Rick Green
Welcome to The WallBuilders Show. You can check us out at wallbuilders.show or at wallbuilders.com Wallbuilders.show if you want to get some of the archives of the program, wallbuilders.com if you want to get some of those tools that will equip and inspire your family to be a part of the solution. I'm Rick Green here with David and Tim Barton. All right, David and Tim Neil Mammen back with us. We're going to be talking about mychurchfinder.org. Mychurchfinde.rorg it's a good place to go to find a non-woke church and if you've got a great pastor, great church that's culturally engaged, biblically sound, all that good stuff you, you need to get them on this website. I don’t know about you guys but when I’m out there and get done with a presentation, people are like, where can I find a church that actually teaches this stuff? Do y'all get asked that very often?
Tim Barton
Absolutely so often people are hungry and looking out. It definitely depends on what church we're speaking at, right. Oftentimes the churches that have us in the people there. Well,
Rick Green
Yeah, I was thinking of places we speak. That's not a church. Yeah, that was pretty bad. Right, I didn't mean for it to.
Tim Barton
Yeah, I get what you Hibbs Church they're like. Where can I find a good church where a pastor will stand up and do something.
David Barton
You go to Jack Hibbs Church.
Tim Barton
But no, I mean, Rick, to your point. We do a lot of events, whether it be schools, college campuses, political events, things throughout the nation during the week, and that is a very common question where people want to know how can I find this? Because and often like, what do I do? Because they're in this dilemma that I love my church and pastor, but I'm bothered that we're not saying these things and addressing these things and how do I navigate? And like, should I go somewhere else? And they don't know what to do.
Or sometimes we're seeing it so much now where people are moving all over the nation and when they get somewhere they really don't know where to go, and especially if you're moving somewhere like a Texas or Florida, which are two very common destinations now, when you're moving somewhere related to the Bible Belt, there's churches it seems like nearly every corner and how do you know which church to go to?
I don't want to have to go to a different church every weekend for five years before I finally found all the churches and now I can make a decision. That'd be way easier if I had something to do. So, Rick, to your point, we definitely get these questions and being able to have a website that you can point people to that can help connect them and obviously, the fact that you can nominate your church and pastor. There's a level of subjectivity to this where somebody thought, hey, my pastor is so good, and you might have a different thought or feeling or opinion, but certainly people aren't going to be going on there if they have a really woke pastor who's promoting nonsense, saying this is a really solid biblical church. You're not going to have that confusion on this website. So this is a great resource for people looking for help finding that kind of church.
David Barton
And we really do need solid biblical churches right now in America. I mean looking back, well, even recently I've seen a lot of social media posts where the people are pointing to and saying, hey, we think there's a revival going on. Look at all the young people coming to Christ more men than women coming to Christ, which is pretty unusual. That is a good sign of a revival. So there's a lot of things that are looking like a revival may go on. And in looking back over previous revivals, it's interesting that I was just last night looking specifically at the revivals that occurred in America in the 20th century. And you've got the Well Street Revival, the Azusa Street Revival, you've got the Billy Graham, all the stuff that Billy Graham did across the nation, speaking literally to millions. You have so many other revivals Billy Sunday, etc.
And if you look back at the First Great Awakening revival that laid the foundation for freedom, this is where the concept of freedom was laid out. This is where constitutional rule of law, all the things that we saw in the formation of the nation, came out of the First Great Awakening, out of the pulpit. You look at the Second Great Awakening. That's where you get the end of slavery, the Second Great Awakening. That was the leader in changing the culture and saying we're not going to have a slave nation, we're going to end this.
And so you look, and every time we've had a revival in America it has changed the culture. Except the 20th century Nearly every 20th century revival we can't see yet where it's significantly shifted the culture. It's created a lot of Christians and they've done Christian things, but our schools, our churches, our culture is more woke than it's ever been. And we've had a number of revivals across the 20th century and it didn't stop progressivism, it didn't stop liberalism in universities and we need one right now that will change the nation change the way people think biblically.
Tim Barton
So instead of people just hearing about Jesus, they need to learn to live like Jesus Like Jesus, that's right. See that transformation and this is where we want to find out okay, how do we navigate churches. And you know our friend Neil so good at apologetics and really his whole story journey is so fun, Rick. You got to sit down with him and interview him and talk through a lot of this. I'm excited to hear more of that right now.
Rick Green
All right, quick break, we'll be right back. Folks, you're listening to the WallBuilder Show.
Break
Rick Green
Welcome back. Thanks for staying with us here on WallBuilders. Neil Mammen he's a non-hyphenated first generation American immigrant. He's an engineer, he's an apologist, he's an author. Anyway, he's done a lot and you can check out noblindfaith.com for apologetics, theology, evangelism, all kinds of cool stuff. You can check out a lot of his blogs at crossexamine.org, our friend Frank Turek over there, and then, of course, recommend that you get his book. Jesus Is Involved in Politics. You can learn more about that at JesusIsInvolvedinPolitics.com.
Had the chance to interview Neil once again over in the Tavern, this time over on my show on Warrior Post Society Network and Patriot U, and I want to share some of that with you here on WallBuilders. Just a phenomenal story of how he got involved in politics in the first place, and actually we're going to jump into the interview at his answer to that question, because that was the first thing I asked him. I was like how did you? You know, you came out of tech, you'd done all these different things. What got you into politics?
Neil Mammen
Well, I guess it was a gradual change. I came here as the son from an extended family of atheists and Marxists. My dad was an atheist and a communist. Three of my uncles were very famous atheists and Marxists. Rather, some of them weren't atheists but some of them were actually Christians and Marxists. Go figure, that's a story for a different time. But in fact one of them was chairman of the World Council of Churches, which is, or speaker of the World Council of Churches, which is a very Marxist Christian ecumenical organization.
So I came out of that and I was kind of socialistic in my thinking. I came here, grew up I was born in Ghana, grew up in Jamaica, Ethiopia, Sudan, Yemen and of course my parents are from India. As you can probably tell, my dad was a professor in physics. He became a Christian when I was about five. So I did grow up in a Christian home, but there's still a lot of socialistic tendencies. Came to America, started working here in high tech, started four companies and somewhere along the line I was not a US citizen. I was talking to my roommates who get all these ballots for voting right every year or every two years, and I would look at them and I would get I'm like what, what is this, what is this? And I would tell them you can't vote for this, I can't vote, but you can vote for it. So they said well, why did you tell us how to vote? So I started a voting recommendations it was called Neils Biased Voting Recommendations and it actually you know it got
Rick Green
wait, wait. How old were you? How old were you at that point?
Neil Mammen
23, 24 at this time.
Rick Green
I love it right
Neil Mammen
yeah, and, and it, um, and then so they. What was funny about that is that, um, I mean, this was before the days of the internet, so we didn't really have much reach, but we, um, I would go out there and I would, you know, photocopy these things out in Hanuman. So, again, maybe 100, 150 people were passing them out to different people. But along the line I was working with junior high, I was a believer, I was working with junior high counselor and this kid this I guess he was about a 12-year-old kid in junior high came up and said hey, you know, because I was still very socialistic in my tendencies, but I didn't, but I realized that tax things were bad, right.
So anytime there was a bond or something, I would say go against this and stuff like that. So this kid comes up and says you got to listen to this guy on the radio. I've recorded every single one of his shows. This is probably 1989, 88. I've recorded every single one of his shows and you've got to listen to him. And so I said, sure, sure, fine.
So I go on the AM radio and I started listening to Rush Limbaugh.
Rick Green
I'm a Rush baby as well. Well, I was about two years behind you because I had somebody in law school actually recommended Rush to me in like 91, 92. And I had been politically active in college a little bit. It's funny, our backgrounds are so, so similar in that regard in terms of our journey into the arena. But I was young when I got into law school because I finished college early, so I was probably 20. Probably 20 when I started listening to Rush. So yeah, man, I'm just enjoying the fact that we had similar paths. Go ahead. So you start listening to Rush.
Neil Mammen
Yeah, and then, of course, being an entrepreneur starting four a startup companies, you kind of tend to realize what the government is on helping you in any way, fashion or form, especially if you're a small company. I realized quickly that the government was there and they were helping their cronies. Everybody misunderstands capitalism to be bad, but no, crony capitalism is bad because you need the government to force small businesses out of business. And that's exactly what crony capitalism does all the time. They give special benefits to different companies, big companies, but the small mom and pop guys don't get it. And we were small startup companies. Yeah, we were raising $15 million, $8 million, but we're still a small company, maybe 30 employees or something. But the whole idea was there look, most Americans. And I would get into these arguments. And the last argument that changed me was the gun argument. Coming from India, and Africa and all that. I was against people having guns and all that. And I would get into these arguments with these conservatives and I would lose every single one of them. And then one day one conservative said Neil, I don't think you understand the right to bear arms. Two things One, it didn't come from the government, it came from God. And two, it's not to protect you against thieves. You should have that right automatically. The Second Amendment has nothing to do with thieves and robbers. You have that from God. But the second amendment is specifically there to protect us from evil governments and then suddenly the door opened wide I'm like
Rick Green
Something clicked at that point.
Neil Mammen
Yeah goodness, how wrong have I been right? Yeah, you know, because nobody ever explained it that way
Rick Green
Well, and I'm guessing with your background, I mean even though you were very young and having so many relatives in all of those countries you mentioned at the beginning you saw tyranny, you saw what it was like when the people couldn't defend themselves.
Neil Mammen
Absolutely. I mean fascist government in Yemen, fascist government in Sudan, fascist government in Ghana. I don't remember Jamaica Ethiopia had. For part of the time I was there, they had the emperor, which is sort of a pseudo-fascist government, and then later on they had a communist government. And, by the way, and this is something most people don't realize, there's never been a fascist in history who wasn't a socialist. People think fascism on one side, socialism on the other side. Go throughout history. Find me a single fascist who wasn't a socialist Hitler fascist, socialist Mussolini. Where we get the name fascism from fascist socialist Idi Amin, saddam Hussein, ba'ath Party socialist. You can go down the line, even going all the way back to Caesar. Caesar was a fascist.
Rick Green
That's how they get to power, right. They have to promise we're going to make everybody good. We're going to make everybody feel good. Give you everything you want. Everybody will share, everybody will be happy. That's the only way a maniac can get into power is by promising people things, and that's exactly what I saw. And then when I realized, whoa, that's what's going to happen. And then so that was what led me into well, Christians need to be involved in politics.
What was really interesting about that is that I had never, because, growing up in a communist /Christian environment, you know, my family hails its Christianity back to St Thomas in 51 AD, right? So we're like ancient Christian church there, and so our family is like Christian way, way, way back when. So, growing up in that environment, I had never considered why you would separate politics from religion. All my uncles were communists and and Christians. The other ones who were like, oh no, we got to marry the two. Um, but what I did understand was the difference between rights and goods, and I'll explain that, and you know this as well as I do. But, um, so I, when I came here, I saw these Americans are like, oh no, we can't get involved politics. I'm like why? Yeah, and then they had to explain to me that Jesus wasn't involved in politics. And when I, when they said that, I'm like why, how could he not be involved in politics.
And then I started. That's when we came up with the book. You know Jesus is involved that he started with. Jesus was involved in politics. Why aren't you, why isn't your church? And I realized the more I wrote it, I realized well, no, He is involved in politics today. And so I crossed out the was and put, the isn't. And most Christians don't realize, and it's quite simply this I mean, the Jews had a system of government. In fact, where do we get our concept of the Republican form of government? We get it from Exodus 18, right.
That was the first time a Republican form of government was ever implemented in the history that we know was ever documented in the history of mankind.
Long before the Greeks, long before the Plato, long before all those guys there was the system of government and even today, like you go all the way back,
Rick Green
even today you think about that leaders of tens, fifties, hundreds, thousands. That's local, county, state, federal government, right there.
Neil Mammen
Exactly, it was all set right there and then all these guys were, and this is what I tell you. Know, when I teach this to churches, I go look, according to the Bible, one in 10 people has to be a politician.
Rick Green
Oh, that's good man, I never thought about that.
Neil Mammen
Look down your aisle, count 10 people. If there's no politician there you're supposed to be it.
Rick Green
That's good yeah.
Neil Mammen
One in 10 of us is supposed to be a politician. We're supposed to be a leader of 10s or 50s or 100s, right,
Rick Green
Of course around here we say no politicians, we want patriots.
But yeah, yeah, yeah, I get what you're saying.
Neil Mammen
And the word in the word in Hebrew was the Tsar, which really becomes Shoftim, which is the judge, which is really not judge, it's ruler. So the book of judges is not the book of judges. The book of rulers is the book of chieftains.
Rick Green
All right, folks going to jump in here real quick for a break. You're listening to Neil Mammen, my interview with him in the tavern, and we'll get a little bit more about that when we come back.
Stay with us. You're listening to The WallBuilder Show.
Break.
Rick Green
Welcome back. Thanks for staying with us on WallBuilders. We're going to jump right back in with my interview with Neil Mammen in the tavern and we're going to jump back into the interview where I ask him about a way to find non-woke churches. Mychurchfinder.org is the website that he created with Roger Ellsworth. Here we go.
Neil Mammen
So Roger Elswick came to me and he said, through Dran Reese some of you guys know Dran Reese he said hey, I want to do a website where we can find the non-woke churches. So we implemented that and in about three months we got up and running. We got it running about November last year and what it is you go online and you've talked about it, we've talked about it here you go online and you register your church MyChurchFindTheOrder.org, register your church as a pastor, and you have a 45-question survey that determines whether you're woke or not, and it determines you based on three things. The lowest grade you can get is a C grade. That is, your biblically sound, and we give you all the questions for the biblically soundness. Then, if you want to do better than that, you've got to get a B grade, and a B grade means that you're not only biblically sound but you're culturally aware. So you're teaching about abortion, you're teaching about homosexuality, you're teaching about all these things that are CRT and all that stuff. You're teaching about those, and that's okay. That's still a B. Why is it only a B? You do something about it.
Neil Mammen
And so to get an A grade, you have to be politically active. That means you have to be putting out voter guides, you have to be talking to your congregation about how to vote and what God's law- People always say well, I'm going to vote my values, no, no, no, you're not supposed to vote your values, you're supposed to vote God's values. They're not your values, they're no different than anybody else's values. When I go to a politician, I say you should vote this way. It's not because that's what I think, no, because that's what God thinks according to the Bible. Right, I have no authority to tell you what to do. Right, it's like Michael and Lucifer. Yeah, I have no authority, but the lord rebuke you. The lord rebuke you, mr. politician, for passing a bill that says that children can be genetically mutilated. Right, no, which?
Rick Green
is also the same, is mutilating, which is also the same response. To say, oh, you're judging, you're judging. No, I'm not judging. God's judging. This is just God's law. He's the one that set these rules in place, not me
Neil Mammen
So you're stuck with it, buddy, you know.
Rick Green
So that's the kind of thing that we want people to do.
We want to get involved. Many people say thank you, thank you, thank you for this, because they've been looking right. They're tired of the woke church. They're leaving these pastors and these churches that won't touch these issues or, worse, they're actually teaching the opposite. They're actually saying you know, God just wants you to love everybody, no matter what. Love their behavior even, I mean, celebrate their behavior. It's crazy how woke the church has gotten and so people have been asking and asking and asking. So putting this tool out there is critical. We want as many people as possible to have this, and it's not only great for the parishioners that are looking for a non-woke church. It's a great little prod right. It's a great little encouragement to those pastors in those churches to take an even bolder stance. If you take that test, you do those 45 questions and you're a C, we'll help you move to a B, we'll help you move to an A. You know we want to come alongside you, serve you, help you.
Neil Mammen
But it also shows you where you're deficient. Now here's what's good about it is, if you go to a church that's good and you want your pastor to be enlisted on there or to enter the survey, there's an email where you can click on it and say send my pastor an email and we'll send him a bunch of emails saying, hey, so-and-so has asked that you fill out this form, and it keeps up. But here's where I think the most power comes from. Right now we have about 250 pastors, so we're just growing right. It's getting the word out. You know pastors are busy. 45 questions takes you about 15, 20 minutes, right, and so you've got to spend that time.
Rick Green
And they almost need to hear about it multiple times, just like any other marketing right, exactly they need to hear you and me talking about it today. They need somebody in their church to say hey, have you filled out that form yet? Exactly, keep bugging them.
Neil Mammen
Keep bugging them right, that's right, but here's what's great about it. So let's say, you get to a point where there's a school board meeting or something's happening locally, right, and you need to gather the other pastors. Well, guess where you need to go? Go to mychurchfinder.org do a search for your zip code and you will see all the pastors in your zip codes who are a pastors.
Rick Green
Got to take another break, folks. Actually, that's all of the mom and interview we're going to be able to do for today's program. You can get the whole thing over at PatriotU, so go to patriotacademy.tv for the full interview. We're back now with David and Tim Barton. Thanks to Neil, appreciate him coming on and helping us have a good resource like this. You know, guys, we had a what would we call that map. We had a few years ago for the Black Robed Regiment pastors, right, and people love that. They love being able to go find a pastor that they felt like was, you know, or they knew was going to be like those Revolutionary War pastors. That's kind of what this does. It's a little bit different but in the same way it's just helping people get connected to a good, non-woke church.
Tim Barton
It really is. And I will say, first and foremost, I am so glad somebody else is doing this, because we were trying to keep up with the Black Group Regiment Pastor man, I mean that's a project. That is not an easy thing. When you talk about the fact there's approximately 380,000 senior churches or senior pastors and churches in America, I mean that is an astronomical number.
Rick Green
Oh, come on, Tim. That only means you only need to call about 1,000 a day just to check back in, see how they're doing, make sure if they want to be on the website or not. 1,000 a day, you can make that many calls
Tim Barton
That seems easy, I mean astronomical project and so having something where people can voluntarily get involved and engage, recognizing that we need churches and pastors to be part of the solution and culture dad, as you mentioned even before the interview, where, when you look back at the great awakenings, one of the defining things of the great awakenings it wasn't just pastors telling people about Jesus, it was challenging them in the way they live life and the way they engage culture.
And you know, I, I guys, I love what Neil talked about where, when, when we look inside of a church and think about that 10% that's tied to God, he said well, I think one out of every 10 ought to be involved politically, ought to be an elected official, at whatever level.
It's such an interesting thought, but if we consider where are the various areas that God has called us to be engaged in and involved in and make a difference, and how much we have disengaged from the political sphere, where people have begun to catch on to, we need people engaged in media and in Hollywood. We're beginning to see this more and more, but it's only been, I would say, in the last couple of more much more recently, maybe the last decade or two, that we have seen Christians begin to wake up and engage and, especially since COVID, we have seen an awakening of Christians recognizing the need for involvement. This is something that certainly I thought he made a great point like 10%. Let's have at least 10% involved, not just voting, but actually on school board, on city council, that are state reps or whatever right that elected official position might be.
But having 10% such a great point
David Barton
You know, one of the things I think is really important too is that we become strong. And even if you think physically, how do you become strong? It's by resistance. If you lift weights, you want a certain amount of resistance. If you do push-ups, if you do pull-ups, anything else you've got to have that physical resistance, otherwise you never get stronger. Well, we're in a culture right now that doesn't like resistance, doesn't like engaging resistance, doesn't like having any kind of debate or conflict or anything else, and you'll never get stronger if you don't engage in some type of having resistance and having to think through it, and sometimes that's even personal resistance.
You remember the disciples when they were talking to Jesus. They said, Jesus, that's a really hard teaching. Who's going to be able to do that? And he said, well, these are the words of life, this is the bread of life, and so that resistance, you got to push through some things that sometimes make you uncomfortable, and that's really what churches need to be able to do.
That's what we're finding out right now, as people are pushing into running for school board. You know, Neil talked about one out of every 10 needs to be an elected official. So we're running for school board. And man, that was an ugly race. Well, yeah, sometimes school board races are uglier than races for US Senate, quite frankly, the local races are tougher and well, not necessarily tougher but they're usually meaner and uglier than high races.
And so I think that's a mentality we've got to get into is just because there's resistance doesn't mean we should run from it. That's what makes you strong and that's what you've got to do to change the culture, and maybe that's what we need in this generation, which we had in the 1700s and 1800s, we had that stick to it kind of push through it type of stuff, and we need to develop that now. We need pastors to help develop that. We need to hang in with pastors who sometimes challenge us, and I'm not sure that I agree with that and I don't think that's right. Well, work through it, get through that resistance and become stronger as a result.
Rick Green
All right, folks, wallbuilders.show that's where you can go for archives of the program. If you missed any of the shows over the last few weeks, you can check them out there at wallbuilders.show and then, of course, go to wallbuilders.com. Make that one time a monthly contribution. Come alongside us. Let's amplify this voice of truth, let's educate Americans, equip and inspire them, and let's save this constitutional republic. Thanks so much for listening to The WallBuilders Show.