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In this episode John and Gregg discuss a meeting that Gregg had with a street preacher.
Gregg explained that he has never spoken to a Street Preacher before but had his curiosity piqued and so began a conversation.
After recounting his encounter with the Street Preacher, Gregg goes on to explain that he had always assumed that people who preached on street corners had something not quite right about them.
But the more he thought about the situation, the more he came to wonder if instead of being in some way aberrant the Street Preacher may actually represent a distillation of most Evangelical Christian orientations!
In other words, Gregg wonders if the Street Preacher was not and in fact an idealized version of what he typically encounters in Evangelical churches. For example, he had his own way of reading the Bible and that was “the right way;” he maintains control of the conversation; his approach to the conversation is not to have a dialogue but to be completely persuasive.
So instead of taking what he learned at church and twisting it, Gregg wonders if the Street Preacher has not taken what he learned at church and refined it. In other words he’s got “to the heart of it.”