Politics and Discipleship

Kelley >> Welcome to the Beyond Ordinary Women Podcast. I am Kelley Mathews. And with me today is Kaitlyn Schiess. Kaitlyn is a friend from Dallas Seminary. I was long gone by the time she got there, but I went back on campus as a GTA and I actually interrupted a conversation she was having with Dr. Glahn, a mutual friend. And I learned later that that might have been the conversation where you guys were talking about you writing your first book. Was that right?

Kaitlyn >> Yeah.

Kelley >> Thank you. We’re going to be talking about the church and politics because that’s kind of like your shtick these days.

Kaitlyn >> Yeah.

Kelley >> And we welcome the wisdom you’re going to share with us. So thank you for being here. Tell us how politics and faith became your go to topic.

Kaitlyn >> Yeah, I keep joking that it wasn’t something that a career counselor ever said. You know, you really should talk about the two things you’re not supposed to talk about at the dinner table – theology and politics.

Kelley >> Yeah.

Kaitlyn >> When I went to college, I thought I was going to go to law school. So I started out as a political science major, switched to history, but thought the whole time I would go to law school. And went to a school in Virginia, Liberty University, that was very politically involved in the years that I was there. There were a lot of politicians on campus. There were a lot of media on campus asking students questions.

So at the same time that I was at a place that politics and especially the relationship between faith and politics was really central to the conversation happening around me, I was also discerning a change that felt really scary at the time, really uncertain, from going to law school to going to seminary, which I had never considered and really had no model for that. Didn’t imagine doing that.

Longer story – but I had been kind of forced into volunteering, not really volunteering forced into by my mother who was working at a church into working with middle school girls for a summer camp and had an experience both a personal spiritual experience and loved teaching them and loved being around them.

And so went to seminary in Dallas. And when I first got there thought leaving behind all my interest in politics and my interest in law, that’s just behind me now and the 2016 election was happening my first semester of seminary so it was a conversation on campus and I pretty quickly realized both that my peers around me who were preparing to pastor or to teach Bible study or to serve the church in some capacity weren’t sure how to handle this.

They both could see that politics was affecting their churches. Sometimes it was splitting their churches. It was causing great division and harm in their churches. And even outside of those extreme examples, it just was affecting how people thought about themselves and their lives and their neighbors. They could tell that there was something the church should say about this or their role in teaching people or shepherding people needed to consider politics. But they were very understandably wary of that and didn’t know what to do.

And I quickly realized, Oh, I have an interest in this. I want to keep reading and bring the gifts that I am learning to these people that are my peers. But also I kind of quickly realized I have a strange good temperament for it. It doesn’t make me as nervous as it makes some other people. So pretty quickly I realized, oh, it’s still challenging, it can still be exhausting, but I enjoy going into churches, which I spend a lot of my time now doing and helping and saying, “How could we have a better conversation about this? What biblical resources help us think about this well? What resources for having good conversations are available to us?”

And I like now being the person when a pastor or a professor at a Christian school or someone who leads a Bible study says, “I need help.” I love being the person now who says, “I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. It is scary, but I would really love to help you.”

Kelley >> Well, then you’re perfect for this entire conversation because that’s really what we want this video to be, a resource for leaders, specifically women. But I have a feeling these principles are going to be for anybody who are leading the church right now in another election season with the same people involved in a lot of the same tensions and conflict even that you experienced back in 2016. So this doesn’t seem to be going away.

Kaitlyn >> No.

Kelley >> And the things that you’ve learned are going to be really helpful. So let’s jump in. Right now you are a co-host with the Holy Post Podcast, which is great fun and you do a lot of great interviews. And you’ve just recently started your own podcast, called Curiously, Kaitlyn, which I think is genius, because what you do there is take really high theological questions, and I love how you put them on the spot, make theologians break it down to what a kid could understand. And all the adults in the room are breathing a sigh of relief because we all have the same questions.

Kaitlyn >> Yes.

Kelley >> And we secretly don’t feel like we can ask them anymore. And so this is a great way for the adults in the room to learn how to break down big ideas into applicable bites. Right?

Kaitlyn >> Yes. Thank you.

Kelley >> We’ll put a link to that. And hope it’s great. But what you’re doing is taking theology and making it real for our lives. And we need that in politics.

Kaitlyn >> Yes.

Kelley >> That’s how we approach it right now. So you’ve written two books on this topic.

Kaitlyn >> Yes.

Kelley >> Do you feel like the first one, maybe more in line with what we’re talking about today, The Liturgy.

Kaitlyn >> The Liturgy of Politics. Yeah. In some ways the books are very similar. In some ways they’re different. The first one does more focus on spiritual formation and how are we becoming the kind of people who can engage in politics well? And what resources does the church have? We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We have resources from our history that we can draw on. Yeah.

And the second one, The Ballot and the Bible, it seems initially like it’s about how Scripture has been used in American politics and our history, which is initially what it is about. But I keep having especially pastors, but also just regular people tell me, Oh, I got this book, and I realized it’s mostly about how we read the Bible. It was like, Yes, that’s kind of the trick. It’s really about how we read the Bible. And it’s similar to the first one in that, on one level, I am offering here some helpful ways of thinking about how we should and shouldn’t read the Bible.

But at the end of the day, a lot of the examples I’m talking about in that book aren’t examples that a list of rules for interpreting the Bible could help us solve. They’re still about spiritual formation, just like the first book is. They’re still about what kind of community are we in? What kind of practices do we have? How do we become the kind of people that when we come across a passage in Scripture that is counter to our political preferences or ask something really hard of us, that we can be the kind of people who can hear it?

I kept feeling like, Oh, these go together very well, because most of the work that I’m doing now, yes, it’s about helping people read the Bible, but at the end of the day, it still really is about how are we as communities becoming the kind of people who can read the Bible well? Not just by lists of rules, but by practices and habits and living in community together.

Kelley >> OK, so if you’re a women’s director or pastor or whatever title you want, and you have a small group who are interested in trying to figure out how do we approach this year or next six months, what’s a healthy way to step into the dialogue that’s going on around all of us?

Kaitlyn >> Yeah. Oh, that’s a great question.

One thing I would say is I think there is a role for intentional conversation about politics. As I said, a lot of my work is going to churches and saying, “OK, we’re doing a workshop on a Saturday or I’m teaching on this for a particular amount of time and we’re going to really focus on it.”

But I think what’s most powerful, which is why a lot of times when I go to churches, I ask, “Instead of giving a lecture or a sermon or a workshop to the whole group of the church, Can I spend time with the small group leaders and the Bible study teachers?” Because what I think is actually more powerful, more effective, is when our conversations about politics come about organically as we are studying Scripture together instead of saying, “Hey, show up on a Tuesday night for us to talk about politics.” Because if you do that, people come ready to fight some of the time.

Or if it’s a planned conversation, sometimes there’s just dynamics that are really hard. Whereas I have seen the most fruitful political conversations about things that people disagree on when we are six weeks into studying Jeremiah and we all are there because we care about the Bible and we care about learning what God has to say to us. And we’ve all built up some credibility with each other of like, I’m trying to understand this and I don’t know all of it. And you don’t know all of it, but I’m not coming in with an agenda of what I want to kind of shove down your throat. We are learning together about this.

And oh my goodness, this passage comes up that talks about how we use our money or talks about how our leaders should function, or talks about how God expects nations to work well. And we’re in it and we’re having a conversation and someone (because politics especially during a presidential election season is all around us in the media), someone draws a connection and says, well, if it says this here and we’re talking about this how does this apply to this policy or this politician or this issue in our community?

And it doesn’t mean the conversation won’t be hard. It doesn’t mean you don’t risk offending someone. It doesn’t mean that people won’t disagree. But it’s a very different thing for that conversation to happen when you are six weeks into a Bible study, then for you to say, hey, come with your political opinions to a weekday event and we’ll hash it out. And again, I think there can be a real role for that.

And I really love teaching people, whether it is in a one day workshop or at my own church through a multi-week Sunday school class, going, “Here’s a biblical theology of politics. Here’s Genesis to Revelation.” It’s not just a few isolated passages that explicitly talk about government. It is everything that teaches us how to live well in community. I love doing that.

But I think it’s better, and what I often tell pastors, but also just anyone who teaches the Bible, is, if you can get in the habit of every time you come to Scripture, every single verse, every single word, you assume says something both to my personal spiritual life and to my public political life. Not that it’s a verse that then tells me what policy to support or what politician to vote for, but that it shapes how I view my community and myself and my obligation to the wider world, if you can learn that as an instinct to not separate out the Bible into parts that are about me and parts that are about my community, and I teach people to approach Scripture that way, that has huge effects on how we talk about politics together because we have shared language and understanding that’s coming from Scripture, not just from our ideas about politics.

Kelley >> Yeah, I appreciate the idea that whatever we’re talking about related to politics and the Bible, they’re related. They’re connected because we are all connected.

Kaitlyn >> Yeah.

Kelley >> And that we do this in a community or in a more healthy way versus me and the TV, me and this one person, me and this article online, whatever. The Bible speaks holistically. And that’s a challenge because you only have so much time with the people under your care. And that may require long term planning for the Bible studies you might pick out. That sort of thing. But yeah, it’s more holistic. And that’s pretty tough in our culture to, I don’t know, maybe I’m just picking on culture, but I don’t see a lot of long term planning and bringing things together.

What do you think are some of the most common challenges, and you may have already touched on some of this, for pastors or any church leader specifically during an election year? This thing may be obvious, but go with the obvious.

Kaitlyn >> Yeah. One of the things that’s so hard is it’s right in your face. And the way people learn to engage it, by their media consumption and by the conversations they have outside of the church and inside the church, the way we’ve learned to engage with this is to lead with really intense emotions that we’re not always cognizant of, and our sense of identity and who we belong to is all wrapped up in our politics. And we learn that way of thinking about politics I think primarily from our media consumption. And then when it shows up in the regular life of a community, which it makes sense that it would, we’re not just dealing with policies or politicians.

Politics is about how we live together in community. Which means it’s about who we believe humans are, how we should live well together, what things we value. So it’s not bad, and it makes perfect sense that it would show up in our churches.

I would prefer that a pastor not say, “Here’s who you should vote for or what policy you should support.” But politics more broadly and how we live well together, of course, it will show up in our churches and it will show up in sermons because the Bible talks about how we should live well together. It’ll show up in our life.

But the way we have learned to engage with it is this way that is unaware of where the depth of emotion is coming from and wrapped up in identity and community. So I often will tell people if you get in a conversation at church and it’s about politics and it seems really heated really fast and you’re unsure why, it’s not just because of the policy or the politician, it’s because of all of these other things humming under the surface.

An example I often give is I remember early in my work in this having a conversation with, and now most of my conversations are with people I’m not in deep relationship with, it’s I’m traveling to a church or I’m going to a school, but this was back when it was like someone I have been ministering to for years. Have a conversation. It gets really intense. I was completely surprised by it.

And at one point I just stopped and said, “OK, this seems really important to you. Can you tell me a little bit more about why it’s so important? Why does this feel so central? Where is this emotion coming from?” And the conversation we got into had nothing to do with politics. It was about family background. It was about some past difficult experiences. It was about her sense of who she was and who were her kind of people and who were the good guys and who were the bad guys.

And so I think the challenge is not only is politics wrapped up in all those things, which makes sense because of course it’s about our lives and our communities, and it makes sense that it would be all wrapped up in these emotions and stories and backgrounds, but we’re not aware of it. We don’t talk about it. We think it’s just about the policies and the politicians.

And so this is how on social media and in real life, you just get back and forth facts. And here’s my article and here’s your article, and we’re never actually scratching the surface to the deeper issues that are underneath. And that’s, I think, the real gift of people serving in ministry is you actually have this tool, this skill that a lot of people talking about politics don’t have. You’re used to going, “Hey, there’s something deeper under the surface. What questions do I need to ask? What do I know about you and your family and your background that I can ask about that can help me understand?”

But in the church, we’ve often said politics is this other sphere. It doesn’t have anything to do with our regular life. If we thought of it as no, this is part of our life, we could actually use some of the skills we’ve learned to help us do this better.

Kelley >> And we have the permission, usually, if we’re in positions of spiritual leadership we kind of have people’s permission to talk about things like this and to get a little personal. But the challenge here is being able to pull those together and remember and acknowledge that politics and how we feel about it and what we believe is integral to who we are. Not a separate partisan type of thing. Yeah. Good.

So one of my questions you’ve already kind of jumped into, What do you think are the deeper spiritual issues that we need to grapple with beyond our favorite policy? And I think you touched on that when identity and finding that we tend to do that whether we know it or not. We find it in outside people, and really we’re supposed to find it in Christ. So those are ongoing growth and struggles that we all deal with. So if you’re running a Bible study sometime this year, in the fall even, and you have the option of addressing politics in some way, what direction might you go?

Kaitlyn >> Yeah, I will say at my own church for our women’s Bible study this last year, we went through the Book of Revelation and it was really good. I know that sounds like such an awful answer to give, but it’s really good and really helpful. And part of what we did, and we had to do some work at the beginning because people are scared of Revelation.

So we did some work at the beginning that was like, you don’t have to be scared. Here’s all the reasons you don’t have be scared. Here’s the ideas about this you may have picked up from like pop culture that are not true. They’re not from the Bible. And I think it helped that it was a group of us women who wrote it. So it was like, we don’t have to pick between the camps of whose interpretation of this were going with. It was internal to our church and we’re lucky to have a bunch of very theologically trained women to write a study like this.

But what I loved about it, this was this last Bible study season but we were already in it. Honestly, the political season stretches so far now. But what was so great about it was one Revelation helps us kind of get appropriately disoriented from the world. We are in it, we’re in the politics of it. We accept the way the world tends to think about politics. And Revelation so unsettles you, like, oh, maybe things aren’t the way I thought they were. Maybe there’s more going on behind the scenes than I thought.

But the other thing that was so helpful that we kept focusing on in the book, in the study, because so often people get freaked out about Revelation because they think the point of Revelation is to scare you about scary things that are coming, instead of the point being to comfort the saints who might be suffering.

So we focus on through the whole thing, and I think this is a great tactic to even respond to what you were just saying of what are some other underlying spiritual issues, another underlying spiritual issue often in our politics is that we have bought the lie that we have to play by the rules of the world because it’s up to us to fix things.

And Revelation is a powerful response to that. That not only says no, actually you can take a breath like you can be comforted in the coming return of Christ to make all things new, to wipe every tear from every eye, to live in reconciled community with all of creation, to redeem everything that has been broken and corrupt, that can just help you breathe a little bit, especially if everyone’s coming into Bible study and read the news and things are bad. And there is great suffering in the world. It’s not a lie. It is real. There is war, there is violence, there is corruption, there is deceit.

To come in and say, OK, but Christ is coming back to make all things new. And that is a comfort to me. And to have descriptions of the suffering saints on earth crying out to God and those prayers being powerful and mattering.

I think one of the underlying spiritual issues we have to deal with is not only we are not saving the world, God is saving the world. We get to participate out of God’s grace and in glimpses of the coming kingdom of God on Earth, including in our politics. But where we often go wrong is when we start to think the weight of the world is on my shoulders. And if I have to fix things, I can justify cutting some corners or mistreating some people made in God’s image. And Revelation was a help.

And it doesn’t have to be Revelation. But I do think one of the things we can do to both address the underlying spiritual issue and not just have it be, OK, we’re just talking about politics, is where in Scripture could I find this combination? Which is they’re all over the place. The prophets do this. Jesus talks about this. This combination of the weight of the world is not on your shoulders. You are not the world’s savior. And you joyfully get to participate in glimpses of the coming kingdom of God. And that combination, that tension, is something that has been missing from a lot of Christian political life, really sadly.

Kelley >> Yeah. The idea that we can do what we can with the Spirit’s help to bring the kingdom in a little bit right now. That’s our job as the church. And I call them outposts, like we’re an outpost of the kingdom. And of course there’s so much going on out there and sometimes it’s right next door, like in our church, it’s not always those bad people out there, obviously.

Yeah, I appreciate your reminder that as leaders we can remind our people who’s in charge. There’s this comfort. I find it really funny that Revelation came up because where I work, we have three studies in Revelation coming out this year. Which, of course, we’re all laughing. Three different people who came to us with three different ideas. So they even approach it differently. So we all have a good chuckle that, Well, why not this year? Sounds appropriate.

Kaitlyn >> Yeah, it does.

Kelley >> Your second book, The Ballot and the Bible, really addresses a lot, like you briefly gave it to us, the way the Bible is used in our culture. And of course we’re here in Dallas and we minister to anyone who finds our website, but there’s a lot of Dallas people and leaders. And so everyone around here knows the Bible pretty well, or so we think. What verses, do you have that pop to mind, that tend to be the most misused?

Kaitlyn >> Yeah, that’s a good question because that’s part of the challenge is even for people who know the Bible really well. Some passages have been so used in our political life that we forget where they come from or the fact that they really belong to the Bible. They don’t belong to American politics.

One that comes up a lot. It’s come up a lot already in this election is the line from the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus calls the people of God a city upon a hill. And it’s not describing America. It is describing the people of God, which is important. But I think what’s more important is that little phrase has been plucked from its context and used so much sometimes in ways that the politics behind it are fine, like it’s not a bad thing that someone’s advocating for.

But when we’ve used that phrase so apart from its context, what often happens is we forget what it meant in its context, which was not you are a powerful, prosperous, shining people. No, it meant you are, the language right after, a light to the world. And a few verses later, Jesus says that the poor and the persecuted and the meek are blessed. So if you put it back in its context, suddenly it doesn’t seem like it’s talking so much about upholding all of the world’s standards of success and goodness. It’s actually is showing a real upside down version of those where the people you don’t expect are actually blessed, and the community that doesn’t necessarily seem to be flourishing actually, surprisingly is and is being faithful. So that’s a big one.

And there are other uses similarly of kind of plucking phrases from Scripture that are about Israel or about the people of God in the church and applying them to any earthly nation. America does this a lot, but in the past, many nations did this. We were not the only ones that often would go to promises given to Israel, promises of land or promises of protection, and said these are promises for us. And part of the problem is not only that we pluck them out of their context and use them in other ways.

Part of the problem is that we think that these are the options for how Scripture can inform our political life. The option is either this verse directly addresses me and my nation, or it must not mean anything to my political life. And I don’t think those are the two options.

So example, I briefly talked about in the book is when I was finishing writing it, there was a big conversation about forgiving student loans, and a lot of people went to the passage about the Jubilee. This regular rhythm of basically every generation forgiving debts, returning land to original owners, like a restart on the kind of economic life of the community. And people said, OK, we need to forgive student loan debt because of the Jubilee. And other people said, no, the Jubilee has nothing to do with our political life because it was about Israel and not about us.

I don’t think either of those are good options. One too directly says we just pull the verses out and apply them directly to political life. The other one says, Oh, that’s about Israel. Not us. So it has nothing to say to us. I think instead doing good biblical theology means we look at those passages about Israel and say, These are the things God cares about in a community. These are the things that God says communities need to function well. So God has said to God’s people, Hey, if you don’t have mechanisms for fixing these inequalities, they’ll get worse and worse over time. And so we need a mechanism for addressing the fact that over generations some people can accumulate a lot of wealth and others will have less.

The Bible doesn’t tell a modern democracy like America what mechanisms we should use for addressing those problems. But it does tell Christians that God cares about those things and we should be faithful in trying to figure out how to advocate well for vulnerable people in our communities.

That’s, I think, like the middle between these two bad options. There are other options. And I think we’ve often fallen into those problems of either saying, I just plucked this verse out of its context and it can apply directly to political life, or the only passages that deal with political life are a handful of passages that explicitly talk about government. No, I think it all says something to us. It’s just a little more work that we maybe want to do.

Kelley >> So what I’m hearing is as leaders, we can help our people by teaching good Bible study methods. Just learning a better way to read and study and know our Bibles and avoid the cherry picking, avoid mixing metaphors, all of those things. So if you’re a woman teaching or leading a ministry right now, consider over the next few months and beyond this election season, this is going to be a perennial thing, of teaching Bible study methods. Maybe take a hermeneutics class that would come in handy at your church level.

All right, so let’s wrap this up. What would an ideal healthy relationship with politics look like in a church? If you could walk in maybe on your own or any other church and say, May I see a really healthy vibe here when it comes to their relationship with politics, what does it look like?

Kaitlyn >> Yeah, yeah. Oh, I love that. I actually do think I see that in my church. I’m thankful to belong to a church where that’s true. And healthy is different than perfect. We’re not going to be perfect on this until Christ returns, right? We’re going to have conflicts. We’re gonna have difficulties.

But I think what would show a really healthy church on this is on one hand, politics is not a separate part of our life that we ignore. So it’s a part of our regular relationships. Pastors and Bible study teachers aren’t afraid, when a passage in Scripture talks about something that we think is political, they can talk about it. People in pews after church if the sermon helped them think well about some local political issue, can turn to a friend and have a conversation about it. They can learn that they disagree and it not ends their relationship.

So on one hand, it’s like we do talk about it, and on the other hand, it’s in its proper place. It doesn’t take over the life of the church, and we don’t substitute that for the varieties of other ways that we share the gospel, that we display the kingdom of God. This doesn’t take too much prominence in our public life.

We both really care about how we vote and how we advocate and the politicians we support. But that’s one piece of our larger, what I would still say is a political life, where we show up and help at a crisis pregnancy center, or my church this weekend is helping set up an apartment for a new family that’s seeking asylum, fleeing some kind of disorder in their previous country and settling here. And as they deal with all the legal issues, they need a place to live. So someone comes and sets up an apartment for them.

So things like that that are, I think, still political in the sense that they shape our common life together. They help us love our neighbors well. Political, even just that word, right. The root of the word, political, polis, Greek word, that just means city or community. So we’re just building a community together.

But I think a healthy church would say we have a variety of ways to get involved in loving our neighbors. And some of them are like at my church, there’s a group of families who all send their kids to public schools that meet regularly because things that happen at the school board in our area really matter. And what I love, too, is people in our church who don’t have kids in public school, who send their kids to private school or who homeschool their kids, show up to these meetings, too, to say, Hey, these kids all belong to our community. I want to know what’s going on, too. So we’re going to be involved. But it’s not done from a place of anxiety as if we have to fix everything.

That’s that second part. It doesn’t take this place of prominence where everything we do is defined by our politics. So that balance of we talk about it, it matters, it’s not everything. I think you can see glimpses of that if a conversation pops up and you’re able to handle it, handle disagreement especially, with some level of kindness and calmness. That tells me you’re in a church where politics is not abnormal. We’re not so freaked out that the temperature rises the minute it comes up. But on the other hand, we’ve learned that we put it in its proper place.

Kelley >> So other than your own books, do you have any recommendations for leaders who might be trying to navigate these waters?

Kaitlyn >> Yeah, a couple. One, Dr. Vincent Bacote, who teaches at Wheaton College, has written a tiny little book called The Political Disciple. And it’s tiny in a great way because it would be a great four-week small group study. And he is just giving here’s a biblical theology of politics. Here’s ways to think about your engagement in the world that are really great.

Another one that I would say is my good friend, Michael Wear, has written a book called The Spirit of Our Politics. And that’s, again, it’s in the same line of what I do in terms of he’s not really talking about who to vote for or what policies to support. His big line, and I’ve spent the last year going to fellowship with his organizations, I’ve heard him say this so much is, what matters is the kind of people we are. The kind of people we are will determine the kind of politics we have. And so he’s another person that’s just helping us think.

And he’s using the work of Dallas Willard, who wrote a lot about spiritual formation, to say, how does this work on spiritual formation help us think through how to be the kind of people who I think Michael would say, regardless of how you vote or what policies you support, the kind of people who love their neighbors well and see the image of God in others, even when they disagree.

Kelley >> Great. I’m going to have to pick up that first one because I have the second one.

Kaitlyn >> Yeah.

Kelley >> I really appreciate the way you’re combining discipleship with politics. So what we do with the issues of the day directly relate to who we are, and we can’t separate them as much as we think we would like to.

So when we are discipling people or leading them, helping people realize that the way we choose to interact with others, the way we think through issues, all those things, they come from a place of how is our relationship with God, how do we think about ourselves, what’s our identity issue going on?

So it’s not an out there kind of issue. It’s not something beyond the walls that we have to make a policy statement about. These are actually issues that we each have to grapple with, kind of personally with us, the Lord, our families, and then our church communities as well. So yeah, it’s not so easy. There’s no dividing line here. It’s all merged together. Anything else that I’ve totally missed that, you’re like, Oh, I need to say this?

Kaitlyn >> Not anything big other than I think what I wish I would have said earlier, because it’s something I think is important to always say is the most consistent instructions in Scripture about our political life are to pray for our leaders. And I said this earlier about Revelation, but it is true, prayer matters and it also changes us. And so when we are tempted to look at our politicians locally or nationally and forget the image of God in them or in the people that support them, it is really helpful to say God is the judge of their actions.

I want to use the power I have well and faithfully and make faithful judgments about who can wield power well. But I don’t have to fear if my judgments are not perfect because they won’t be. I can go to God who it says in Revelation not only hears the prayers of the suffering saints, but it says the prayers are purified before they come back down to heaven as God’s power. So we don’t have to fear that we don’t get it all right exactly. God purifies our prayers before God acts. So we can take great comfort in that, I think.

Kelley >> Awesome. Yeah. Taking comfort in who God is. It’s really the bottom line. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. For all of you who are watching and would like to see this video and all of the content that we have in our show notes, we’ll have Kaitlyn’s books there and her podcasts and a little bit of the bio and any of the other videos that Beyond Ordinary Women offers to you to resource your ministry. So we hope you’ll take a look at all of those. Thanks so much.