Roundtable: Spiritual Gifts in the Church

All right, well, welcome brothers. I'm looking forward to this conversation. Matt Chandler, Andrew Wilson, we're gonna have a conversation here about spiritual gifts. And so, love it. This topic is one that creates excitement for some people, confusion for other people, and our hope is just to have a charitable conversation where we can learn from one another, encourage one another, maybe clarify some things. And so I'll just start the conversation by asking this: when we talk about spiritual gifts, what are we talking about? Somebody want to give a definition?

And, uh, you want to see if we can frame… I think I think I’m… so be talking about gifts of grace that God gives through the spirit to build up and edify the church, which are meant to be used by a believer or a group of believers in service of other believers. In a sense, I think the term could be used very broadly in the sense of you have this spiritual gift of being able… you make other people feel better around you; you strengthen them. But usually we narrow it slightly biblically to the gift which are particularly identified in Romans 12, in 1 Corinthians 12, maybe Ephesians 4, maybe one or two other places. And so they're the ones where most of the attention goes. But I think in a way those… the gifts that get the attention are really a subset of our gifts of grace that God gives by the Spirit of the church. And I think they are all designed for edification of the body. And I think that’s the best way, you know, what they are is spirit-given gift of grace to try and build up the church. Okay. You got something?

Yeah. Well, I want to add to… I just want to… so you wouldn’t… you wouldn’t care for the categories of like miraculous gifts versus…

No, I wouldn’t. Because I don’t think there’s such a thing as a gift in a sense which is just like an ordinary innate possession. And I think I know what people mean. Yeah, I think they mean a gift that you can see and go, “Oh wow, that’s particularly impressive,” or a gift that moves beyond superhuman, beyond normal human powers. But at the same time, I… I think it’s unwise at both ends. I think it can… think the Corinthians did this, sure. The over-elevated miraculous gifts and poor… saying, “No, no, no. Some people have got that. Some people have got the gift of helping.” Yeah, but I don’t… can I also think you can undervalue the gift of helping if you don’t rightly frame that as a spiritual gift as well. And I think Paul’s aim in a text like 1 Corinthians 12 to 14 is to try and get everyone to realize that the test of this is whether or not you’re loving your brothers and sisters by using your heads, it appears, not how miraculous or what it is. So I can… I understand the further, but I don’t tend to use it much.

Yeah. Okay. If… let me see if I can reframe that. So the gifts… when we’re talking about the gifts… God has sovereignly decreed in his generosity to give gifts of grace to his people for the building up of his church.

Yeah, so far, yes. Okay. And Matt, you kind of fleshed out the question or talked about the question… some people talk about those gifts… is some of those are miraculous gifts or sign gifts, and you talked about there’s a certain subset of those gifts of grace. What’s the… what’s the confusion then, if… if we just kind of keep it up high and say, “Hey, God gives gifts to his people for the edification of his people.” I think most people would say yes, right? So where’s the confusion? Where’s the challenge? Or would most people not say yes?

No. I… I think by and large, I don’t know of a school of thought in Christianity that says, “No, God does not sovereignty bestow gifts upon his people for the build up of the… the…” The debate is… and I’ll try to make it… I think as simple as I know how to make it… are all the gifts that we see in the New Testament still available for all believers today, or are some of those gifts available while others are no longer needed and necessary because the Canon of Scripture has been closed? So the… the question of giftedness has embraced by all… again, I don’t know of any historical subset of Christianity would say that no, that’s simply not true… not all believers have been given… given gifts of grace. But the… the real tension, and… and hopefully I would… I would hope charitable tension that is around the… the more miraculous gifts… if I see… I don’t… I don’t… it’s a sign… yeah… the subset around… I think the distinction exists… the reason the distinction exists in the discussion is because I think it has existed for segments of the church for a long time. So I think that for me the dividing line is probably not the most helpful one, but I know what people mean. But I think historically it has functioned, particularly since the Reformation, as a way of dividing out the kinds of gifts that we still have and the kinds of gifts we don’t have. And part… that was a… it was a historical result of the way that the Reformers thought that the Roman Catholic Church had allowed their miraculous gifts to run amok. They still believed they had apostles today, like the Pope, and they still believed they had prophetic ongoing revelation, like papal statements, and they still believed you could go and get healed by going to the tomb of this dead person or whatever. So the Reformers were quite cautious about some of the… what we were now called miraculous names. But I think in… in responding to that, I think they’ve introduced a split to your way of thinking about the gifts that I don’t think you’d see in Paul. But I do understand why, in the context… I think a forum discussion, it ends up functioning as two separate categories. So let’s see if we can clarify the distinctions.

Okay. So there is disagreement… there is… if we can be reductionistic, maybe two camps on this. You have camps… one camp who believes that there are all the gifts that are present in the New Testament are present today, and another camp that believes not all of the gifts that were present in the New Testament are available today. Is that a fair reductionistic view, or does there need to be more nuanced than that?

I’m not sure that… I’m not sure that’s reductionistic. I think that is the issue.

Okay. So then let’s talk about that. What… what… where is their agreement? Where is their disagreement? What are those views called?

Well, so… did… if you overdraw the lotto… you have a… server cessationist would be somebody who says that the revela… I think often the line that they might often draw is actually the revelatory gifts… all the gifts were… which I think is what you mean by sign gifts… actually, the idea that the gifts like prophecy and probably tongues… prophesies usually the big one… yeah… apostleship today, and often they would then also say the gift of languages and the gift of healing. But prophesies really the main one… that God is not revealing fresh things to and through the church today… that that’s complete with the Canon of Scripture… that would be generally what… and then cessationists, depending on their stripe, might add a whole bunch of other things in there, or they might say, “Actually, I think nearly all the other gifts can still function. I’m cautious about whether they don’t.” But it’s really about prophecy. And then continuationists or charismatic… swear… I think the distinction… it’s a distinction without a difference. They’re different labels for a kind of way you practice, I think. But… I care… I would usually use the word charismatic usually. But somebody believes that all of the spiritual gifts continue to be given today, and that’s really those of the… I think the two best labels. But in that… but you have various grades and shakers in brain. And so obviously there’s some people who would wear that charismatic who would horrify me in the way they practice, just as I think there are some people who wear the label cessationist who would horrify a lot of cessationist brothers and say, “No, you’re very unsure to pull in the way you apply that,” or whatever. So you’ve always got extremes, but those are, I think, the two key…

Okay. So we have the cessationist camp, which they believe some of the gifts have ceased or stopped. You have the continuationist camp, which believes all of the gifts have continued. We’re also calling the continuationists a charismatic, right? Same… different labels, same group. And then you have this continuum. Okay. What… what do these camps agree on? What are the things that they would both say yes and amen to?

Sue… yeah, I think the big one on… on both camps, by and large, although I can get confused in the aunts with both of them, is that God has revealed himself to us via the Word of God, and that in its healthiest places that the Word of God is sufficient and given to his people as the true test of all revelation. And so I think that’s the… that… that’s the healthiest… on… the healthiest… the… the charismatic side, the continuous side can be, I believe. And then on the cessationist… I think they’re gonna give a hearty amen to that. In fact, it’s their belief in that that makes some of the revelatory gifts so difficult for them to embrace because they can see it as an assault on the sufficiency of Scripture. So if Scripture… if the scriptures are sufficient, then why do I need a dream? Why would I need a prophetic utterance? Why… how would I put any stock in that of any real value when I know that this is wrought with danger and an error, and it can be confusing, and it can be used to manipulate and use a… where the Word of God is… is unchanging; it’s ever… you know, it’s eternal; it’s gonna… and so it… that… that in the end I think starts to… what we hold in common… the sufficiency of Scripture and the… but I do know that then, like Andy was alluding to, there’s a group of charismatic that he may be… him struggle with what I just said about the sufficiency of Scripture.

There. Yeah. I think that would…

Do you have any nuance on that? You know, I mean…

No. I think again to add… I think that’s… I think that’s where the groups would agree on the sufficiency of Scripture. I think they’d also though agree on the necessity of spiritual gifts insofar as they believe they are still given today to build up the church. So I think you get your most hardcore cessationist… Andy sit down… we disagree about which gifts are in that group, but over the gifts where we agreed we’d say, “These are necessary for the building up of the church and encouragement and edification,” and if the church doesn’t have those gifts, it’s not functioning properly; it’s not healthy. And so I think there would be agreement on that… that what’s just the disagreement is over whether or not that is true of prophecy particularly, and then the other gifts like healing and languages, or whether they’re not. But… but I think we’d probably agree on the necessity of the spiritual gifts for the church. Just my brother’s would make a distinction between the kinds of gifts that are available, and I wouldn’t… how would… so a cessationist argument would say, “I… I do believe that God heals; I… I just don’t believe the gift of healing is present. I do believe that God does for miraculous; I just don’t believe the miraculous gifts are present.” Flesh that out… what… where did the nuances come in on that… on that argument?

I think it depends on the person. I mean, I think some… I think the idea to… don’t you see… if you deny that God does miracles, you end up in very quickly and sort of… dais territory or material… you know, you’ve got real… real problems with not just a witness of Scripture but even the view of God you seem to ordinary… whether you get back in the 18th century clockmaker God, that kind of thing. So rightly people have been very careful to… preserved… and God can do anything; he reigns. But I think what can happen is that in… in saying, “No, God no longer gives the miraculous gifts,” that the effect of that in the way that you do or do not pursue it in the church can actually be very similar in the sense that you’re not necessarily expecting that to be something that God particularly does. He might. And of course, if you get ill, you can pray, but you’re not particularly expecting that to be something that… that happens. And you’re certainly not looking for some individuals in the people of God to be able to minister… particularly have in that gift. And that in practice is the way the difference works out.

Hey, you bet. Okay. So we could probably spend the rest of the day talking about disagreement. So we talked about what we’re… these two camps… sorry… what are the… if we could just summarize the disagreement. Okay. And I think… I think you’ve already touched on it, but I just want to pull it out to highlight it. And as we’re kind of walking through this… what do they disagree on? We talked a little bit about the revelatory gifts… that the sign gifts are no longer present. If we could just kind of reduce it simply for the sake of conversation, what do they disagree on?

Yeah, I’m not sure how to say it other than the way we’ve said it so far, which is the disagreement is around particularly the revelatory gifts of the Spirit, that of prophecy primarily, but also the miraculous gifts such as healings, and then tongues can get thrown into there. And… and whether or not those gifts stand in contrast to the sufficiency of Scripture. Yeah. So cessationist by and large would say yes… if those things are still active, then the sufficiency of Scripture… a… well, the Scriptures can’t be sufficient because God’s got to say these other things, right? And… and then a healthy biblically serious charismatic would say, “Actually, I believe these things exist because of the sufficiency of Scripture, and the sufficiency of Scripture is saying that God does these things. And so I’m surrendering to the sufficiency of Scripture by practicing these things, by helping maybe people discover whether or not they have these things, creating space for us to try to figure out how these gifts work in our body.” And so that… that’s the primary arguments… all about the sufficiency of Scripture and whether the revelatory gifts… if they’re active and… and present… if the miraculous gifts are active… and that hasn’t… what that does to the sufficiency of Scripture.

So it’s good… we talked about two… two camps, but there’s a continuum, right? There’s… there’s a spectrum, and you have extremes on both ends. But maybe one of the more common perspectives is the idea of open but cautious cessationism. Eager to talk about what that is and maybe what some of the challenges in your eye on its… as I understand it, there are… and so I have a lot of friends who would talk this way. They’d say, “No, I do believe that the gifts… biblically, I think, and even historically, I can be persuaded that the gifts continue. I don’t have a knockdown argument that the gift of prophecy ceased at the end of the 1st century. I can see it here through church history, and I can… I can… I don’t think I can defend that position from my exposition of Scripture. But I also have seen it used badly so much that I don’t want to pursue it.” Right. And so… put positively, I think they’re saying, “I am biblically persuaded, but… passed already cautious.” Put more negatively, which is sometimes with my friends… as I were sometimes challenge them on it, is to say, “I think that amounts to saying, ‘I believe the Bible says we should eagerly desire these gifts, and I’m not going to.’” Which I think… so obviously depends… they would not frame it quite that way. But for me… because obviously leaders then… if they could do that, then you would be… there be some headway, right? It’ll be another issue.

Exactly. And I think… so to me… and I’ve had plenty of conversations that have that form, and I think sometimes there are very… you know, it’s sometimes very well-grounded reasons for saying, “This is why I haven’t gone there in my church, because it would take all the oxygen out of the church; we’d have to do nothing else with that,” or there’s just too much fear or whatever. But I still… I think there’s quite an important principle with the stewardship of all of the gifts of God, and that pretty much every gift God has given has been distorted in teaching somewhere in the church’s history. And the answer to that is to teach it and practice it well rather than not at all. But I think that’s what open… opening courses are… so guys who would say, “Biblically, I’m there. I might even agree historically… at least persuadable if not persuaded. But in practice, I don’t pursue it.” And so for me there’s… there’s the challenge of saying… so really what you’re saying, if you’re not careful, is this biblical imperative that does challenge me, and I’m just not going to go there. And is why I have concerns about it. And what do you think’s behind that? Is it… they feel inadequate or ill-equipped to pursue it? If it’s… I believe in the position biblically… I have no models for how it’s to be practiced faithfully. And… and I have a finite amount of resources, time and attention to give to it. What do you think is… how would you encourage somebody in that blessing?

I see… in large part, I think some of that is because Christians from my kind of stable have not always… well, at all… and in a sense of… then created the impression… if you end up going down this road, you’ll end up in lunacy land over there. And that’s… so one of the things I wanted to do essentially to help charismatic think about how to do these things biblically. I think that’s a big part of it. But I do… for me, I’m encouraged in the discussions I’ve had in the last few years about this petition in your country… actually, I think in the UK the mainstream is more charismatic than the mainstream is in the US. But I think I’m… I feel like the biblical debate is winnable. I feel like people are… because everybody involved is saying, “No, I really want to see what Scripture did.” This is a very Berean spirit in North American evangelicalism: let’s go back and see if these things are so. And obviously there are some who would… no, no, no, no. But a lot of people who I think would say, “I think the biblical arguments are stronger than I’ve realized,” or stronger than are my tradition perhaps emphasized. But I still want some help frantically doing that. And of course that’s where I think you need a mixture of leadership… where a lot of this comes down to poor leadership or just clumsy bad stewardship of the leadership gift or poor pastoring of people as much as it comes down to biblical exposition being… 40… I think sometimes it’s people going, “Oh, you’re right about the gifts, but you’re… that way of doing it is gonna really spook all of these people, and that wasn’t wise. And you didn’t distinguish between this excellent word and that just ridiculous nonsense that that person said in the church. Therefore, doesn’t feel safe,” right, when you handle the gifts that way. So I think in a way there’s partly… we just gotta admit that… I think we’ve got to get our own house in order as well. But I do think the biblical case is still worth making, and I’ve been encouraged the extent to which people have taken that and said, “Yeah, we’ve got stuff to learn here.”

Yeah. And I could speak as the… the pastor of a church that doctrinally speaking has been a continuous church from day one. We believe in the revelatory gifts of the Holy Spirit; we want to walk in those. And then we just kind of let it sit as a doctrinal statement for over a decade, right? And so people would come in and… and they would even learn in our membership class, “Hey, this is what we do.” We’d put just some caveats around it: “Hey, if your goal is to come in here, get everybody speaking in tongues, that’s gonna end in an awkward meeting. So let’s just… don’t… just don’t join our church… that… the… join a church that… that is their goal, and that is the sign of maturity, and that is… that’s not how we’re gonna do things here.” But… but it never really thought about… okay, how do we help people understand these? How do we train them to use it? How do we unleash it? And I know in my own struggle as a… you know, charismatic with a seatbelt on, or… you know, there’s a thousand ways to say it, was that there really is a level of the unknown once you open that box. And… and once you open that up and… and you… you see what you’re doing… and this… for me… so two years old to see that I’m going, “Woo, oh… I’m… I’m convinced biblically, and I’m dragging my feet in regards to the practicalities. And because there’s gonna be a cost to this, and… and am I willing to pay the cost to my reputation? To what it might mean at our church? For…” And… and so then now I’m… I’ve grown in conviction to go, “Okay, how do you do this well?” And… and I think a church like the village… what we’re still in the middle of is… how do you do this well? How do you champion the Word of God as being sufficient and inherent and in the bedrock, and yet that sufficient and errant infallible word says that these are gifts given to the church for her good? But I have found in the last two years of my life a constant grabbing of this group and grabbing of this group… abode… no, I’m… you’re… we’re saying the same thing… while some of them are like, “We’re not saying the same thing.” You know, “We’re in this group…” “Oh, no, we’re not saying the same thing.” Then… and I’m saying, “No, we are, and we’re trying to get to the same place.” And I don’t know if it’s personality types or past experiences… if I think about our elder board… I know two of our elders who are very excited about growing in this area… we’re super hesitant and anxious early on because they grew up in really terrible Pentecostal charismatic settings where they saw excess and abuse and… and just really early on… if that’s where we’re going, I’m not… I’m not interested in going there. I’m like, “Man, aha… I’m not… I can’t go there convictionally.” And so I think that there’s a… there’s a couple of things that play… one… there is… okay, where do I begin? And so then you’ve got to kind of come… you know, make your mistakes. And the mistakes are costly if you’re preexistent, and you’re… you know, you’ve got a good thing… the spirit of God’s working, and people love the Bible. And then you’re saying, “Okay, if we love the Bible, here’s what the Bible says. Let’s step into this.” Well, there really aren’t a lot of good models for existing churches to go, “Okay, how do we move the needle faithfully?” And so I know that TVC… I’m just trying to create space… let’s just create a space that’s slow and quiet. Let’s ask the Holy Spirit to work. And then simultaneously create a space for people that are like, “All this really wigs me out still.” So I just want to be able to go… it’s okay… it’s not like… if… if your buddy gets a word for somebody else in the room, he’s not varsity and you’re not junior varsity, right? He’s not the mature one; you’re not the immature one; the… you’re both beloved by God, purchased by the blood of Christ, and… and God’s gonna use and grow you in his time and how he wants to do it. And man, you might not ever… and… and they might have a thousand… gosh, I look around all the time. I’m like, “I want that gift.” And I know Paul says… I don’t get him all. But… and I think you alluded this in a sermon I heard you preach years ago where you got Adrian at your church… even just… he prays, and people gets healed, and you can see it. And even in Corinth… this is what Paul is… median is a church where… I think sometimes it’s been misunderstood as a church… as a letter about… you guys are all crazy spiritual… all pipe down. But it isn’t really. It’s a letter… you… this segment of the church is crazy spiritual, but you’ve got this other group here, and these guys are looking down on these guys, and these guys are looking down on these guys, and we need to bring you together. So the idea of the dangerous thing is actually when people start to despise one another within the body over not just their position on the guest but their practice.

Or lack thereof. And use you look at the broad sweep of evangelicalism, you'd say, "Well, I can definitely see that there." And then in many local churches, it exists as well. Yeah. And the charismatic person is at least as likely to do it, which is why the love chapter is there. And it's it's not wasn't originally written for weddings; it was written if the spiritual gifts right, like, "New guys are this is why you got to figure this out." Tongues of men and angels are all very well, but if you don't have love, it adds up to nothing. So I think is is that's another way I'd help encourage someone who was wrestling with how to apply it. I think, "Well, let's spend some time talking about the application of it." And you know, we we did some definitions, and we we didn't spend a ton of time defending a position. And so we're assuming at this point that people at least are or maybe leaning more towards the position that we're talking about here, which is a continuationist position.

And if you you know what I think it would be helpful just to give a little bit of context, so maybe to bounce back a little bit to talk about if somebody wants to grow in their biblical understanding of this position, where would you point them? Where would you point them to scripturally? Where would you pointing to historically? I think I think that would help the cover. So yeah, sure. I mean, biblically, I think in some ways the ID maker almost a hermeneutical default argument. What I mean by that is I would say that if there is an imperative, a command addressed there are New Testament believers, and it's not clearly constrained by context to only apply to one person, then our working assumption should be that's something I should obey. And therefore, when you have five different times in the New Testament, in 1 Corinthians, in 1 Thessalonians, where Paul says earnestly or Romans earnestly desire or if anybody has spiritual gifts to use them, and if you have this one use it, if you have prophesy, prophesy and use it according to your faith, then you have those texts. And so I'd say go to 1 Corinthians 12:14, Romans 12, and 1 Thessalonians 5 as well, actually. And then say those commands ought to stand unless there's a strong reason from the context that they shouldn't. That's how we should do biblical interpretation about anything. Like, you know, otherwise people you get people go, "How old pick and choose." And I like that one, but I'm not sure that's for today. You say, "No, the principle would be commands in the Bible apply to me." So and God when Paul says, "Do this," you do it unless you've got a strong reason from the context that doesn't matter affect you. So I think that's where I go biblically.

Historically, I'd tend to say jump eleven centuries further back than we often start our church history back to them or even fifteen centuries further back instead of starting it in the sixteenth century, where as we said at the start, there's quite a lot of contextual factors that you could defend very easily that the Reformers were objecting to. If you go back into the 2nd, 3rd, 4th centuries, you'd find a proliferation of testimonies of miracles, of prophesying, of speaking in other languages, of interpreting other languages, of healing gifts. And you see that quite a lot in Irenaeus in Basel at an Augustinian. See a lot of that stuff in the first four centuries. And I think I'd probably say go back just and there's plenty of my book does that. Sam Storms's book does that. There's quite a lot of quite helpful little summaries you can go to and saying, "Here's a bunch of resources to get you started." And then I think just the third argument, if I can throw it in, the other one I tend to go with this, the the argument from eschatology, which is really that we are looking for the the breaking in of the whole of the kingdom in the future. And really what I think you have to do is to look at the New Testament and say as and when the New Testament discusses the end of the gifts, where does it place that end? And I think the answer is that not just in 1 Corinthians 13, although notably there there are a number of texts that indicate that the end of the gift, but when they run out in their usefulness is actually the return of Christ rather than at the end of the first century or the end of the fourth century or whatever. So that will be a third argument I would use as well. But so I think it's not it I don't think it's a particularly days in a way. And obviously there's there would be responses to each argument for ample and people who I love very much and have taught really openly about these things. But I think so long as we can go then this is there's a solid biblical and historical argument for this, then I think what we'll find is that most of our conversation actually ends up being about how then do you do that without going weird, which is why that's what we spend most of our time talking about. Let's come back to that: How then do we do that without going weird? We've talked about it a little bit, but I do want it just to end the conversation for those maybe individuals, church leaders, or churches that are desiring to move in this direction faithfully, albeit clumsily, yeah, maybe even in the beginning, or maybe it's just that way all the way through. Yeah, how would you encourage that person, that church leader at that church? What would be some principles that you would give them to affirm them in this and maybe some some points of caution or some points of yeah.

I think if the goal is that it it's not weird, if that's what we're hoping for, then then that's not gonna happen. And so I think we live in a disenchanted age, and so I think part of your preaching and teaching is to help reimagine or re-enchant that their hearts and minds that there are spiritual realities all over the Bible. And and yet if you if you talk about a virgin being, you know, regenerated by the Holy Spirit, like that you do the in connection that outgoing, well, that doesn't like nobody's like, "I just can't I just can't." But but if you're in Daniel and there's a territorial spirit, now you're all like, "Wait," and that's just too much, right? So there is a you have to help re-intent the imagination by letting the Bible be what it is. And I think just I think you can highlight certain parts while you're normally preached on that you have to do a you know, things get weird sermon series. But but I think as you're preaching, you can point out, "Hey, if we were really in this moment, this would really freak us out, and yet look at what the Lord is up to." So I think you have to reinstate his. And then I think that that if you're gonna do this in a healthy way and you're an existing church that hasn't done these things, you need to define terms early. Yeah, you need to talk about the way that's going to look because if you just open the box and you don't do those things, then it will be defined by the most popular book out or yeah, that yeah. And and then then what you're doing that you're gonna spend a lot of your time going, "No, I mean, yes, but no." And and I think that if you can say as best you can, "We're gonna define what these terms mean in the Bible, so when the Bible says a word of knowledge, here's here's that as best we know from history and the Word of God, this is what a word of knowledge is, this is what prophecy is, this is what the gift of healings plural, never singular, is, this is that." If we can take those and we can define them, now we've got our definitions. Now from those definitions, we can begin to build around that. And so those are the two I I think steps you have to take if you're gonna try to move is is one you need to reinterpreting almost anywhere in the Bible. The Bible is a weird book. The way God has chosen to act as strange, like, right, Jesus spit in some mud and rubbed it on a guy's eyes. Yeah, I mean, that that's why a and so and I specifically state New Testament, Old Testament came even weirder, right? But it's all the same thing; it's a it's a God outside of time entering into creation and acting, and that's just gonna look weird. And so we've to us. And then I think you've got to define some terms, otherwise you're gonna say word of knowledge or you get a word from God, and there's gonna be a thousand or 300 to whatever bigger churches, different definitions of what you're talking about. Those would be my two. Any insights there?

Yeah, I mean, I agree. I think that's really wise. And actually, Matt's done this in some ways. My I've inherited I've been I've grown up in ministry in charismatic contexts, so I don't have quite the same I haven't had to work through some of the issues you have, I expect. But I think the other thing the other thing that I've found has been very helpful for judges that have done it is simply to create contexts we use them. My friend Dave Smith uses the language of shallow end and deep end from a swimming pool, like that if you try and bring the gifts into your Sunday morning service from nowhere, a lot of people get spooked, the overreaction will set in, and you'll end up in trouble. Whereas if you create another setting in church life to be able to pursue that with people who know what they're getting into, where they stand it that can actually help as well. Yeah. Any final thoughts, wrap up this conversation? I think my own is I I am hungry, and I think we're seeing the first fruits of it for a movement of God in our day that is biblically serious. I mean, they are serious about the Word of God. The Word of God matters. It has been claimed is accidentally preached; it is embraced as cherished; it is loved. And and that the people are then spiritually alive. And and I don't just mean that in regards to salvation; I mean, they know they're gifted; they understand their gift sets, and they've deployed that gifting, you know, for the glory of Jesus in his bride and to the ends of the earth. And and I I can look around North America, and I can see the first fruits of that. And so I'm eager that we might be on the cusp of something. Yeah, that's my hope. It's great, Andrew. I'm excited too because I think and I've been privileged to see it in local churches where don't always get it right, but where people's sense of being animated by the Word of God but also animated by the gifts God has given them by the spirit that the two actually synergized and they come that actually can increase people's love for the Bible and increase people's faith that God wants to meet with them when they encounter him in normal ways, like praying, reading the Bible, and sharing the Lord's Supper and going to church. And I think the two rather than being sort of pulling against one another, I think I've seen the beautiful effect when the two reinforce one another. And I I just think it's an exciting vision, this exciting time. Well, thank you both for being leaders in this space for helping carry this conversation along, not just in your own churches but even wider than that. Yeah, thankful for yeah, thanks for the time. I love it.