Ep. 18 / Reimagining Faith Leadership for Modern Times ► Carey Nieuwhof

What if your life took a sharp turn from a promising legal career to leading a church? Join us as we uncover the fascinating journey of Carey Nieuwhof, a renowned leadership specialist whose podcast has reached over 34 million downloads. Carey shares how a supernatural call to ministry led him to swap law books for sermons. Through his recounting, listeners will gain insight into how the critical thinking skills developed during his law school days have been pivotal in his ministry work, transforming three small churches into the thriving Conexus Church. His story is an inspiration for anyone contemplating unexpected paths in their faith journey.

As we navigate the complex world of church leadership in the aftermath of COVID-19, Carey and I dissect the shifting landscape of ministry. From technological advancements to cultural shifts that challenge traditional structures, we explore pressing issues like burnout among pastors and the urgent need for new evangelism strategies. The episode also sheds light on the critical gap in practical leadership training in seminaries, reflecting a broader issue seen in various professions. These discussions provide valuable insights for leaders facing the evolving demands of shepherding a modern congregation.

Identity anchors have shifted dramatically in today's world, and as we explore these changes, we draw on the wisdom of figures like Tim Keller and Rick Warren. The discussion moves into the heart of modern evangelism, where familiar frameworks have given way to transient identity markers and secular pressures. In a culture increasingly detached from Christianity, Carey offers practical advice on rooting identity in Christ and inspiring others by living out the gospel. This episode is a beacon of encouragement for those striving to authentically express their faith in a rapidly changing society.

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Chapters

• 0:10 Podcast and Leadership Journey
• 7:18 Navigating Church Leadership Challenges
• 21:47 Rediscovering Identity in Modern Evangelism
• 31:05 Living Out the Gospel Today

Transcript

Brian:

00:10

Hello and welcome to Evangelical 360. My name is Brian Stiller, global Ambassador for the World Evangelical Alliance and host of this new podcast series. On Evangelical 360, I interview leaders, writers and influencers about contemporary issues impacting Christian life around the world. My hope is that it will not only be a global meeting place where faith is explored from different perspectives, but that each person listening will come away informed, encouraged, challenged and inspired. 

00:43

Today's : is leadership specialist Carey Nieuwhof. His podcast on Christian leadership is one of the largest in the world, with over 34 million downloads and counting. His Art of Leadership Academy provides an online community for church leaders as they seek to grow their congregations in healthy and effective ways. His many books touch on subjects such as cultural shifts affecting the church, how churches can effectively engage younger generations and what role social media might have in shaping church communities. Cary's daily connection with leaders, writers and thinkers provide a contemporary assessment of the church and its role in society. I'm sure it's going to be an engaging and informative conversation. Carey, I'm so delighted that you're with us today and I'm amazed that a Canadian pastor has one of the largest Christian podcasts in the world. How did that happen? 

Carey:

01:49

Now that's a great question. I mean a lot of grace. I can tell you that let's just start there. Very, very fortunate and it's funny. You know, I was talking to leaders here in the US in Atlanta last week about podcasting and we had some of the other biggest podcasts in the Christian realm in the US in Atlanta last week about podcasting and we had some of the other biggest podcasts in the Christian realm in the house that day. It is part mysterious. I mean, I give a lot of credit to God. You know it's like why does some stuff work and why does some stuff not work? I don't know 100%. What I do know is I was very fortunate to have started in 2014. 

02:23

So the podcast has been on the air for 10 years and at that time, a decade ago, I thought that it was already crowded space. I thought, oh, I've missed this, it's too late. Well, way more people are listening to podcasts today than were then. We did a couple things that might have helped. I wanted to bring long form interviewing into the church space and, to the best of my knowledge, there was one other Christian podcast. 

02:48

I was speaking a lot in Canada, but mostly in the US and, in some cases around the world and I'd be in green rooms with incredible thinkers and speakers and you know you have a typical green room conversation and I would always leave going gosh. I hope. Wish my elders could have heard that, I wish our staff could have heard that, I wish everyone could have heard it and I thought, well, why don't I just bring this to people? So that was the vision behind it and everybody told me I was wrong. That was a time that they released the data for the first time that humans now have the attention span of goldfish. So they said 40, 45 minutes, no one's going to listen. And I thought, well, I want to try anyway. So we tried and a decade later, it's gone fairly well. We're really, really encouraged. So, and I believe that there is a deep appetite for long form, meaningful conversations by thoughtful leaders. Those are the kind of conversations I want to have with people. So that's what I try to bring to my audience, terry. 

Brian:

03:46

I'd like to circle back to how all of this began in your life. So many people are wondering how can God use me? How do I start? What are the ingredients that I need to accumulate to be effective for God? You started out in law as a pastor. Give us a thumbnail sketch of your early years. 

Carey:

04:08

I thought when I was a kid that I wanted to be a lawyer. You know, this was the pre-digital era. Now you can Google any position in the world. Back then it was like it's what you heard from friends of your parents, it's what you saw on television and I thought, oh, lawyer, looks pretty good. I had no rationale behind what being a lawyer involved at all, but I thought, oh, that looks good. So I went to law school, met my wife there that was the best part Started dating this incredible woman who was in my first year class with me and we fell in love, got married. That's the best thing to come out of law school. But it also reshaped my brain, like I think, like a lawyer, and I bring a lot of that critical analysis, I think, to my work in the church space. 

04:52

But halfway through Osgoode I had a supernatural experience like a call to ministry and being Presbyterian in background, I'm trained to doubt all of those calls, anything supernatural. But it was irresistible and I tested it. I was skeptical of it but out of obedience, finished law went into seminary and thought I don't have gifts for ministry. I thought maybe I'd go on to teach. I looked into doing a doctorate at Princeton. At one point in homiletics I thought well, I like to teach, maybe I'll just teach. So, long story short, we decided to try out congregational ministry and I found three little churches north of Toronto, about an hour north of Toronto, in a community I had never heard of, oromidanti Started with those three churches and here we are, almost 30 years later, and those churches would go on to become what is today Conexus Church, which I had the privilege of leading for 20 years, and we're still part of it, my wife and I. We attend, we give, we serve when we can, and so that's sort of the brief thumbnail. 

06:00

And then all of this that I'm doing now started out as a hobby. When our church, those three Presbyterian churches, started to grow. It was an anomaly in the denomination. First of all, not a lot of growing churches in Canada period. Secondly, very few churches that were growing in my particular denomination at the time. So we began to get questions how is this happening? What's going on? What are you doing? 

06:20

And so I started to teach and I would do workshops at a presbytery. I would, you know, jump on phone calls with leaders at the time. And then that led us to doing a conference. We did a couple of national conferences for well, it was Presbyterians, but it was a lot of people from across Canada. That was like 20 years ago, and then I had a period of burnout in 2006. One of the reasons I burned out was I thought I have no life outside of work, so I thought what could I do? That would be interesting. So I started experimenting with blogging a year after I burned out, and then, in 2012, doubled down and in 2014, launched a podcast. And then, when I stepped out of the lead pastor role in 2015 and became the teaching pastor at Connexus, I had even more bandwidth and so I really started doubling down on the hobby, and the hobby becomes what I'm doing now full-time. 

Brian:

07:18

Your focus is on pastoral leadership. Did that emerge out of your experience in the church or were you seeing something on a broader scale? 

Carey:

07:25

You know the way I think about it, brian, is I went to law school and no one taught me how to run a law firm, and I went to seminary and nobody taught me how to run a church. I feel like what I do right now is I fill in the blanks. Like you may know how to parse a Greek verb, but how do you lead your board? Or how do you raise money without losing your soul? Or how do you actually learn to preach without using notes, or all those things that are really practical skills that, honestly, I'd learn the hard way? Or how do you deal with a difficult congregational member or trolls online who are attacking your church? So all that stuff can't really take a course for it. So that's what I teach and that's the niche that I found that I really enjoy speaking into on a daily basis. 

Brian:

08:14

I was listening to you this morning and you were talking to a therapist dealing with pastors who are burned out. As I'm listening, I realize that there is across the country, especially following COVID, enormous needs that probably aren't being met by denominations. Was this something that you had observed? 

Carey:

08:35

Oh, yeah, definitely. You know, if you think about a denominational structure and I'm a fan of denominations, I'm not against them, and I went back to my old denomination after 18 years and had the privilege of working with some leaders in that denomination. So I speak to churches all the time. But you know, things are changing. Denominations were perfectly set up for 19th and early 20th century world and what's happened is we have access to communication we've never had before. We have access to connection. Well, what's happened in the last 25 years in particular is the cost of entry has dropped to pretty much nothing. And then, you know, with mass communication broadcasting in the 20th century, the internet in the 21st century people suddenly have access to people and resources and help that they didn't have before. So the denominational walls kind of broke down and we're more affinity based now. So when you look at all that, yeah, people are looking all over for connection, for content, for help. 

09:41

I think that's one of the reasons we're so burned out too is information used to be scarce. 

09:49

Now it's plentiful, and every time you look at your phone, you're one click away from doom, scrolling into some horrible rabbit hole of despair that you can find in everything from mainstream news to social media accounts that you follow and everything seems to be just overwhelming. The utopia that we sort of experienced briefly in the 90s and the early 2000s seems to have gone and it seems like we're in a very dystopian world. On the one hand, the good news is you can do things like this now. The bad news is everybody's doing things like this and it can be very depressing at times and leadership is hard, particularly in the Canadian context. You know there isn't the infrastructure there used to be to support church leaders. You're dealing with a congregation and a community that has significant mental health issues. My burnout happened in the context of a highly growing church, but I talked to a really good friend who's Roman Catholic and he says well, lead a dying church that has its own burnout and depression and difficulties associated with it. 

Brian:

10:53

Cary, as I travel the world, your name pops up in so many places and obviously the nerve that you have touched is leadership within the church as you observe the church today and leadership and the issues that we're facing. What are the prime matters affecting church leadership that you're addressing and that you are listening to as you interview your various people? 

Carey:

11:18

So one of them. I think that is under the surface. In Canada we're kind of from the future, because the Christian era died when I was a kid. Like by the time I was in high school, almost nobody went to church anymore. You know people my age and they're coming to terms with it in the United States right now. 

11:38

What I'm trying to help leaders come to terms with and this is a sub theme of my work is it's like guys, it's like it's a different world out there and you know we can't assume that all of our neighbors are going to come to faith. And when I give that message in the Bible Belt, I could be at a place like Dallas or Nashville or Atlanta. The boomer pastors will come up and say, son, you don't understand. This is still a Christian country. We're still a Christian. And I'm like have you talked to your youth pastor? And the youth pastor is like this feels like California man, this feels like New England, this feels like like here. It's happening in the U? S generationally and that's just a matter of time until it trickles up and that's creating a lot of the polarization of politics, that's creating a lot of the tension in churches. That's creating a near death of evangelism in North American churches, and you see that a little bit. You mentioned COVID earlier. 

12:36

Like one of the trends I was watching Canada is, you saw a lot of churches circle the wagons. It's like we don't like the government, we don't like these regulations. They circle the wagons and it's like we're the true believers who are left. That's a problem on about a thousand levels. First of all, you know first, kings 19,. You're not you're probably not the only one left. Secondly, what do we do about this world that is literally without Christ? 

13:05

In 2023, the number of pastors who said our church is effective at evangelism was 1%. In other words, 99% of pastors had the humility to say we're not very good at this. And you hear this rallying cry around discipleship. Yeah, there are discipleship issues in the church, but who's reaching the lost? Only three to 5% of American churches are experiencing what they call high conversion growth. I don't have equivalent stats for Canada, but I imagine it's even smaller. 

13:37

You know, when I led Connexus, and now under the great leader who has followed me, jeff Brody, 50% of the people who walk in the door at Connexus Church North of Toronto self-identify as not having a regular pattern of church attendance. I love that. Identify as not having a regular pattern of church attendance. I love that. That's three to five percent of churches in the US can say that, and the other 95 percent of growing churches. 97 percent of growing churches, it's all transfer growth, it's consolidation. So even when you look at the anomaly stories of high growth, larger churches in Canada and the US, what you discover is it's a shuffling of the saints. We have some serious problems and that's all around the culture wars. People are saying, well, we'll just take back Washington, we'll take back Ottawa, we'll take back the political agenda. It's like I think that was discussed 2000 years ago and I'm pretty sure Jesus said let's bring in a different kingdom. So those are some of the issues that I'm wrestling with on a daily basis. That's under a lot of what I do. 

Brian:

14:37

How do we engage the younger generation, who may be disillusioned from traditional practices or even may be upset by the politicization that has occurred in our churches throughout North America? 

Carey:

14:50

Well, to pick up from where I left off, I think it's the alt-kingdom, I think you know. Think they've seen the world. They're digital natives and Solomon named this 3000 years ago. He said with much wisdom comes much Z is. They've seen it all and they've seen it all before their 15th birthday. They've watched the mental health crisis of their parents. They're up on politics, they're up on culture. They're disillusioned. They've already had their hearts broken. 

15:28

Not trying to paint an overly difficult person, but it used to be. A couple of generations ago, you got a little bit cynical if you weren't careful. As you got older, all that knowledge is now infused on a very young generation. So what do you do with that knowledge? I think that's what they're dealing with, and they look at the politicization, what the church has done in terms of partisanship, what the country has done in terms of partisanship, and go. That's not it either. So I think, to say it succinctly, they're not looking for an echo of the culture, they're looking for an alternative to it. 

16:03

So I go back 20 years when I was leaving our church and it was growing like crazy we do crazy things that kind of echo the culture. We drove a car on stage one Sunday, you know, or motorcycle, we were doing cover tunes and you know the band could pull this off. That era served a purpose for a time, because it said to the church or to people who didn't go to church hey, this is relevant, like we understand the world you live in. Well, now everyone's got access to that and anybody can do that. So now it's actually we want to posit an alternative. There's more worship music, there's more silence in church, there's more spiritual topics. So, you know, as Connexus Church has continued to evolve and grow, we pivoted away from that attractional church model. 

16:48

And what's interesting too about the next generation is when they reach out to you online or in real life, they're actually interested in going deeper. Sooner, 20 years ago, you get a younger boomer who's sitting in the back row with his arms crossed and he's not particularly might take him six months of sitting in the back row to make up his mind about whether church is interesting to him. If you got a Gen Z coming to your church today, trust me, they've done the homework. They have asked chatbots about the meaning of life, they have Googled it to death, they have searched TikTok. And if they show up at your church or they show up online. They're curious, they're hungry and they're ready to go further, faster. 

17:33

And I think churches have to get with the program. They don't want to be entertained, they want to be discipled. They want to know, like, what is Christianity really all about? Can you please show me? And if they understand it and they're converted, they will invite their friends. And we see that happening at scale at Connexus right now. Right now, it's absolutely exciting to see the next generation not only walking in but coming to faith, inviting their friends and realizing that there's an alternative to the despair that really is so much of our culture these days. 

Brian:

18:06

Cary. Social media is with us, it's all around us. My generation learned how to operate with it, but to what degree are churches, in your view, aware and utilizing social media as a means to engage younger people, or even people of my generation, with the gospel? 

Carey:

18:30

Yeah, I think we're in the very early stages of that right now, brian, and I'm not sure we're doing a particularly good job. So you know, as a former lead pastor myself, what do we like to do? We like to talk about Sunday. We like to say, hey, coming up this Sunday, coming up this Sunday, don't miss this Sunday. Hey, if you miss this Sunday, here's the message. You can catch it online. 

18:50

Basically, most churches vast majority of churches still use social media as a billboard. They're using it to advertise their product, and their product is an in-person service. That's not terrible, but it's probably not the greatest effectiveness. The churches that are getting it right are using it as social ministry, as Nona Jones says, not just social media. So what that means is they're asking questions. They're posting about how can we pray for you today. They're creating group chats or that kind of thing where people can actually ask their questions. They're running Alpha, not just in person, but online. They're doing things that actually say this is not just a billboard for our church. This isn't like don't miss Sunday, don't miss Sunday. They're actually trying to engage people and they're scrolling through the comments and they're following people who follow them, and so all of that is happening. 

19:48

I'd say it's easily 10% of churches max. Like it's really small the number of churches who are doing that well, and when they do that, what they're doing is they're actually building relationship with you, they're getting to know you as a human being. And then it's like oh, your name's Brian, great Brian, you know, tell me a little more about yourself. And there's a dialogue that develops and finally, you know, you go. I think I'm going to connect with this community. So you know, if you think about it less about content, I mean, use your content, put the message clips up there. That stuff's great and AI is making that easier and easier as we speak. But to go beyond that, to actually connect with people, that's a whole other level and very few churches are doing it. 

Brian:

20:29

Carey. As we talk, we're in the month when the US is having its presidential election and I suppose this election highlights the cultural wars that rage in North America and elsewhere. But as evangelicals, we have been caught in the middle of it and of course it lines up on various sides, depending on who you are, where you live, what church, what political community you have been identified with. But in the midst of that, church pastors are having to lead their people and bring some kind of accommodation to the chasm that, or bridge the chasm that, has been created by this cultural war. So, in your leadership role, what are you learning and what are you advising pastors to do now and following the election? 

Carey:

21:23

I think there are issues under the issue. So you know, if you try to get a MAGA supporter and a progressive in the same room, good luck if a fistfight doesn't break out. That's really, really difficult. And so I've thought about this question a lot and I think it has applications to Canada and globally. I mean, you know, what's happening in the US is not completely isolated. 

21:47

So my thought about it is sort of, if we take it to the philosophical level, one of the things that Keller talked about a lot before he died and I had the privilege of having a few conversations with him in his final years is I asked him the question Tim Keller? I just said hey, if you're starting again in New York City, what would you be teaching on? And he said you know, when we got here in 1989, it was pretty easy we just kind of had to say a version of this isn't your parents' faith. And then it got into how is success working for you? And idolatry. If you ever read his Counterfeit Gods, it's absolutely brilliant. But he said if I was starting over again now, I would talk about identity. He said you think about weddings 100 years ago. You think about weddings today. 100 years ago, you might spend the modern equivalent of $1,000 on your wedding or $5,000 on your wedding. It was short, simple, sweet. You look at the $100,000 Instagram weddings or TikTok weddings today and it's insane what people spend on their weddings. And the Jewish theologian simply said 100 years ago we had our identity in God, we had our identity in family, we had our identity in place. Now what's happening is we take all of the things we used to trust for our identity and we put them on another human being and we say in you I trust and all of my hopes and dreams are riding on you. Don't blow it. Well, that's pressure that no other human being can bear. Our identity is really at stake here and it's no longer, even for Christians, primarily rooted in God. 

23:24

And I think what we've seen in the last 25 years, particularly among evangelicals, is I am what I think, my partisan position and my support of the conservatives or the progressives or the liberals or whoever we happen to be Republicans, democrats If you attack my partisan identity, it's actually attacking me personally. So I am what I believe, and we're not talking theologically because our theology is shallow. We're talking about partisanship, and that is a real challenge for leaders. So what I would do, what I counseled leaders to do some actually did it was if I was preaching through this election, I would do a series on identity, because our identity is secure in Christ and Christians have forgotten that. And maybe your identity isn't in partisan politics, maybe it's in. Can I buy a house in this market? You know, I am what I make, I am what I own, I am how I succeed, I am how many downloads there are on my podcast, I am how I vote. 

24:29

But that has to all be securely reattached in Jesus. And that is deep, deep, deep discipleship, you know, and as John Mark Comer says, we're all being discipled. We just don't know how we're being discipled. We're being discipled by Fox or CNN or CBC, or we're being discipled by our career or our job. And as Rick Warren said years ago, he said, never place your identity in something that can be taken away from you. And as Rick Warren said years ago, he said, never place your identity in something that can be taken away from you. 

24:59

And somehow we become unhinged when it comes to identity. So I look at the culture, wars and they're raging because people are afraid. We were not designed to worship people, we were designed to worship God. We were not designed as human beings to be worshiped, we were designed to worship. And all of that has become unhinged with the death of God, quoting Nietzsche. He's not dead, but you know the philosophical reference for those who have studied it. You know the demise of Christianity in our culture. Our identities are seeking to attach to someone or something, but they only really come home to rest in Christ, but they only really come home to rest in Christ. 

Brian:

25:37

Carey, I was raised at a time when Billy Graham was the name and that form of evangelism dominated the church, the evangelical church, especially, of course, that era. He has died, that era is gone. But as the church looks at the cultural wars and the secularization that has been so dominant in Canada and seems to be emerging more in the U S, what forms of evangelism are you seeing? Do you see emerging in the church and with the church leaders that you, that you work with? 

Carey:

26:14

I have immense respect for Billy Graham. One of the advantages or actually I don't know if there was an advantage it was just the moment that God raised him up. He could do a revival, so to speak, or a crusade, and he was calling people back to something they knew they had left, or that they had a memory of. The challenge right now is nobody really has a memory of Christianity. The challenge right now is nobody really has a memory of Christianity. I was at a Conexus event a couple of weeks ago in someone's home and there was a couple that had just been baptized came in. I think he was raised Roman Catholic in South America but really didn't have a personal faith and she's just like yeah, I had no idea. I was raised here in central Ontario, didn't even know who Jesus was, couldn't tell you, like you know and Christians find that hard to believe. But if I asked you, tell me more about Mahatma Gandhi, tell me more about the Buddha. Who was the Buddha? Did he actually live? What did he teach? What is the eightfold path of enlightenment or Confucius? Let's go beyond stereotypes. What do you know about Confucius? Most Christians would be. Yeah, I have one sentence, half a sentence. That's all I've got. That's what most people in our culture today have. So that's one of the reasons evangelism has changed so much in our lifetime is we can't call people back to something that they walked away from. We have to introduce people to something that they've never experienced. That's why, you could argue, Canadian culture is almost pre-Christian now. And so what's compelling in the midst of that? Well, definitely, answering their spiritual questions. But they will be and they have been for years at Connexus, because we have so many unchurched people Like okay, so you know, reincarnation like Jesus was all for that, right. Like okay, so reincarnation like Jesus was all for that right Now, if you start freaking out as an evangelical, you're going to lose them because they're like oh, clearly I don't know the answers here, I don't belong here, but if you're like that's a really interesting question, let's talk about that a little bit more. What do you believe about reincarnation? And what you'll discover is most people have three sentences of belief around reincarnation. They just thought it sounded spiritual. Is most people have three sentences of belief around reincarnation. They just thought it sounded spiritual and they introduced the words that they knew. And then you're like well, actually we're not so much about reincarnation. We're about resurrection. Well, what's about resurrection? Tell me more about that. The Alpha Course has served us very, very well over the last 25 years in helping us answer people's questions about spirituality. I know a lot of your listeners will be familiar with Alpha. It's the best we know of at answering those questions for a pre-Christian, non-Christian culture. 

28:45

Another thing is the winsome lifestyle of your neighbors who happen to be Christians. Evangelical, particularly in the United States, is now a secular term. I don't have the exact stat, it's something like 17% it could be higher Evangelicals never go to church. It's become a political term and it's associated with hypocritical, judgmental, angry demonstrating Christians. But that's not really the definition of a Christ follower. 

29:17

The way I look at it and you know, hopefully our lives are characterized by the fruits of the Spirit Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control. You know there's no argument against those. Everybody kind of goes yes, those are good. We need more of that in our culture If we embody that as Christians. And I mean on a neighborly level and when they meet us in the supermarket, when they meet us at restaurants, when they meet us in our homes, when they see us at the homeowner association, whatever we happen to be in. 

29:48

If that is how we conduct ourselves, that becomes a very attractive lifestyle, and it's not so much evidence that demands a verdict, it's a lifestyle that demands a verdict, like if your neighbors are going, okay, what? 

30:02

What is this about you? Why are you doing that? Why are you taking my trash out when I'm not feeling well? Why did you offer to cut my grass? Why did you offer to rake my leaves? Why? Why did you offer to go shopping? What makes you tick, brian? And you're like oh, you want to have a conversation about it, I'd love to it. And you're like, oh, you want to have a conversation about it, I'd love to you know. 

30:23

And so I think it's that kind of lifestyle evangelism you know with, with the ability to answer some of the questions and you can get help with that with things like and then the power of a personal invitation. The polls are still showing that the vast majority of people, including Canadians, will go to church if somebody invites them, but most of us aren't going to invite somebody. So who do you know that you can invite to church? Invite them, and hopefully your church has a partnership where they know how to handle new people, they know how to introduce people to Christianity, answer their questions in a responsible way. So the ecosystem for that is kind of broken down in our country, but I look forward to the day when it's not as broken down as kind of broken down in our country, but I look forward to the day when it's not as broken down. 

Brian:

31:05

Carey, we began with issues of leadership, of cultural wars of generations, of social media, and you have led us beautifully into the end of this podcast by outlining how we are to live as followers of Jesus, and that lifestyle is indeed the witness of the gospel in today's age, and so I so thank you, carrie, for being with us today and giving us this insight into who you are and what you're seeing, and your application to our lives in our witness of Christ day to day. Thanks again for being with us. 

Carey:

31:42

Brian time flew. I want to thank you for everything you've done, not just for seminarians but for the church in Canada and for Canadian Christians and evangelicals Really appreciate a lifetime of faithfulness and really an honor to be with you today. Thank you. 

Brian:

31:57

Thanks, Carey, god bless, don't miss the next interview. Be sure to subscribe to Evangelical 360 on YouTube. See you there.