JY: Welcome to GearTalk, a podcast on biblical theology. Today, Tom interviews Joe and Christy Allen. Joe recently presented a paper at the Evangelical Theological Society that Tom and Jason felt would greatly benefit our listeners. The paper is titled “Theological Factors that Contributed to the Rise of Islam in Christian Contexts.” This paper has implications for churches, missions teams, and families. You’ll find a link to the PDF of this paper in our show notes.

TK: Jason, this is going to be a fun podcast.

JD: I think it is. I’m eager for listeners to benefit from what we have for them.

TK: Alright, so now I think it’s two weeks ago Jason and I were down in San Antonio at the Evangelical Theological Society annual conference. And Jason, what would our listeners find if they went there? What’s happening at this place?

JD: Well, it’s unlike any conference that I’m aware of. You have about 2,500 evangelicals who celebrate the Trinity and celebrate that the Bible is without error as God gave it to us, and that’s the common ground that we have together. Many academics, mostly academics, meaning people that are professors in schools training up future ministers. But also a number of pastors who are engaged in the front line ministry. And then also students. That would be the third category.

So we gather together, papers are presented, we go to various papers, we engage. Usually presentations are 30 minutes and then there’s 10 minutes of questions. There are also plenary addresses every year. It’s in a major city—this year in San Antonio. Then it will go to San Diego, Boston and Denver. It goes in that rotation.

So we gather annually in order to challenge one another with what is truth, what is Scripture teaching, and try to—we get to present our research and gain pushback and have an opportunity also to have sweet fellowship with brothers and sisters that maybe we haven’t seen for an entire year or more—to be able to encourage one another in the faith, to uphold and help and be a blessing.

For me it’s a time of mutual edification. I find my own heart strengthened. The Lord meets me year by year. It’s very different than, say, a Bethlehem Conference for Pastors, a Together for the Gospel, a Gospel Coalition conference, a For the Church conference. Because of the nature of the papers, they’re less sermons or messages given in front of several hundreds or thousands. Instead what you have is these smaller rooms of anywhere from 5 people to 100 people that might be gathered in a single room to hear a specific paper, and then larger plenary gatherings where there could be hundreds or thousands in a single room.

So it’s just a different setting. There’s no music that accompanies the whole. There’s a large book room. It’s a time for fellowship and thinking deeply over the deepest of things. So it’s been a blessing for me yearly to go and to present papers, to benefit from the feedback of others. And Tom, the last two years you’ve gotten to present and that’s been a new experience for you. I’d love to hear your reflections just briefly on what that experience has been.

TK: That’s been a terrific experience. It is strange, I think, for a lot of us to go somewhere and then—I think even the first time I ever heard of this—like people go away and they just read something they wrote. That’s a strange thing for people to do, to go and to read something you wrote. But it makes sense when you consider people are wrestling with ideas, texts, whatever, and the exact wording matters and people are caring about the argument you’re making.

So it’s been really good for me, shaping me, pushing me into spots and allowing me to hear back. Even this present time hearing back on the paper I presented. I think it does a lot to sharpen us. So we get this kind of—I guess I described it as a magazine—and there’s all these papers there and you’ll circle ones that you want to go to. Jason, I circled one and the title I circled—I found it fit with work we do and the title was “Theological Factors that Contributed to the Rise of Islam in Christian Contexts,” and then the name of the person presenting was Joe M. Allen III. So Jason, you didn’t go to this one not because you don’t like Joe M. Allen III, but because there’s so many papers to pick from and you were somewhere else. I did go. But you know Joe, don’t you?

JD: I do. Joey and his wife Christy are dear to our family. I actually coached his son in Rec League basketball. But they are relatively new transplants in Kansas City. He is a fellow faculty member—actually, both of them are fellow faculty members with me. Dr. Joey Allen is our new missions professor. New as in, I think he’s now in his third year. And he and his wife Christy served overseas for 14 years in South Asia, serving among Muslims and serving among Hindus and having to learn an entirely different language and live day by day in a very impoverished context in order to see the gospel spread and the Kingdom advance and healthy churches planted.

To be around the Allens is to be around those who treasure Christ, who just delight in Jesus. You encounter him when you’re with them. Both of them are graduates of Dallas Theological Seminary. Joey got his PhD then from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in North Carolina. And now Christy is working on her PhD at Midwestern Seminary. They’re both learned, thoughtful, yet grounded, down to earth.

Joey is one who has wrestled hard with the doctrine of God and why is it that in so many places where the Christian Church established itself throughout the world, it has now been overcome by Islam. And that’s specifically what his paper is about—wrestling deeply with historical factors, theological factors that played into why it is that Christianity lost ground, lost turf. So it truly is a fascinating study, and today we’re going to get to hear from both Joey and Christy as you interview them—specifically interviewing Joey about his paper, but also about their story a little bit, as I understand it. But you know better than I do what you got to talk to him about. So introduce for us what we’re about to hear.

TK: Joey and Christy—and she kind of joined me in interviewing her husband—but this paper focuses on what factors, aside from the sword, aside from conquering, led to certain Christians being able to hold on to their faith much longer than others. And I think this will—Joey’s paper will undo a lot of thinking people have had about what happened at the rise of Islam and Christianity in North Africa, particularly in the sweep of Islam over that area. But it has lasting significance, I would say, for us as we think about missions and as we think about doctrine.

So he’s going to emphasize the importance of Bible translation and getting Bibles in people’s hands in their heart language. And he’s also going to emphasize the importance of teaching the Trinity to people early and thoroughly and not minimizing the gospel. That’s something he’s going to emphasize—minimizing. So bringing things down to a—we might say, “Wow, that’s more, that’s easier to understand”—a level like that can lead to abandonment of the gospel. So I found this deeply helpful.

Both Jason and I listened to numbers of papers. And there were three of them in particular that we just thought, “OK, we should record if they are able to later” and this is one of them.

JD: Well, I think it’s going to serve our listeners so let’s go for it.

TK: Love it. You’re going to find a PDF of the paper, a link to the PDF of the paper in our show notes. I would encourage you after listening to this interview to go and download that paper and read it. It will be good for you—as families, as you consider the things we talked about, missions teams and churches. So blessings, enjoy listening to Joe and Christy Allen.

Alright, so it’s Tom here and Jason is somewhere else, but I’m at the Evangelical Theological Society sitting across the table from Joe Allen and his wife Christy. Welcome both of you.

JA: Thanks for this opportunity. Great to be here.

CA: Thank you.

TK: So we’re at this place and both of them are doing the same thing I am, which is going hearing a bunch of papers. So did you—are you tired out? Or today a good day?

JA: We’re energized, yeah.

TK: Alright. Today—so if—going to actually have two podcasts here. First one is based on a paper Joe gave today, so real briefly, though, the two of you can introduce yourselves—the short version of who you are, and then if you could give us the title of your paper here, and then we’ll just interact. And Christy, I’m going to ask him some questions. If you could also throw in questions because we’re basing on his paper, so we can fire away at will. So who are you guys?

CA: I’m Christy Allen. I grew up actually as a missionary kid in the Philippines, came to Christ as a child, and my husband and I got married, moved overseas.

TK: Did you meet in the Philippines?

JA: We did actually.

CA: We met on a mission trip to the Philippines.

TK: Which place?

JA: I think we met in Manila. The first time I remember laying eyes on Christie was in a McDonald’s in Manila.

TK: OK.

JA: But we hit it off and we were friends for a number of years.

TK: Not at Jollibee?

JA: Not a Jollibee, no.

CA: Yeah. So we—yeah, so the context of our relationship was doing missions and then after we got married, we had a map on our wall, a map of the world on our wall. And as we’re going through seminary, praying about where God would send us. And so we decided to go to South Asia. It was the highest concentration of lostness, the fewest number of missionaries, and we moved over there when our daughter Claire was one, and now she’s 17 and we have a son who’s 14.

TK: Love it. And Joe, what do you do now, job wise, since you’re going to be the one talking here?

JA: Yeah, well, after serving overseas for about 14 years, we came back to the States and now I teach missions at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, MO. Christy also teaches at that institution and is getting her PhD there. So we are all in with Midwestern. It’s a joyful place to be.

TK: Awesome, love it. So you gave a paper today. Do you have the title in front of you? These things are kind of funny, they have long titles and whatever. So I actually—you kind of go through this book and you circle things like, “Wow, I’d like to go to that.” So I know Joe, so I wanted to go to people I know anyways, but the title actually made me say I want to go to that. So what was your title?

JA: Theological Factors that Contributed to the Rise of Islam in Christian Contexts.

TK: So we’re not going to get your whole paper here, and actually this in some ways is better because for those who have never been to a thing like this, it’s a little weird because people come in and they read what they wrote instead of just speaking freely. But here if you could just tell us what you did and Christy and I can fire away at what—what’s the point?

JA: Alright. So Mohammed died in 632 AD. Christ died in 33, so about 600 years after Christ. Islam then began to spread out from Arabia north, south, east, and west. And as it did, it came into communities that had been Christian for 500 plus years. You think of the church fathers of the church, like Augustine and Tertullian—they’re North African. They had a profound impact on Christianity. These Christian communities—they’ve been Christian for centuries. Suddenly many of them seemingly overnight became Muslim. What happened?

So what I did was I began looking at the difference between some of these communities that remained faithful to Christ and compared them with the Christian communities that became Muslim and tried to identify what made these different. What made them able to stand strong in the intense pressure from Islam?

TK: So is it fair to say though the common story has been that the pressure of war caused everything to change, and that was the predominant thing? Is that fair to say that’s been the predominant thought?

JA: That’s right. In the popular imagination, Islam spread by the sword. I make a pretty strong case that Arab conquest spread by the sword, but the process of Islamization took, in some cases, centuries. In some places it was quick. But in other places it was slow. What made the difference? That’s the question.

TK: Yes. What did make the difference?

JA: OK, so in order to isolate the factors, I was able to say, all of these communities, whether they were Trinitarian Christian groups or Arian Christian groups—non-Trinitarian groups—

TK: Can we—so Arian, real quick, can you help us know what you’re talking about?

JA: Arians deny that Jesus is divine. So they believe in monotheism—

TK: So they believe there is a Jesus.

JA: They believe there is a Jesus, but he is the exalted creature, not the creator. He’s an exalted creature, and he’s worthy of honor, but not worship. So pretty big difference. So all of the communities, whether they were Trinitarian or non-Trinitarian faced economic pressure, political pressure, social pressure from Islam. The Arian, the non-Trinitarians capitulated really quickly, but the communities that had a Bible in their language—that was really key—and the communities that had a Trinitarian foundation, a strong theological component—they were able to survive, in some cases to the present day. In Ethiopia, you have a Christian community that has not capitulated to Islam, even to this day. And then in Egypt, while much of Egypt is Muslim majority—vast majority—there is still a Coptic Christian community that has never capitulated to Islam. In other places, they didn’t have the Bible in their language, they didn’t have a strong Trinitarian theology—Christianity disappeared, evaporated, and the final traces are those years when the Arabs conquered their lands.

TK: So you have two parts, two things, two ingredients. Let’s start with the first one. Not having the Bible—what difference would that make? Why would that make a people able to withstand stronger than if you didn’t have a Bible?

JA: So in my research I discovered that the Bible had not been translated into Arabic until at least 100-150 years after Mohammed’s death. So Mohammed himself did not have access to the Bible in Arabic. He did have access to these heretical works.

TK: Things about the Bible.

JA: They were later versions of stories that had been corrupted, polluted, but they were extra-biblical works and he had oral stories when he had come in contact with Christians. It was almost always heretical versions of Christianity, so it’s really no surprise that he rejected this false notion of Christianity that he was exposed to anyway. So in Arabic there was no Bible and that meant Muslims came, preaching, “Yes, we have a Scripture for you in your language. It’s called the Quran and it’s in Arabic.” Well, that’s really going to appeal to them. It’s in their mother tongue. “And you’ve heard of Jesus—guess what? We honor Jesus too.”

TK: He’s in our holy writings.

JA: That’s right. He’s a prophet. We honor him. We honor his mother, Mary. But the community had no access to the Bible in their language, so it created a weak faith.

TK: OK, so that was part one. And then part two was—you just mentioned that if you did not have a robust understanding of the Trinity, or even maybe they didn’t even have a category—I don’t know—that they gave in far quicker too.

JA: That’s right. One of the problems that Mohammed saw was polytheism, and so he hit really hard against that in his preaching and his teaching. And the polytheists realized this is an intellectually inferior position to hold. And so his accusation was, “Well, you talk about the Trinity. That sounds a lot like polytheism.”

TK: Many gods.

JA:  “You need to convert over to Islam. We are pure monotheists.”

And if the audience didn’t have a robust idea that there is one God who is the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, they thought, “Hey, what he’s preaching sounds pretty good.” And if it means avoiding persecution, if it means avoiding taxation, if it means avoiding social stigma—what’s the harm? I already, you know, have this diminished idea of Jesus. I already want to avoid the charges of polytheism. Yeah, I’ll become Muslim. And I can avoid all the persecution and hardship that goes with it.

TK: And keep Jesus as a dear cherished friend or whoever.

JA: That’s right.

CA: And then they have a distorted—or Muhammad had a distorted perspective of the Trinity in general.

JA: That’s right. So it seems like what Mohammed was rejecting was distortions of the Trinity that he had picked up from these heretical groups. So it’s kind of heartbreaking to think about—how would history have been different if Muhammad had had access to a Bible in Arabic? What if Mohammed had heard an accurate depiction of the Trinity? All of history would be different.

CA: So what did he believe about the Trinity?

JA: He thought that Mary—it appears from the Quran that Muhammad thought Mary alongside Jesus and God the Father were the Trinity, and so he had this idea that there was a sexual union between the Father and Mary that produced offspring named Jesus. Now we hear that as Christians and we say, “Well, that’s not what we believe.” But that is what the heretical groups told him we believe. And so he rejected that. Of course, we reject it, too. What that means for us interacting with Muslims today, they still have that idea. Oftentimes, they think that when we say Trinity, we mean Father, mother and son. Of course, that’s not what we believe. So part of explaining the Trinity is just telling them what it really is.

TK: What do you think—and so we’re making a little transition here from history to today, and by the way, would you be OK with us putting your paper in our show notes so people could download it?

JA: Sure.

TK: Alright, so you want to get the full deal, you can read it.

JA: That’s right. All the footnotes and everything.

TK: Love it. If we might think something like this—I’m going to—the Trinity is complicated. We struggle to speak about it. I’m just going to talk about Jesus and that will win the day. Give kickback at that. Yeah, and that could even be with our neighbor because I might not live in an Islamic context. So it might be with somebody else and say I’m just going to talk about Jesus. Or it could be with our children, something like that. This is too complicated.

JA: Well, we admit, and we confess the doctrine of the Trinity is mysterious. That doesn’t mean we are ignorant of it. We can say what the Bible says, and that is most simply at a very basic level: We believe in one God. And we believe that this one God is eternally the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—three persons, one divine essence. This is a joyous truth that we confess, and it is not merely proven through a few simple proof texts. No, it is throughout the Scriptures, progressively revealed in more detail, and most explicitly revealed by the Lord Jesus in communion talking to his heavenly Father—he’s not talking to himself—working in the power of the Holy Spirit.

So we see most clearly at the baptism—the Lord Jesus enters the water, the Father speaks from heaven and the Spirit descends on him like a dove. And then in the Great Commission, the Lord Jesus tells us to baptize in the name—the singular name—of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So the doctrine of the Trinity is not ancillary, it’s not secondary to our faith. It is right at the core.

So in dealing with Muslims, sometimes the temptation is to neglect this doctrine because Muslims are going to find it offensive. They’re taught the Trinity is false. They don’t want anything to do with it. Confessing the Trinity for Muslims is the unforgivable sin, so the tendency is for missionaries or Christians to downplay it: “We’ll talk about that later. Let’s just talk about Jesus.” But in fact, the gospel itself has a Trinitarian shape. Think about it. One of the most simple gospel verses, the first verse we taught our children when they were itty bitty—First John 4:14—The Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the world. So you have the Father sending the Son. The Father did not become the Son, the Father did not adopt the Son. The Father sent the Son, the eternal Son who had always been with him, to be the Savior. That salvation—so the gospel itself has a Trinitarian shape.

When you put your faith in Christ and you’re united to Christ, you’re indwelt by the Holy Spirit. So the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all involved in our salvation. And what happens when you by faith are united to the eternal Son of God? The Holy Spirit is called the Spirit of adoption, and the Father takes you and makes you a son or daughter of God. He makes you his own child, so that now we can address God the Father the same way Jesus did, as Abba Father.

TK: Could—can you just speak a second to how a Muslim would think of God and what “the Father” sort of language just used, how they would hear that?

JA: So in Islam it is forbidden to call Allah father. It is haram, it’s blasphemy. They do not relate to Allah as father. They relate to Allah as the way slaves to a master. And so it makes sense when one of the five pillars of Islam is to pray five times a day—a good obedient slave is going to follow those instructions. But what do I tell my own children? You have to come see me five times a day? No, I tell my children, “For you, my doors are always open. You come to me as often as you want. I’m not your employer. I’m not your master. I’m your dad. You crawl up in my lap and you experience love.”

And so not always, but quite often, when Muslims encounter this doctrine that God, through Jesus, adopts you as his child, it penetrates their heart in a way that a philosophical argument, an apologetic defense of the Scripture, or something like that—it penetrates deeply in a way that few things can. Because it offers a relationship with God—not just a generic relationship, but a family relationship. The Father adopts us and invites us to be in his family. And it’s a relationship of love, something that Allah cannot provide. It stands in stark contrast to what they believe, and I think we press into that contrast because that’s really the beauty of the gospel.

CA: Because even for Muslims, they—they don’t, they’re not allowed to call God “father,” right?

JA: That’s right, it’s forbidden to call Allah “father.”

TK: A lot of us are in contexts where we’re not in day-to-day conversations with Islam. However, the—I know from talking to you, but you’re going to say the lesson from your paper applies to people who will—that will never be the context you’re around, so can you just talk a little bit to maybe pastors or parents about the lessons you learned that you put in the paper about the importance of the Bible and the importance of the Trinity having a robust view of the Trinity?

JA: you will meet Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, other apparent so-called Christian faiths that, you know, even some Pentecostal groups want to talk about Jesus only. When pressure comes—and it’s coming—when hard times come, the temptation is to find an easier path. For these early Christians that were being confronted by Islam, they faced a difficult choice. Do I give in? Do I become Muslim and escape, avoid some of this hardship? Or do I bear the steep cost now?

What my research shows is that the groups that have the highest likelihood of surviving that kind of pressure were the ones that had the Scripture in their language and had a Trinitarian theology. So let me give you a really fascinating part of my research. I was able to identify 270 martyrs. These are people who died from Christian communities, but at the hands of Muslims during the first two centuries. And not one of them was a non-Trinitarian.

TK: Really?

JA: All of them were Trinitarians.

CA: So this is after Muhammad?

JA: The 200 years after Mohammed. Yes, thanks for that clarification. During the first 200 years of Islam, first 200 years after Muhammad, these 270 martyrs that we can identify—they either directly confessed faith in the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, or by implication of their church affiliation, we can identify them as Trinitarians. The takeaway—the implication is we cannot find a single example of an Arian dying for his faith. They were not willing—

TK: The application being they didn’t make it—that there was no faith to lose by that point. It was already gone.

JA: It wasn’t worth it. I’m not dying for this. But the Trinitarians—they were willing to die for their faith. We also see that in the literature that was written, the apologetic and polemic—which means either defensive or offensive—literature written against Islam. This was all written by Trinitarians. There’s not a single apologetic or polemic work written by an Arian, by a non-Trinitarian.

I think that has huge implications. We can learn a lesson. This is a vivid illustration from history that if you want to protect yourself, your children, the people in your congregation, from apostasy—orthodoxy protects against apostasy. If I could summarize the whole thing in three words, that would be it. Orthodoxy protects against apostasy—apostasy simply being turning away from the faith, falling away.

TK: I think that’s a really, really good word. It’s a good word for all of us—that thought of “I’m going to bring this down because I feel like if I presented the whole truth, so and so wouldn’t accept that, they wouldn’t hear it”—whether it’s your church members or your children, or how wherever you’re going, and you’re just saying it just doesn’t work.

CA: Right, I think when you’re thinking about maybe talking to your children about some of these big theological truths—one of the things I noticed from the Gospels, such as the Gospel of John—Jesus doesn’t tell his disciples, “Understand, understand, understand,” he says, “Believe, believe, believe.”

TK: That’s helpful.

CA: Yeah. And so sometimes as we’re teaching these deep theological concepts with our children—when our kids were young, we taught them from the very beginning: God is one, but he’s Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And we taught them these—the creeds and we taught them these fundamental Christian beliefs. Because it’s a matter of faith and I think as you believe what God says about himself through his word, then the understanding comes in time, you know, and of course there’s so much—as my husband said, it’s a mystery, but I think—and kids are such a great example of faith, aren’t they? They don’t—we’re the ones that get cynical and skeptical about things.

So I think, you know, when you think about—and specifically thinking about teaching children—to be able to not be afraid to just tell them what the Bible says in simple clear wording that they can hold on to and believe. And so I think I’ve seen children really embrace that. And I think it’s really good for them to learn these truths from a very young age.

TK: That’s really helpful. I am super glad that one, you wrote this paper. I think it rings true. It really does. We need God’s word. So even thoughts about should we as missions agencies and things say that translation is important—it is important.

JA: Unquestionably important. That’s right. We see that in history, and I think this gives a vivid illustration comparing different locations that had the Bible—they were more likely to survive, and if they didn’t have the Bible, Christianity disappeared in those places.

Let me also add to what Christy was saying. We do have a resource available that we wrote, I illustrated, called “Big Thoughts for Little Thinkers.” It’s theology for kids, it’s a four-part series. One book is on the Trinity, it’s for 4- to 8-year-olds. One is on the gospel. One is on the Scripture and one is on the mission. And just a few words per page, few sentences per page, but it introduces children to the one God who is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

And really what it points out is that if Jesus is not divine, he can’t save you, he can’t forgive your sins. If Jesus isn’t human, he can’t represent you before God and bear the weight of your sin as your substitute. And so the Trinity is foundational to understanding who God is and really what the gospel is. It’s a gospel issue. So it’s not an esoteric, vague, academic exercise. It is intensely practical.

TK: So what’s the name of it again and how can people get ahold of this?

JA: “Big Thoughts for Little Thinkers.” It’s available on Amazon. I’m listed there as Joey Allen and these four books—the Gospel, the Trinity, the Scripture, and the Mission.

And Tom, it occurs to me that when you’re talking to a Muslim, the word Trinity could be an obstacle. Red flags are going to come up, they’re going to hit a roadblock. But you can talk about the doctrine of the Trinity, the concept without using that word. Do you know how I know? Because the Bible never uses the word Trinity.

TK: That’s good.

JA: So the Bible clearly describes that there’s only one God. Jesus confessed there’s only one God. He quoted the Shema. And yet we see Jesus is divine. He’s an object of worship. He raised the dead, he calmed the sea, he had power over demons. He did so many things that God alone can do. And we see the divinity of the Holy Spirit. So we have three persons interacting, but one God. And so the doctrine is there.

When you’re talking to a Muslim, by describing the gospel accurately, you are describing the Trinity at work. It’s really a beautiful thing and I see people get really excited about the gospel when they realize the theology, the nature of God that undergirds it. It’s really beautiful.

TK: Alright, this has been really helpful. Christy, you actually read the paper before Joe read it today. This is going to be one of those things—we’ll put the link in the show notes, but I would encourage people to read it. Is this too hard for people, Christy? Like if we don’t know foreign languages, things like that, can we handle this paper?

CA: I think you could. I think you could get through it. There’s—it’s definitely an academic paper. And so I think my husband’s description of it is helpful kind of hearing it verbally, but I think it would be a good resource.

TK: For me, I think I found when I’m accessing things we already do it and things like we’re going to the doctor and there’s a thing and we skip over parts like “I don’t know that word,” but we get the context and we get the point.

CA: Exactly, yeah.

TK: Joe, you’re pretty clear. So I would encourage you to download the paper and read it and then the Big Thoughts for Little Thinkers sounds terrific, so I’ll put a link there also and get that too.

JA: Thank you so much, Tom.

TK: Thanks for being part of this and we’re actually going to record another one because we want to just hear about life for you guys, so blessings all.

JY: Thank you for joining us for GearTalk. Next week, we begin a four-week series on the book of Ruth. Again, go to our show notes and download Joe Allen’s paper. You’ll find a link to sign up for Hands to the Plow’s newsletter in the show notes as well. For other resources related to biblical training for the church, visit handstotheplow.org. To stay up to date on Hands to the Plow’s resources, follow us on Instagram at @handstotheplowministries and make sure to check out our YouTube page for more content.