Blood Red Church with Jeff Kliewer

All right, we are back. This is Michael Coughlin, and you may be listening to this on the Things Above Us roundtable, which is our discussion on the thingsabove.us website, or you may be listening to this on my Be a Berean podcast on the Bible Thumping Wingnut Network. Today I have with me a special guest. First of all, my trusty co-host, Quatro Nelson is sick.

And I don't know when you'll be listening to this episode, but if it's anywhere near the beginning of November, maybe you can pray for him in case he's still sick when you're hearing this. There's also a chance I'll post it on YouTube. We're still not quite sure what we're doing with YouTube yet. But so pray for Alan. But I have a special guest today. It's an acquaintance of mine who I think I could call a friend with somebody who I I don't know really well yet, but I have spent time with him in person and heard him speak.

And Jeff, why don't you introduce yourself and tell us a little about a little bit about your church and even your denomination, if you like. OK. Yeah, I'm Jeff Clewer and I pastor an evangelical free church in Mount Laurel, New Jersey. So I came here in 2016. And before that, I was actually a inner city missionary to Philadelphia. So in the Kensington section of Philly, we lived and worked.

And that was eye opening to me because there were there were things and assumptions that I followed in that ministry, which later my eyes were open to some of the dangers of social justice because of, you know, the. Well, really what happened was many came to Saving Faith, or we thought, and were baptized, but a number of them ended up departing years later, departing from the faith. And it was really sad to see, but there was a common denominator with each one that would leave the faith.

It was something to do with social justice. So whether it had to do with race or LGBTQ issues, it was this kind of victim narrative that took hold in the inner cities. And in Philadelphia, that's, of course, the case. And we saw, sadly, a number of people apostatize from the Christian faith. So that really kind of set me on a crusade to expose the lies of social justice.

And so I wrote a book called Woke Free Church last year and then another one this year, which was a follow up to that. So I've been pastoring in the suburbs, and you don't see quite as much of this social justice nonsense in the suburbs until 2020. And then there were a number of churches that just threw open their arms and embraced the whole idea of social justice.

And that's when I began writing publicly about these things. They remind me of the name of your church. Yeah, it's called Cornerstone Church. and tell tell us briefly about your denomination i think i've i've heard the denominational name and i i actually couldn't tell you a distinctive of it okay yeah so the evangelical free church of america um i love the denomination because of the statement of faith the statement of faith was written um by a couple of guys who um very doctrinally sound in a number of ways um and they have they brought us a real blessing with the statement of faith so it's a church that rallies around that and then the evangelical free church tries to remain somewhat open to differences so you can have calvinists and armenians both in the denomination um but the problem is there that openness can drift easily into some compromise and when the area of social justice came in, unfortunately, the Evangelical Free Church has had some compromise on that.

So my first book kind of talks about that and outlines where that crept in to the free church. It's about 1,500 churches nationwide, so it's not a small denomination. Yeah, I've heard of it before, and but the when i heard of it it was like 20 years ago or so i had a friend who so i'm in technology i had a friend who is a who is a developer and he he managed the website for an evangelical free church and this was long before i was a christian i i just was like okay you know no idea who they were i i knew it had the word evangelical and and you know i didn't want anything to do with it, so I didn't investigate much, but that was before I became a Christian.

So Woke Free Church was your first book. Right. But the book we're on here to talk about today is The Blood Red Church. Right. And so what I want to do is, first of all, just introduce for anyone listening that I'm I'm about halfway through the book, maybe a little more than halfway at this point, and I'm impressed. I really have liked the book.

And this is a book that could have been 1,400 pages, but you've made it 140 pages or 150 pages. And that comes from being very straightforward and direct and concise in your points that you're making, which I appreciate because everything seems very clear. I don't have to read through three paragraphs for you to make a point. And if somebody had said, you know, conclusively prove everything, obviously it would have had to be a longer book.

But this is kind of a good, I'll say, 2022 style way of getting a point across in a generation of people with short attention spans. And so I really appreciate that. And I also think that the way you laid it out was very clear for people Well if I just want to go to a certain chapter and read about a topic it just right there And yet you have the topics ordered so they do build upon each other.

So that's nice. So let's start with, give us a synopsis or kind of the basis of it, you know, for somebody that's thinking, well, why would I read this book? You know, what are they going to learn from this book? What are they going to be challenged to think about? Yeah, so the big idea is that there are red churches and there are blue churches, just like there's red states and blue states in the United States, right?

A red church is one that upholds Christian ethics and applies that in the public realm, so areas of politics. A blue church is one that stands completely opposite to the biblical teaching in regard to Christian ethics. But what I think a lot of people miss is that there's also this movement in America to be the gray church, a church right in between red and blue, and welcome both political movements into God's house.

And, of course, the result of that is to compromise over ethical questions. So the point of the book is to say, look, there are certain things, not everything, not every political position, but there are certain political positions that are essential for the Christian to hold. And of course, the first one would be life. We have to uphold life. We can't compromise at that point and begin to allow for the killing of the unborn.

So in the gray church, you'll have someone come to a conference and say, listen, we know that we're pro-life. We have to stand for life. And the Bible upholds life. Okay, sounds great. But then out of the other side of his mouth, he'll turn around and say, but someone else might read the scripture and say, there are societal factors that put a woman in a position where abortion could be a needed option.

So on the one hand, he'll say the conservative is well and good to hold to a biblical view of protecting the life of the unborn. But the progressive view can still be a Christian view. And what we need to do is have both perspectives in the church and welcome this political diversity. So this political diversity movement is really what I'm taking aim at in the book.

And I'm saying, no, you can't compromise with issues like life. And then I'll give six other issues that are of that nature, where it's an essential for the Christian to hold it. Yeah, it seems like, and I'm not trying to use big words here, but it seems like a form of standpoint epistemology where, well, I'm personally pro-life, someone would say, but I'm not going to say other people in the church should be.

Exactly. And you're coming in the book and you're saying there's a few issues, and there's certainly more than these seven, but here's the seven most important issues for our church in the United States right now that we need to stand for what the Bible would have us stand for and would tell us we must stand for. That's your point, right? Sure. Yeah. And where that standpoint epistemology really is an attack on scripture is this postmodern idea that there are different truths for different people as if the scripture is not clear and doesn't speak with one unified voice.

So that's really the root issue. Absolutely. And I want to clarify one thing for anyone listening before they discount it. When you say red church and blue church, you're not equating that with Republican and Democrat. You make that clear at the beginning of the book, but you found that to be kind of a convenient color scheme to sort things out. Right.

There is a consistency within the Democratic platform that they're the party that is pro-abortion. Right. And they are for all the authoritarianism, the authoritarian measures like locking down churches and forcing injections and employees being fired for not taking the shot. And they're the party that pushes affirmative action. So these are the first three chapters of the book.

By the way, have you seen that affirmative action is in the courts? Yes. Right now. Very interesting. Yeah. So there's a chance that that could finally come to an end.

In 2004, Greta versus Bollinger, Sandra Day O'Connor and the leftists said that it will be 25 more years and then you won't need affirmative action. Well, we're almost 25 years on and social justice questions only bigger and more. Yeah, only worse. So, yeah. Oh, sorry. Go ahead.

I was just going to say, yeah, the Democratic Party upholds all of the seven anti-biblical positions. So I'm saying, yeah, it'd be a sin to vote for Democrat, but I'm not saying that the Republican Party always has the Christian ethical position. And there's some Republicans who you should never vote for because of that. Yeah, yeah. But the point of the book would be that you could have made it green, orange, and blue, and it wouldn't have made a difference in the points you make in the book.

It doesn't one-to-one relate to political parties in the United States. One thing you made me think of when you were talking about affirmative action, and this is true on things like pro-choice, is there's this fiddling with words, right? So affirmative action, who could oppose something called affirmative action, right? It's just a nice sounding title.

And I think one of the problems is that we don't read the details. And so when you hear social justice, it's like, well, that sounds great. Let do justice socially is what it sounds like right And so you almost sound like a jerk for opposing something Black Lives Matter Why would you oppose that right And so I think that we need to learn to read the details.

We also need to recognize that one of the schemes of the enemy is to use words that mean something important to Christians and then use them in a different way, right? Your second chapter, well, let's just highlight the chapter. So there's life is one of the major issues, liberty, pursuit of happiness, family, church, capitalism, and nationalism. These seven points, you call them the seven deadly sins of the nation. these seven points are the seven points that you will argue in the book we must take a certain side on and the bible tells us what side to take and to be gray or neutral in those areas act makes you functionally on the side of the anti of the biblical stance is that correct so the seven deadly sins these societal sins would be the opposite of the chapter titles of the ones that you read.

So yeah, killing the unborn would be the first of the deadly sins, obviously. To highlight what you said there about language, affirmative action. If you're making a plus, an affirmative, the color of somebody's skin in admissions to a university or something, by definition, that's a leg up in the admission standard. So if you want to really think through that concept, Sam Alito was questioning the presenter who was arguing for affirmative action the other day.

And he kept pressing that point until the person who was questioning him was like dumbstruck, couldn't answer any longer. Because what's happened in our culture is we've lost the ability to reason, critical thinking, to think through the implication of what affirmative action is. And the same thing with social justice and BLM. If you say Black Lives Matter, well, all lives matter.

But here's the issue of saying Black Lives Matter. You are in that statement, in that sentiment, you are saying that there is a special societal injustice being perpetrated against that particular people group that needs to be rectified. So you're assuming systemic racism. And when you press on that with any kind of critical thinking, well, who is doing this?

Well, the first person that they bring up is the police officer, right? And then police in general as an entity. So the problem here is people aren't willing to press the logic of what they're saying to the point of being able to either defend it with evidence or else it be refuted. So instead of having critical thinking, the gray church just says, all right, we're going to welcome both sides, even if one is completely against the word of God.

And we're going to just mesh it together in the church and call that unity. I'm taking it away for a minute from the topic maybe of the book. But in your opinion, in your opinion, why, like how, why or how have we lost this ability societally to ask the hard questions? What's the reason? The reason for lack of critical thinking? Well, I don't know.

I don't know why we've gotten to that point. I think that's just an observation I'm able to make, but not a cultural analysis that I, but I think it's pretty obvious. that critical thinking is not a common ability. Yeah, I agree. And it's because we read the headlines and we don't read the details. But do you notice that the people who are critical thinkers, which in theory should be the noble way of being, that they're actually then branded as the wicked ones or they're just jerks for asking a question about something?

Yeah. So the blood red church position on these things to be dogmatic about these seven things is a very unpopular position, even in evangelical Christianity in America, which is it's shocking because the word of God is not mushy and unclear about these things. so the the teaching of generous justice which comes into the church through tim tim keller redefining what justice is as a needs based theory of justice saying if a person has a need justice is to meet that need over against the biblical teaching on justice in romans chapter three, that justice is giving people what they deserve, what they're owed, right? And the whole foundation of the gospel and just thinking in Romans chapter three is that God is both just and the justifier of the one who has faith in him.

So it's a legal argument based on justice itself. The idea, if God gives us what we're owed, we go to hell. But instead, he justly put the punishment of my sin upon his son as a substitute and satisfied the demand of justice in the dying of Jesus on the cross. And having satisfied justice, he remains a just God who punishes sin. He doesn't just gloss it over.

He punishes sin in his son, and he justifies me through faith in the Son of God. I'm united to Christ, and the imputation of his righteousness, the righteousness of Christ, the foreign righteousness, now makes me right in God's eyes, right? So this concept of justice is very biblical. It's very important. But generous justice comes along and turns that on its head with this need theory of justice and through that imports doctrines of socialism That the just thing to do is that you owe the poor your money and therefore we need to lift all of society through taxation and redistribution of wealth because there's a need.

It's just to do because there's a need and it's unjust for there to be an inequality. So you have these competing views of justice, quote unquote, economic justice, as the social justice warrior calls it, and the biblical view of justice, which is giving people what they're owed. Now, there is a category called compassion and mercy for meeting the needs of the poor.

That has to be voluntary. It has to come from the will of the person who's desiring to give. But for the government to come in with the sword and confiscate the wealth of taxpayers without any recourse to the one who has to pay taxes. You go to jail if you don't pay your taxes. The government to come and take that wealth and then distribute it to society in general to lift the whole boat, to lift all ships, that's fundamentally unjust.

It's not what government was constituted to do by God. So the idea here is that the great church is going to say, well, OK, you might have someone who leans towards socialism and someone who leans towards capitalism. And what we really need to do is just find unity in the church and not address these things, not have a clear moral compass to offer to the world and to the church.

So that's chapter six about socialism and capitalism. Yeah, you can see how all of these societal sins or from the titles of your chapters, how the virtues that are extolled in the book, how they all overlap, too. Yes. You know, it's almost impossible to talk about social justice without referring then to government and taxation and redistribution because they're all kind of part and parcel, it seems at this point.

Right. And, you know, I was thinking that when you were explaining justice, you know, and you said justice is getting kind of what you're owed. And that's why we have mercy on the poor, not because they're owed something, but because we want to help them. But I think one of the arguments people would make would be, well, there's been some oppression, some real oppression that has occurred that we won't deny. that there has been some people who have been treated wrongly.

And so the question then is, is how do they get what they're owed for being treated wrongly? And if the answer isn't big government, go and redistribute it for them. You know, what should the response be to those types of cries for justice that we want to take legitimately? Right. Well, any cry for justice has to be preceded by the pursuit of truth. Truth has to come before justice.

So to say that that I'm a victim because of some identitarianism, the color of my skin, or you could say your height or your ability, whether you're disabled or not. any number of factors that differentiate people to create an identity group and then say that entire identity group is the victim of some other and therefore deserves compensation. That's where you're not doing truth work before the justice work. So you need the critical thinking to decide that justice is even required in a situation.

So, I mean, go back to 2020 and churches, they're all blacking out their Facebook page and doing the BLM thing. And the truth work that needed to be done would be to say in the George Floyd incident, who was the oppressor and who was the victim? So you have an individual who was oppressed by particular individuals, but there's not even the attempt at that point to prove that the reason that this officer kept his knee on that man's neck for nine minutes was because of race.

There was never that connection even established. It was just assumed, right. And then having established that to prove that this is systemic, right? So to go to the data and say how many people were shot in 2019. This is what Votie Bauckham does in Fault Lines, right? To prove that there is systemic racism in the police force across the country, that this is, you know, as LeBron James says, we're literally being killed every single day.

That kind of truth work has to be done before you can try to rectify the quote-unquote injustice. Wouldn't it be easier just have the government take all our money and give it to LeBron James? And then he could just do what's right with it, right? Right. So talking about Black Lives Matter for just a moment, there's the chapter on family. And Black Lives Matter had at one point a statement of faith, we'll call it, on their website that was taken down once it got a little publicity.

And one of the main points that the BLM movement themselves tried to make was the destruction of the nuclear family. Right. And do you recall that? Yeah, absolutely. And I'm thinking that in your experience in Philadelphia on your missions, Can you can you speak maybe more personally and experientially about how you have observed that movement and what effect you've seen even just personally?

Right. So the religion of the inner city is social justice. That's the primary worldview. Right. of the inner city. And with that is the breakdown of family. So you see the result of fatherlessness in the disparities of outcome, right?

That's obvious. So my book doesn't totally deal with that issue. It's not taking aim at that subject. But what I'm trying to say is that the gray church is introducing elements of the blue worldview and meshing that together with a very clear biblical ethic, right? So how would that affect the family or what does that look like in a gray church? Maybe just around the corner from you.

A gray church will begin to put women in position of teaching over men. You say, well, how does that affect the family? Well, it's changing the God ordained role of men and women in the church and in the home. So, I mean, let me just read this scripture. We're all familiar with, but first Timothy two, very, very clear. Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness.

I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man. Rather she is to remain quiet. And then there's the grounding for this, this teaching for Adam was formed first, then Eve and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing if they continue in faith and love and holiness with self-control.

So it couldn't be any clearer, right? That's the biblical ethic regarding the dynamic in churches. So what I've seen at our conference, sadly, the Eastern District Conference of our denomination, is that in year one that I began to attend, well, this is actually maybe the second year that I was there, they had a female come and speak to the men. And they were introducing ideas and subjects.

It was very topical and it was short, but it was clear that they were having a woman speak. And all the pastors stood up and applauded. Oh, yeah. They're just cheering for this. Well, the next year, they had a second woman speak. And then the third year, again, so you're seeing a pattern in this platforming.

There's always at least one woman speaker of the three or four. And then the fourth year, another woman, still yet a different one, she gets up and she exposits from 1 Peter for half an hour. so you've moved to to outright exposition of scripture teaching men in this context which is a church context it's a church conference so it's a slippery slope but what you're seeing though is a reversal of god's clear description and it's a slow progressive kind of step-by-step movement towards that and and before long then you have ordaining women or some some similar thing in our denomination you have some women who are being called shepherd because we mostly still complementarian but you have some you have a shepherd of spiritual life on staff at the church So these are the kinds of shenanigans, which is just the same word translated pastor. Correct.

Well, I, so, so let me ask you this. We'll kind of close up here. What, who do you expect to interact with your book? So I told you in our kind of, before we recorded that your book, I think, will really speak to the hearts of what you call the red church people. And so in that case, you're just writing something that people already agree with in that state.

And then you kind of have your gray church people and your blue church people. I guess, whose minds are you hoping to challenge with your book and have them interact with it? Yeah. My book is written to gray church pastors and elders of those churches that don't realize that they've become a gray church because they're just imbibing the gospel coalition and they think, oh, this is solid, reformed, evangelical, biblical teaching.

And they assume that's the case, but they don't realize that it's sprinkled through with some very destructive doctrine that's seeping in and making their church gray. So it's to that pastor who's not really familiar with social justice, and it was kind of new to them in 2020. And maybe they read an article on Gospel Coalition of why we need to submit to the government lockdowns.

And they're thinking, oh, okay, that's a Christian thing to do. You know, I don't have any rights. But when they hear a different perspective, they think, oh, wait a minute. Maybe there's more to this story. And then they start digging and searching, and they go read Votie Bauckham's fault lines. and light bulbs are going off. And I've seen it a lot.

There are churches that have moved from gray, but not understanding that they're gray to blood red. And by the way, my book is not called Red Church. It's called Blood Red Church. And the reason for that is it's to the redeemed. We are redeemed by the blood of the Lamb. And so we need to be holy as he is holy.

And that's not just in private things. It's also in public matters. So yeah, that's the point of it. And you want to challenge people to be critical thinkers. Right. I don't think you want anyone to read your book and just blindly believe what you wrote either.

I think what you hope people would do is they would take the arguments that you make, maybe even read opposing arguments, and then go ahead and work these things out themselves with the God-given reasoning that they've been given and with the light of the scriptures. Would you agree with that? I love that point. I think truth does not mind being questioned. questioned.

So it's Acts 17, 11. It's Proverbs 18, 17. One man seems right until another comes and examines him. It's that cross-examination. But the gray church would never sit down with James White and debate the issue of social justice. Tim Keller would never defend the things that he's written and taught in the form of public debate because it's indefensible.

So what I found is that instead of people engaging woke free church they try to cancel me right So they charged me with Christian nationalism as a denomination I had to go defend myself against that They found me not guilty of it but then were angry about the process by which I operate process crimes kind of thing But there's there's only the effort to cancel the voice to the right of them. There's no willingness to sit down and actually debate these issues because truth doesn't mind being questioned. So, yeah, I would welcome people to email me if you disagree with something.

Call me up. I'm not inaccessible. And other pastors who have done that, that have pushed back, I think the ones who have spent time talking have realized that there's actually an argument to each thing that they are just assuming is a slam dunk case. So some of them have come around to our way of thinking. Others have become more entrenched toward the left. so yeah it seems that people will either become more red or more blue if challenged in the gray so how how do people find your book and uh get your book and then how do they get a hold of you if they do want to interact yeah so my email address is jeff.klewer that's k-l-i-e-w-e-r at cornerstonesj.org or someone could just go to cornerstonesj.org and the form there goes to me if you submit an email.

And to find my book, if you use that last name, it's an odd last name, Klewer, you'll get to all my books on Amazon. Yeah, but Blood Red Church is the title. So Amazon is the main place where people can get your material? I publish all my books through Amazon, and that's the way to get at them. Okay, perfect. And so ultimately, what's the reason to write a book like this for you?

What's in your heart? When you're thinking, I want the redeemed to read these pages that I made, what's in your heart? I believe that a church or an evangelical institution like the EFCA is not gone. It's not a ship that sunk to the bottom of the ocean. You have a lot of pastors that love the Word of God. Most pastors, obviously, love the Word of God.

And the people are to the right of their pastor by and large. Now, that's not true in every church, but the guys that went to Trinity or maybe to Wheaton or Moody or Gordon-Conwell or even sadly recently, my own Dallas Seminary, some of these pastors are coming out with woke tendencies that their people don't have. And I think if we can really shine light on these issues, the EFCA can correct course.

And I believe that. I think that we have enough pastors that are rallying around this and believe the same way that it can be rescued. So that was ultimately why I wrote Woke Free Church. And this is then the sequel to that for the EFCA. But I realize that it's not just the EFCA. The EFCA is very typical of the Southern Baptists and all the evangelical denominations in America.

So if we start looking at these questions and let the word of God speak, I think that that's how how the victory will be won. You seem genuinely concerned for people's well-being. Yeah. You seem generally concerned for protecting innocent life I think the fear that that I have as as somebody that that is you know endorsing your book and I like your book and I want people to read it is is I don't want people to think you're just this like fire breathing polemicist over in Jersey, you know, like you're, you're just a guy that loves the church.

You love Jesus Christ and you love other Christians and you're trying to display for them, look, these are some clear things the Bible has said. Yeah, thank you for saying that. Yeah, why don't we all just rally together around what Jesus believes and just suffer whatever the consequences may be for those beliefs, right? Yeah, unity rallies around truth.

It's not just something that you force and say, be unified, be unified. No, get to the bottom of the question of truth and you'll have unity. Our church here in New Jersey has had amazing unity for years and it's grown. I mean, we've gone from 100 people to 300 over the last couple of years. And it's been as we're more and more unified around truth in these areas.

There's a hunger for that. And it's brought people together. and that's just the grace and providence of God that brought that all glory to God in that regard but yeah and I think as far as like being passionate about this subject anybody who who kind of knows me understands where I've come from with the inner city and seeing how lives are destroyed by social justice and the reason to wage war against something is because you hate what it does to the people that you love yeah amen that's well put well I appreciate you. I appreciate your ministry.

I appreciate the balance in your book of scriptural teaching, even balanced with a little personal reflection and putting it all together in a way that I think is readable. I don't think it's a seminary level book. I think anybody could read your book and understand what you're teaching. So that's Jeff Klewer, and it's jeff.cleaver at cornerstonesj.org right and that's your church cornerstone what's cornerstone what's yeah cornerstone church in mount laurel new jersey what's the sj sounds for south jersey that's what i thought cornerstone south jersey okay all right i figured out what it is got south jersey and north jersey and yeah it's almost two different states in some ways yeah just making sure it wasn't society of the Jesuits.

Yeah. Okay, so cornerstonesj.org and then your books are both on Amazon. Yeah. All right. Well, hey, thanks, Jeff. Thanks for having me, Michael.

Appreciate it, man. Thank you for listening to Be a Berean with your host, Michael Coughlin. I am a writer at thingsabove.us and I also have a personal website, michaelcoughlin.net. You can contact me by emailing me, michael at thingsabove.us. I hope that you have been encouraged to search the scriptures.