evangelical 360°

Ep. 30 / The History of Russia's "Holy War" in Ukraine ► Philip Yancey (Part 2)

• Host Brian Stiller • Season 1 • Episode 30

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What happens when a nation rejects its moral compass only to find itself lost in the wilderness? Philip Yancey takes us on a journey through one of history's most remarkable untold stories - how Russia's brief spiritual awakening after communism's collapse ultimately gave way to authoritarian rule and war.

In this fascinating conversation, Yancey shares his firsthand experiences from the early 1990s when both Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin made an extraordinary request of Western Christians: help "restore morality" to their country. For approximately ten years, Russia experienced an unprecedented openness to spiritual matters, with missionaries flooding in and churches flourishing. Yet this window of opportunity eventually closed under Vladimir Putin's leadership.

The historical connections between Russia and Ukraine run deeper than most Western media coverage acknowledges. Yancey expertly guides us through the spiritual roots of the current conflict, explaining how Kyiv represents the birthplace of Russian Orthodox Christianity dating back to 988 CE. This religious heritage helps explain why Patriarch Kirill frames the Ukraine invasion as a "holy war" to reclaim Christianity's Russian birthplace.

Perhaps most compelling is Yancey's cautionary tale about church-state relations. After enduring severe persecution under communism, the Russian Orthodox Church welcomed Putin's support and protection - only to become an instrument of state policy rather than its moral conscience. Meanwhile, Ukraine demonstrates a different model, with Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim communities uniting to serve those suffering from the conflict.

"The church should not be master of the state or servant of the state," Yancey reflects, citing Martin Luther King Jr. "It needs to be the conscience of the state." This wisdom challenges believers everywhere to consider how their faith intersects with political power. Rather than seeking influence through corridors of power, perhaps our most effective witness comes through consistent, compassionate action that embodies the gospel.

As Ukraine stands at a historical turning point, Christians worldwide are called to respond with prayer, compassion, and support. Whatever the geopolitical outcome, the contrast between Russia's state-aligned church and Ukraine's interfaith cooperation offers profound lessons about faith's true power in a broken world. 

You can learn more from Philip Yancey through his website and books and you can find him on Facebook.

And don't forget to share this episode using hashtag #Evangelical360 and join the conversation online! 

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Brian Stiller:

Hello and welcome to Evangelical 360. I'm your host, brian Stiller, and I'm pleased to share with you another conversation with leaders, changemakers and influencers having an impact on Christian life around the world. We'd love for you to be a part of the podcast by sharing this episode using hashtag Evangelical360 and by joining the conversation on YouTube in the comments below. My guest today is Philip Yancey. He's an author of 25 books and has sold over 15 million copies worldwide. One of his most recent books, what Went Wrong, russia's Lost Opportunity and the Path to Ukraine. He reflects back on the fall of the Soviet Union and interactions he had in the early 90s with Soviet leaders. Given the geopolitical realities of today's world, I know his experiences and insights will be well worth your time. And don't forget, this episode is part two of our conversation with Philip Yancey, so be sure to go back and listen to part one as well. Thank you, philip, for joining us today on Evangelical 360.

Philip Yancey:

I'm delighted to be with you talking about a most important topic.

Brian Stiller:

We are and just for people who are listening or watching at some point later on, I want to indicate to you the time in which Philip and I are having this conversation. It's three years into the war. Russia has invaded the Ukraine and we don't know where this is going. We don't know how it'll be resolved, whether there'll be peace talks. We don't know what side will eventually survive. So we're into this conversation at a time when there is great uncertainty. But, philip, you had a remarkable experience during the fall of the Soviet empire and you wrote this book. What Went Wrong? Russia's Lost Opportunity and the Path to Ukraine? You had a unique opportunity of engaging with Russians on a matter of faith as the empire was falling, as Russia was reconstituting. How did you get involved with Russia? Can you tell us a bit of how that story began and how it rolled through in your experience with them?

Philip Yancey:

Yeah, let's roll the clock back to 1989. And that, of course, was the year that the Berlin Wall fell and Eastern Europe opened up in a way that it had not been for 70 years. There was the USSR 15 different republics, all part of one government, the USSR, Russia being one of those. And then there are other satellite countries as well. As soon as the Berlin Wall fell and some of these republics had the opportunity to the USSR, russia being one of those. And then there are other satellite countries as well. As soon as the Berlin Wall fell and some of these republics had the opportunity to choose their own freedom, they did so. In fact, 14 out of 15 did the very first year, and they used to joke. Maybe we should call it the UFFR, the Union of Fewer and Fewer Republics, because no one wanted to be dominated by the Soviet Union like they had been for the last 70 years.

Philip Yancey:

Russia itself was in turmoil For a couple of years. There, the ruble was almost worthless, alcoholism was huge among men particularly, the suicide rate went up, the economy was in free fall, they didn't have a history of real property, who had ownership over buildings or whatever, and it was a chaotic period. And these various people from Harvard and University of Toronto, I'm sure, and places like that went over with these ideas about changing the economy. But these things take time and in the meantime there were people who had no pensions or the pensions were worthless because the ruble was worthless. And there was also an underground revolution in understanding. For the first time, people were being honest about the fact that communism has failed. We're nowhere near the level of where we should be compared to the rest of Europe. It's just we've been lied to all these years and for the first time people were free to say that openly.

Philip Yancey:

They could admit there were no goods on the shelves that anybody would want. Russia wasn't producing anything that was worthwhile to the rest of the world except oil and gas, primarily. But there was this underground feeling that we have been betrayed and we don't know what to believe anymore. And in the middle of that period it was so chaotic that some of the older people may recall that at one point Mikhail Gorbachev, the president of Russia, was kidnapped by the Air Force and was being kept as a hostage. Communists trying to purge the government of them and he actually fired had tanks fire on what was called the Russian White House, which is a place where their parliament met, and nobody knew where it was going to come down, what was going to happen. And so for about 10 years after that there was a period of chaos.

Philip Yancey:

And we actually we, being a group of Christians, got a letter. Who knows where the names came up from. I know where mine came Ron Nickel, a great Canadian who was head of the Prison Fellowship International, was one of the people on the list and he said well, philip is my friend as a writer and we really need a journalist to take a record of this, because we had just been invited by both Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. I still have the letter in Russian and also the translation, and it asks us to come to the Soviet Union, to Russia, and restore morality to our country. And they actually quoted the scripture, they quoted the Bible in this invitation letter and it was such a remarkable invitation. Of course I had to say yes, as a journalist, I grew up in the middle of a Cold War in Atlanta, which was in striking distance of nuclear missiles based in Cuba, and Russia was always the enemy, and now they were turning to us for help, using Christian language, saying we're deliberately going to Christians to say what can you do to help us?

Philip Yancey:

So that began a group called Project Christian Bridge and we spent about 10 days there, a little over a week. I don't think we completely fulfilled our goal of restoring morality to the Soviet Union in a week. I don't think we completely fulfilled our goal of restoring morality to the Soviet Union in a week, but we had some amazing experiences that I wanted to get down in print because it's kind of an untold story.

Philip Yancey:

When I tell the story to other people, they're just shocked how did I not know about this? This is huge, and part of it is just the bias of the media. They judge everything in terms of the economy and military strength, not moral string. But there was a moral battleground underway in Russia for about a 10-year period. There, as they're trying to figure out, what kind of people do we want to be? And it was headed in one direction we want to be open like the West. And it was headed in one direction we want to be open like the West. But then a new president was elected, vladimir Putin, in the year 2000,. And he started turning things back.

Philip Yancey:

He said the greatest catastrophe in the 20th century was the dissolution of the Soviet Union and we need to rebuild our empire, I would say, and one of the things he did was merge a support base with the Russian Orthodox Church. So that was the background for this book, because, of course, when Russia invaded Ukraine, we were all just transfixed by out of nowhere. This country was just besieged by a ground invasion, by air invasion, and bombs and drones falling every night, night after night, and that has continued to this point for at least three years, and so I wanted to explore what happened between that period when, for the first time, light was shed on the Soviet Union and Russia. People were being honest and missionaries were flooding in, people were interested in spiritual things, churches were flourishing. What happened from that to the current situation, where missionaries have been kicked out, Ukraine has been invaded. What happened behind the scenes to cause that?

Brian Stiller:

and what did you discover? What have you learned in asking yourself that question and reflecting on it? What went wrong?

Philip Yancey:

Well, to understand what really happened in Ukraine, you have to go back to the very first Christians in Russia, and that was in 988. So over a thousand years ago. I mentioned that the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, but you know that a thousand years before that Russia converted into a Christian country, they made a decision. There was a dictator there named Vladimir the Great, and in fact, I think of the history of Russia as a tale of three Vladimirs Vladimir the Great back in the 10th century.

Philip Yancey:

And then Vladimir Putin and then Volodymyr Zelensky it's just the Ukrainian spelling of the same word, Vladimir. So all three of them with the same name, but, my goodness, they definitely have a different outlook. So all three of them with the same name, but, my goodness, they definitely have a different outlook. And Vladimir the Great, back in the 10th century, was the one who said well, he kind of had a rehearsal where he brought in representatives from different religions. Should it be? If we're going to convert, should it be to Christianity? Well, let's consider what the Muslims have to say. Should it be Roman Catholic? Should it be Eastern Orthodox? And they did their little explanation of why you should convert this country in this direction.

Brian Stiller:

And he liked the.

Philip Yancey:

Orthodox. He liked the music, he liked the art, the icons. So they said okay, we're going to become a Christian country. So everybody needs to go to the Dnieper River, kiev, and be baptized on Sunday, and tens of thousands of people were. This is back in the 10th century, and so the capital of Ukraine, kiev, it's like the Vatican to Orthodox. It's where the Russian Orthodox Church was founded, was started. There weren't Christians in Russia before then, and now there are.

Philip Yancey:

And this is Rome, this is the birthplace, and so that helps understand a lot of the fervor that Russia has in wanting to take over Ukraine again, to occupy it. It's gone back and forth. Sometimes Russia controlled it, sometimes it did not, but in recent years it had been part of the USSR, part of the orbit of Russia, but certainly not occupied by Russia. And then, when Vladimir Putin wanted to reverse what he saw as the catastrophic effects of losing an empire, he started with Ukraine because it had great wealth, but more than that, it also had. This heritage of. This is why we are Russia, this is who we are, and part of that is the church, the Russian Orthodox Church, and the patriarch of Russia, patriarch Kirill, became one of the biggest supporters.

Philip Yancey:

We talk about church and state in places like North America. You know what role should they play? Well, in Russia they play a very tight role. The Russian Orthodox Church was one of the main backers of the war in Ukraine. Kirill said it was a holy war to recover the birthplace of Christianity in Russia, and that was the kind of background that you don't really read about when you read McLean's magazine or Time magazine. You don't read about the underlying spiritual forces going on, and I wanted to capture that. I wanted to show the motive that Russia had in retaking and the threat that Ukraine posed being open to the West and there was that period of 10 years there, where as many as 7,000 missionaries flooded into Russia and then they were kicked out about 10 years later.

Philip Yancey:

So I didn't know much about that. And yet there it is. It's just not being reported in the media, and I wanted to, with some Russian experts, explore what actually happened.

Brian Stiller:

The Russian Orthodox Church in supporting the Russian invasion, was it trying to reinforce the rebuilding of the Russian empire and did it see Ukraine as being an essential part of it, and thus the religious aspect? Given that the Russian Orthodox was also dominant in Ukraine, Was that a motivation behind the Russian Orthodox supporting Putin?

Philip Yancey:

Absolutely it was, and if you go to Ukraine and visit I'm sure you've done this, brian the places they take you are seminaries that were founded, you know, hundreds of years ago and they were all Russian Orthodox, because that was the one faith. And, of course, many of them have withdrawn from the Russian Orthodox. They're still Orthodox, but they don't call themselves Russian Orthodox. They've had a definite split there. Yeah, it's that old empire. The thing is Russia. It's almost hard to come up with a time when Russia was not dominated by a top-down structure. In the old days you had the czars and the peasants, and then, when the Communist Party took over, they controlled all the power and ordinary people were dominated by fear and they were afraid of being reported on by their neighbors, and it was just a society. It was an unhealthy society based on fear, and they really haven't had much alternative to that.

Philip Yancey:

The situation in Ukraine has been different over the years. They had this terrible period of famine that was imposed by Stalin. Stalin just came in and took all their grain they were the grain basket of Europe and just took it all away, and three to five million people died as a result. So the Ukrainians all know about that, and they have museums reminding people how poorly they were treated by Russia. So they were dominated by their neighbor, obviously, but they had no great love for their neighbor, and when they were finally free to have their own elections, they kept electing people who were distancing from Russia and the East and looking to Europe for a model. And then Vladimir Putin would usually intervene and cause another election or make them recount the votes, you know, to get his people in power. So there's always been this distance between the way Russia viewed the world and the way Ukraine viewed the world.

Brian Stiller:

When you were in Russia, did you ask why the government wouldn't turn to the Russian Orthodox for guidance on creating the moral structures of the empire, rather than bring in outsiders?

Philip Yancey:

We did, yes, and one reason, a huge reason, is that the Russian Orthodox churches had been infiltrated by KGB agents, and some say all the way up to the office of the patriarchs. And so you couldn't trust the pastors. They could be KGB agents and if you said something you'd be reported. And there we go again, and there we go again, and the whole nation was just questioning who are we and what should we believe? We had extraordinary experiences. We did meet with Gorbachev and Yeltsin and I visited some of the prisons there and, frankly, the one meeting we had that stood out most to me was when we went to Prof, the newspaper. The newspaper had been in a terrible decline. The year before they had 11 million subscribers and now they're down to 700,000 because people couldn't trust it. It means the word Prof means truth, but they didn't believe that it was the truth.

Philip Yancey:

So we met with the editors of Pravda and it was a place I felt very comfortable in I'm a magazine editor at the time and we were sitting around a table, the kind of place where you talk about the next day's stories and which should be featured and how big the headline should be and what photos to use. And they had these clippings on the wall, but they came to talk about how can you Christians help us? And person after person would say something like this. It would say we're among the elite, we were sent to the best Marxist schools, we were true believers in communism. We swallowed it completely and now we look around us and we see that it has failed. Our country is in a mess and we believe that the only way that we can recover is to have some sort of spiritual revival. We're turning to you because you are Christians. How can you help us? How can we, as editors, express to get people to care about simple things like charity?

Philip Yancey:

There were children who had been damaged by the nuclear power plant, chernobyl, that had blown up, and we've been trying to have a charity to get people to care about those children. There's no history of charity here. There's no history of compassion. It's every man for himself. We need a revival in our country.

Philip Yancey:

We need to become more like you and in fact, when we look at Christianity, it's so similar to our goals as Marxists. You are against poverty, we're against poverty, you're against racism, we're against racism, but somehow, even though we had similar goals, we've produced the greatest monstrosity that the world has ever seen. That's a direct quote, because just recently Solzhenitsyn Alexander Solzhenitsyn's books, have been published and he sets out the fact that as many as 60 million people were killed by their own government in Russia over the years. That's the monstrosity. And they said how can we change? How can we change the hearts of the Russian people? It was a devastated place and that window exposed the rot at the core and the missionaries flooded in, but the missionaries were still kicked out and they're still trying to figure it out years later.

Brian Stiller:

So, when you look back on that experience you had and the subsequent invasion of Ukraine by the Russian army, what are we to take away from this as it relates to our own situation in North America and the affinity between politics and religion, the evangelical faith particularly? What lessons do you draw from the Russian experience that has application to other parts of the world, maybe specifically North America?

Philip Yancey:

That's a wonderful insight, brian, and I can't think of a stronger cautionary tale than what is taking place in Russia. Because you take a I'll just be frank you take an immoral act like the invasion of a neighboring country and the brutality with which it was done. You've been probably to the cemeteries in Bushehr where several hundred civilians were killed with a bullet in the back of the head, their hands tied together and they're buried there. Or the bombs that fall on kindergartens, or they fall on train stations that say children inside, and just the brutality trying to destroy the infrastructure.

Philip Yancey:

I mean war is terrible. It's a terrible thing, but this is a war almost conducted on medieval times. Just the way people were tortured and the Geneva Conventions and things like that were just ignored. And yet who's the biggest cheerleader? Patriarch Kirill, and you can kind of understand, because for 70 years under communism, his churches, the Russian Orthodox churches, were persecuted. Most of them, about 98%, were shuttered, were closed down. Something like 40,000 priests died. So they were persecuted, surely.

Philip Yancey:

But then when Putin came along, he said if you support me, I'll support you, I'll rebuild your churches. And he did. He made his part of the bargain come true. And so some of the beautiful churches in Moscow these days are reconstructions of the old churches that have been destroyed. And then at the same time you've got the patriarch who is strongly supporting the war effort, and when people are questioning whether it's the best thing to do, he says no, it is. This is our only cause, it's our crusade, that we must recapture the seat of where our church was founded. You can understand why the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church welcomed closeness to the new government, because the old government under Marxism had persecuted the Russian Orthodox Church.

Philip Yancey:

They had killed 40,000 priests, they had shuttered 98% of the churches in Russia. And suddenly Vladimir Putin is saying if you support us, we will rebuild your churches. And he did. Some of the greatest churches, most beautiful monuments in Russia today are churches rebuilt by Vladimir Putin. So you've got a loyal church supporting a government action which, I'll just say frankly, is an immoral action, the way it was carried out especially.

Philip Yancey:

That's a cautionary tale, because in my country I don't know what it's like so much in Canada, but there's a constant urge on the behalf of, on the part of evangelicals to get close to the corridors of power. We've seen that not just recently in the Donald Trump era, but long before that in the bushes. And as evangelicals were a good what 25 percent or so, maybe more, of the population, they were an important voting bloc and they were courted by politics, and it feels good to be courted. You would certainly rather be invited to the White House than thrown in jail for your faith. You know which happens in other countries and some places and times.

Philip Yancey:

But the problem is when the church and state get together closely, the church is always the one that suffers. The state conquers, the state controls, and I've seen that, just as an American, as somebody from the United States, again and again, and I've seen that just as an American, as somebody from the United States, again and again, and I've seen how the church gets used by the government. They know what they're doing. They want to stay in power and they want votes. So that's why I call it a cautionary tale. We need to learn from the experience that has played out in tragic ways between Russia and Ukraine.

Brian Stiller:

And those lessons that come out of your own experience, years ago in Russia and now living in a country where the evangelical community has shown its interest in being in the corridors of power. What's your best counsel to young people who are looking to understand how their faith intercepts and integrates in their own country?

Philip Yancey:

Martin Luther King Jr used to say this. He said the church should not be a master of the state or a servant of the state. It needs to be the conscience of the state. It's a power source that is rooted, not based on are we a power or not, but based on how much like Jesus is the country around us. And we've talked about some negatives going on here, but I've seen some positives too. Kazakhstan would be a good example.

Philip Yancey:

I was in Kazakhstan a number of years ago and I met these delightful people who were in a training session with Campus Crusade, now called CRU, and I went around and just asked people how did you come to faith? Now? These were actually CRU missionaries at the time, and every one of them told me the same story. They told me about their sick society. Their father was an alcoholic who would beat the mother, and the economy was terrible. They didn't even have running water. It was freezing cold. And then communism fell in 1989, and they didn't know what to believe anymore. And then somebody came up to them on a university campus and gave them this tract called the Four Spiritual Laws and said God loves you and has a plan for you. And they had never heard anything like that. It's almost like they memorized the same testimony. But these were the true stories I checked about and in that case they used that opportunity of being powerless to find. I'm not going to take my identity on how I'm ranked in the state. I'm going to take my identity on how God sees me, not how Kazakhstan sees me. And it's still going on and I've seen numerous people from that time I've kept in touch with go to places like Turkey and Uzbekistan and Tajikistan and Iran even, and witness for the gospel and a name that I'm sure you know, brian John Sigurian in Lebanon.

Philip Yancey:

I've been to Lebanon several times visiting John with Youth for Christ and at the time I was there last, there were like 10,000 refugee tents in this one little encampment and these are the UN kind of padded tents they put up and people had been in them for a couple of years actually, and the kids are allowed to work. You can't get a job there if you're a refugee and they really had no school teaching them, so they would just hang around all day and Youth for Christ started building basketball courts and education centers and teaching crafts and skills to the, especially the younger refugees, and the Muslim activists didn't like this and they came charging into the imam and said do you realize what's happening? These Christians out there who are being very careful not to talk about the gospel unless asked, but these Christians out there are doing all these things for our people. You should shut that down. And the imam said what are you doing for our people? These people are living out their faith.

Philip Yancey:

And that became for me a beautiful model of just simply going about acting like Jesus wants us to, caring for the refugees and looking out for the least of the people in the world, people with dire needs. And we've seen that wherever missionaries go, like in Africa we're bearing the fruits now of a couple of centuries of selfless work by missionaries who go and establish clinics and hospitals and schools and education centers is simply acting like Jesus wants us to act and it does get noticed and it does have a long-term effect. You see that again and again in African countries. So I guess that would be my advice or my understanding of the role of the church. I frankly get very nervous when the church gets close to the people in power because again they're the ones who come out on top. The church almost always suffers. But if we're consistent to doing exactly what Jesus told us to do, the world will notice and, as Jesus said, it's like grass and wheat and tares growing up together.

Philip Yancey:

You leave the judgments to me. You just go around and plant your seed and do what the kingdom is supposed to do. All the images of the kingdom that I read in the Testament are small things to do. All the images of the kingdom that I read in the gesturing are small things, like yeast and bread, like salt and meat, just little things. But it can affect the entire society and we in North America have lived through that.

Philip Yancey:

We've seen it happen again and again and still is happening with many organizations who are just trying to do the kingdom without work, and that's our job just trying to do the kingdom of God work, and that's our job. Sometimes it is noticed by the rest of the world and sometimes it's not, but eventually, if we are indeed the conscience of the state, people are going to say that's why their society works better than our society. It's got the Christian roots, it's got the foundation that Russia is still seeking for.

Brian Stiller:

Frankly, I was in Kiev with a patriarch some time ago and he told me of a story of a patriarch back in the 30s and the Ukraine was being wooed by Stalin of Russia and Hitler of Germany. And he said the patriarch didn't know which way to go. And he said, when you're in that kind of moment of confusion, in that place of tension, when you don't know what to do, his advice was love children. In other words, with the conundrums of political opportunity or opposition or pressure, he Do good. Allow the power of the gospel to move you to do what is good to help people in that moment, and don't be constrained by the geopolitical issues, but allow Christ to use you in serving and meeting the needs of people. And it seems to me that in today's world of enormous political tension, that the advice that you have given of being the salt, being the light, being the yeast, caring for people in ways that we can, that our hands can find to do today, is a way for us to express the gospel in our current world.

Philip Yancey:

And you know, brian, I know you're aware of this, but it's so stark in Ukraine, the difference, because in Russia they kicked out all the other missionaries, some of them settled in Ukraine, and Ukraine became known as the Bible Belt of Eastern Europe formerly of Eastern Europe, formerly Communist Eastern Europe. And when the war broke out, what happened was the churches came together. So you've got Pentecostals and Catholics and Orthodox all working together and they would divide. Okay, you've got a seminary here, so you've got a cafeteria so you can feed people. We've got some other skills here.

Philip Yancey:

We've got one organization that came up with this small charcoal stove that you could actually heat your house with and cook on at the same time, and it was beautiful to see all these different denominations working together. In Russia there were none left, it was just the Orthodox Church pretty much. And in Ukraine, as a spillover effect, the churches came together. They didn't say it wasn't a turf war situation. They said we're all facing the same disaster and let's divide up. You deal with the orphans, you help out with ways to transport people who need to get out of the country, like mothers and pregnant women and mothers with young children, and I'm sure you saw that in person as you visited.

Brian Stiller:

It was remarkable to see the Orthodox Roman Catholic, the various evangelicals, baptists, pentecostals, along with the Muslim community come together and form a cooperative religious response both to what the government was doing and the issues that came about by the invasion. And the cooperation among these various religious groups was astounding and it was heartening to see how people could come together in those difficult moments.

Philip Yancey:

Yeah, I had exactly the same reaction. It's sad. Sometimes it takes great suffering to bring the church together in a unified way. We know that that's what Jesus wants from us, because at his very last prayer with the disciples, at the last supper table, you said if I could have one thing I wish the church would show my people would show the same unity that we experience in the Trinity, which is quite a prayer when you come to think of it.

Brian Stiller:

It is Philip, and thank you so much for being with us today on Evangelical 360.

Philip Yancey:

Well, I love what you're doing and I thank you for spreading the message, and I hope people, no matter what happens in the next months and years, still keep Ukraine on their prayer list. It's a country that is in a hinge in their history. We don't know exactly which way it's going to go, but it's absorbed great suffering and they deserve better than that, and we Christians should lead the way in responding with love and compassion.

Brian Stiller:

Thank you, philip, for joining us today. Your life experience, writing and wisdom has helped us better engage with the realities of our world, and thank you for being a part of the podcast. Be sure to share this episode using hashtag evangelical360 and join the conversation on YouTube. If you'd like to learn more about today's guest, be sure to check the show notes for links and info, and if you haven't already received my free e-book and newsletter, please go to brianstillercom. Thanks again, until next time.

Brian Stiller:

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