Grown-Up Church Kids

Do You Still Speak in Tongues? Michael Bethany on Pentecostal Faith & Modern Worship

• Dwan Hill • Season 1 • Episode 11

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0:00 | 59:54

Michael Bethany joins Grown-Up Church Kids to talk about growing up Pentecostal and COGIC, learning the difference between gospel music and modern worship, leading in CCM spaces like Gateway, and how he thinks about speaking in tongues today. This conversation is full of church kid nostalgia, honest theology, Black church memories, worship leading, spiritual gifts, and the journey of carrying Pentecostal faith into new rooms without losing the fire.


0:00 Welcome to Grown-Up Church Kids

0:45 Introducing Michael Bethany

2:30 The guest speaker experience in the Black church

5:15 "Lily in my valley" and the art of the preacher introduction

8:00 Growing up in a storefront COGIC church

11:20 Did cameras and phones kill something real in church?

14:45 Everyone got to talk in old church and why that mattered

17:30 Church traditions, liturgy, and belonging

20:10 COGIC theme song breakdown and what it actually means

23:00 From COGIC to CCM: Michael Bethany's musical journey

27:15 Singing BGVs for Fred Hammond and Kirk Franklin

29:40 How Michael Bethany ended up at Gateway Church

33:00 The bridge between gospel and CCM worship culture

36:20 Do you still speak in tongues?

40:10 What Paul teaches about tongues and spiritual gifts

43:30 Dwan's mom delivering a message in tongues that changed his life

46:00 What Pentecostals and Presbyterians can learn from each other

49:15 Finding the secret place beyond the performance of church

52:30 How Michael Bethany wrote Secret Place and Walk With You

55:00 God connects people for a reason: how Dwan and Michael met

57:30 Michael Bethany performs Secret Place live



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SPEAKER_04

How did you go from that church to Gateway to a song that you have out now called Secret Place? Let me tell you what we did not sing in Kojik is any song called Secret Place. That's very true. Do you still speak in tongues? Do you would you do it on stage at a CCM show?

SPEAKER_00

Okay, so I I believe the scripture is clear around this, whether, first of all, the scripture is clear around what tongues are.

SPEAKER_04

Shama, you always say that like I don't know your name. Oh, my bad, my bad. I'll let you say that. But you should say your own name. I was gonna say it for you. Thank you. I appreciate it. This is Shama. And uh we're here in Nashville, and this is another episode of the show, man. This is uh where stories are better than sermons, and there's more of us than you think. I mean, I didn't realize until we started this show how many grown-up church kids exist. From all types of churches, we got Pentecostal churches, we got Baptist churches, we got Church of Christ, we got Catholic. Um what other kind of churches are there? Non-denominational, Presbyterian, Methodist. And even though all those denominations have particulars about their experience, uh, we have a lot in common too. For example, I'm sitting in this old church here in Nashville. Shout out to Mount Zion, uh pastored by the bishop Joseph Walker. Uh God bless you, uh man of God. Um we've done a few episodes now with different people, artists and speakers, and different guests from different backgrounds. And I encourage you to like and subscribe on the YouTube channel because the more episodes we put out, um, we want you to know that they're out. And so make sure you click all that down below. And also there's music attached to a lot of these episodes. In fact, I have a friend here today that I'll tell you more about later. And uh, we're glad you're here. I think we're ready to jump in the show, man. Let's jump in. Okay, let's do it. Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, Saints. Thank you. You can praise the Lord anytime.

SPEAKER_02

You don't gotta do it off the top.

SPEAKER_04

I do it.

SPEAKER_02

Do it in the middle.

SPEAKER_04

I gotta praise the Lord today for a specific reason, though, because we have a special guest in the house. It's a guest speaker. We used to have guest speakers back in the day.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

Pastor was on sabbatical or break or something else. And uh they would have somebody come in and speak for the pastor. And today we have they would also say he's part of our family. Oh, yeah. Even though we haven't seen him, you know, in a long time. You haven't seen him in for your whole life. Never met him.

SPEAKER_02

He's an integral part of our family.

SPEAKER_04

Um, it's true, man. We had guest speakers, but this dude really is part of my family. He has been an encouragement to me. It's like he came from nowhere, man. It's like he showed up in my life at a very, very pitiful, pivotal time. Pitiful. It was pivotal and pivotal.

SPEAKER_03

I was I was in the valley of shadow death.

SPEAKER_02

Oh no, this bitch showed up at a pitiful time in my life.

SPEAKER_03

I don't know if I would have made it. Not his.

SPEAKER_02

His, he was fine. It was pitiful for you. Lock this intro in. No, no, no. Don't listen. Don't cut anything from this intro. This is perfect. Lock this in as is.

SPEAKER_04

This is perfect. Um he is seriously, he's incredible. Great singer, uh, national, international worship leader. Uh, he's working on a book. He's had his own business, beautiful wife, two incredible boys. I think he's raising up church kids too in his house. Uh, I need y'all to put your hands together and give a warm welcome for my friend, the bishop, the pastor, Michael Bethany. What's up, Michael?

SPEAKER_00

Listen, I've been trying to be good over here and let y'all finish this introduction because I I am losing it right now. Praise the Lord, thanks. Praise the Lord's sake. Praise the Lord's. So glad to be here. That's how you gotta say, yeah. I'm so glad to be here tonight.

SPEAKER_04

Wait, okay.

SPEAKER_02

Even though it's daytime.

SPEAKER_04

Michael, give them what you would say or what your pastor would say when you come up for the first time and you haven't preached yet. This is like your intro, your prelude.

SPEAKER_00

I'm getting ready to preach. Yeah, you ready?

SPEAKER_04

Oh my god. You know what it is. Give him, give them the whole five paragraphs of that.

SPEAKER_00

Praise the Lord, saints. I said, praise the Lord Saints. I said, praise the Lord, Saints. Amen, amen, amen. So glad to be here this morning. Yes, yes. Uh, finding myself yet saved, sanctified, filled with the Holy Ghost, baptized in fire. Yes, yes. Do speak in tongues as the spirit of the Lord gives utterance. Um glad to be here. Um, God bless you and your awesome pastor's lovely wife. I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the uh the the cream in my coffee. Amen. The honey in my tea, the lily in my valley. Hello. My wife is here this morning. Isn't she beautiful? Come on, wave at them. Wave at them. I love that wonderful hat. I bought that head, amen, last Mother's Day. Amen. Her mother's with us as well. God bless her. Amen. Amen. Well, I'm gonna get into the word tonight because I I don't know about you, but I got a feeling. Okay, I'm gonna stop because it's it's getting serious. Lily and my family is crazy. Listen, I've never heard that even my good. It's not another city. That's not even a good thing. I can't quickly in my spirit. Whoa! Oh, touch somebody and say, neighbor, he's a lily. All right, let me let me ask for it. Man, you asked for it. You asked for it. You went in. I kind of got lost in it for a minute. Whoa. My wife and her mother is there is her mother. All the shout-outs. Hold on. But the random shout-outs while you're preaching, amen. God bless Brother Brown in the room tonight. Good to see him and his wife and his son. Praise God. But the Bible says in Luke chapter 5, God bless you, Bishop. Good to see you here tonight. That's like, that's like that's like that's like going live on Instagram and shout out to this in real time. This is the truth. Shout out to the truth. Real shout-outs to people that walk. But the Bible says in the middle of the message and on task.

SPEAKER_04

First of all, how did you turn that on? So he said the hat I bought her. There's so much pride in your introduction.

SPEAKER_00

I'm definitely taking the credit for everything.

SPEAKER_04

Last Mother's Day. So you didn't buy it recently. No, it wasn't recent.

SPEAKER_00

I bought it last Mother's Day, I remember, because I went down to the swap and it was the only thing there, amen. But I thought it was beautiful.

SPEAKER_04

Amen after everything.

SPEAKER_00

It fit her head perfectly. She's got a round head. So just sit nicely.

SPEAKER_03

Okay, okay.

SPEAKER_00

So no, but see, okay, here's the thing.

SPEAKER_03

That was incredible.

SPEAKER_00

Like, it is so real when I go back to that time in my life. It is like a movie. It's like have you remember when we were kids? Before there was like cable and Netflix, and you would just watch reruns of like, but you knew all the lines. All the lines. That's what it like it's like for me. Like, I remember all the lines, all the scenes, all the characters. I can play them all.

SPEAKER_04

You can play them all. That's what's scary. I know them all. He said, I do speak in tongues. You said so many things that I was like, why is that necessary to say on a microphone?

SPEAKER_02

It's really a uh uh just a trip of it's partial insults, it's it's ego, it's glazing, it's shout-outs, it's comedy.

SPEAKER_00

It's comedy, it's all it's but a lot of it is the cultural learned behavior. Like, like we didn't ask why I should introduce myself this way. No, I just saw it so many times so that when it was my turn. Now, the funniest thing about this shaman is this is these aren't old people. This is 13 years old doing this. Like, it's like this is how you conduct yourself in this environment. I'm 13 years old.

SPEAKER_02

Talk about your girlfriend, that's the lily in the battling the cream in my coffee.

SPEAKER_00

No, we've been dating for two weeks. Listen, listen, you keep your girlfriend private at 13. Nobody, nobody knows about that. We don't date a public struggle. That is you talking like that at 13 is funny. 13. Oh, man. But that was my life, though. Like my father was a pastor.

SPEAKER_08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

And in all reality, it was like for me, it was so sincere. Like when I think about True Hope Tabernacle, Church of God and Christ in the hood, in the storefront church, there was nothing beautiful about it. Right. The church is raggedy, the sound is raggedy, and it ain't that many of us there. So that's really hardly anyone to impress. Yeah. There ain't no service format. We've had no meetings, just no plans. All we want is for God to move. Come on. Like that's really all we really wanted. Wow. And if we felt like he didn't move, we would push him. We do something. Like we're gonna do something here. We gotta do. But it was such a I don't know how to how to even describe it, because there are certain things about it that would seem extreme now, but there's also like this innocence in it where, like it says, no one's gonna ever see this again. This moment is gonna happen in this little room, and only the like 12 of us who were here will remember it. That's right. And it's our experience. So yeah, it's that's my childhood, bro.

SPEAKER_04

Crazy.

SPEAKER_02

I think we're losing a lot of that with the cameras and the cell phones and the like I was talking to a friend who worked at a campus of a big church, and he was like, Man, everybody who spoke, they all used AI to write their sermons. Yeah, you know, because they're trying to craft these great uh sound bites. And I'm like, yeah, because you're trying to impress people and you're trying to have clips that pop off. But there was a time where you were just in the room.

SPEAKER_08

Yeah, that's it.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, you were just talking to the you talk 12, 15, 30 people in the room, yeah, and you didn't care that you could speak to the world. You just cared about the room.

SPEAKER_00

And I think people are losing that way. I think I think you're a hundred percent right. And I now even looking back on it, everyone got to talk. Like it wasn't just the the pastor who spoke. Even people who shouldn't have talked who shouldn't be speaking, people who didn't microphone on the microphone. Everyone got you got you got testimony service, you got announcements, you have a welcome and a response. Yeah, so someone who's gonna respond to that wonderful welcome? Like, why do we need to respond to this? Like, just thank you for but we were all everyone got to speak, and to your point, it wasn't because they were good at it. It was almost like it was just one step removed from just me hanging out at your house. Yeah. So if I come to your house, there like everyone can talk in that setting. So it you didn't have to perform necessarily on a level of excellence. Yeah. You just had to mean it.

SPEAKER_06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

We had at least feel it. You know, and so I think you're right, but I think there is something beautiful about that because it's harder now to give people the experience of belonging, like being integrated, like you can now come to church and it's been this way for a long time and sit in the back and no one knows your name, and you never say anything. They don't even know you were there, and you leave. When we were grew up growing up in church, if you show up in church, like hey, hey, what's your name?

SPEAKER_02

Right, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Do you got the Holy Ghost? You want to be saved? Have you been baptized? Like, it's like you you're not going to escape. You couldn't blend in. You could not blend in. Yeah, yeah. So, but in a lot of ways, that's the purity of that community because you're always gonna be seen.

SPEAKER_08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Where I think it's challenging now for people to be seen, to be integrated, to be fully a part of that community. And community is still a necessity. And for all the things that people might look back on and may not appreciate, what you have to appreciate is the communities were real. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06

Right, right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

And everyone that was in that community was truly in it.

SPEAKER_04

Well, I some people might look down on that particular tradition you just mentioned, the the intro to the sermon, and say that's a bunch of antics and a bunch of fake and a bunch of but every church has some type of pattern or liturgy.

SPEAKER_00

Very, very true.

SPEAKER_04

And whether it's the robes you wear or the sacraments you take or the songs you sing, once you stay in a church for a certain amount of time, you start to figure out the rhythms of that church. Right. We just don't know everybody's rhythm. Yeah. So language, like vocabulary, like whatever it is. If I walk in the Catholic church, I'm gonna experience something very different than what you just said. But from a category standpoint, it's very similar. It's like they go through the same prayers, they go through the uh calendar, liturgical calendar. And so I say that so people don't see what you did as this alien situation. Culturally, it is different than what they may have experienced. But you took me back to my childhood and we grew up in different cities. That's incredible. That's how I know it is a pattern. There's there's something going on that can be transferable because you grew up in St. Louis. I grew up outside of Memphis, and that dude was at my church. Same guy, same dude, with the same wife, with the same hat, different suit, yeah. They they both went to Bert's. Did y'all have to have Bert's or uh Burlington Co-Factory? You know what I'm saying? It's like it's the same thing. Which is that's what's so I guess uh inspiring and maybe nostalgic and encouraging to me that even though there's a lot of division in the world, we have a lot in common. It's true. And even though we may have never gone to your church in 1993, I kind of did. Yeah. Because I went to one in 1993 in Memphis and it's singing the same songs, singing the same songs almost the exact same way.

SPEAKER_00

With a little bit of with no internet. Right, right. Like everywhere in the country. What was that? I don't know. It's like it's crazy to me. It's a miracle. It's not it is not even just Kojic. It's like a number of denominations within just the cultural expression of like just a black church in general. Right. You can go to a Baptist church, a Pentecostal church, or whatever, right, and a and a large sample size of the songs were gonna be identical. Right.

SPEAKER_04

Well, I think some of that, you know, not to get too technical, but the music industry was smaller and you only had what you had.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

So instead of having a playlist of 15,000 songs, if Andre Crouch came out with a record, everybody heard that record. And everybody learned those 15 songs through their church services. Walter Hawkins.

SPEAKER_00

Well, what about this? Jesus getting us ready for that? That what I don't think that was on a record. Like, where'd that come from? That's true. Who started singing that and why does everyone know it? There is no record where that's a good thing. Lu shall be able to stay. Like, what is that? Jesus on the main line? Where'd that come from? Tell him what you want. Tell him what you like. Why is that song so popular? I don't know, man. You can go to a comedy show and say Jesus on the main line and the whole crowd, tell him what, like, why do y'all know this? Why do y'all know this? But it's it's pretty incredible.

SPEAKER_02

Also, can he accept multiple calls or is it like one by one? Well, that's the what kind of main line is it? Am I on hold? The analogy does break down. It really is.

SPEAKER_00

It's not real, it doesn't do it. Tell him.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04

It didn't stop people from singing it real life.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04

They just do if I could call him.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

If I got through to the Lord, he would hear me.

SPEAKER_02

Did y'all ever, in Tanzania, this was a big thing. If somebody came from a different church, they would share a greeting from that church. That's what, yes, yes.

SPEAKER_00

I was just saying, like, if if if if you came to my church on any given day, especially if it was a special program. Yeah, especially that would be a welcome. We welcome you once, we welcome you twice. We welcome you. We welcome you three times in the name of Jesus Christ. That's right. And then there'll be a response. Is there a response? Let's see. You get to come up, walk, come on up. Introduce yourself. And you say, How would you, how would you respond? Bringing you greetings.

SPEAKER_04

Bringing you greetings all the way from the uh fellowship church guide in Christ. So grateful you had us here today.

SPEAKER_03

You gotta say who your pastor is. Oh, yeah, I can't forget the pastor. Oh Lord, that's that's the worst. You have to say, Um, who's my pastor? You gotta get past the past uh super soup yes, superintendent initials.

SPEAKER_00

It feels everything.

SPEAKER_03

Michael, I forgot about all of the Superintendent J.R.

SPEAKER_04

Watkins. Is my pastor. We come in with three selections from the choir, and the choir is walking up.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, man. Crazy, man. That's like biblical, though, too. I've been reading through the New Testament. Come on. And most times, anytime, like Paul wrote an epistle or something, he goes, hey, the church of this church greets you. Yes, come on. That's true. Come on, so there was this unity of like, hey, I this brother is from a different body of Christ, the same body of Christ, but from a different community. Yeah. And that community has a message for this community. Come on, man. Come on. Yeah, that's I feel like that's you know, I don't since we don't do those. I my church doesn't. If you come from a different church, you're not we're not giving you a mic. Yeah, it's hard to scale.

SPEAKER_03

It's hard to scale.

SPEAKER_04

We're talking about auntie and uncle. Um you keep saying Kojik. You keep saying church guide of Christ, and I know what that means because I grew up in it. But Hannah didn't know what that meant maybe a year ago. She said, Kojik. What is Kojik? And I I explained to her. She grew up Pentecostal, she grew up assemblies of God. So very similar. Cousins. Cousins. Yeah. Siblings maybe.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, very close.

SPEAKER_04

And uh so once I explained the culture, she was like, That's my church, basically. Yeah, but she had never heard of Church of God and Christ, which is the name for the acronym Kojik. Um Kojik is what?

SPEAKER_00

Church of God and Christ. Yeah. It's uh it's amazing to me though Kojik is really born out of a Pentecostal movement in Azusa, which really birthed all these uh churches. They kind of look the same, right? Just a different denominational and different regions, different racial demographics, and all that, but a lot of it is really the same.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

He didn't know the theme song was updated. We were talking earlier. And I was like, Duan told me that the theme song was updated, and you were like, ah, no way.

SPEAKER_04

So the theme song we grew up singing all of our childhood was This is the Church of God in Christ. This is the church of God in Christ. You can't be born in you gotta be born in Christ. Wait, you cannot join in. You gotta be born. You can't join in, you can't join in you can't join in. You gotta be born. This is the church of God in Christ. Now let me repeat the lyrics I just said. The new lyrics. No, no. This is the old lyrics. Okay. You can't join in, you gotta be born in. Now, what does that mean? It means you have to be born again. Born again. That's all it means. But when I told my wife friends at my public high school the theme song for my church, that's not what they understood.

SPEAKER_02

First of all, were they like, your church has a theme song? Like the Disney Channel, your church where you all gather together. That's very innovative.

SPEAKER_00

It is very, yeah. Yes. That's very innovative.

SPEAKER_04

It is very innovative to unite your churches. It's like the national anthem.

SPEAKER_00

We got a song for the country.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Isn't the Lord deserving of a song?

SPEAKER_02

You know what? After this podcast, I'm gonna call the Southern Baptist and go, hey guys, let's cook up something. I can get a hold of Duan and we can we can get we can figure something out.

SPEAKER_04

I think it's gonna be very theologically sound. It's gonna be, yeah, but kind of boring.

SPEAKER_02

They may already have one and just didn't quite catch on. This is the Southern Baptist Convention. Is that that's the one? I mean, it won't have a tempo. It won't have a tempo like that. It won't have seasoning, soul. It's like it's like chicken, it's like chicken breast at a boiled chicken. What was that? Chicken and water, Hannah? What did you grow up eating? What'd you grow up eating, Hannah?

SPEAKER_01

That swimming chicken.

SPEAKER_02

It's water chicken. Water chicken.

SPEAKER_00

That's a real dinner. Water chicken. Meal. Water. We'll talk about that later. I'm so sorry. I'm gonna talk about it later.

SPEAKER_02

We call the police. Somebody needs to go to jail for feeding y'all water. It's the essentials. It's protein. Protein.

SPEAKER_01

Which I feel like is kind of stuffing Baptist.

SPEAKER_04

It's like, yeah, you're gonna get this bread and butter. This like you're gonna get what God is. Yeah. You're not gonna get seasoning, though. You're not gonna get seasoning. We love y'all. Let me just say that. We do love y'all.

unknown

Because

SPEAKER_04

Because y'all aren't gonna help with the theme song. Are you gonna help with the theme song or not? Well, my point is we had a theme song, but some of our meat was off. You know what I'm saying? Like we could sing it. We could sing you up and down. Bro, let me tell you, the best singers, best musicians, the best preachers came out of Kojik. Now, what we were singing about sometimes. Sometimes.

SPEAKER_00

Sometimes. We were just talking about I am on the battlefield. Oh, I will stay on the battlefield till I die. Like, it's like there are some openings that you can't sing that. Like you can't sing that at a funeral. Yeah, till I die. But we were singing that on Sundays. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, it was a lot of sincerity. A lot of sincerity. And I think contextualizing it, you have to always look at like the Kojic church itself. Most of those churches like the church I grew up in was in the hood. Uneducated people who were fervent, sold out, not a lot of us, and we weren't there because there was some institutional support. Even the Church of God in Christ, even the way it's structured, they don't buy your church and do all those things. It's more of a like, I don't know, it's more of a network of churches. Yeah. In a way, even though there's some different components about it that have more controls or accountability in them. However, it's not the same as like Methodist churches where you get sent to school and you get equipped and they help you get into a building. It's like, no, we we scrapped this together and figured it out, and we're here because we love Jesus. And I think the value in this is just progressively through the church, in every type of denomination, you're gonna always find a lot of error. You're gonna find that even in the Bible, you're watching error in the even the apostles, like the way Peter's carrying on and Paul confronts him. But Peter's an apostle. So it's like, you know, I think understanding, contextualizing, like, hey, you know, there's gonna be some of this going on. The beauty in it is seeing the high level of commitment of these people who will do anything to please the Lord. Like anything. Even some of the stuff that you don't have to do. It's like, no, we're not gonna eat, we're gonna wear these clothes, and it's gonna be the summertime, but the women have to wear stockings.

SPEAKER_03

That's right.

SPEAKER_00

You no pants, no makeup. Um, you know, all these things, all these rules you have to do, even as a kid, like we were told, like, listen, you live for Jesus. This is your life. You know, this is this, there's no adult, like children, Holy Ghost, and uh, like there was this level of seriousness that wasn't informed necessarily by theological, you know, academics. It was just like, I love Jesus, I got radically changed. Yeah. And what I will say about that is while we have grown over the years theologically and educationally, just as a as a culture, as a country across the board, um, there's something that we I do see, according to even what you were saying earlier, that the more educated we've become, our commitment has not paced with our education. Our commitment, like when people knew less, they were willing to do more. When people know more, they're not willing to do more. They typically do less.

SPEAKER_04

It's almost like uh that's that scripture that says knowledge puffs up. It's like once you start to get information, I don't really need your help once I know enough. And because you mean I remember growing up, man, black churches, Kojic churches, were very needy people. And I mean that in a very Yeah, economically, yeah. Yeah, but even like spiritually, like we knew we needed God. Oh no one else is gonna help us get out of this bond but Jesus. And so a lot of our songs reflected that need. It it wasn't a lot of theology in our songs. We weren't concerned about being theologically correct. We we needed God in our present situation, which is why you have lyrics like, He's gonna pay my bills and he's gonna bring me out. And those are true, may not be the full gospel, but I would I would say the other side of the coin, the ones that were so theologically rich, seem to be distant in real life experiences.

SPEAKER_00

From yeah, yeah, that's like so I will I will comparatively look at let's look at the children of Israel, contextualize what are you singing about? Right. Look at the Psalms. You're singing about the context you're in. So everyone's songs, it's not, it's not, I am singing to the Lord or praying to God, my supplication, right? Let your request be made known, you know, to the Lord. Whatever that is, whether it's in song or in a prayer, it's based on where you really are. Right. So whatever that is, that's gonna inform your lyrics of your songs and your prayer requests and all of that, which is totally fine and historically correct, all the way back to the children of Israel.

SPEAKER_08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

So there's nothing wrong with that. And I think it's even it's a beautiful thing to be able to be vulnerable enough to say, I'm gonna share my plight, my struggle, and my challenge, and we're gonna sing and we're gonna call on the Lord. I think that is so, so powerful and so, so strong. Because what it does is theologically, even if you don't understand all the um the theological concepts around who God is, you know enough to know that only God can give me out of it. As a matter of fact, the way God would continually talk to the children of Israel through the ages was I am the Lord who brought you out of Egypt. I am the one. Right. As a matter of fact, you're gonna get this all the way through the through the New Testament. Every time the gospel is preached, it is preached in context of history. That's right. Even I'm the God of your fathers, Abraham, Abraham, Isaac. And this is what you know, and and understanding that the way you know God is from an experience of deliverance and not education. And though we are educated and we do grow and we do get more and more revelation, that revelation doesn't negate the fact that without God delivering you, the information, education is worthless to you. And like Abraham, Abram to Abraham, he's not a theologian. He's having an experience with the Lord. He's a father of faith, not because of his theological depth. It was because the experience he had with the Lord. That if he if anyone had that same experience now, they would get questioned. Right. But it was very normal to expect God to speak to me, to talk to me, to help me, to deliver me from a situation I can't deliver myself out of. But that is the quintessential meaning of salvation. That's right. That's what salvation is.

SPEAKER_04

Yep. So it's a testimony, man. I think I remember people standing up in that same heart, giving a testimony of what God had done for them that day or that previous week. And it wasn't a it wasn't a faith that was separate off in a distance. It was, I talked to God this morning.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

I talked to God last night. And y'all want to talk to him too in the service? And you you met and you expected God to be in that room and to do something in that room.

SPEAKER_06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

Not out of uh repetition of tradition, but you know, we had we had like uh what do you call them? Uh crutches hanging on on the wall. Yeah. And it that we would hang them up there as a it was probably 30 years ago when I was at that time, but they were there to remind the church God is a healer. Yeah. We'd also have flags, right? The flags would say Jehovah Jirah.

SPEAKER_00

We had the Sunday school, like how much money we raised for Sunday school.

SPEAKER_03

Last week's attendance. Last week's attendance. Yes, yes, yes. Yes, yes, yes.

SPEAKER_02

Um there's a big I've talked to a lot of I'm 33, 34, a lot of younger people, and there's this big emphasis on whatever we do as Christians, like Christianity was cringy. Like everything y'all just described, people could say, like, oh, that's cringy. Like we we want to streamline service and the Sunday morning experience. Like, we don't everyone can't share, and I don't care how great your testimony is, send us an email because Sunday morning is about these few curated experiences. But I'm like, hearing you guys talk, I'm like, no, there is beauty in hearing the testimony of people that you see weekly. That's right. Going like, man, I lost my job. Or that's right, you know, we walked through this, or so and so was sick, or we and then hearing the the miracle that happened from that, yeah. It does something in you, even growing up listening to that. Like, it does something in you to go, like, okay, I'm a part of something bigger than just like coming here singing, listening to a guy talk, and then going home. Like, there's more going on in this context that I think we might be subtracting. Like we tried to subtract, okay, what is the spiritual experience gonna consist of to the point where it's like you know, a handful of voices.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah. Sometimes, in the name of getting more people in, cycle through more services, and that's not all wrong, but I think sometimes you lose, you know, someone comes in the back of the church and they don't you don't know their name. And the the mother in the front row walks to the back and says, Baby, how you doing? And you can't get that from different sizes.

SPEAKER_00

Well, let me let me say to that as well in scripture, all throughout scripture, I mean, it's established early on, large groups of people gathering in the name of the Lord. That's not uncommon. And if you look at just say Exodus 18, right? Moses now has millions of people and he has to figure out a way to deal with them, and he's trying to do it all by himself, but it's not gonna work. So he's gotta come up with a system so everyone can be heard. Just gotta break them down into numbers. And it gets kind of sophisticated, which was a good thing because doing it this way, it wasn't bad that there were all those folks. It was how am I gonna how am I gonna make everyone feel heard? Yeah. I think that's what we're seeing a lot of in this version of the church now, whether it's Jesus or the apostles. But the difference is when Jesus would talk to the multitudes, he would also go back into the house because there was a difference between who was in the crowd and who he was personally discipling. Right. And so he would answer the questions. The early church, they met from house to house. There's nothing wrong with the gathering. The problem is when we try to make the gathering do everything that should happen in houses. Come on. So when you when you got large gatherings and no house gatherings, you have a gap in the discipleship process. I don't know about you, but I feel like I'm talking to somebody tonight, even though it's not evening time. It just sounds better when you say the night. I don't even spell that the night on the night.

SPEAKER_04

You were preaching, they had to had to get the band up because the band was but that's the point.

SPEAKER_00

It's like you have to have a balance between your Sunday morning gatherings and your person-to-person connection. Yes. It's wonderful to gather hundreds of people, thousands of people. Yes, but to make thousands gathering a discipleship process for formation will never work. You've got to have house-to-house fellowship that has a system attached to it because it's not about the thousands, it's about the one.

SPEAKER_04

That's right.

SPEAKER_00

You can't get to the one, you can't build strong believers who can multiply. Come on, Reverend. No, I'm tell I'm telling you, man, he just didn't. I'm sorry because my voice even shifted. Oh, hold on. I'm sorry, I'm gonna stop. This is grown-up church kids.

SPEAKER_04

Well, I'm I'm glad you're doing this because most people know Michael Bethany from your work with. Well, hold on. I I gotta give everybody the history lesson. You you probably most recently know Michael from his music, which is awesome. Maybe a little bit before that was Gateway, which is awesome. But you gotta know Michael has sung BGVs for Fred Hammond, has sung BGVs for Kirk Franklin. I mean, the list goes on and on. And so I was talking to you last night. I was like, man, I think I want to know how did you go from that's nice. That's really good. It's actually like 50 bucks a month. That's a ripoff. No sense. How did you go from that church to Gateway to a song that you have out now called Secret Place? Let me tell you what we did not sing in Kojik is any song called Secret Place.

SPEAKER_00

That's very true. Um so what's interesting is my father was Baptist. He got saved Baptist, but his mother was Kojik. Okay. So when he inherited this church, it was a Baptist church. Okay. And he converted it to Kojik. And I have different explanations as to why he did that, but his family's denomination was Kojik, so he had to go with that. So, but because I I say that to say my father was not the traditional Kojik pastor because he didn't get saved necessarily that way. Like that wasn't necessarily like his like he sang quartet music. He had a lot of people around that that weren't Kojik. So I think for him, a lot of what I experienced was a little bit left to center. It was very much Kojik, but a little something else. So, like songs we would sing that weren't necessarily Kojik songs, like we're together again, we're praising the Lord. I don't even know where he got that from.

SPEAKER_04

Oh, that song.

SPEAKER_00

So many songs that were not Kojik songs, but it started to put like musical preferences in me that weren't cogic. So I would listen to other things. And eventually I was in this Columbia music thing where they would send you CDs that you never paid for. Back in the day, you don't, you guys don't know about that. I remember this. Right? You would you could order these CDs and they would send them to you without you paying first. And you're supposed to send the money, and I was just too young to understand that. I didn't pay anybody for anything. Um But now they got you on the record. Hey, Columbia, he's right here. No, no, it wasn't much. It was a few CDs. But it was, but but the wild, like I started getting these wild worship CDs and all this kind of stuff like that. And I was a teenager. I shouldn't have been getting these things. You guys were irresponsible for that. Whoever made that decision, you call maybe you're the reason. You're the reason that things are the way they are now. But all that to say, I would listen to Avalon and Michael W. and all these things, and I really like them. And I would write things that sounded like that while I was still coaching. But that was nowhere to sing any of this stuff. So as I started moving on, we moved um when I got married, my wife and I, we well, we we we left coaching. My father passed away, we went to a non-denominational church, and then we started listing all kinds of stuff like Ron Cannoli, you know, Alvin Slaughter, like different things.

SPEAKER_02

Um Is it funny that when you said you went to a non-denominational church, I was waiting for you to say, and we flipped it to be Kochick. No, I was like, man, what it took a while to franchise on your running. First your dad, then you.

SPEAKER_00

If I'm gonna be around, no, but I like this, like it started to evolve slowly. And eventually when I got to Dallas, like my first church was a mega church, and it was very diverse. They were singing everything from Hill Song to Kirk Carr. And they had a horn section and percussion and a choir and a praise scene. It was like I was I was overwhelmed creatively. So I was like, I can sing everything I want. And so slowly I started to move in that direction until I became a worship pastor of a church that was predominantly white. It was just God just slowly moving me. Like my brother was like, hey, if you want to, if you want to really work in the churches in Dallas, you need to learn your chord charts, like your numbers. You gotta learn all these things. And I learned those things which qualified me to play in different cultures. And eventually, it was just a natural progression, but it was like a point where I was able to express the things that that I wanted to express. And it just kind of happened naturally until eventually I ended up at Gateway. It didn't feel like a stretch to me. I was I was at that point accustomed to the production differences in ear, lighting, MD in your, you know, in your ear saying something, the click track, all the different things happening around me don't bother me because I've I've slowly moved. And then being a vocalist and not just singing mindlessly, understanding what a vocal composition need to be for this song, then it's not a stretch to say, well, I'm not gonna do oh because this song doesn't need that, right? I'm gonna sing straight because doing that run is a distraction to the message in the moment.

SPEAKER_04

You're not gonna come on this podcast and run like that and keep talking. You see, hey, he just he did the run.

SPEAKER_02

Talented people are so annoying, man. If I could do that, I'd do that all the time. I would never stop.

SPEAKER_04

But he knew it was good as well. I was like, I didn't mess it up.

SPEAKER_00

I didn't mess it up. But you learn, like, you even learn if you go back to commission, because I love like commission songs, a lot of songs that they did were really CCM. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And they were just crossing their lines. I loved all of that music. So I think it was pretty natural for me to make that.

SPEAKER_04

I feel like this is a first of all, this is a whole episode. You got to come back and talk about this. The bridge between gospel to CCM.

SPEAKER_00

Oh, that's a whole thing.

SPEAKER_04

That's a whole thing. I mean, I I can't even get into it right now. I just want to acknowledge that you're not the only one that experienced growing up in a gospel music church and feeling like you had to learn a different thing to be accepted in a CCM type of church.

SPEAKER_00

Can I say one thing about this? I think just to give we're not, we're just gonna tease it. Okay. It's like a two-minute sermonette.

unknown

Okay.

SPEAKER_00

All right. So when you think about, we grew up singing these simple songs and they were like frameworks, yeah, core structures. Yeah. Same. Yeah. CCM is the same thing. Blues, same thing. RB, same thing. Rock, same thing. It's and the songs that go the furthest stick to the format the most. So CCM is just doing a different form of the very same thing.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, but the CCM singers and musicians can't show up at your St. Louis Cultural Church.

SPEAKER_00

No, but it's like you still have to learn the language. Yes. Right? If you learn the language, you can speak the language. And it's they are learned very differently. The experiences are very differently, very different. But it's like understanding, like if you grow up in that culture, that's what you know. And the same like if you grow up in a CCM culture, there's a certain level of production, which has a lot of it's attached to economics and you know, kind of all those uh privileges you might have if you have that kind of situation. But you understand how those production components really work, which is why that sounds the way it does.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

So, but all that to say is like you only know that because that's the context you learn that music and it becomes second nature to sing it that way. I think we're not that different in the way we're applying musical principles and theory. Yeah, we're applying it in a way that we can replicate this quickly over a large sample size of songs.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah. For the for the person who has no idea the difference between gospel and CCM, but they do notice like to leave one kind of church and go to a different kind of church. Yeah. I want to use speaking in tongues, for example. People either listening to this show either grew up in that environment and are still tongue talkers, or grew up in that environment and aren't anymore. And I'm curious what you think about that. And do you have anything to say to people who either direction? Maybe some people are like, Man, I I wish I grew up in a Pentecostal church, and I grew up in a very liturgical or very meditative church, and they want that experience, or people grew up in a Pentecostal church and like, man, that kind of wore me out. I kind of want to sit down and be quiet. What would you say to someone who is in the middle of that?

SPEAKER_00

I've been all over that spectrum because I grew up that way. And as I started to mature, I it was hard for me to differentiate between what was right, authentic, and then what was um unhealthy. Right, right, right. And I needed to grow and learn. So I had to some in some ways I had to separate myself from the environment and learn something else. And then over time kind of integrate them to see, okay, theologically, what do I believe now and how can I responsibly weave in history with proper theology? Like my context. And so I think for me, I think it's important for all of us to place the word of God over cultural experiences and wrestle with that tension. As opposed to me telling you you should do this. I think you should really wrestle with the text. And I think there's also a gap hum in like our human experience that it will leave some people on a spectrum with one experience or another, which is fine because not everyone's arriving at the same destination at the same time. And some of us may never arrive at the same place at the same time ever. That's just called being human. So I don't I don't necessarily want to wrestle over you should be doing this or you shouldn't be doing that. I think what we should be doing is all looking at the same text and wrestling to go in that direction. And I think the closer you get there, you'll see more similarities in how we're expressing spiritual gifts or things in the church. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

Do you still speak in tongues?

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

Do you would you do it on stage at a CCM show?

SPEAKER_00

Okay, so I I believe the scripture is clear around this. Whether, first of all, the scripture is clear around what tongues are. Um and you can you can just the scripture teaches Paul teaches that very thoroughly, I believe. But in teaching that, I also I also believe that he teaches there are some parameters on how this should be used. And so I use I kind of I look at first Corinthians, you know, as my structure around. How am I gonna actually do this? And what what guidelines am I gonna follow? And so I think for me, if you see me, I'm never going to be on a platform like speaking in tongues. And and honestly, and this is kind of funny, it's not funny, but you probably won't ever really catch me play talking in tongues either. I mean, it's I'm not trying to make nobody feel terrible. Yeah, it's a serious thing. But to me, I just feel like I'm just not gonna play with that. Yeah, yeah. And for me, it's like I'm gonna I'm gonna take that seriously because I want to make sure that if I'm ministering and I need the whole room to understand what I'm saying, I need to I need to do things and speak in a language that's that's uh understandable to them. I also believe that if you're in the company of people where that's no longer your goal, because these are all spirit-filled people and you guys have the same faith, belief, and convictions, I think you then have a different set of rules. It's like going home with your family, you'll talk one way. Right. But when you show up at church, you talk a different way. But when you go to your job interview, you talk a different way.

SPEAKER_06

Right.

SPEAKER_00

You're not three different people.

SPEAKER_06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

You're speaking in a way that is most appropriate for that environment, and that's authentic in all three places. Yeah. So I feel like that's how I handle that personally.

SPEAKER_04

It's great, man. I mean, we grew up here in tongues all the time. It it was second nature to our church. But I I wrestled with it for a long time because I felt like it was something that was gonna take over my body and just start yapping in my throat. And that just never that never happened to me. While my friends were going off. Yeah. I mean, roll on the floor, run around the church. And um my mom, one time, she got up. She she prays in tongues, she speaks in tongues, but she got up one time in one service. The same, my same mom, obviously, that not drinking alcohol. But she got up in one service, man, at Fellowship Church God in Christ in Carrieville and delivered a message in tongues. I had never seen her do this, and it was so um clear and so um uh proclaimative, like she was proclaiming a message, and when she got done, she had like five paragraphs of interpretation. This is what God says, this is what God says, this is what God says, and then she sat down. Now, what was crazy to me was that's my mom. Yeah, y'all can do whatever y'all want to do, yeah, but when you know the person and you know that's not their normal thing, and you see the spirit of God come on somebody and fill them to the point of ministry, it changed my life, man. I was like, I know that's not my mom doing that out of pride and out of self-glue. She she experienced something in the spirit that turned into something special.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

And so from that point on, and in later now in life, it's just like Lord, whatever you want to do. Yeah, whatever you want to do. And for people who listen to this, I have a lot of friends that that have a wide range of spiritual experiences. I learned that I don't want to be closed off to God. And whatever God wants to do in or through me is probably what I should agree with. And that has been a lot of different things, a lot of crazy things that I couldn't explain to you right now. But because I know God initiated it and he sustained it and he was involved, it was a blessing.

SPEAKER_00

But I also think it's important not to allow a lack of agreement around any of these particular things to become a point of division. Right. Because we were just joking about SBC, but I've got there are churches, SBC churches that are friends of mine.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

I lead worship there. We fellowship together. And I feel like you I think one of the things that we have to lean into that Paul is establishing is not just the gifts, but wisdom. And he's even telling the church of Corinth, like, you guys, you can't just go off anytime you feel like you want to. You need to be thinking. Right. There needs to be some some real intention to why you're doing this, who you're speaking to, what's needed.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

You're not just mindlessly going through some something's taking over your body. That's not happening.

SPEAKER_05

Right.

SPEAKER_00

So you can control yourself. You if you're if you're at the grocery store, you don't have to start doing that.

SPEAKER_04

It's always a grocery store.

SPEAKER_00

Like, I just can't help myself. I don't care why. It's like cereal. You actually can't help yourself, and you need to. Yes. You need to help yourself because this is not helpful to other beings.

SPEAKER_08

Yes, yes, yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

I appreciate the fact that even with, you know, I grew up Pentecostal. Like and then having friends who are Presbyterian and having friends who grew up different denominations. I'm like, man, I envy a part of their upbringing. And I'm like, man, I wish we had that. And then I wish we had some of this. But then I'm like, you know, God is gracious enough to where even with all of our experiences, you may feel like you lacked or you had too much. Oh, we spoke in tongues too much. Like that's but even then, it's like, no, it's the right, it's correct for every person. It doesn't hinder your relationship with him.

SPEAKER_08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

You know, I you know, I don't know. I mean, there are people who just don't I know people who don't have abandoned the gifts of the spirit like altogether.

SPEAKER_04

Yes.

SPEAKER_02

And I'm like, I mean, you're okay, but yeah, God is still good to them, and you know, and they can walk with the Lord as well. Yeah, they're wrong.

SPEAKER_04

They're heritage. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

I just wanted to look into the camera one. He did it, he knew. You're missing out.

SPEAKER_03

That's a true Pentecostal. We like to look down on people, man.

SPEAKER_04

I think you're right, though. I think there's grace for that.

SPEAKER_02

You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_04

Like, and I think Paul would say there's love despite difference. So he's not highlighting difference gifts to say, you go do your thing, you you go do your thing, and then figure it out. He's saying God has gifted his church with a diversity of gifts for the building of everybody. That's right. And so I would even say denominations can learn from other denominations.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

And say, hey man, I you guys have tapped into something in God's spirit that we don't have.

SPEAKER_00

Right. A hundred percent.

SPEAKER_04

And I think Pentecostals have something to learn from Presbyterians.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. And I've learned a lot from other denominations. I mean, my formal training is in the Baptist institution. You know, so theologically, a lot of the resources I love to read, study, and learn come from Reform theology and all these different things. So I'm I'm I'm holding the tension with, you know, with actually with joy. I'm glad to hold that tension.

SPEAKER_08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Because we're we're all seeking to understand and know God and how can God be known unless He reveals Himself. And that's tough. So I think having the collective thoughts and expressions all together, the tension is on one side, challenging at times, but the collection of what the Lord has revealed to us in different contexts is actually pretty beautiful too. So I I think all of that is very helpful. And I think we just need to be more open. I love what you're saying. When I look at like people who grew up a different way, even when I got into different environments, what I learned is a huge part that I was missing, even though I'm not speaking down on education, it was education. Yes. Not because we like not being educated. Most of us in that denomination didn't have the opportunity for that. So when I got a chance to get education, education wasn't bad. That training actually helped me to express more faithfully and understand what in the world was happening when we were having that service. How can I look in scripture and see that and understand how do I frame that theologically, right? So that I can have a way of teaching and replicating it to my children so they understand it. That's right. So all those things to I love, even I was sharing with this with you last night that I grew up in church and we knew how to praise. And praise was like it was the defining marker of the culture church. We're gonna dance, we're gonna shout, we're gonna do all that stuff. But as I got older in different places, I learned intimacy in a way. I never learned growing up. So I learned how to have church in a way, but as I matured in faith, I learned what a secret place was privately. I grew up, you know, he dwells in a secret place of the most high. So the Bible shadows the whole money. We would say that. And though that is true, I learned how to live that out in a way that did not need an organ or anything. And it's not that people didn't have that, but there's a there's another mode you can go into with the Lord that is so, so very different. I think it's more like what you see in scripture. Like, what is Moses experiencing at the burning bush? What is experiencing on Mount Sinai? What is experience? Because understand, that was not everyone's experience, but now that we have the Holy Spirit, we can all experience him in our own context, right? And that has nothing to do with a cultural expression. That's right. And that's something that I begin to really learn to grow, which is why I started writing these songs, like Walk With You and Secret Place, because I was learning to express in lyrics the beauty of personal intimacy with the Lord.

SPEAKER_04

Incredible, man. Incredible, man. Yeah, I'm grateful that God taught you that because a lot of people now are being blessed by your music and by the songs you're putting out, and may not have known the background that you had. Um, I think people need to see a story like yours to really understand that God is not one-dimensional, he's not one denomination, he's he's he's beautiful. And I mean that in a literal sense. Like he he exudes light and beauty and presence. And you can look at him from any angle and still get as much beauty. And he's beautiful in culture church, he's beautiful in Tanzania, he's beautiful in and I mean I I student taught at a Catholic high school. Teacher sent me a message today. She wants to have a like a 20-year reunion with her Catholic students at this high school, and you know, that's beautiful. That's beautiful. And we need all of it, man. Praise God for all of it. I'm glad you came to hang out with us. Um you you already did this crazy run that was rude to everybody. So we already know you can sing. Thank you for announcing that with your run. Um but would you mind singing some songs with us before you leave? I would love I would love to do that.

SPEAKER_00

Yes. And before we do, I want to congratulate you, Shamma. For what? For really giving your life to God. Because you cut your hair, and I know that must have been a change. It must have been a change. I can see it on your face. It's not just your hair. I can see something shifted in your life, and I'm proud of you. I'm godly proud of you.

SPEAKER_01

I've been holding on to that day. Did my mom send you?

SPEAKER_02

Yes. Now my mom. Now my mom sends you. You're moving. You know, black moms, man. Like, yeah, just look how you look when the birds look how you look is crazy. Look how you stick with that dress how I dress you. Don't do anything different. The question is, did the power leave you though when you got your hair cut? I'll tell you what, when I cut it, it came back. I feel funnier.

SPEAKER_01

I feel hilarious.

SPEAKER_02

I'm no longer in the band newsboys anymore.

SPEAKER_03

See? That we shut the band down. Is there one? That's when the altar call happens. And no words behind that.

SPEAKER_02

That was funny. But you got me, dude. You paused perfectly. I just need you guys a little given your life. Yeah. Man. Erica looks good. I'm married. I got four kids. I was like, I can't be out here with dream next to the four kids. I talked to a guy and I was like, yeah, I got four kids, and he was like, same woman? Yeah, I gotta get that. Why do I look at the type of person? The devil is a lot of. The hair was given. Yeah, he was the white guy that's not. He was what he was a white guy. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_01

He was like, young man, how do you have four four different baby mamas? I was like, no, one baby mama, then. I don't like that dreadlocks equals.

SPEAKER_04

I don't do the goddamn dude. We're gonna talk about the next in the next episode.

SPEAKER_02

Black hair. Next episode. Grown up church kids. Black. We're getting into it. Weaves, perm, the whole thing. The whole thing. And oil. How do you pluck onority on black people's hair? We'll even talk about biracial kids' hair, all right? You know that some of y'all struggling. I'm talking to my wife.

SPEAKER_00

No.

SPEAKER_02

You know, we gotta talk about how do you handle black kids' hair baptismal because that's a real thing. They can come out looking little toothed.

SPEAKER_03

He gets crossed over. He's in the spirit now. No, no. We needed this.

SPEAKER_00

Yes. And I regret it now. Somewhat regretted it. Incredible, man. You got me, man.

SPEAKER_03

Incredible.

SPEAKER_02

I do like the haircut. No, really, we could have ended this episode after you did that introduction from the top. That was incredible. It was incredible, man. That's real life.

SPEAKER_00

That's just real life.

SPEAKER_02

My wife, my wife, her mom.

SPEAKER_04

I bought that hat on last Mother's Day. It was great, man. That blessed me. Improv genius.

SPEAKER_02

It's incredible.

SPEAKER_04

Hey, I gotta say one more thing, or we're out of here. I gotta say how I met Michael to really validate he really is a man of God. I was in my pitiful, my pitiful season. I really was. I really was in a dark place, man. And um he sent me a message on Instagram and said that God told him that he needed to come hang out and have lunch. And you know, that's like, nah, I'm good to a stranger on Instagram, I'm good. And um I felt I felt the same kind of like maybe I should I should hang out. We went to Burger Up here in Nashville. And when I say this man read my mail, I mean I say stuff from that lunch to my wife last week. I quote that lunch last week. Wow. And I just want to tell people, man, God is real and he he connects people for a reason. And Michael has been somebody that God has put in my life for a specific season. And I'm not pitiful anymore. He brought me out of a uh out of Lodabar. I didn't bring him out. The Lord did, but I was there to see it. Front row seat. Front row seat, man, and I really appreciate that. Thank you for being obedient to the spirit. Thank you for coming and being a friend to me for how long was that? How long? I don't know what five years. Five years ago, man. It wasn't that long. Since then, he's gone on to do great things from godly. Godly proud.

SPEAKER_00

So you got to turn that after he met me. The Lord moved in his life. He had to serve me first.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, yeah. No, I'm really grateful for you. Thank you for being here. I appreciate that. Thank you for being here. Thanks for being here. Um we can't let Michael leave without some songs. He's gonna do a couple songs for us. One called Secret Place from his latest live record, right?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04

Uh the live record is called Sanctuary Live. Sanctuary Live. Um you all need to check out Michael Bethany's music. Check out the Overflow conference, that Overflow conference that happens in Dallas. Um, check out his Overflow podcasts on YouTube. I mean, there's an unlimited amount of resources you can check out for him that are really great. Um, but he's also gonna do a uh a throwback with me on Oregon. We gotta do some old church songs. We're gonna do that too. Thank you all for watching Grown Up Church Kids and uh be sure to like and subscribe on the video. We'll see you next time.