Ladies and gentlemen, looking for something new and original. Something unique and without equal. Look no further. Here comes the one and only Eric Metaxas. Folks, welcome to the program. I am so excited right now. I could burst almost literally, but not literally. I have on a friend, Neil Mammon, who is involved in something that I've been talking about for some time. It's really exciting. So before I tell you all about it, why don't I just say welcome, Neil Mammon. Thank you, Eric. Good to be here again. Okay. We're going to be talking about something. I can't believe it exists. I feel like I dreamt it up, but nobody would ever execute such a thing. But you and Roger Elswick have made this a reality. This is a big deal. This is an answer to a real problem we have. I say everywhere I go that folks, if you're going to a church that is not dealing with the issues in our culture, that is unwilling to face this and that is whistling in the wind, that is fiddling while Rome burns, you need to find another church. I say this over and over and I beg people, God will judge you for sitting in a church that is shrinking from its duty before God to speak to these issues. And then the question is, people say, well, where would I go to a church? So, Neil, tell us. Well, the problem is really, really obvious and I get that all the time. I go around speaking, people go, oh, do you know a good church in this area or that area? Well, it turns out that more than that, it turns out 1 .7 million people look for a new church every month. 1 .7 people look for a new church. A billion. A billion. And now if you assume that's a family unit here or there, that's about 5 million people looking for a new church every month. 5 million. Most of them, turns out, it's Sunday morning. So I wanted to do some research on it, so I went on, you know, the source of all information is Google's Bard Artificial Intelligence. And I said, tell me what sort of churches these people are looking for. And Bard comes back with, oh, they're looking for progressive, more loving, more accepting churches. That's what Google's Bard said. And I said, really? Is that true? I don't believe that. So I said, give me the information. Give me the evidence of that. By the way, before I start, I should mention this. I have a statistic. I want a statistic. I want your readers. I don't want you to guess because you'll know the answer. Here's a quote. Only 17 percent of Americans go to church. The interest in religion is minimal. And in New York, single women are more likely to be sexually active than attend a church. Worse, 33 percent of all pregnancies in New York are out of wedlock. Now, I ask people, what decade do they think that is? And they always say, oh, oh, that's 1990s, 2000s, whatever, right? You know, actually, this is 1990s because today is probably a lot worse. But we'll come back to that. But so so I asked Bard, I said, what what since you think that these are people looking for progressive churches, can you give me a list of the growth rate of progressive churches? And Bard said, OK, so it gives me this rate and it's you know, it shows me this list of people of churches and like the UMC. They've dropped like 50 percent, the Presbyterian, the USA, you know, the liberal Presbyterian Church, they've dropped by 38 percent. And so I go down that list and I ask I ask I say, well, give me the list of all the progressive churches and how they've grown in the last 20 years. So from 2000 to 2020. So in 2000, the progressive total people going to progressive total was about 18 .7 million. And today it's about 16 .8 million. So they've dropped by 10 percent total. There's no surprise people going to these ridiculous, you know, quote unquote progressive churches that have veered away from biblical doctrine. I'm surprised anybody goes to those. Exactly. I mean, the the Presbyterians, they've dropped. The Presbyterians were the ones that dropped by 50 percent. The UMC has dropped by 15 percent. Yeah, because why go to a church like that when you could go to to like a local, you know, Neil, where are you going? What's the punch line? Because I'm getting confused. Are you? I know there's my assumption would be that most people who actually care about church are trying to find a conservative church, a church that teaches biblical doctrine, but also that speaks to the issues that people like because many people can go to these ridiculous mega church or whatever, where they they're avoiding the hot button issues that everybody has to deal with when they leave that church, their kids are dealing with it, everybody's dealing with it. What's going on in America? So the idea is, how do you find those churches? So I know that's where you're heading with this. So I turned the bar and I said, OK, now give me the conservative churches. I'm on board just looking for liberal churches, progressives. I said, give me the conservative churches. And it gives me things like, oh, the Orthodox Presbyterians, they have grown by 50 percent in the last 20 years. The Orthodox Russians have gone by 29 percent. Independent Baptists have grown by 33 percent. The conservative. And so I did I said, what about the Calvary church? The Calvary churches have grown by one hundred and fifty percent. And then the you know, even the Southern Baptists who's stuck in the news all the time, they've grown by seven and a half percent. OK, but conservative total have grown from sixty seven million people in 2000 going to these conservative churches to ninety two million going to these conservatives. So they've grown by almost thirty seven percent in the last 20 years. Now, what's interesting about this and this is the kicker here. This is all pre covid data. It didn't have any data for twenty one, twenty two, twenty three. This is twenty twenty. And as you know, and you're going to be preaching in my church in Santa and in in San Jose and sometime in your future Calvary Chapel, San Jose, right. They grew from three hundred people to three thousand people over covid. Why? Because a couple of things is very important here. Pastor Mike said, I'm not going to let the state determine what I'm doing. I'm going to be legislated, be active with voter guides. We had candidates coming in who's fighting the state. Remember, we say we're the finest church in all of America because we have four million dollars in Calvary Chapel, San Jose, because we wouldn't shut down for covid. So churches like these have been exploding all over the nation. So just these numbers are three years old and I can't seem to get the twenty twenty three numbers. So, no, the people who are looking for church. And so I went back to Bartlett said, well, this is the growth rate. Our people are really looking for more progressive rates. And, you know, I always say, well, I'm really sorry. I apologize. Yes, you're right. They must be looking for conservative Bible believing fundamentalist churches is what it comes back to. So it actually says, oh, yeah, you're right. You were correcting me on it. Right. So the issue here is then why? How do we find these if five million people are looking for churches every single month, how are they going to find these conservative churches? OK, this is this is a very long way of getting to the punch line, because this is such an exciting punch line, Neil, that I am just at the bit to get to this. We started. I know what I mean. I just want to say.