a lot of people there.
I know that there were 200
sheriff and police officers there for for crowd control.
So I know for a fact there was 200 police officers there because the city of
Sacramento tried to send us a bill for that, trying to bill us for for that,
which obviously we sent that back and said, you can,
you can send that bill to the protesters.
They're the reason you came. We have church there every week.
But but, you know, so there was 200 police officers.
So I would imagine that, I don't know, 1500 is probably accurate.
I know there was lots of people there.
So we had this big protest.
And then and then a few weeks later, we had the first Red Hawk Preaching Conference.
So all of this was kind of the the media was on it.
You know, so it was like something they were talking about every day.
And some people thought that I preached
the sermon as a as a publicity stunt to like hype up the Red Heart Preaching
Conference, which obviously I you know, the Lord worked that out.
It helped the Red Heart Preaching Conference.
But, you know, it's not like I asked this guy to go shoot up a gay nightclub so
that I could do publicity. Wow.
The funny thing about that whole event
is that I ended up becoming like public enemy number one in the country.
I was the most hated man in the country and I and even more hated than the shooter
himself. Yeah. Right.
Like I said, even in Vancouver, Washington, I was knocking on doors
and people were having visceral reactions to the name Roger Jimenez.
And think about like what's so crazy about that clip that we just watched is
that one man that was talking to the reporter, he said that he's been in church
his whole life and he's never heard something like this before.
And that's the reason why they are seeming to be able to censor us as much as they
are is because seemingly no one else is preaching this stuff like our generation
has just decided that they're not going to preach what the Bible says on the
sodomite issue, so it's real easy to pick out preachers like you or Pastor Shelley
and look at that preaching and call it extreme and troubling rather than looking
at pedophilia as extreme and troubling or rather than looking at people that the
Bible says are filled with murder that are being filled with all unrighteousness.
We would look at that and say, hey, that needs to be canceled, you know,
through a lawful sanctioned death penalty by the government.
That's what needs to be sanctioned to be canceled.
But yet because preachers are not
preaching it, they think that we're extreme and troubling.
And that's why they're able to censor us, censor us.
And preachers don't want to preach it because of all the crap we've dealt with.
You know, I mean, it's true, like my life would have been a lot easier.
Pastor Shelley's life would be a lot easier right now if we shut up about these things.
But if we if we don't preach the truth, then why are we even in the ministry?
And these guys are in the ministry for for reasons other than preaching the truth.
But that's why at our church where we're
meeting, you know, in temporary meeting spaces, wherever we can find meeting in a
park, listening to Pastor Shelley actually rip and preach the word of God.
I'd rather listen to that than be in some super nice, you know, Bible college church
where they wouldn't touch Romans one with a 10 foot pole.
They wouldn't touch Psalm one thirty nine with the 10 foot pole.
We sing Psalm one thirty nine before the service.
You know, like that's the type of church that I'd want to be in.
Amen. Praise the Lord.
And you know, they after our big protest, we we were protested for months after
and for like three or four months, every service Sunday morning, Sunday night,
Wednesday night, obviously after the big one, the fifteen hundred.
It was never like that again.
But but there were every protest.
There was anywhere between 20 to 50 people protesting our church.
Our our soul winners were getting yelled at and harassed out in the community.
I got yelled at and harassed.
I mean, I've got so many stories I could do.
You know, we could do a whole podcast and just be telling a story.
Isn't there a good, yeah, yeah, there's a there's a lot of stories.
But yeah, so I mean, it's it was, you know, it was it was an exciting time and a crazy
time, but when you're there, there's still feeling it, correct.
I mean, obviously, it's not the same level of heat, but there's still going to be
down downward spiraling consequences and just reverb effects of this and just
lateral damage and I can see, like you said, why the preachers don't preach on
that just because it is real that there's going to be pushback.
It is real that there's going to be a fight.
And but at the same time, how is not bringing up these issues going to fix our
country, you know, how is not talking about what the Bible has to say.
And and of course, you're trying to just balance everyone in this country from
all this bad example, these supposed Christians falling all over themselves
to love the ungodly, as it were.
And you're trying to just kind of jerk back the steering wheel and say, wait a
minute, you know, we should have God's perspective, not what the media wants to
tell us and spoon feed for us.
And, you know, I appreciated the sermon.
I didn't get to look.
I didn't get to listen to it because it was just immediately censored.
But I got to hear I got to hear all the good parts.
So, you know, the media.
And, you know, I thought it was great.
Now, here's another consequence of that sermon, in my opinion.
And this is what I call the YouTube the YouTube.
The pastor meant is YouTube policy.
Yes. But I want to pull up on the screen.
We have a Google policy.
And I remember finding this.
I got censored for something or something happened to one of our sermons.
And I went in and looked this up and it blew me away.
It was like a few years ago.
It blew me away when I read this because I was thinking like, this is all about
Pastor Menes and so I figured why not bring on Pastor Menes to get his thoughts.
But can we pull up that on screen?
Their Google policy on what's called hate speech.
Now, this phrase is becoming very popular in our culture.
All of a sudden, a lot of companies are adopting this and their terms and services.
In fact, I was like you said, you know,
you're kind of shopping online giving solutions.
I was going through the list and I ran into this one.
It's a Christian company.
And the guy told me he's like, hey,
we can also put you on our app so you don't have to get shut down on YouTube.
People can watch your sermon on our app.
And I said, OK, well, what's your like, you know, restrictions or policies?
Like, just read our terms and policies.
You know, as long as you abide by those, you're good.
And I started scrolling through.
It literally said that you'd be banned for any level of hate speech.
And I'm just thinking, like, why would a
Christian site want to ban hate speech?
Like, what does that even mean?
I asked the I asked the guys.
Oh, well, I said, we're probably going to get a ban because of hate speech.
And he's like, oh, but we're not supposed to hate anyone.
Wow. And I said, I said, well, what about Psalm 139?
Where the Bible says, do not I hate them, oh, Lord, that hate thee.
And he goes, oh, that's above my pay grade.
It's just like, you know, it's weird how even the Christians so called are are
trying to say, oh, you can't have hate speech and everything like that.
Now, in this you this YouTube Google policy, I want to scroll down.
They have a section in there called errors.
I'm not sorry. Examples, I'm sorry.
Yeah. So if you scroll down now
in this policy, scroll back up because we can't see for the I want to go down there
in just a second, scroll kind of back to the top.
It's going to describe for us here hate speech policy.
So the hate speech policy, also known as the pastor Jimenez policy.
If you scroll down just a little bit,
read what it says, it says, oh, scroll back up just here for me again.
I want to make sure that the viewers can see this.
The safety of our creators, viewers and partners is our highest priority.
We look to each of you to help us protect this unique and vibrant community.
It is important you understand our community
guidelines and the role they play in our shared responsibility to keep YouTube safe.
Take the time to carefully read the policy below.
You can also check out this page for a full list of our guidelines.
And they've more recently updated it since when this first came out.
But then it says you're not allowed to have hate speech against.
And then it gives kind of a blanket list.
But of course, they put down their, you know, gender and basically being
a sodomite and all kinds of stuff like that.
But then they want to give you some examples.
And I think this is kind of comical.
It says on the first example,
here's an example of what you're not allowed to say on YouTube.
I'm glad this and then in brackets, violent event happened.
They got what they deserved in brackets,
referring to the persons with the attributes noted above.
And I'm just like, that's exactly what pastor said.
And then and then the second one, it says, quote, in the brackets,
persons with attributes noted above are dogs or persons that are like animals.
And I'm thinking like these people are literally writing policy based on pastor
sermon, just like verbatim, it blew me away.
And I'm thinking like Pastor Minnis went
so viral that Google itself, the like most powerful company in the world,
arguably, maybe Amazon now, I don't know, but it's up there is is making policies
based on a pastor of a couple of hundred people in Sacramento, California.
You know, it's like obviously people say, oh, that's a small church.
But I don't see them making YouTube
policies on Joel Osteen's church or T.D. Diggs Church.
You know, I mean, so from a perspective of impact, it seems like it's the biggest
church, it's making one of the biggest impacts for the cause of Christ.
And a lot of people are even getting saved.
You know, people don't realize that they'll
say, like, well, why don't you preach the gospel?
Yet I guarantee lots of people have gotten
saved by hearing those comments, looking at Verity Baptist Church,
hearing about Verity Baptist Church, having a normal brain in their head
and essentially a soul winner coming by and like, you know, I want to hear what
that church has to say, and then they hear the gospel of Jesus Christ and they end up
getting saved, whereas they weren't that interested without this kind of event,
without this kind of media attention, as it were.
And some people would argue there's no such thing as bad press.
And I almost feel convinced that that's probably true.
Do you do you feel like there is your quote unquote bad press as it?
No, I agree.
I mean, here's the thing.
First of all, the fact that YouTube and Google
are making policies based off of my preaching and the preaching of other
pastors like me is a testament to the power of the word of God.
And that's that's why it's a win when our sermons are even out of context are put
all over the world, because it's the word of God.
It's what the Bible says.
And and then absolutely, you know, people hear it.
You know, there's people all over this country that are in my church and your
church and other churches, new churches that will tell you that they got saved
because of documentaries and sermons and things going viral and whatever.
And, you know, you there might be a few out there, but I usually the story is not.
I I Google what must I do to be saved?
And I was where the heaven video came up.
Usually it's I watch this documentary.
I saw the sermon came up.
I saw this news thing.
And then that led me to something else
and led me to something else that eventually got them saved.
So God uses that, you know, and it's it's it's been effective.
So I don't believe there's any such thing as bad publicity.
Obviously, if you want to be loved, if your goal,
I guess it depends what your goal is.
If your goal is to be loved by the world like Joel Osteen or Billy Graham, then
yeah, there is a such thing as bad publicity.
And there are some things you're just never going to say.
You're never going to preach.
But if your goal is to get the word of God out, if your goal is to get the
preaching of God's word into the ears of as many people as possible,
then there's no bad publicity.
In fact, bad publicity is better than any
publicity, in my opinion, because it gets you out further, faster.
And I don't know if this is a word, but freer.
Yeah, it's it's free.
I mean, a few a couple of years ago, back in I want to say it was 2019.
We had the LA and LA Times reporter came to the Red Hot Preaching Conference, was
here the entire conference and then did this whole article.
And I think we were like the front page
of the LA Times or something like that, it was a big article in the LA Times
all about our church and our conference.
And if I would have went to the LA Times and said, hey, I'd like to, you know,
have this huge publicity thing in your in your newspaper.
It would have cost me like thirty thousand dollars or something.
But they gave it to us for free.
So
I don't think there's any such thing as bad publicity when your goal is to preach
the word of God and get the word of God out.
If your goal is to become rich or be loved by the world, then then that's a different story.
Yeah, of course.
They're not going to be censoring lies.
And so I we do have we have been neglecting some callers.
So I want to get some callers in a minute, Dylan.
You know, obviously you're just a young guy.
You hear pastor men as his comments.
Did you did you talk to other people about that?
Like you said, you kind of heard that in the car.
But did you bring that up with people?
What was kind of the reaction from other people, you know, about this type of event
or what is kind of the word on the street?
Did you get anything, a few things at the time that this was happening, I was still
going to an old IFB church.
So the only time this was brought up around me was in a very negative light, you know,
because this church was afraid to preach on this issue, was afraid to talk about the sodomites.
And that's really like we said earlier, since most people aren't preaching this, that's
why the censorship is able, you know, to come after us so single handedly.
But then, you know, when I move, obviously, to Vancouver, Washington and go to Verity
Baptist Church Vancouver around some people that actually believe the Bible, you know,
of course, then they're supporting their pastor and supporting what he said.
Why?
Because, you know, of the man?
No, it's because he's preaching the Word of God.
And you know, the reason why there's literal people conspiring and specifically coming
against Pastor Jimenez, Pastor Shelley, you know, churches like ours, you know, in Psalms
chapter 2, the Bible says the kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers take counsel
together against the Lord and against his anointed.
And so, wherever the Jesus of the Bible is being preached, wherever the Word of God is
being preached, that's where the spiritual darkness, the powers of this earth are going
to be conspiring to come against those people.
The devil doesn't care about Joel Osteen.
The devil doesn't want to try to stop Joel Osteen.
In fact, Joel Osteen works for the devil.
Joel Osteen is helping the devil accomplish his goal in sending people to hell.
But churches that actually preach the Lord Jesus Christ, the anointed, that is the church
that the devil is going to set his targets against and try to come at them with censorship
at first.
That's the devil's goal at first, is to shut them up.
But eventually, as we see in the book of Acts and as we read about in the New Testament,
they want to take it past just shutting our mouths, don't they Pastor Shelley?
Absolutely.
Now, we're not about that, but we do have a way to call in too, because we're trying
to do the opposite of censorship.
We want to bring the most censored pastors on our show and we don't know how long we'll
be on YouTube.
But obviously, we want to keep going.
But if you want to call in 231-Baptist, 231-Baptist, we've got a couple callers on the line.
I think we have a John on the line from Verity.
So let's see if we can get him on the line.
Hey, John, are you there?
Hello?
Hey, you're on The Baptist Bias.
Say hello.
Oh, hi.
Actually, my name is Jeffrey.
Jeffrey, I'm sorry.
Jeffrey, how's it going, Jeffrey?
Hey, Jeffrey, how's it going?
I'm hanging in there.
Pastor Matt, it's good to hear from you again.
It was good to see you on Sunday after all this time.
Yes, Jeffrey, how are you doing?
[INAUDIBLE]
I'm hanging in there.
Hanging in there pretty good.
Be working again tonight, of course.
Well, Pastor Shelley, I hope you guys are doing OK,
given everything that's been going on
and the different type of censorship,
especially with the way a landlord can just
almost like flipping a switch after what goes on.
They just do it on a dime.
It feels that way.
Yeah, I mean, sometimes it can be anticipated,
but you never really know what's going to happen.
So I was going to see, do you have
a question for Pastor Menez or for the show about censorship?
Do you have something, or do you want to share your experience
there on censorship?
Well, I think it's good that we're
trying to build our own infrastructure to counteract
the censorship, especially with the banned
but not banned email lists that we're able to keep
distributing sermons or other materials.
So that way we don't interrupt the pipeline
of being able to continue to operate as it is.
Yeah, so that's great.
I think we should get past a minute to talk about that.
But have you been on that list?
Have you seen that working?
Is that something you enjoy?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, sometimes it links whether to the traditional sites
or to the alternative tech sites.
But the material's all there.
So it's all there for us to use and learn from.
Is that something you share with other people?
Yeah, absolutely.
That's great.
Now, to give some of our listeners a little idea, this band but not bound list is kind
of an email list.
Is that correct, Pastor Minnis?
Yes, it is.
And I can talk a little bit about it.
Jeffrey, thank you for calling.
And thanks for bringing that up.
We're praying for her.
I hope she gets better soon.
In regards to the Band But Not Bound email list, this was something that we actually
started as an answer to the censorship.
Because like I said, we work at building YouTube channels and all of that, obviously that helps
us get our message out.
But we've had channels with 5,000 subscribers get shut down and 10,000 subscribers get
shut down and many other channels that have different sizes get shut down.
And of course, YouTube just at any moment can just hit a button and take your whole
channel away.
So what we decided was that instead of trying to build a channel that could be taken away
from us, that is owned by people who hate us and hate God and hate the word of God and
are using me as an example of what they don't want on their website, we thought that it'd
be good to build an email list and so we got this idea to do an email list called Banned
But Not Bound and what it is is that we are asking people if they like this type of preaching,
they can go to BannedButNotBound.com, I'll give you a plugin if that's okay, BannedButNotBound.com
and they can sign up and right now we have 2,203 emails on that list and it's growing
every week.
Obviously, it's harder to grow an email list than like a YouTube channel.
But in my opinion, I think the emails are very valuable on that email list because these
are people that are going to a website, signing up and they're people that want the truth
and what we what we tell people is when you sign up for the Bad But Not Bound email list,
you will get an email from us every month and it'll have a link to a sermon that has
been censored from YouTube and it we're not promoting any one channel or anything.
Sometimes we have them on like different sites that alternative type social media sites and
sometimes they're not even our videos, they're other people's videos, steadfast videos, whatever.
But they get those emails, they get links to sermons that are not allowed on YouTube.
And we also send a bunch of other stuff, just normal sermons, videos when we do shorts,
we send them out when we send out a link for this live stream tonight.
So it's a way to gather information and emails of people who want this type of content.
And what I like about it is that it can't be taken away from us, a YouTube channel can
be taken away, but they can't take away this email list.
So that's one thing we did to try to respond to the council culture and the censorship.
And obviously, we're still going to use YouTube and we're going to use anything we can until
they literally kick us off the internet, but this was a way for us.
So we've got to let us know, send us, give us the link, we'll mail it out, email it out
and let people know.
If you have a sermon, you know, and I'm talking to you, Pastor Shelley, but any pastor that's
hearing this, if you have a sermon that's been censored from YouTube, you know, put
it on a different site like Rumbler or something and then send us the link and we'll get it
out.
We'll put it into that schedule where people get something every month.
And it's our answer to the censorship.
It's one of our answers.
It's not the only answer, but it's one of the things we're doing is BannedButNotBound.com.
So if you haven't signed up for it, please do so.
Yeah, I think that's a great idea and it causes us to be more creative and work even harder.
Whereas a lot of these other people, they don't have to work hard or come up with creative
solutions because they're just basically following the devil's agenda and the devil's not giving
them any kind of resistance.
Absolutely.
I guess on a request, maybe there's a documentary I heard that's pretty good, Sodomite Deception.
Maybe you could put that in there in June, in the month of June.
We will do that.
I'd be surprised if it's not on our list already, but we'll make sure to have it be the June
email.
There's definitely some fiery clips from a guy named Pat Sturman is in that one.
We really like that.
But you know, it's interesting how far this is going to go.
And you know, I think that sometimes we want to even be ahead of the curve potentially.
And I think that this band but not bound is a great way to kind of be a little bit ahead
of the curve, looking forward and realizing, hey, I might have 15,000 subs right now, but
that could be taken away tomorrow, like you said.
And they could even just figure out new and creative ways to just keep getting us off.
I wanted to play another clip.
I think we still have some call ins.
If you want to call in 231-Baptist, we'll get a quick question from you.
Thanks Jeffrey for calling in and for his comments and we'll be praying for his mother
as well.
But there's a video I want to play, it's called a big win for Google and I'm sorry, no, there
was a hate speech Google rep.
That's the clip that I want to play.
It's basically this lady talking to Congress or some kind of lawmakers and she's from
Google and she's kind of explaining what they're doing to literally censor people like
Pastram and as people that want to share the truth and then they wrap it in this language
of quote, hate speech.
But let's play this clip and I want to get some of your thoughts on what they say here.
Around 2 billion people come to YouTube every month and we see over 500 hours of video uploaded
every minute, making it one of the largest living collections of human culture ever assembled
in one place.
We know, however, that the very platforms that have enabled these societal benefits
may also be abused, ranging from the annoying, like spam, to the criminal, like child pornography.
Over the past two years, we've invested heavily in machines and people to quickly identify
and remove content that violates our policies against incitement to violent and hate speech.
First, YouTube's enforcement system starts from the point at which a user uploads a
video.
Kind of similar to videos that already violate our policies, it's sent to humans for review.
If they determine that it violates our policies, they remove it and the system makes a digital
fingerprint so that it cannot be uploaded again.
In the fourth quarter of 2018, over 70% of the more than 8 million videos reviewed and
removed were first flagged by a machine, the majority of which were removed before a single
view was received.
Second, we rely on experts to find videos the algorithm might be missing.
Some of these experts sit at our in-house Intel desk, which proactively looks for new
trends and content that may violate our policies.
We also allow expert NGOs and governments to notify us of bad content in bulk through
our Trusted Flagger program.
We reserve the final decision on whether to remove a video that gets flagged by any of
these entities, but we benefit immensely from their expertise.
Finally, we go beyond enforcing our policies by creating programs to promote counter speech.
Examples of this work include our Creators for Change program, which supports YouTube
creators who are tackling issues like extremism and hate by building empathy and acting as
positive role models.
In addition, Google's Jigsaw Group has developed the redirect method, which uses targeted ads
and YouTube videos to disrupt online radicalization.
It's important to note that hate speech removals can be particularly complex compared to other
types of content.
Hate speech, because it often relies on spoken rather than visual cues, is sometimes harder
to detect than some forms of branded terrorist propaganda.
It's intensely context specific, and it can be contentious, as there is often disagreement
on what could be considered political speech.
On the opposite end, overaggressive enforcement can also inadvertently silence voices that
are using the platform to make themselves heard on these important issues.
Often in this space we've found that content can sit in a gray area that comes right up
against the line.
It may be offensive, but it does not violate YouTube's policies against incitement to
violence and hate speech.
When this occurs, we've built a policy to drastically reduce a video's visibility by
making it ineligible for ads, removing its comments, and excluding it from our recommendation
system.
In particular, we understand the issues around YouTube's recommendation system may be top
of mind.
This is why several months ago we also updated our recommendation systems to begin reducing
recommendations of even more borderline content or content that can misinform users in harmful
ways.
In conclusion, I'd like to end where I began.
Google builds its products for all users from all political stripes around the globe.
The long term success of our business is directly related to our ability to earn and maintain
the trust of our users.
We have a natural and long term incentive to make sure that our products work for users
of all viewpoints.
People will value these services only as long as they continue to trust them to work well
and provide them with the most relevant and useful information.
That's why hate speech and violent extremism have no place on YouTube.
This clip is really interesting for a lot of reasons to me.
Number one, she's making it clear and you know, nobody cares in that congress meeting
because all those people are probably like on drugs or something.
They don't really care.
But if you pay attention to what she's saying, she's just literally giving the game plan
for YouTube.
They say that they're like working tirelessly to essentially shut down anything that they
claim is hate speech, which again, how do we even determine what hate speech is?
Because I guess it's whatever Pastor Jimenez preaches because that's how Google writes
their hate speech policy.
But she also said something which I think is really interesting because they use all
these fancy acronyms and they try to sound really intelligent.
But she said, sometimes we rely on NGOs to help us identify the videos in this speech.
Well, NGO stands for non governmental organization, which just means any it just means anyone
basically.
I mean, hey, we use the government and non government organizations.
So you're just saying you use anyone potentially is what you just said.
And of course, they're going to use people like the SPLC.
They're going to use the ADL, the Anti Defamation League, they're going to use essentially just
whatever private interest group that pays them a bunch of money.
They're just going to do their bidding and then claim its hate speech and get the silence
whoever it is that they want.
But I'd really like to see if they could give you the data, it'd be interesting to see how
many videos they've censored of hate speech against Christians because of course, there's
plenty of people that hate on the Bible, the Lord Jesus Christ, people who believe the
Bible, Pastor Jimenez.
I mean, I wonder how many videos have been taken down for people saying hateful things
about Pastor Jimenez.
That would be an interesting list.
I think it'd probably be zero.
And of course, it's fine to hate Pastor Jimenez, like you said, you said you were literally
the most hated person in America.
It's hard to contest that.
I mean, I feel like even the Muslims hated you because they were hoping they were going
to get all this glory and you took it away from them.
They're like, they don't even care about the guy that literally committed a massacre.
They care about a Baptist preacher saying that he's not sad that it happened, you know,
essentially.
And it's just kind of crazy how they get to just shift the narrative and demonize whoever
they want and then claim at the same time that they don't hate anybody.
It's just a giant hypocrisy that really just kind of goes unnoticed by them because I think
they're all just, I think the news at this point is kind of paid actors, if you ask me.
But I wanted to get your thoughts on, you know, kind of the things that she said.
It sounds like they're pretty active towards trying to censor us coming up with creative
ways.
I mean, does it not feel that way that you know, there's really a full scale attack and
just basically this, this system that's going into place to try and really censor just Christianity
in general?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And that she brought up, um, which is the fact that not are they shutting down our channels?
That's, that's one thing, but also they are suppressing our channels.
So I, we've that there are, there's, there's content we put out and it just kind of seems
like for the amount of subscribers we have and kind of the, the things that we're used
to seeing there, there should be a lot more views here.
There should be, but one thing they can also do is they can just hide you and suppress
you so that they don't really take you off, but nobody really sees you unless they're
looking for you.
So that's definitely something that, that they're, they're doing as well.
And and like I said, that that's why we have to, you know, we, we could sit here and just
have this defeated attitude that says the whole world is hostile towards us and you
know, there's nothing we can do about it. And, and the whole world definitely, it
feels like the world is definitely hostile towards Bible believing Christians.
And even with the point that you made about Muslims, you know, you're, you're
right that you would think that there would be this hate against Islam instead
of hate against me. But it just shows you that the media wants to hate
Christianity. They don't necessarily care about other religions. They want to
hate Bible believing Christians. And so that's, that's their agenda.
But we, we have to just not have a defeated attitude. And, you know,
we have to have an attitude like Paul said, when, uh, you know,
he said, I labored more abundantly than they all.
And the truth is that you and I are not going to get to be treated like all
these liberal old IFB bastards that are not preaching controversial things.
Um, but we're going to just labor more abundantly than they all,
we're going to work hard and work harder to get the message out. And,
and I'm not, you know, ban, but not bound. It's just what we did. Um,
I like to do things that I understand. And to me, I,
I understood an email list that made sense to me, gathering emails,
sending out links, you know,
the problem with some of these alternative social media sites is that they just
don't get the traffic that YouTube does. So you can post videos there,
but they don't get as many views. But my thought was, well, if we could gather,
you know, and as far as I'm concerned, we're just getting started. I mean,
my goal for band but not bound would be to have 5,000, 10,000, 15, 20,000
subscribers, a hundred thousand emails one day. And my thought is this,
if we have to start a brand new YouTube channel every week,
cause they're just shutting us down,
but we post a sermon on a YouTube channel with zero subscribers and we
email it to 50,000 people. Um,
then I don't really care what the views are. If they shut us down every week,
we're still getting the message out. So we just have to work at it.
And there's other things you can do. You know,
people talk to me about blockchain and, and, and other, uh, things.
I think anything we can do, I'm all for it. Some of these things,
I'm not a techie guy. Some of these things I don't really understand.
I get an email list. Um, but I'm, I'm all for it.
I'm all for figuring out how to get the word of God, uh,
out there. And you know, we did ban, but not bound, but that's not the,
the only thing, you know, I, obviously the other thing we have to remember is
that social media is not the only way to get the word of God out there.
And obviously it's a big way and it's technology. We live in a society,
we live in a world where technology is available to us,
so we should use it, uh, in my opinion. But you know,
obviously we do door to door soul winning, uh,
because the Bible says to do that, but that's,
that's a way that you can get the word of God out. Um,
something else that we started at our church, uh,
which is just an alternative way to reach people is we started a,
uh, prison ministry, not, not,
not a traditional prison ministry like what you normally hear of a church going
into prisons. We want to do that and we're trying to do that too, but we,
we've had issues with that. Um, but,
but what we started was a mailing list for prisoners and uh,
people that are in prison. Uh, it started with, with one guy, um,
that we was in prison that was part of our church family and we wanted him to get
sermons while he was there. So we started trans, you know,
transcribing sermons and mailing them cause they,
they don't have access to the internet or YouTube or whatever. And, uh,
and then he got somebody saved.
So we started doing it for a second guy and they got another person saves.
We started doing it for a second guy and it just kind of grew from there.
And today we have 303 people on our prison ministry,
mailing list and every month they get two transcribed sermons from our church,
303 inmates throughout the country. Um, that's, that's an, uh, in my, you know,
that's an untapped, uh, ministry.
Get the word of God out there. And let me say this,
if you're watching and you have a loved one or a family member, a friend,
that's, that's, uh, incarcerated, uh, please, uh, email us their,
their address and we will get them on that list. Um, info@ardybaptist.com
and, uh, you know, we, we, we transcribe sermons and, uh,
and then we, we, our staff guys once a month,
they get together and we've got some young guys that volunteer, uh,
from our church and they print them all out and fold them and put them in
envelopes and we have the mailing list and the return address labels and the
stamps, they get it all together and mail them out. And you know, that's,
that's another thing we're doing. Uh, so it's not all about social media, uh,
but obviously social media is a big thing and we want to continue to use that.
No, I think that that's great. And you know, this hate speech thing is just,
it's just really weird. You know, is that something you grew up with Billin?
Have you ever heard of hate? I mean, when did you hear about hate speech?
I mean, growing up, even just in the two thousands,
I feel like a lot of the things that you guys preach against,
we're still seen as a negative growing up.
So it seems like it just happened overnight almost where, you know,
I'm 24 years old yet when I was a kid, even I feel like I'm in a different
country now than back then. So to me,
it just seems like it just blew up overnight in the 2010, 2011 ish time.
But no, growing up, I had never heard of that.
Well, there's gonna, there's a lot of challenges. You could kind of tell,
you know, what she's saying, you know,
especially having a little bit of a tech background,
having been a software developer for several years, you know,
they can't just necessarily turn off certain words because sometimes the people
that are against us, they use our words against us. And so they just ban,
you know, certain words,
they'll just kick all kinds of people off of their YouTube platform and they'll
get mad at them. Or if they ban particular words,
sometimes people might misspeak or their accents thick and they say a certain
word and it sounds like another one and then they get their YouTube video flag.
So they have to have like this army of human people constantly watching her
sermons. I, you know,
would be cool is if when we get into heaven, there's like this YouTube moderator.
That was like, so I hated you guys,
but I had to listen to so much of your preaching. I ended up getting saved.
I mean, that would be so cool if we got that. Now we have some more,
we have some more callers online. I want to get, see if we can get to them.
Keith had called in and we've kept them on the line waiting a little bit.
So apologize. I hope that he's still there. He didn't give up on us.
You got to be steadfast when you're one of these callers. Okay. Keith,
are you on the line? Can you hear us?
Hey, yeah, I'm here. Can you hear me all right?
Yeah. Thanks for calling in. Keith's from Utah.
And didn't you say you had lived in California for a little bit?
Yeah. Just about an hour or so from Pastor Mejia when he was in
El Monte before he got blown up.
Oh man. So do you have a question for us related to censorship or,
or something you wanted to share about censorship?
Yeah. I just wanted to say it's been great hearing the examples so far.
And just out in Utah,
the town that I'm particularly in used to be ran by a cult leader.
He's in prison now because he got caught and proven in court to be a pedophile,
but he was an offshoot of the mainstream Mormon church.
And we're just about 12 miles south of Zion national park to kind of just give a
reference for that. He was such a wicked person.
He got on the FBI is most wanted list.
He made it into the top 10 when Osama bin Laden was still on the list.
And the people in this community kind of have turned a blind eye to it.
They, they, they bought into this perception that it was just persecution
against him instead of admitting the fact that he was just a pedophile.
What he had done was he had groomed children as young as 12 years old.
And he had eventually amassed over 70 wives in this massive compound in the
desert. And one of the big reasons that that's a big deal in Utah is because he
got all of his ideas from Joseph Smith who the church vehemently denies was
involved in polygamy even though he was doing a lot of the same things that the
guy out here was doing in the 2000s.
So I've just found it interesting talking to some Mormons that are fundamentalists
and Mormons that aren't fundamentalists.
It's just kind of mind blowing the cognitive dissonance that's out here when it
comes to that.
Well, and I guess the Mormons, they exercise their own form of censorship.
I've, I've heard it online and I've kind of asked some Mormons and they kind of
conferred, but they,
they literally won't listen to anything that's negative about the Mormon church.
And what I think is kind of interesting is that's almost like what America is
trying to do to itself.
They're trying to become like the Mormons where they're not allowed to hear
anything negative, nothing bad about America, nothing bad about its politicians,
nothing bad about the Democrat party. You know,
we're not allowed to preach the Bible and preach against a certain community.
And you got to ask yourself if the Mormons can get so weird to have 70 wives
and become pedophiles. I mean, what's that going to do to America?
If we just get one narrative, you know,
you can only hear one idea and one essential program.
You know, that type of censorship literally just destroys an entire area.
Whereas, you know, I don't feel like from a biblical perspective,
you really see the idea of the censorship. In fact,
I think of Jeremiah in the Bible.
He even allows other preachers who are like just literally a false prophet,
just get up and preach just to hear what they have to say.
But then obviously if it's false, he's going to call them out,
but he doesn't like stop them from even being able to just at least share
whatever they were going to share.
He just allows them to condemn themselves by their own words, which, you know,
it seems a pretty effective tool because whenever you compare a truth or a lie,
that the lie just doesn't have a chance.
And that's why these people want to censor the truth is because they know it's
going to expose them for who they truly are. Like this cult leader,
you said there in Utah.
So thanks for sharing that story with us, Keith. And thanks for,
for hanging on the line. Do you have another quick question or?
I would just maybe one more story with the same region.
So he actually ended up banning certain words in the community and he also banned
access to internet. He banned different colors that you couldn't wear.
So you'd be either no drag out of town basically by the little,
they have like a mini car cell police force that they would use against people
like that. But it was like,
unlike anything you totally would see on any other place in America.
But now it's kind of feeling like the internet is like that where, you know,
just because something's offensive to somebody,
I think that it's going to be offensive to people that haven't heard it in a
long time or they're hearing it for the first time. It might rub them the wrong
way. It might make them uncomfortable,
but it doesn't mean that they don't need to hear it because the second people
hear that,
what was really going on in a lot of situations or when people realize the
differences between what the LDS church teaches and what's actually in the
Bible, when you're just able to make that difference with somebody,
it goes such a long way for them to say, wow, that was really,
really refreshing and uncomfortable at the same time.
You can kind of see them having that thought battle back and forth in their
head. Just like, man, like what have I been told my whole life?
But, um, that's really what I like about just being able to share the truth with
people and, and making a difference that way.
Because when people are just so sheltered from information,
it does nobody any good.
Well, thanks so much for calling in, Keith. Uh,
I didn't realize that colors could be hateful. That's new to me.
He banned the color red.
How are we going to have the red hot preaching conference if we can't even have
the color red? Yeah. Well, thanks for calling in. Have a good night.
And, uh, have you ever heard about someone banning the color red,
pastor Venice? No, that's the first I've heard of that. That's pretty crazy.
Well, you got the square in Moscow and aren't Russians banned now.
Yeah. Well, you know, it's, it's crazy. The, the,
what you've been bringing up pastor Shelley is so true.
It's crazy that we live in the United States of America and a country that
prides itself on freedom of speech.
And that's exactly what is being censored is free speech right now.
I just saw a quote recently from the CEO of Twitter.
He's a thing. He's like an Indian guy or something,
but he literally just says that like, forget about freedom of speech.
We're only allowing the things that we like and that we allow.
And it's just crazy. It's, it's, it's the world and it's happening here in the USA.
It's insanity.
So what's the point of having the first amendment if every single business just
decides not to allow the first amendment to even exist? I mean, it's like,
doesn't the first amendment say that there should be no law passed? I mean,
and obviously that's from a governmental perspective and I get that, but I mean,
how much are we going to blur the lines between the laws that the government is
allowed to have and enforce with just all of these companies who are essentially
monopolies propped up by the government funded by the government, you know,
intertwined with the politicians who are making these laws and then say like,
Oh, but it's a private business. You know,
it's like that argument doesn't really, you know, hold any water. Um, and,
and again, it, to me,
it almost seems like we're just becoming a giant cult of personality. Um,
there's just a few men behind the curtain, whoever they are that, I guess,
get to decide some NGO, you know, that tells Google what to do.
You know, is that, is that George Soros? I mean, who do,
who even know this is who is this person that's deciding what's hateful? Um,
I ventured to believe everything is hateful to someone.
And so it's really kind of a dangerous, uh,
society that we're getting towards if we don't have anybody standing up for free
speech. And you know, there is some people that are, you know,
maybe not quite our brand of Christian or maybe not even Christian that are
fighting supposedly for free speech.
And there's a lot of these quote unquote alternative platforms,
but I've noticed that on these quote alternative platforms,
they still don't want our level of free speech. Like they,
they claim that they're free speech, but like rumble, you know,
I put up the sodomy deception and it got taken down faster than YouTube took it
down. Oh really? Wow. Yeah. I, or we put up, you know, our sermons or information,
you know, like even that Christian app, they're like, Oh,
YouTube censoring Christians. And I'm like, well, here's what I preach.
And here's our content is like, well, we can't have that. And it is just like,
it doesn't seem like anybody actually believes in free speech anymore,
which is kind of a sad day for America because you're really not limiting hate
speech. You're just limiting the truth. Right. We have another caller.
Peter James is calling in and I think that he has a plugin that has to do with
pastor men is here too. But Peter, are you on the line? Can you hear us? Yeah.
Hey, how are you guys? Great. Thanks for calling in. Hey Peter, how you doing?
Hey, pastor. How are you? I'm good. Good to hear your voice. Yeah.
So, so you guys are talking about censorship? Yes, sir. You got a,
you got a question or a story for us? Well, you know,
I I've been censored on Facebook a lot when I just post basic opposition to like,
you know,
sodomite brainwashing of children and that kind of thing.
And it becomes more rampant, but now they banned my main Facebook account.
So I can't even plug the Northeast new ISP conference night that's happening.
I love it. Have you heard about that? Pastor Shelley over there at Steadfast.
I feel like I need to hear more about it. Why don't you tell us?
Well, if you haven't heard, uh,
pastor Jimenez who you have on the program tonight is going to be out here
preaching on June 10th in New Jersey. And that hasn't been censored yet.
And not only is pastor Jimenez going to be here preaching also pastor Aaron
Thompson will be here as well. And that's on a Friday night, June 10th.
And then on June 11th, we're going to have a soul winning marathon.
So I'm trying to spread the word abroad for this event. It's going,
it's going to be exciting. I've been excited about it and I'm looking forward to it.
Well, we want to fight that,
that Facebook censorship and give information out there sounds like a dynamic
duo and that's going to be great. Um, too bad. I'm like,
I don't know, 25 hours away from New Jersey or something like that.
But I know that pastor Jimenez must have a lot more love than,
than he gets credit for, if he's willing to come from sunny California to New
Jersey here.
Yeah. The garden state, huh? Nice in the summer there.
Isn't it nice in New Jersey in the summertime? Oh, well, let me just say this.
Like it gets a bad rap and we joke about it,
but New Jersey is a great state, the great state of New Jersey.
It is the garden state. It's got four good seasons. It's, but the thing is,
it's, it's March right now in New Jersey and that's when we get, you know,
those bitter, those bitter windy cold, that bitter windy cold.
But other than that, I like how the, we have the four distinct seasons.
They're not too extreme,
but people think it's just drab dreary kind of state. But you know,
I like living in New Jersey, but yeah,
I'm really excited that a pastor Jimenez coming out here to visit and,
and pastor Thompson, that's going to be awesome. I'm trying to prepare things.
Yeah. Hopefully you'll have a big crowd. How do,
if someone has any questions about it, how do they contact?
Or who do they need to contact? Or is there an email or something?
They can contact me. They can email me at eastcoastbaptistone@gmail.com.
Also, there's information about,
it's called the Northeast New ISD Conference Night.
And there's information about it on the Verity Baptist Church YouTube channel,
also on the Pillar and Ground YouTube channel,
Shere Foundation Baptist Church YouTube channel, you know,
Pastor Thompson posted about it as well. But, you know, I'm really excited.
You know, one thing I'm really excited about is that we have two church
planting pastors coming. And because that, you know, that's basically my
vision and my hope for this part of the country is that the church is planted
out here in my lifetime. But it's been really, you know, one thing that's been
really delightful, like as a Christian to see is basically seeing other people's,
you know, growth and their progression and seeing, you know, how, you know, God
is using them. And, and yeah, so Pastor Jimenez sent out Pastor Thompson and,
you know, you have one church planting pastor who sent out a pastor who is now a
church planting pastor. And the fruit of the righteous is the tree of life.
You know, there's lots of trees, you know,
we have a couple of trees of life coming over here and hopefully we can get,
hopefully get some churches planted over here as well in the future.
Yeah. I mean, obviously the East coast needs the gospel really bad. And you know,
we need more people that are willing to go out to these parts, the garden state.
So maybe, maybe your conference can plant some seeds and some young men's hearts
that want to maybe reach that demographic, reach that area.
And I know I listened to a podcast one time and someone said that California is
the front lines and that Texas is like where you go to just relax.
Well, I think you're proving us wrong. Just a part. No,
no, no one ever wants to come to California because it's so tough.
And I think you're proving that maybe they should come to California and get a
break from all the persecution there in Texas. So, well, you know,
I know people are given Texas a bad rep,
but I did see that they recently appointed in California is the first state to
have an openly transgender judge. And so I know,
I know the judges over here get a bad rep,
but I have a bad feeling that if I had to go get evicted in front of that judge,
probably wouldn't do very good. Right. I hadn't heard that.
That's actually the first I've heard of that.
So I'm going to look into that and make a short about that. But, um, you know,
I do want to say, uh, that I, I'm really excited about going to New Jersey.
And if, if anybody lives in New Jersey,
New York or driving distance surrounding area, come on and see us.
That's June 10th, Friday night. I'll be preaching.
Pastor Thompson will be preaching,
looking forward to spending time with Pastor Thompson and Ms. Sherry.
And I'm going to bring it out. My entire family, my wife and all my kids,
we're going to be there for that Friday night and for the Saturday soul winning.
And it's going to be, it's going to be a great time.
And I've known Peter for a long time.
He recently sent me a text with a picture of when I baptized him and I don't
know when that was, was that 2000? I don't know if Peter's still on the line.
It might've been 2015 or 14 or something like that.
Yeah, that was, that would have been August 2014. Yeah.
So we've known each other for a long time and I love brother Peter and he's been
coming out to the Red Heart Preaching Conference for years and every year he's
been asking me about preaching in New Jersey and I always have an excuse why I
can't. But this last time he,
he asked me again and I said, let's do it. So I'm looking forward to it.
I think it's going to be a great trip. Hey, persistence is key there.
Yeah, there's a reason that poor widow, you know, it's like, it's like, yeah, you know, I'm bothering my friend, but you know, because of this opportunity, he's going to give me some bread.
Well, I really do. I truly do appreciate that a lot. And, you know, I trust that, you know, I trust that, you know, my fellow Christians, you know, believe the scriptures the same way I do. And I know that they believe in going.
You know, I believe that I, when I ask God, I receive and I believe Christians, you know, they have the spirit of God in their hearts and that they want, you know, to, they have like the word of God that says, you know, if someone compels you to go a mile, go with some twain, but you're going, you're going a lot farther than that. You're going like 3,000 miles.
So does that mean he has to go to China? Like, if you go, if you're willing to go to New Jersey, you have to go all the way to China?
To the Philippines.
Well, yeah, so not only to the Philippines, but all the way to... it's great. Yeah, I'm really excited and I appreciate it.
And it's going to be a good appetizer to the RedHouse Preaching Conference this summer, I think.
Well, that's really exciting. Sorry about your Facebook censorship.
I think that's something that almost everybody's probably experienced at this point.
You know, anybody that shares anything that has any kind of teeth to it, it seems like Facebook will put you in jail for just about anything.
And we're not even just talking about Christians. It seems like everybody's kind of experiencing this, this censorship.
And to me, it almost seems like everybody's kind of sick of it.
Like everybody kind of hates it a little bit, but at the same time, they're just kind of going with the flow.
And, you know, I don't know what new technologies or new things that we can invent in the future.
Obviously, technology, we've benefited a lot from, but I guess it's possible technology may not necessarily continue to be the
fruitful, you know, harvest that we've had.
And the one thing that still works is going in person, you know, you're not going to not hear Pastor Minnis-Sermon when you
actually show up in New Jersey.
It was a June 10th, and you hear him in person.
Yeah, I'll give the I'll give the exact meetup details to both days before I hang up.
But, you know, the thing about that is, and Dylan quoted before Psalm 2 about, you know, the the rulers setting themselves, taking counsel against the Lord and against his anointed.
But, you know, and, you know, saying, let us break their bands asunder.
But what's funny about that is how, you know, he that siteth in the heavens shall laugh, the Lord shall have them in derision.
So what's been so great is like seeing that, you know, this, you know, this New World Order or whatever, you know, and this satanic system, how they have all this, you know, this, they're meaning all this for evil and they have all these plans for the technology.
But God is basically just like, you know, let's see how many people I can, you know, will see the Bible way to heaven and like, you know, let me and seeing Christians use these tools and the tools that they're given in this generation.
And no, and we know that the gospel is going to be preached in, you know, in the in the last days. And even though like wickedness is going to abound, you know, great works for God are going to be done.
So that's why you can kind of just relax about it, even though it's it's so strange seeing this, you know, your country being given over to these delusions of, you know, and literally like having a demented president and who is just, you know, like, who should we elect to the Supreme Court?
I know, I know who's going to be what the qualification should be, as long as it's a black woman, that's who we're choosing.
And, you know, we're going to have a trans admiral, we're going to, you know, we're going to take this tranny, and we're going to honor them with all these these like, you know, these honors and these accolades.
And then just getting, you know, a normal person stating their opinion, you know, these people have control over these systems that disseminate disseminate information and, you know, they can censor information.
And, you know, these weird blue haired Marxists, they're the ones in control of it. It's so weird.
You know, I guess I don't have to worry about it. Right. I feel like I keep hearing this song less now that proud to be an American.
It's like, how much longer can they even play that song?
I mean, with the way that our country's turning, it's just, you know, I don't even know how people can be patriotic anymore.
I'm just hoping Putin will invade us because at least, you know, he's not going to put up with the transvestites at this point.
That is Dylan's hope.
It's, it's an interesting hope, but I don't think it's going to happen.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
You might have to prepare, but you know, it's more likely that Kamala is going to be in charge.
Exactly.
But you know, I like that attitude, brother Peter, because honestly, the censorship definitely does affect us.
Don't get us wrong.
It is a headache.
It is a headache, you know, putting in months and months of labor into a building and going through all the legal processes for months and months and getting evicted in a country where we thought we had the First Amendment.
That is very frustrating.
You know, it's very frustrating when you get your banking shut down.
It's very frustrating when people don't want to work with you.
But, you know, just so the audience is aware, Steadfast Baptist Church is doing great.
You know, we were four people shy of breaking our attendance record this Sunday morning
in a temporary meeting space, you know, compared to the number that we had in our building before.
Between Thursday and Saturday, our church had 76 salvations, tons and tons of soul winners.
And it's all by God's grace.
But I like what Brother Peter said, you know, at the end, God's going to have the last laugh.
And, you know, as long as we're doing what we're supposed to be doing, we really can.
Sit back and relax because we're watching our church.
You know, we're watching.
We're seeing with our own eyes how true the Bible is, that the more they afflict us,
the more we grow, just like in the book of Exodus.
And so even though it is a headache, if we have to suffer the headache of censorship
so that more people will be saved, so that we can continue to preach the word of God,
then that's worth it, if you ask me.
Yeah, I mean, with the censorship, we kind of have to put this in perspective of
historical biblical situations, you know, the apostle Paul didn't have his YouTube
channel shut down, you know, the these guys in the Bible, you know, to me,
technology is kind of like sugar is like the cherry on top.
You know, the gospel has been preached
person to person for the last few thousand years.
You know, it wasn't being disseminated online.
And while I'm all for online, I love, you know, being able to put our sermons up
and people can watch them later and they don't have to miss that content.
You know, we really need to still embrace
traditional methods of going to church in person, going out and knocking the doors,
preaching the gospel, and of course, you know, I don't think
that the censorship is going to stop with the online, you know, eventually they're
going to get to the point where they're trying to stop the physical meetings.
And, you know, the the devil inhabiting
the Antichrist is going to cause you to not even be able to buy or sell literally.
And so we're not really looking to a bright future.
In fact, we're really headed towards the Antichrist, a great falling away.
And we need people to get plugged in because I feel like it's taking time bomb online.
I don't know how much longer we're going to be able to have a major impact.
I think that we're going to still be able
to slip through the cracks and we're going to still be able to do
cool things like your ban, but not found email list and other methods.
But, you know, there's nothing to replace the physical in person,
going to church, preaching the gospel out, you know,
knocking doors and even just the people you interact with.
I got a text message from a friend who
just said that they got one of their co-workers saved.
And, you know, they said that's a really
cool experience that they're able to share with the people that they know
in their personal lives, getting family members say.
We call in last week where someone was talking about how they got a bunch of
their family members saved and and so that's what we need is people to start
talking to their family members, to their co-workers, to their neighbors,
going to their church, getting plugged in, preaching the gospel and making an impact
where they're at locally, that's how you really fight this censorship.
That's how you really combat this evil.
And you need to get out there.
10th, New Jersey, Peter James, a Real Zealous Soul winner.
Great lineup, Pastor Menez, Pastor Thompson.
And, you know, thanks for that plug.
Do you have another question, Peter?
You want to you want to ask us before we let you go?
Well, I don't have any more questions.
I don't have any more questions.
But, you know, I totally agree with everything you said.
I believe God is never he's never going to leave us without the tools to preach
the gospel, you know, even as as dark as things get, you know, and even as close
to the end as we get, I think we're always going to have what God
thinks we need to accomplish what he wants in that time.
So, you know, and it's like you said, they can't stop us from, you know, if they take
away our Facebook, that's fine.
It's just like it's like a digital detox for 30 days.
It's fine to be banned for Facebook.
But, you know, they take away your YouTube, you know, then you have your emailing list.
They take that away, you know, you meet in church and, you know, you can go to your friend's
house, you can call them, you can go out and knock, knock doors.
No, no one can stop you from walking up to somebody and giving them the gospel.
And, you know, that's what that's the goal of the weekend in June.
We really just want to corral, corral some soul winners and some zealous believers.
There's and, you know, I know they they're out here.
We just want to remind them that, you know, God, you know, God is still on the throne.
He needs to be needs to be served.
And, you know, we want to kind of inspire people to get back out there and go soul winning.
You know, I believe it's really important to I believe the Bible emphasizes in the New
Testament, especially continuing in, you know, what you've learned.
If you've been given something good, if you've been taught something that's good and right
and godly and God used, you know, certain people who are on the right path and, you
know, churches and, you know, his people to teach you the right way.
You know, you should stick with that and consider that and not be so quick to just, you know,
turn away from that, you know, forsake people who've taught you.
And you know, I think, you know, there's just blood, there's blessing for staying the course.
So, you know, we want to see what God can do out here.
If we work with what we have, if Pastor Jimenez and Pastor Thompson, they come out in June
and a lot of people show up and God sees that people are interested in serving the Lord
out here, God willing, you know, you know, I just need to, I want to know people who
know people who know people that, you know, one day want to come start churches in New
Jersey.
So that's the plan here.
But if there's no interest, God might not necessarily invest in New Jersey.
So I'm trying to cultivate that harvest here in New Jersey the best I can and with my friends
over here.
Well, I hope that, you know, churches get started over there too.
And thanks again for calling in.
We really appreciate you being on the line and I look forward to seeing you again, hopefully
at the Red Hot Preaching Conference, if not some other day, some other place.
Good to see, good to hear from you, Peter.
Yeah, Pastor Jimenez, it's really good to hear from you too and I'll catch up with you
more and it was really good talking to you guys.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, thanks.
We did have another question I saw put in the chat and someone kind of just asked do
you think the censorship is going to kind of ramp up.
One thing that's interesting is even though obviously some of our friends and some Baptists
have been persecuted, I've seen this in a lot of places even not just like our circles
there's a guy named Andrew Torba who created like an alternative social media site called
Gab and that guy's been severely shut down.
I saw an article it said that he had been shut down at his fifth bank in a row in like
a really short period of time I think it was just only a few weeks and they're getting
like all of their accounts shut down just basically they can't even bank this business
because it's just basically disseminating too much truth and you know I don't know exactly
what they believe. I don't even know if Torb was necessarily saved. I know that he's a
Christian and that he's pretty unashamed about being a Christian but you know it doesn't
matter any level of Christianity is just being censored. He can't even be on the app store
I don't believe. I've been on Gap but you know it's just hard for sometimes for these
things to even take traction because if they want to shut you down they're gonna get you
shut down and that's why I think you got to go back to the traditional methods because
again the banned but not bound email list if you think about the story it's the Apostle
Paul's put in prison and he's saying hey the gospel didn't stop when I went to prison you
guys need to go out and preach the gospel you know it's not Paul that gets the gospel
out the Christians get out the gospel and you know even if God forbid you know they
shut down steadfast Baptist Church or did something to very Baptist Church you know
we're not the end stop of the gospel or the preaching of God's word we need other people
other like-minded Christians to be stirred up and and to preach the truth and have boldness
and have courage and to basically not be ashamed of Jesus Christ be ashamed of his word.
What is kind of your feeling for the future in just this area pastor men as what are you
kind of preparing your church in any way or well yeah absolutely you know one thing that
I want to say is that the Bible says there's no new thing under the Sun and the truth is
that censorship in the way we're seeing it seems new to us right now obviously with social
media and all that stuff but censorship is not new I mean if you remember in the gospel
of Luke the Lord Jesus Christ his very first sermon when he really launched his ministry
after his baptism they tried to throw him off the cliff you know and then you've got
Stephen of course he's preaching the word of God and they stone him to death but so
so people's trying to stop true Christianity is not new it happened to Jesus I mean they
ended up crucifying our Savior so that so the council culture has been around for a
long time what I think is funny is that people look at us and they'll they'll say like you're
not a real Christian Christians aren't supposed to hate and it's like well you obviously have
never read the Gospels you've never read the book of Acts you've never read I mean literally
Paul has these Jews following him around trying to get him thrown out of every city trying
to get him shut down trying to get him cancelled he Paul you know people will look at like
my church or your church and say well you guys there must be something wrong with you
if you're getting sued and it's like have you read the last part of the book of Acts
I mean the whole end of it is just like court case after court case he's just being brought
by all these different people so you know we're living new testament christianity is
just new testament christianity has a lot of persecution and issues um is the reality
and people just start reading the bible and realize that uh so but I do obviously I do
see it getting worse and worse like you said we were moving towards a one world government
and a one world religion we're moving towards a world that is so under control that they
can control who can buy and sell so obviously it's not it's it's it's not going to better
um in regards to in regards to that and it really is ingenious what our country has done
because you know usually it used to be when I was a kid people would talk about the government
and fearing the government and we should fear the government I mean you know we obviously
we should be worried about the government um in regards to what they're doing but you
know we have laws in this country that say that you can't create laws against free speech
so what the government has done is they've allowed these private companies to control
the dissemination of speech in the world and now they're able to kind of stand back and
support these wicked companies like Facebook and YouTube and Google and whatever and uh
and they don't have to follow these laws of allowing free speech because they're quote
unquote private companies, private entities or whatever. It's this culture that has been
developed to make sure that they can control speech, that they can control information
and we have to, like you said, we have to fight against it but we also we need to try
to be cutting edge with technology and with our thoughts. The thing about Christianity
has always been on the, has always used the cutting edge of technology. I mean go back
to William Tyndale and the invention of the printing press and that was used by Chris
at the Baptist churches like Jack Hiles and Curtis Hudson and Lee Roberson. These guys,
they had these mailing lists where they would tape the sermons from their churches and they
would physically mail them out every week or every other week or every month to all
these mailing lists that they had. And I thought, you know, that's kind of what gave me the
idea for the band, but not that obviously we're not going to send tapes out, but to
get email lists and send links. Yeah. Well, we may have to do that at some point.
Walkman. Well, we could always send out transcribed sermons. Yeah. And you know, people might
just have to learn how to read again and get back to reading, you know, too. But but like
you said, God did not call us. I mean, I'm all for using all that. But God called us
to local New Testament churches. And you know, when John the Baptist was preaching, people
came out to the wilderness to hear him preach. And I just believe, you know, if they take
us off the internet, which I'm not sure that they will or when they will or whatever, it
might be one of the best things that ever happened to our churches. I mean, I go soloing
in Sacramento, I can't tell you how many times I've knocked doors. I mean, I've literally
been down the street from our church, knock on a door, the door opens and I'm like, "Hi,
we're coming from Verity Baptist Church." And the person's like, "Oh, I know who you
are Pastor Jimenez, I watch you on YouTube." And they literally live down the street from
our church and don't come to our church. And I mean, I've had stuff like that happen a
lot. And if they take us down from YouTube, then maybe people will actually get their
rear ends in the house of God, which wouldn't be a bad thing. So like you said, one great
way to not have the sermons canceled is for you to go to New Jersey to the preaching night,
be there. If you don't mind, let me plug the Red Hot Preaching Conference in July, which
Pastor Shelley is going to be preaching at the Red Hot Preaching Conference. We have
a great lineup this year. Of course, Pastor Anderson, Pastor Mejia, Pastor Thompson, Pastor
Jones is invited to come, and Pastor Burzins is coming. He hasn't came in a few years,
but he's coming. And Pastor Buzarnsky, I hope I'm not forgetting anyone else, but we're
going to have a great lineup. And here's the thing about the Red Hot Preaching Conference
is we can't stream it on our main channel because it gets shut down. We have to set
up a secondary channel, which if you want to be able to watch the Red Hot Preaching
Conference live stream, go to badbutnotbound.com, sign up to our email list because we will
disseminate the link through there. And if it gets shut down, we'll start up another
account and send it that way. So we'll do our best to get the information out there,
but here's a great way to not miss it. Just come. Come to the Red Hot Preaching Conference.
And it's this year, July 14th through the 17th. So we'd love you to come to Red Hot,
of course.
Amen. And that's absolutely right. If you're anywhere near Sacramento, California, you
need to go to Verity Baptist Church. And especially if you can't just make it to every service,
you need to come to the Red Hot Preaching Conference. It's the greatest conference
of the year. I've been there almost every single year. I kicked myself because of course,
I didn't make the first year and I was like, I asked a whole bunch of people and at church
I said, "Hey, who wants to go with me on a carpool?" And I couldn't find anyone. And
I just didn't make the drive by myself. I should have just driven by myself, let's be
honest. But I made it the next year and I made it almost, I think almost every year
since then. I think the year that I had to start Pure Words Baptist Church, I was, I
can't remember. I can't remember. I might have missed one of those years there too. But
great conference, great spirit. I think they had over 500 last year. And I wouldn't be surprised
if it's a bigger number. Of course, you know, with COVID and things like that, it kind of dampened
some people's plans. But I think a lot of people are kind of over that now. And I wouldn't be
surprised if this conference grows to where it's literally thousands in the future. It's one of the
most anticipated events. People love it. Every single time I've ever gone, everybody seems to
have a great time. And they have a lot of great activities. Hey, it's where I met my wife. Hey,
some people get married. Single guys out there. And you know, I know they had they had a football
competition. Last year, they had a ping pong competition. I think the person that won was
from what was the church? Ping pong? Yeah, who won the ping pong? I can't remember. Who was that pastor?
Well, well, you know, you know, just like Google put out new laws as a result of my preaching,
we might have to put out new laws as a result of steadfast baptist church because you guys brought
these professional ringers in. And you know, you paid them to I'm sure you paid them to fly out to
the conference. And the good thing is we got them saved while they were here. No, I'm just kidding.
Well, I have to say that, you know, we did have a couple of guys from a church come,
they were in the final finals. In fact, there's another person that finals. I think it was just
all steadfast finals. Once we got to the last three people in the competition, I had to gracefully
bow out and but steaming others better than yourself. Yeah, exactly. But I did not pay
a single dollar, I don't think for these men's trips. So you know, they were just there. And
they're definitely welcoming of the next ping pong, you know, game if we have that again,
I don't know if you're bringing that. Well, you know, the first year we did football. And we lost
that to Sher Foundation. And then the second year we did the you know, the year after that we did
ping pong. And we lost that to steadfast. So we're just gonna keep changing it till we find
something we can win at. So I think this year we're doing water polo. Now I'm just
something we're doing ping pong again, and table tennis. It's just football was nice, but it was
just, there's a lot of work and being outside and all of that. It worked out really well with the
table tennis because we were able to do in our fellowship hall and people had a good time and
the ladies were more interested in that than football too. So the kids were able to participate
which they weren't able to participate with football. So we're gonna do table tennis again.
So, but yeah. Well you had some great kiddos in the table tennis. Some youngsters were
really tearing it up and ping pong and so I look forward to seeing how the competition goes again
this year and we really appreciate you putting on that conference. I know it's a lot of work and a
lot of effort but you know what you can't get censored when you're at the conference and you're
hearing you're hearing it live. You know that's the best way to hear sermons is in person. That's
how it's always been done. That's how it's all going to continue to be done and while they can
definitely shut down a lot of things as long as we got breath in our lungs, we're going to keep
preaching and that's what God's called us to do. I really appreciate you coming on the show. I know
there's so much more we could talk about but I feel like we've taken a lot of your time already
and we really appreciate you coming on for one last podcast this season and I know it's probably
better than other podcasts in California but I do at least appreciate you coming on the show
and supporting our church too. Pastor Minas has been a supporter of Steadfast Baptist Church and
they've done a lot for our church emotionally, financially, sending preachers to fill pulpits
and you got a great staff over there. I really can't recommend Verity Baptist Church enough.
It's a great spirit and obviously all are doing a great job over there. I can't imagine being in
Sacramento, California. The weather is beautiful. I'm just not a California guy. But you know what,
I would move there for Verity Baptist Church. To me, that's the appeal of Sacramento is Verity.
To some people, it's the one blemish and to me, it's the one bright spot.
I really appreciate the work they all are doing out there. If you have any final comments, I'll
let you give us your final concluding thoughts here, Pastor Menes.
Yeah. Thank you. You have a great church there. I know you've been getting hit a lot
in a lot of different ways. I got him saved. I got him baptized. I performed his wedding.
Hopefully, the tree is known by its fruit. Hopefully, he's making me look good over there,
but I know he is. We love Brother Dill and Pastor Thompson, of course, everyone.
I appreciate you having us on. I just want to encourage people to keep fighting the good fight
and definitely get in a local church. Find a good church in your area and get connected. That is
the number one plan. When it comes to censorship and how we're going to fight it, I'm all for
looking for alternative ways and trying different things. At the other day, the best way to fight
censorship is to have ordained preachers sent out to start local churches. If we can have
a new IFB church in every city in this country, they can't stop us. They could stop me. They
could stop you. They could stop individuals, but they can't stop all of us. That's really
what we need is church planning, soul winning, preaching the word of God using every available
means. At the end, I realizing that the answer is the local New Testament church.
Thank you so much for coming on. Get into Verity Baptist Church. If you come back, maybe we can
give you a better Ben. We're just kind of just working on our bench players here. But thanks so
much. Tell them I miss them. Yeah, I will. Thanks so much for coming on. And we'll throw it over to
Dylan. Do you have any final thoughts for us? Yeah, just a couple things. First of all, thank
you very much Pastor Minnis for coming on. Like you said, you got me saved, baptized me, you married
me and my wife. And so I really do look up to you. And you definitely mean a lot to me. I look up to
you as a leader and I just appreciate all the work you've done. And honestly, you've changed my life.
So keep doing the great work. I'm sure that many other people have that testimony. And you know,
like you said, we just have to keep preaching. And since this is the Baptist bias, I want to
read some scripture here because there was a point where people wanted Jesus Christ to shut his mouth
and they weren't just threatening to, you know, take him off YouTube or kick him out of his building.
It was actually a lot worse than that in John 5. He had just healed a man. And in John 15 it says,
"The man departed and told the Jews that it was Jesus which had made him whole. And therefore
did the Jews persecute Jesus and sought to slay him because he had done these things on the Sabbath
day." So Jesus, He wasn't just facing, you know, being deplatformed. People were literally trying
to kill Him. And sometimes we have to put things in perspective of the level of persecution that
we're facing now versus the level of persecution that we can face in the future. But what was the
Lord Jesus Christ's reaction in verse 17? You know, did He cower? Did He stop preaching? Did He
apologize? He said, "But Jesus answered them, 'My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.'" He just
kept preaching, just like these pastors are saying. That's the answer. When Jesus Christ was faced
with persecution, with people wanting to shut Him up, He didn't shut up. He didn't let them stop Him.
He kept preaching, and guess what? It did cost Him His life eventually, but you know what? If He
wouldn't have done that, none of us could be saved. And so, that might even be the level
of persecution that God may require of us and of our generation so that other people would be saved.
And what we need to do is we need to pray for boldness, because it's real easy to just say,
"Oh yeah, keep preaching," you know, even if it's up to death. That's real easy to say,
but I have to imagine that that's a whole other thing to actually do. And so, you know,
church members watching this, what you can be doing is being, is to be praying for your pastor,
praying for the people that are preaching the Word of God, that they'll have the boldness and,
you know, us ourselves as preachers praying for ourselves that we would continue to have
the boldness to preach the Word of God. And there's one more thing that I'd like to plug before
we sign off, and that is next month, April 22nd through the 25th, is going to be a
soul-winning marathon put on by Shear Foundation Baptist Church in Detroit, Michigan. I'm going
to be going to this. I know Deacon Corbin Russell is going to be going to this, and many other people
are going to be going. It's a great soul-winning marathon to go to, especially if you've never been
to one before, especially because the tickets are so cheap because no one wants to go to Detroit for
any other reason. And I got my plane tickets for less than 200 bucks. So if you want to learn how
to preach the gospel or you want to just have some receptive soul-winning, come out with us
to Detroit, Michigan, April 22nd through the 25th to preach the gospel. Well, thanks so much for
tuning in to The Baptist Bias. You can check us out on all kinds of different podcasts. We've got
Apple Podcasts, Podbean, Spotify. Obviously, we're trying to be on YouTube and Facebook as much until
they censor us. And of course, the Jews didn't like how many subscribers Jesus was getting. They
were afraid he was going to eventually have them all so they had to crucify him. And of course,
they're going to constantly try to shut us down, but we're going to keep fighting. And I look
forward to season two. We're going to have a lot of good ideas and a great show. Hopefully, maybe
we can have some guests back on the show, maybe Pastor Menah is back on the show for a future
episode. But that's going to do it for us for season one. Thanks so much for tuning in the
Baptist Bias. Check us out, share us, blog us, tweet us. We'll see you again after a while.