the freewill baptist church with Ben Gibson (ep 3, 28).

Pastor Ben Gibson did not grow up in a Christian home. His earliest memories are the police at the house, and then a kitchen in Colorado where his father, newly and radically saved, poured every ounce of alcohol down the drain. The whole family was baptized together in 1984. Fifteen years later, on the Saturday night before Easter, a patch of ice took his father's life, and a calling arrived that he can only describe as a compulsion. Since 2011 he has pastored Phillips Chapel Free Will Baptist Church in Springdale, the most diverse city in the Ozarks. He teaches his tradition with real care. Free grace for everybody. Congregations that answer to no hierarchy. A church that rewrote its own bylaws to match what it actually believes, traded the youth group for rooms where seventy-year-olds and toddlers pray out loud together, and scattered itself into neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. Since the lockdown lifted it has grown by roughly a quarter every year. And this is the conversation Season 3 has been circling without a guest willing to represent it until now. Gibson has preached on Christian nationalism by name from his own pulpit and claimed the term. At this table he lays the vision out with unusual candor. A nation brought back to Christ, not by force but by conversion, by discipleship, by generations of believers stepping onto school boards and city councils until the laws change and the culture changes. He also says the church was never meant to wield political power, that top-down political rescue is a pipe dream, and that he is not sure America can even be called a Christian nation. Both of those are his words, and the space between them is where this episode lives.  https://www.theunderview.com/the-free-will-baptist-church-with-ben-gibson-phillips-chapel About the underview: The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness. Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/ Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠ Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewthe Host: @mikerusch