Ideas Have Consequences

Homelessness and The Tragedy of American Compassion with Dr. Marvin Olasky

• Disciple Nations Alliance • Season 1 • Episode 99

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America’s secular approach to fighting poverty has been a disaster, yet we can learn a lot from how Christians helped the poor successfully 200 years ago. If you want to make a difference on the poverty in your community, you need to join us as we feature Dr. Marvin Olasky, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, the former editor of World Magazine, and the author of The Tragedy of American Compassion. Olasky’s passion for this topic led him to live in a homeless community in Missouri recently. Our conversation underscores the significance of personal involvement, community, and family in combating poverty, as opposed to bureaucratic solutions and handouts alone. Further, we discuss the dignity of work and the need for employment to uplift those in poverty. Join us and discover what it truly means to live out our faith by loving our neighbors on the streets of our towns. 

Marvin Olasky:

I just want to point this out, because if you give, let's say, a homeless person, stuff that's harmful to that person, such as giving him money that he can then use for drugs, it's as if you are shooting heroin into Jesus' veins.

Darrow Miller:

It cuts both ways.

Marvin Olasky:

You can do wonderful things, very valuable things with money. You can do very harmful things with money.

Luke Allen:

Hi friends, welcome back to Ideas have Consequences. The podcast of the Disciple Nations Alliance. As you know if you've listened to this podcast, on this show we examine how our mission as Christians is to not only spread the gospel around the world, to all the nations, but our mission also includes to be the hands and feet of God, to transform the nations to increasingly reflect the truth, goodness and beauty of God's kingdom. Tragically, the Church has largely neglected this second part of permission and today most Christians have little influence on their surrounding cultures. Join us on this podcast as we rediscover what it means for each of us to disciple the nations and to create Christ-honoring cultures that reflect the character of the living God.

Scott Allen:

So welcome again everybody to another episode of Ideas have Consequences. This is the podcast of the Disciple Nations Alliance. My name is Scott Allen, I'm the president of the DNA and it's great to have you back listening to another episode. I'm with my team Dara Miller, dwight Voet, luke Allen and today I'm really so privileged to announce our special guest, dr Marvin Olaski. For those of you who don't know Dr Olaski, he currently is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute for the Center for Science and Culture up in Seattle. He lives in Austin, texas, but many people in the evangelical world know him for his long work at World Magazine. He works as the editor-in-chief at World from 1992 to 2001. He was a professor, a provost and a chairholder and dean at the University of Texas, austin, as well as at King's College and Patrick Henry College and the World Journalism Institute from 1983 to 2001. So a long bio and we would love to hear more from you, dr Olaski, to fill in some of the blanks.

Scott Allen:

Those of us at the DNA have been privileged to know Marvin for a number of years, I think. For me, marvin, your book you've written several books, but it was your book, the Tragedy of American Compassion, a book that you published in, I believe it was in the 90s. That book had a huge impact on me personally, on those of us in the DNA. So, anyways, I just want to thank you for your work, your ministry and the huge influence. I'm looking forward to kind of talking with you about that. I want to share some of those insights with our listeners. But before we jump in, marvin, yeah, I'd love to just have you share any more about your background that you'd like to share. I know you have a fascinating background and in fact, you even had some time up here in the town that I'm in right now, currently Bend, oregon.

Marvin Olasky:

So yeah, yeah, the two long tenures I had occupationally were with the University of Texas, where I taught from 1983 to 2008, with a few years off on leaves for good behavior. And then World was from 1992 through the end of 2021. So those were the two major occupational activities I had. But you mentioned Bend. Right after I graduated from college, I bicycled across the country from Boston to Bend about 3,000 miles and worked for about only half a year for a small newspaper there and then got involved in radical politics a strange thing to do in Oregon, but it happens at times.

Scott Allen:

We're known for our radical politics in Oregon. I think you know that, so that's right At that time not so well known.

Marvin Olasky:

Mark Hatfield, who was an evangelical and a good guy, was one of the senators from Oregon, so Oregon was more of a normal state in those days. It was, it's true it was a type of normal with the national organization for the reform of marijuana laws, but anyway, yeah.

Scott Allen:

Yeah, wow. So yeah, that bicycle trip. That's a long trip, marvin, from Boston to Bend. That's amazing. And you graduated I didn't mention, but you graduated from Yale in 1971. That's right. And you have a doctorate in American culture from the University of Michigan as well, so highly educated. I'd love to have you just share briefly. I know this would be we could talk the entire time about your history because it's so fascinating. But you identified as a communist for some part of your life and then had quite a shift from that to your current position. You wanted to share a little bit about that, so our listeners have some context, oh sure.

Marvin Olasky:

This was the radical politics. After working on the Ben Bulletin, a really good small newspaper, ben at that point was more of a lumbering town of 13,000. Now it's much more of a vacation town 27,000, 30,000, something like that. But after doing that I grandly resigned from the newspaper to protest, I suppose capitalist depression or something of that sort, and then over the next few months, spent a lot of time reading Marx and Lenin and so forth and, oddly enough, in Oregon, joined the Communist Party USA in the middle of 1972.

Scott Allen:

And that was. I'm reading a book right now called oh gosh. It's on that history. I'm blanking out on the title of it right now, but it was kind of in a violent stage at that point, wasn't it?

Marvin Olasky:

Not so much the Communist Party.

Scott Allen:

Okay.

Marvin Olasky:

But there was a lot of stuff going on. There had been a lot of. We tend to look at the United States now and see polarization and so forth.

Marvin Olasky:

Well, it was certainly there back in 1970. And so there were bombings going on from an offshoot of students for a democratic society called the Weathermen. Angela Davis, who went on to become a professor in the University of California system, was involved with one terrorist activity. A lot of stuff going on like that. And the Communist Party wasn't involved in that, but certainly sympathized with people who were.

Scott Allen:

Right, angela Davis was a mentee of Herbert Marcus, which I didn't know until recently, and he's a card-carrying member of that Frankfurt School. You know that goes back to some of this history that we've been talking about recently, so interesting To a lecture, a Marcus lecture at Yale while I was there.

Marvin Olasky:

And boy that place. This was a big auditorium with maybe 450 people in it. It was packed. Every seat taken, people sitting on the stairs, people sitting on the stage. So he was the end thing at that point.

Scott Allen:

No kidding, Wow, Marvin. And then, yeah, continue with that. Like what happened? How did you? Because, you know, in your journey with kind of that Communist, Communist Party of the United States, I believe, you traveled to Russia even, didn't you? Well, I did.

Marvin Olasky:

I took a Soviet freighter across the Pacific and ended up, and in that trip then a small Russian ship from Japan to Nakhadka, on the Pacific coast near Vladivostok, and yeah then spent a week on the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

Scott Allen:

That's kind of the vacation land of Russia back there. Yeah, that's right.

Marvin Olasky:

Yeah, it's, you know, 6,000 miles the train ride and at that time I was thinking this was this came out of my opposition to the Vietnam War and concerns about poverty and a lot of misunderstanding and misapprehension of what's right and what's wrong.

Marvin Olasky:

But I thought at that point the Communist Party was a subsidiary of the Soviet Communist Party, actually bought and paid for, and that was okay with me because I thought the United States is a big country. It's a country that's engaged in violent imperialist action in Vietnam, enormously destructive. Therefore, you need a bigger country to fight it.

Marvin Olasky:

So I was happy that the Soviet Union was twice as big, just as far as geographic extent from East to West. So yeah, the bigness of the Soviet Union was actually part of my weird fascination. At that point I was planning to stay in Moscow, become an international correspondent. Some communications didn't work out. I ended up back in the United States, worked in the Boston Globe as a correspondent for half a year, studied Russian in summer school at Yale and then went to the University of Michigan.

Scott Allen:

How did you become a Christian? Tell us about that, because at some point all of this changed obviously.

Marvin Olasky:

Yeah, I heard the other day Ernest Hemingway's story from a while back. The question is, how do people I think this was the question, hemingway how do people with big fortunes lose those fortunes? And Hemingway said, well, first slowly, then quickly. In my case he asked okay, how did I come to Christ, in a way, first quickly, then slowly. I mean, there was one particular day I can point to, november 1, 1973, where I had been pretty solid in my thinking as an atheist. I grew up Jewish by March 13, atheist to 14, that's a sad pattern in American Judaism these days, and so I was pretty convinced in atheism. I was reading a pamphlet by Lennon called Socialism and Religion, where Lennon talks about a theism as the basis of communism, which I think is accurate. And then suddenly, for some strange reason, which I still really know why, I was the beneficiary. But for the next eight hours I was sitting in my red chair next to my bed, just off the University of Michigan campus in a rooming house and just bombarded with a sense that atheism is wrong, that there is a God of some kind and it sounds a little mystical. It's a long time at this point, but that's yeah, it was very strange, the strangest thing that's ever happened to me in my life. So that was quickly. I was quickly no longer an atheist. But then I certainly did not want to become a Christian. I had grown up believing that Christians worship Christmas trees. Christians are kind of stupid doing that. I certainly did not want to become one of them, so really took three years of pretty much fighting it every step of the way, but increasingly through a series of things not my own, I mean.

Marvin Olasky:

I'll just give you two quick examples. Number one to get a PhD at that point at least, at the University of Michigan, you had to have a good reading knowledge of a foreign language, and I had forgotten my childhood Hebrew. I had forgotten my high school French. I had studied some Russian, learned some Russian, but I needed to do more. So I studied Russian and was able to eventually pass the test with a reading knowledge. But how did I pass it? I didn't take a class, I was pretty much reading on my own. I would go to the University of Michigan library and, when I was a communist, read Pravda. Afterwards, after I left communism, I no longer read Pravda, but I happened to have, in God's providence, in my bookcase, a book I had been given a couple of years earlier, long Story which I won't go into now. It was a copy of the New Testament in Russian.

Marvin Olasky:

And I picked that up shirly, completely for reading practice. For so I thought and started reading it very slowly. I really liked chapter one of Matthew right, because it's begat, begat, begat, begat, begat. I could get through that pretty quickly. I knew the Russian verb for giving birth to and so forth. But then I had to slow down and by the time it was, you know, Matthew 5, 6, 7, the Sermon on the Mount. I was thinking, wow, this is something really special, this is amazing.

Dwight Vogt:

Because when I was a communist.

Marvin Olasky:

It wasn't an eye for an eye, it was basically two eyes for an eye. Or, more precisely, sometimes what they said in Stalin's days nine grams in the back of the head, nine grams being the weight of a bullet. So that was the idea in communism you, someone beat, you, you killed them. And here Jesus is saying turn the other cheek. Not an eye for an eye. That was really weird, but I thought this was special. I had to teach a course. I was assigned to teach a course on early American literature because the regular professors of the University of Michigan wanted to teach Polynesian literature or other specialties. No one wanted to teach this stuff from colonial days. I had never studied it. I was assigned to it. I had to do a lot of cramming. What's early American literature? Lots of pureed and sermons. So these dead white males from three centuries ago or so were preaching to me. Things like that made a big difference and so, really fighting and kicking all the way, after three years I finally professed faith in Christ.

Scott Allen:

No, kidding, what a story. Praise God, he's just got such humor. I love that your introduction to Jesus was reading Russian a Russian New Testament. I think that's hilarious.

Marvin Olasky:

Well, god has a sense of humor, he definitely does, he definitely does and we see it in our own lives.

Scott Allen:

Yes, and I love that.

Luke Allen:

Here at the Disciple Nations Alliance, dna, we equip believers throughout the world with a biblical worldview, empowering them to break the bonds of poverty in its many forms in their lives and communities and bring about God's intended flourishing for families, churches and nations. Our core training resource here at the DNA is called the Kingdomizer Training Program. If you want to learn more about who we are and how you can begin to break the bonds of poverty around you, make sure to check out the Kingdomizer Training Program and join over a million others who have learned how to bring biblical transformation into every corner of society by signing up for the Kingdomizer Training Program at quorumdayocom today, or you can find the link in this episode's landing page.

Scott Allen:

Well, marvin, I think and I know the team I could easily dominate this discussion and I don't want to. And I think, for those of you who know the DNA well and have read Darrow's books and my books, marvin Olasky has endorsed almost all of our books. Usually we feature those prominently, and so that has meant a lot to us, marvin, your endorsements and your belief in our ministry. But I just want to give you a little bit of insight, because we come out of Christian relief and development, poverty fighting, really trying to change the world, trying to make the world a better place, especially in really broken communities. And the world of Christian relief and development that we came out of was very secular.

Scott Allen:

The approach to poverty fighting was rooted in kind of a secular worldview. The solutions were very material. It saw the world through a materialistic lens, but as Christians because many Christians weren't thinking worldview-ishly they adopted a secular framework for poverty fighting. But they prayed in the morning, right, they had devotions and read their Bibles, but it didn't affect the way they're thinking about poverty fighting For them. That was what they learned how to do in university, and by that time the universities were quite secular.

Scott Allen:

So, all that to say, when we read your book the Tragedy of American Compassion. It was just so eye-opening because what you did was you opened our eyes in a really profound way to what a uniquely distinctly biblical approach would look like. If you were asking the question how do we see poverty ameliorated and how do we see people really help that are living in poverty, in poverty situations. And the way you unpacked it in your book was historically and I love history right, so I was just loving that.

Scott Allen:

And you went back to a time in American history when America wasn't secular largely. It was largely Christian, as you mentioned earlier the early Puritans that founded the country. They had a particular approach to poverty fighting and you went back and looked at that, looked at their principles, how they did it, and then traced the history forward through all of these phases of change as America secularized, leading up to the welfare state of the 1960s and 70s. And then you end the book with this call kind of let's go back to those principles that are from the Bible Dero. Do you guys want to add your thoughts to that? This is just kind of my overview, but that stayed with us and that really shaped our thinking, and it still does to this day.

Darrow Miller:

I would say, marvin, that book was written at a time when we were working for Food for the Hungry and realizing that money wasn't going to solve the problem of poverty. There was something else and something happened in my life at that time that gave me some insight about the relationship between worldview and poverty. And then I read your book and it just exploded in my mind what you were saying and it just answered so many questions that we were having at that time in our lives and I cannot thank you enough for writing that book and I know many, many people have been blessed by your insights in that book, marvin.

Marvin Olasky:

Well, thank you and Dero, you've written some really good books so I've learned a lot from you. But I appreciate what you've said. That was in 1992 when the book came out and, yeah, a really interesting experience. I've probably broken the hearts of a number of Christian publishers who have been published enough to publish books I wrote that got very little public attention. That book, the Tragedy of American Compassion, got a lot because for his own reasons Newt Kingrich really promoted it heavily, just as he was becoming Speaker of the House of Representatives in 1995. So got a lot of reading in Congress. Probably had some useful effect. So I am glad for God's mercy on that book.

Darrow Miller:

Can you tell us a little bit about where you were at that point in your life that led you to write that book?

Marvin Olasky:

Well, I professed faith in Christ in 1976. In the late 1980s I was just reading the Bible and seeing how much the Bible has to say about poverty.

Marvin Olasky:

There's a lot in there, in every book of the Bible. The Heritage Foundation in Washington said hey, why don't you come to Washington for a year and give us a project that can lead to a book? I was reading in the Bible about poverty. I went in 1987 to a meeting in Valar, switzerland, on international poverty, so I started thinking about that. At the University of Texas.

Marvin Olasky:

I went into the library and started reading books and the stacks about poverty, the history of poverty and just about all the books there was occasionally maybe a reference to something in colonial times in early America, 19th century, but for just about all the books, poverty fighting in America started in the 1930s with a new deal, yeah. And it seemed to me that, okay, here I'm reading the Bible and I'm thinking about this. People who read the Bible a lot more than we tend to do in America now, let's say in the 19th century, wouldn't they have been moved to think about this a little bit? Wouldn't they have done something? And so that became my project, that I proposed a heritage. I'll spend a year in Washington. I will forage through the Library of Congress and find out what Christians were doing in America before the 1930s, because that's been left out of most of the historical writing.

Marvin Olasky:

So it was just that type of a guess. There must be something there. People read the Bible and want to apply it in some ways, and that's what led to the book.

Darrow Miller:

You mentioned Vilar and I think I was at the same conference. Yep Vichel Mangalawadi was there.

Marvin Olasky:

Yes.

Darrow Miller:

And that was a remarkable week conference that I think shaped all of our lives.

Marvin Olasky:

Yeah, yeah, this is my friend. Howard Amundsen was behind that conference funding it and yeah, I met a lot of people there who have become my guides and I was just able to contribute this a little bit.

Scott Allen:

Marvin, I would love to have you share some of, because you're right, I love the way you're describing it as kind of lost knowledge. As we became secular, our whole approach to poverty fighting became secular and rooted in that narrative of the great society and FDR and all of that but leading up to the kind of the modern welfare state which let's just say has been a disaster if you really want to see people rise out of poverty. It's been just such a disaster. But you came back to some principles and you ended by bringing those principles forward into the and I think they're timeless and they're biblical and would you mind just kind of running through the way you ended the book was by laying out those principles in a really terrific way. You used this kind of ABC approach to doing that and there was more than ABC. But would you mind just sharing those principles? I just think they're so powerful.

Marvin Olasky:

Well, sure, and the organization excuse me, the organization I really owe to a fellow named Adam Meyerson who was the editor of a heritage foundation magazine called Policy Review, and he asked me to write an article summarizing what I was finding. And I wrote the article and had a discussion with lots of quotations and so forth, and he said, well, this is very interesting, but it's not going to be memorable for people. Can you organize it in some way to lay out the basic principles? And because of that work of a good editor, yeah, I started doing this ABCDEFG and let's see if I can remember them after all these years.

Scott Allen:

We'll try to help you, I know.

Marvin Olasky:

yeah, I think I can this is a test of the emergency broadcasting system. The affiliation, namely look for the community in which people, people who are poor, are or are not bonding. If there isn't a community, help them to found one by maybe one to one helping that person not just in a bureaucratic way.

Scott Allen:

Go ahead. Let me just go back to. I know we can go through them quickly, but I just want to just let me just quickly on the A, because it's so important that people understand affiliation and how that comes out of the Bible and how that's kind of different from the welfare state which sees the poor as a mass of people and it's a government problem to solve. And there's a bureaucrat in Washington DC and he's doling out money to kind of faceless, nameless people. That's the kind of the secular approach. But the biblical approach is based in kind of biblical structures of affiliation, of family, right that there's a responsibility, first and foremost and this comes straight out of the reverses in the New Testament to care for those in your family. Parents have responsibility for their children, children for their parents when they're older and et cetera. And so I want to go through them, but I also want to just pause and just reflect on just each one is just loaded with importance for poverty, fighting that affiliation.

Marvin Olasky:

Yeah, newspapers and magazines are full of these days, full of stuff about the loneliest epidemic, the loneliness epidemic in America.

Dwight Vogt:

I think in.

Marvin Olasky:

England they actually have a minister, a cabinet minister secretary, to deal with the loneliness problem.

Dwight Vogt:

This is happening, apparently, worldwide.

Marvin Olasky:

But yeah, god puts us in families, god puts us in communities. We have churches. That's where the initial emphasis should be.

Scott Allen:

That's where it has to start. So the question is, yeah, who's poor in my community that I can help actually personally, right, you know Right, so yeah, yeah, dickens used to make.

Marvin Olasky:

Charles Dickens used to make fun. I think his term was telescopic philanthropy. That is someone in England is in his era, is intent on helping, maybe a project in Africa that may or may not be a good project, but nevertheless the telescope pointed at Africa rather than something right next door. So, yeah, the biblical idea is well, jesus has asked who's my neighbor and he tells the Good Samaritan story. So that's the biblical emphasis on doing things family, community, doing things locally.

Scott Allen:

And being personally involved. Right, that's the tragedy of American compassion, if I got that correct, is that it becomes kind of a bureaucracy that's responsible. That's compassionate work, what government is doing. I'm not saying government doesn't ever roll here, by the way, but the biblical emphasis on compassion is to get your hands dirty to walk alongside somebody who's needy. That it requires action on your part. That goes beyond writing checks and things like that. And affiliation enables that, because you're asking the question who can I help in my circle that I have affiliation with?

Marvin Olasky:

And the tragedy in America is that we actually know how to fight poverty and we've forgotten it or ignored it or had other priorities take over.

Scott Allen:

Let's go to bonding, because bonding is important, because there's people that have been cut off for different reasons. Right? So these natural bonds of affiliation, familial community, church, they're cut off. So talk about bonding then. What does that mean?

Marvin Olasky:

That's the B, this means, as opposed to a bureaucratic approach, actually a personal approach, often one-to-one, helping a person in need. That was that book. Of course, I wrote a long time ago, but now that I am retired from editing, some people, when they retire, just wanna play golf. My type of golf that I really like is writing. So I no longer have to just play my golf on Saturday. I can play at most days of the week. So, I'm doing writing. Now I'm getting back to homelessness questions.

Marvin Olasky:

And last month I spent 10 days living in two homelessness or ex-homeless communities in Missouri one in Springfield, one in Joplin and what I saw there again is the power of bonding. Often we refer to the homeless as some big mass and we come up with a governmental program to help the homeless. One of the useful things in those 10 days is that I actually got to know people as individuals and saw that those who are coming out of problems usually it's I would say usually, often probably usually because there's one person in particular who has become close to them and really helps them.

Marvin Olasky:

The homelessness tends to be a fairly lonely activity. You get very suspicious of people. Other people are there to trying sometimes to steal or beat you up. You pretty much stay alone. The whole idea of a homeless community of happy people, intense or sleeping bags is pretty rare. So bonding is what's really essential there. It's nice if people already have bonds, but if they don't, it's important to rebond people in some way so it's not just a bureaucracy, and not just being treated as one of the homeless, but actually as a human being made in God's image.

Scott Allen:

Yes, I think for me, adoption is also just a very powerful picture of bonding. You're bringing in somebody who's not directly part of your family and literally saying I'm going to bond with you and you're gonna become part of my family and I'm gonna treat you as if you're part of my family, and that's the idea. It's finding those people who are cut off and many of the homeless are, for various reasons, completely cut off. Family either won't have them back or they don't want to go back. They're you know. So this bonding idea, coming alongside people who don't have those connections and forming a kind of forming a new family with them and you can't obviously do that with a lot of people you know.

Scott Allen:

But yeah, go ahead.

Marvin Olasky:

No, it's interesting. In the debates about homelessness today, the left tends to talk about housing prices, which are significant on the coast. They're significant in New York City. They're significant in Los Angeles and San Francisco. It's not all that important or difficult in much of the middle of the country to find places that are affordable at normal wages or even minimum wages, but nevertheless, that's what you hear a lot from the left. It's all housing prices, and then the right tends to talk about drug use, which is real and also, to some extent, mental illness, which is also real.

Marvin Olasky:

What both sides tend to miss is the questions of community in the middle of individual relationships, and, of course, the spiritual dimension of this also tends to be overlooked, both on the left and on the right. So that's one of the things I'm learning about as I spend time actually getting to know some people in this community.

Scott Allen:

I'd love to talk to you more about your current learning on that. That would be a whole. Maybe we can do that as another podcast. Actually, I'd love just to kind of go into that issue because it's such a huge issue, especially here in Oregon and Washington and stuff. But let's continue. And so A, b, affiliation, bonding, c, I believe, is categorization. Do you wanna talk about that, prince?

Marvin Olasky:

Well, yeah, rather than thinking of every poor person is the same or every homeless person is the same, find out more about the individual circumstances and be willing to say well, here's someone who is in a place right now in his or her life which makes that person amenable to trying to change.

Marvin Olasky:

If a person is intent. If a person who's an addict and alcoholic is intent on continuing an addiction or alcoholism, then what you try to do to help that person probably won't be effective. That person has to want to change and in fact, that person probably has to. I think parents find this out sometimes with kids. If you want a child to do something, the child has to want to do it. The parent may want to do it, but if the child isn't willing, that gets very hard and it's the same thing, in a way, when you're dealing with questions of poverty. So you have to be willing to categorize and be actually able to say well, this person really wants to change this person. Here's a way we can help. But if a person doesn't, wanna change.

Scott Allen:

So kind of one-size-fits-all approaches aren't gonna work. You have to kind of do some, and I think C and D go together, by the way, quite nicely. D is discernment, Right yeah.

Marvin Olasky:

And you have to be able to discern the individual circumstances and this whole question of why is this person poor right now, why is this person doing drugs, why is this person alcoholic? And look at the particular questions involved rather than just generalizing.

Scott Allen:

And that's the problem with welfare is it doesn't do the categorization and discernment. It treats the poor as a kind of a group or a class, and again this comes from its materialistic kind of worldview, whereas the Bible, people are image-bearers of God and part of that means that they make choices and they have to want, like you said, they have to make a choice at some point to want to overcome some of these problems. You have to yeah. Guys, I'm dominating, I wanna-.

Dwight Vogt:

I have a question with your work in Joblim with the homeless. Is that with True Charity Living Waters Are you connected to?

Marvin Olasky:

them at all.

Dwight Vogt:

Yes, yes. Because they have, they put together a course based on your book and it quotes your book quite a bit and this is a shout out to that course.

Marvin Olasky:

I mean it's really good and so I was just wondering if you were connected to them.

Dwight Vogt:

True Charity initiative.

Marvin Olasky:

Yeah, no, for four days I lived with those folks and it was interesting I had. My youngest son was a little bit worried about my doing this and I said nothing to worry about, I'm gonna be living in tiny houses in Springfield. So it's a village of 31 tiny houses and they're pretty close together but they're individual houses and so he was worried that you know who knows what. I said no, there's individual houses, there's a lock in the door and so forth. Yeah, I didn't tell him about the Living Waters in Springfield because these are guys I was living with in one house and really I came to like just about all of them a lot, but just about all of them have felonies on their record, sometimes violent crimes, and so happily I did not have to tell my youngest son or my wife that they're.

Marvin Olasky:

But you know, the common denominator of summoning these folks in Springfield and in Dropland, all with a lot of different things, is very troubled childhoods, parents who were alcoholics or addicts or violent in some way, huge amounts of most people in foster care, which is a very good thing if there's some stability. But if you're changing foster homes every several months or so, that can really hurt a child's psychology. So adoption in those circumstances is very important, as Scott was mentioning. So yeah, interesting people. I find myself liking them a lot and really enjoying being there, but it was an interesting experience that I wanted to do some more of.

Scott Allen:

That's great. Good for you for doing that.

Marvin Olasky:

The other thing, just as you read things about homelessness. I've done stuff where I just stopped at a place for a couple of hours and maybe interview one of the managers and interview someone who's usually handpicked from among the residents there. It's really different when you've been there for several days and people see you there. You hear things, you find out things that you just don't find out from the typical journalistic drop-in. So I'm learning a lot by actually being at places for a while and that's something where, when I read accounts and newspapers and magazines, that's something that's fairly rare. That's awesome. Well, every week I publish a column in a website called Fix Homelessness a rather audacious title, but Fix Homelessness, it's a discovery institute, and so, week by week I do this. The series on my stays in Missouri will start in January, week by week, but right now I took a trip just to get a quick sense of a number of places in the middle of the country. So the weekly columns right now in Fix Homelessness are about that trip where I was just comparing, getting a quick comparison of what the management of these different places was trying to do. And I can give you a quick example.

Marvin Olasky:

There's a very impressive place called Springs Rescue Mission in Colorado Springs, and I won't go into all the details here, but there's a way of guiding people along into a deeper understanding of their own motives and then introduce them to Christ, sort of week by week, month by month. So I'm very impressed with programs like that that take care of the physical needs but also try to show people. Here's what you have to learn, here's what will be very helpful to you if you actually have a spiritual walk and people, sometimes motivated by material objectives, nevertheless get in deeper and deeper. In other words, it's not that there's pressure to make a confession, a profession of faith, because that's what in China they call becoming a rice Christian, if you just make a profession of faith in order to get some material benefit, but to help people see that there's something more that they should learn about, and then they themselves, within God's providence, will make a decision one way or another. That's a very useful thing for homeless shelters to do, and most don't do it.

Marvin Olasky:

I was impressed in Colorado Springs with the Springs Rescue Mission that they do do it. So I'm learning about what different shelters do, and there are some Christian shelters that use the hammer, namely, if you wanna get fed, you have to sit in a service, which the most lusty, exciting singing I've ever heard in a church service was at some places like this. Some of the people are drunk at the moment but they're singing praise songs, but that's not all that helpful. On the other hand, just to ignore, as some groups that are Christian groups do, but they just say, well, we're just gonna feed them and house them and then it's all up to them, that's not real helpful either. So I'm learning about places that try to guide people step by step to look deeper and then decide for themselves what they wanna do, but urge them to do it in various ways, not forcing them, but providing some reason for them to wanna just go further and further and deeper in, as CS Lewis might say.

Scott Allen:

And this is E, isn't it Back to our A, b, c, d, e. Right Is evangelism, am I correct? I'm trying to remember as well. Say that again. It's evangelism, isn't it?

Marvin Olasky:

Well, actually, no, the E probably should be evangelism, but in the original thing it stands for employment.

Scott Allen:

Employment. Oh okay, I'm wrong.

Marvin Olasky:

Thanks for correcting me, but it should be evangelism.

Scott Allen:

Well, I know that the spiritual comes in at some point. Go ahead, darryl, yeah.

Darrow Miller:

Let me interrupt, especially because of this last 15 seconds of conversation. Marvin, do you know Ena Richards?

Marvin Olasky:

I don't.

Darrow Miller:

She would be someone fascinating for you to get to know. She's from South Africa, worked in the slums in South Africa, she started a program called Work for a Living, and she started the program with skills training and realized that's not what the people needed, not what these kids needed. They needed work virtues, and so she created a program to train young people in the virtues needed for work, and this program has gone all over Africa. It's going into South America. She's a remarkable woman who, in light of the kinds of things you're doing now, it'd be really good for you to get to know her, and I'd just be wonderful to see what came out of a discussion between the two of you.

Marvin Olasky:

Sure, if you could email me just contact, information, website stuff like that, I'll check this out.

Darrow Miller:

I will certainly do it.

Scott Allen:

Yeah, she's fantastic, no, and that's exactly right.

Marvin Olasky:

There are the virtues that are needed. So sometimes it's not job training, it's basically job readiness training, and that's important.

Scott Allen:

Yes, yeah, so the E is for employment, but maybe I should have E squared or double E in order to have employment and evangelism.

Scott Allen:

Yeah, well, they're both important and I think that those are to see true change. You have to kind of address those deeper levels, the spiritual level as well, and people need to know the Lord, they need to come to Christ and very often that's essential for them breaking addictions. There's just not the power there to do it apart from Christ. If addictions are really at the root of the problem, and of course everyone needs, we want everyone to know the Lord. But yeah, so E? Well, okay, before we get to E, I want to just pause and go back to discernment and categorization, because you see this in the Bible. I'm always amazed that people, christians that are working in poverty, fighting neglect. The passages in Timothy, you know that talk about the widows, but that's exactly what is happening in those passages is Paul is encouraging the church. You've got to do some categorization, discernment, you know, between true widows that have needs and widows Darrell, how do you say it in your teaching? Widows, indeed, how do you say that? Yeah, widows indeed.

Darrow Miller:

I think I got that from Marvin.

Scott Allen:

Yeah, yeah.

Marvin Olasky:

If I remember correctly, and again, widows. These are people very close to God's heart. We're particularly commanded about widows and orphans. But even there, with widows yeah, what is it over 60, not prone to gossip? There are several. There are several even within the widows category. There are several factors that require discernment to be able to and the goal. Back in the 19th century they had some, really, they had some nomenclature. That's very troubling for people today, but it's important to explain. They talked about the worthy and the unworthy poor in England and that can readily be understood. All of us are unworthy of God's grace and mercy. Nevertheless, god and His kindness does provide that. When they talked about worthy, they didn't mean whether people are made in God's image or not.

Marvin Olasky:

I mean all people are made in God's image, worthy, was worthy of attention and immediate physical help, material help, because they will benefit from it, as opposed to just passing out money at a stoplight or a street corner to a person who very likely is going to use that money for drugs. There have been some studies and again this may be exaggerated in the figure, but I remember one study that said 90% of the money that's just handed out that way goes for drugs or alcohol. So that's not helping a person and I want to be careful in saying this because it's very easy. It's very easy to you see someone at the corner. It's very easy just to walk on by at a stoplight, to roll up the window and not make. You have to be willing to expend some time and sometimes it's going to be wasted time in terms of actually helping a person. But you have to be doing that. But at the same time, be careful in just passing out material help. Try to combine it with relational help, personal help, spiritual help in some ways.

Scott Allen:

Or else you may be hurting the person. That's right and that's something we all are challenged with increasingly as we're driving around our cities and people are asking us for money. And I think you know we all struggle with that, I know I do. You know it doesn't ever feel right to just leave the window up and ignore them, because there's something going on in my own heart with that right. You know we're supposed to be concerned and caring and at the same time just giving money is not the right answer either, because you'd like you say, the studies are showing that it's not helping them. You know it's being used for drugs or alcohol, so but it's, I think, taking that time to say, to point them to places that they really can get some help. Whether they choose to do that, that's up to them. And back to the your book, marvin.

Scott Allen:

I read one of the stories in your book that you told of colonial America. That stuck with me on this way that they used to kind of determine worthy and unworthy. The discernment was wood piles, right, you know. And they would be a wood pile out back. And if somebody said, hey, I want some help, would you give me some money? You know, would you? Would you help me? I'm poor. The first thing that they would require is you've got to go split some wood first. That also touches on employment too. But and if they weren't worthy, if they weren't willing to do that, then they weren't worthy. As he said, there's a difference between you know being worthy and God's sight. I did. That story stuck with me because it treats people as human beings and not just mouths or animals. Right, I mean, I think this is what really is powerful. We're not dealing with livestock here, we're dealing with human beings.

Marvin Olasky:

Yeah, just a couple of stories. What's the equivalent of a wood pile these days? A wood pile then again it was a. It was a work test to see whether an able bodied man was willing to chop wood, but it also, of course, helped the organization. I mean, they burned wood for heat at that point, so it was very useful. Now we don't we don't use wood piles that way anymore for the most part. What's the equivalent today?

Marvin Olasky:

Back around 2000 or so, broadway Community Church in the Upper West Side of New York City started asking people who they were going to be helping physically. Here's a, here's a plastic bag. Can you go up and go outside and pick up some trash for half an hour or an hour and then come back with it? Because that part of Broadway was was pretty loaded with papers and other stuff floating around. That's the equivalent of a work test. Other other churches may have other opportunities as far as cleaning up or doing this or doing that, but that was an important way to see to run away, because discernment is very difficult. But if you have a test of that sort, then that really helps. You see whether the person is willing to to work and change changes life in some way.

Scott Allen:

Yeah, absolutely. And then you know we touched on E again employment. But the goal isn't just continued handouts. You want people to be able to work, to earn a living. And again that gets to our being made in God's image. Right, we're created to be creators, to be workers. That's part of our dignity, that's what it means to be human. So to bypass that is not helpful. You need comments, marvin, on that principle.

Marvin Olasky:

No, that's the one of the things you see in the Garden of Eden is that is, that Adam has work to do. He has and I think Darrow has written about this very well he has. He has physical work in terms of gardening, he has intellectual work in terms of naming the animals. So that's part of our very nature and it's cruel just to treat a person who's who's able, body and able minded, as if the person is the equivalent of of a pet. You know, I love my dog. I put food in his bowl in the morning, we go out for a walk. He's not a working dog, he's a very cute dog, and so people, people say, oh, what a pretty dog, and I say thank you very much, as if they're telling it to me.

Marvin Olasky:

I try to take the dog's personality in that way. But yeah, this is people aren't, aren't animals. We should not just be putting food in their bowls and saying lie around, you can't do anything. No, people are creative, people can work and it's cruel to to just treat a person as as a pet.

Scott Allen:

But again, the secular worldview that so much of our poverty fighting is is rooted in sees people as animals. I mean, it literally comes from this Darwinian idea that we're evolved from the animal kingdom. That's what it means to be. A person is essentially no different than an animal. This is ideas have consequences. This is the name of the podcast. That's a powerful idea. That's a false idea, it's a lie, but when it comes to poverty fighting, it has a real consequence.

Marvin Olasky:

So yeah, the one, one verse that is quoted a lot and is a hugely wonderful verse is in Matthew 25. Where the question of supplying some material. And should we do that? Should we not do it? And you know, jesus has, as much as you did to the least of these, my brothers, you should do to me. I'm paraphrasing here, but but this is a. This is an important verse about how we should look at everyone in God's image and we should look at helping people as if we're helping Jesus himself. The way that verse is used is almost always give and give and give, and in general that's a good thing. But it can cut both ways, and I just want to point this out because if you are, if you give, let's say, a homeless person stuff that's harmful to that person, such as giving him money that he can then use for drugs, it says, if you are shooting heroin into Jesus's veins, it cuts both ways.

Marvin Olasky:

You can do wonderful things, very valuable things, with money. You can do very harmful things with money. Now, given our own natures, there's a tendency for us to be to, to, to err on the side of not giving rather than giving, and this is where discernment comes in. But still, we need to think this through carefully. Absolutely what a lot of people need I mean a lot of homeless people need is is the food they can get. There are a lot of places these days that will feed people. They need some recognition that they're actually human beings.

Marvin Olasky:

The, the fellow who's in charge and thinking about just my recent experience visiting the, the spring rescue mission he has a regular basis of someone comes in off the street and he will say you will put out his hand and say my name is gives his name, what's your name? So he is actually saying, well, here's who I am, here's my name, and I want to know your name. I want to know you as a human being, and that's actually often more important than just putting a hot dog in someone's hands. The food is available in most places and and if you're in a place where the food isn't available, and that's something important to make sure that food is there, but it's the recognition of a human being, that this person is human being that's often not there and that, in the long run, is just really important.

Darrow Miller:

And I'm just thinking what you've said is so critical. How does this become more actuated in our relationships? So this is the normal, like this guy you were telling us about. This becomes more normal in those kind of relationships.

Marvin Olasky:

Yeah, how does it become normal? It's, it's really hard in lots of ways. I had a friend who ran several homeless shelters. She also did some prison time and we had her instructing our, our church here in Austin a few years back and she pointed out that it is really hard for middle class or affluent people not to give money no-transcript, because it's something you can afford to do and that's the tendency, just to do it and leave it at that.

Marvin Olasky:

So my thought is, wherever you are, try to find a place where you can actually get into a relationship with a person in some ways. Now, every time a homeless person stops you in the street, you're not going to be able to take that person to a McDonald's or a Burger King and sit down with him or her actually at a table. And so far as we have lives and jobs and activities of our own, you can't do it every time. But if you can do it once in a while and then another person can do it once in a while and another person can do it once in a while, that can be, enormously beneficial.

Marvin Olasky:

So, sharing a meal with a person offering food, but also some conversation, even looking at person in the eye, is more than most homeless people get from most people, Because we're all in a tendency to avert our eyes.

Marvin Olasky:

We don't want to make eye contact, but that eye contact is important and we need to do it in a way where we can follow through on that with actually some conversation, treating another person as human being and then often making sure that in our community there's a place where that person can go to live, to live, to eat, to work, to learn. If you're in a place where there isn't such an organization, well Starwin.

Dwight Vogt:

You know my, let me just say, this is like I want to throw in, of course, some praise for my wife.

Marvin Olasky:

We moved to Austin 40 years ago and when we came here there wasn't a crisis pregnancy center or pregnancy resource center that evangelical churches were involved in.

Marvin Olasky:

And she had been a volunteer when we lived in Delaware before coming here at a crisis pregnancy center, so she knew a little bit about it, but she really wasn't a person who could do master management of organizations, but she was able, even in her way, without advanced degrees in helping people or business management things like that she was able to start a thing. So, boy, I really hope I mean I'm enjoying this conversation with you and probably talk more than I should, but I really hope that someone who's listening will look around the community where God has placed that person and see what needs to happen in this community so we can better serve or serve it all homeless people or women in a crisis, pregnancy or a variety of things. If there isn't an organization in your community I can speak directly to the listener here If there isn't an organization like that in your community, start one, find a few people, find a few friends, get going on it. You can do it.

Scott Allen:

Yeah, and use Marvin Olaski's book the Tragedy of American Compassion to uncover the biblical principles that will really help people to rise out of poverty. Those principles are biblical, they're timeless. So this is not a book that, oh, it doesn't speak to our current situation. It speaks clearly and again, it's like you say, marvin, it's something that we used to know in this country 200 years ago. 150 years ago we forgot, and the church needs to recover that, that biblical approach to this. Marvin, have you seen there was a documentary that came out maybe 10 years ago, five years ago, I can't remember now it wasn't that long ago and it's called Seattle is Dying and it looked at the homeless crisis really in Seattle, just the exploding number of homeless people in that city. Have you?

Marvin Olasky:

heard of that. I've heard of it. I haven't seen it, but oh gosh, I would love to have you watch that.

Scott Allen:

Yeah, I thought it was. It was made by a local television station, so it wasn't a Christian documentary, just local TV. But it was exceptionally well done in the sense that they went out to kind of say what's going on with this whole homeless situation. They interviewed the homeless themselves, they interviewed business owners that were affected by homeless, they interviewed the police. They interviewed the city, the city officials, people in city government pretty much everyone whose life was touched by it somehow was interviewed, and so they were just trying to kind of help people see it from this big picture standpoint.

Scott Allen:

And one of the things that kind of I took away from it was that the current approach in Seattle was or at least at that time I don't think it's changed, was it was an enabling approach and it was basically these people are victims. It was kind of based in a kind of victim mentality, so they need to be enabled with housing and fresh needles and things like that. It wasn't helping and they were often breaking the law right, you especially heard that from small business owners that really couldn't hardly run their businesses anymore in downtown Seattle and the police were so interesting because they would. Often they have to uphold the rule of law, and they were arresting these people but the DAs were putting them right back out. They interviewed one homeless person that had been arrested and released 50 times in Seattle, and so it wasn't working. Everything was broken and they didn't offer like a solution at the end of it, other than they pointed in the direction of a program and I would love to learn more about it but it was a program in of all places Providence, rhode Island where they, as the city, they said we're gonna, first of all, do a rule of law right, we're gonna.

Scott Allen:

If these people are breaking the law, these homeless people, we're gonna. We're going to bring them in and, instead of incarcerating them, kind of in a punishment type of way, we're gonna use the opportunity to put a lot of control in their lives, which they don't have, and help them to get off drugs. That was the priority. And then, once they're off drugs, we'll help them to get employed, move them kind of in a positive direction. And it was kind of working.

Scott Allen:

There was some things that were working about it, but the thing that I thought was, at that point, once the kind of the state, if you will, the police and the justice system had kind of done a role, there would be a place for the church to come alongside at that point and kind of almost adopt like this is the bonding principle adopt some of these people that had gone through that. There's already been some categorization and discernment but really I think the church at that point could play a hugely positive role in very personally personalized help for these people that were willing to come out of that lifestyle. And they did interview some of the people coming out of that program in Rhode Island and they had tears in their eyes about how somebody cared enough to help me to see my life change at a point where I was just lost. So I don't know, I have often thought that would be just such a great thing to see happen in so many of our cities Any comment on that or thoughts.

Marvin Olasky:

Well, two things. First, concerning Seattle specifically, discovery Institute has its office in Seattle and on the Fixed Homelessness website, if anyone Scott, if you or anyone wants to learn more about Seattle, that's what, probably over half the stories on the Fixed Homelessness website are about Seattle, because that's where Discovery Institute is.

Marvin Olasky:

There's a very talented videographer named Jonathan Cho, who may have actually been involved in the documentary you mentioned. I'm not sure the name of it, but he's very good and he shoots a lot of video of what actually is happening on the streets of Seattle. So that's the place to go to learn more about Seattle. And now I wanna ask you all, and then impose two minutes of silence on myself I wanna ask you all what's happening in Phoenix and what have you seen there?

Scott Allen:

Yeah, daryl Dwight, I was in Phoenix. You know it's interesting, marvin. Just a couple of comments. When Daryl was leading the training program that I went through at Food for the Hungry called the Hunger Corps. It was training to go overseas and serve as a missionary in poor communities overseas to try to help, as Christians, bring people out of poverty. One of the parts of that training that had a huge impact on my life was similar to what you just did, where we had to go to downtown Phoenix and essentially not just observe but be homeless ourselves.

Scott Allen:

For two days Just 48 hours and what a life-changing experience in the sense that you're putting on clothes, walking with the homeless people, getting the services that they would get. You see things from an entirely different perspective and I learned, like what you said at that time, this was many years ago, but food isn't the issue right, there's food everywhere. There's deeper issues that need to be addressed, but I don't think Phoenix has the same problem with homelessness at the scale that Portland, seattle, san Francisco and some of the other West Coast cities do. All those. I think it's grown.

Dwight Vogt:

I saw Phoenix mentioned with several other large cities the other day in a study where there's conflict between a couple of legal rulings that says the police cannot move people if they don't wanna be moved, and yet the need also to move people into safer, better places for themselves. And so there's conflict between the legal apparatus in this city on how to deal with homeless people and no one seems to have an answer to it.

Scott Allen:

You know, marvin, I'm in Bend, oregon, now, and it's the number one issue. It's in our headlines every day, and the Bend bulletin, by the way, is still a functioning newspaper, and so it's, and I mean to learn more about it, you know, during my time here.

Dwight Vogt:

So I'm trying to be a part of the solution.

Scott Allen:

There's so much more we could say. I really do feel like it's one of these discussions we're just scratching the surface on. But, marvin, we gotta kind of wrap it up. But I do wanna just again, I wanna just thank you and draw our listeners' attention to Marvin as a guide, sherpa, if you will, for rediscovering a biblical approach, a distinctly biblical approach, rooted in biblical principles that, when you put them into practice, you know there's obviously there's no guarantees. People are broken people. They need the Lord, but they work, you know. And so, marvin, thank you for the way that you've invested in our lives and believed in our ministry and just have helped us so much. I'm really glad to hear, then, some ways, that you're. I'm sure that the transition from world wasn't easy, but I'm glad to hear that you're back. You know, dealing with issues of poverty and homelessness again, I think that's wonderful.

Marvin Olasky:

So Thanks, yeah, and, you know, thankful to all Darrow's books in particular, but the other DNA activities. My wife and I saw one organization in the DNA network in Africa and saw that that was operating very effectively in Ghana.

Scott Allen:

So yeah, chris, Ampadou, yeah, I remember your. Yeah, you were helped to promote the work that Chris was doing. You had the what was the name you did awards every year for effective poverty fighting. I always thought that was wonderful. Does world still do that? Do you know? Are they still doing that program? I think not.

Marvin Olasky:

I'm not in contact with the folks there, but it didn't happen this year so far at least. So I don't know.

Scott Allen:

Anyways, we were really grateful for that, darrow Luke Dwight. Any final comments or questions?

Darrow Miller:

I just thank you for taking the time, marvin, and I think we're all aware that we can do this again and go deeper, and I just wanna give a general invitation that we'd like to set up another time with you in the future.

Marvin Olasky:

Well, I have a couple of books coming out, actually one in, I think the pub date is February 13th about. It's called Moral Vision Leadership from George Washington to Joe Biden, and it's a vastly expanded remake of a book I wrote about 30 years ago called the American Leadership Tradition. But I've gone deeper into some of the stuff and added on a lot and so, yeah, I'll be glad to come on in February to talk about moral vision and questions of where the country is going. And then in March I feel somewhat embarrassed to say, well, I've written a memoir, but I guess I have. It's called Pivot Points and it'll be coming out. I think it's official date is March 13th. So I'd be glad to, in my promotional spirit, to actually try to help a publisher, not lose money on my books. I'd be glad to come on and talk about either of those.

Scott Allen:

We would love to talk about those books, marvin, so we look forward to seeing those and thank you for bringing that to our attention and we'll look for those, and we'd definitely welcome an opportunity to talk with you once those books are out and available. Yeah, so sorry for spending so much time on a book that has come out a long time ago. It's just to me, it's just such a powerful book.

Marvin Olasky:

Well, it's the classic.

Darrow Miller:

Yeah, you're more current on it than I am.

Marvin Olasky:

I had to yeah.

Scott Allen:

Anyways, Marvin, how do people, if they want to be in touch with you and take advantage of all your writing and your knowledge and your wisdom, what's the best way for people to get to you and to learn to connect? Well, there are two things.

Marvin Olasky:

Number one people can email me Marvinolasky at gmailcom. And the other thing is okay. My other activity, along with my equivalent to golf, that is writing. We have a little foundation called Zenger House after a Christian newspaper editor from the early 1700s, john Peter Zenger and Zenger House. On the day that Pulitzer Prizes are handed out it's in April or early May we hand out Zenger Prizes, which are for journalists mostly Christian but not necessarily who have really done street level reporting, that is, instead of just writing opinion pieces, have actually gone and done hard reporting and seen what's actually going on at street level.

Marvin Olasky:

Street level, rather than sweet level, is the way you try to explain it and we give out 10 awards each year, and if there are listeners who have read some really good article that feature article usually that goes into depth on some problem with really good reporting let me know. Or just go to the Zenger House website, zengerhousecom, and look it up and you can see people. You all can see our winners. We've done it twice already so you can see our winners from 2022 and early this year. Read their stuff a couple of podcasts are there too, based on street level reporting, and send us a message If there's some article you think we should be paying attention to. We are right now drawing up our long list of possible winners for next spring and that will turn into a short list. And, yeah, we're really interested in any suggestions people have. Well, thanks for that opportunity.

Marvin Olasky:

Yes that's Zengerhousecom.

Scott Allen:

Zengerhousecom perfect.

Marvin Olasky:

Yeah, I should spell it out ZENGER, make some sort of a chant.

Darrow Miller:

ZENGER H-O-U-S-E.

Scott Allen:

You're so funny, marvin. Give our greetings to Susan your wife we really appreciate her as well, and it's just a blessing to connect with you again, marvin. Thanks for your faithful ministry over all these years and your friendship. It means a lot to us.

Marvin Olasky:

Well, and I'm thankful for Susan's faithful ministry over these years, all these years. We've been married for 47 years, so congratulations. It's a pleasure for me, it's hard work for her.

Darrow Miller:

I love your humor, Marvin.

Scott Allen:

And just wanted to thank all of you again for listening to another episode of Ideas have Consequences. This is the podcast of the Disciple Nations Alliance. I'm Scott Allen.

Luke Allen:

Thank you for listening to this episode with Dr Marvin Olasky, as always. If you'd like to check out any of the resources that we mentioned during this discussion, including the tragedy of American compassion, just head over to the episode landing page, which is linked in the show notes. On that page, you can also learn more about Dr Olasky and his current work, and you can also comment on the episode and ask us any of your questions that came to mind during the episode. We'd love to hear your thoughts. If you'd like to learn more about our core training, the Kingdomizer Training Program, you can find that information on the episode landing page as well, or you can head straight to the course at quorumdalecom. The Ideas have Consequences podcast is brought to you by the Disciple Nations Alliance. To learn more about our ministry, you can find us on Instagram, facebook, twitter and YouTube, or on our website, which is disciplenationsorg. Thanks again for joining us and we hope you're able to join us here next week on Ideas have Consequences. Announcing мор.