[00:00:44 ] Remy: Yeah. Yeah. There are others worse, but it's great because I can just kind of springboard. You can be real smart and I can just kind of springboard off of that and look smart, and so that's what I like.

[00:00:55 ] Gage: Oh, that's unfortunate, because I was hoping this would be the reverse.

[00:00:58 ] Remy: No, no, no.

The only other thing I really know about you gauge is that you pretend to have a girlfriend on the Internet. So.

[00:01:11 ] Gage: Hi, Anna.

[00:01:11 ] Remy: I know you'll listen to this, so tell me.

Yes, that's right. Anna.

Yeah. Really creative, Gage. Good job.

[00:01:24 ] Gage: Wait until you hear her middle name. It's even less.

[00:01:28 ] Remy: Is her last name Smith?

[00:01:30 ] Gage: No, no, her last name is a lot more creative. But her first two names are Anna Marie, which is.

[00:01:37 ] Remy: Which totally not made up.

[00:01:40 ] Gage: Oh, she gets so mad. She's like, this is so basic. I sound like a boat.

[00:01:46 ] Remy: It would be Maria, though, right? It would be Anna. Maria would be a boat.

[00:01:52 ] Gage: Probably. I don't know. I like. I don't know anything about them.

[00:01:56 ] Remy: Before we get into it, I do want to say you were instrumental in this.

[00:02:00 ] Gage: I was. I was.

[00:02:01 ] Remy: This is great. I love this.

[00:02:03 ] Gage: I'm so glad.

[00:02:05 ] Remy: If people don't have this, they need to get this. It's from the old Justin Center. Yeah. Product placement. Wonderful little book. A lot easier.

[00:02:16 ] Gage: Just so we're clear, we don't get any of the money?

[00:02:18 ] Remy: No money? No. Jordan keeps all of the money for himself. So, yeah.

[00:02:26 ] Gage: Justin center totally makes enough money for him to do that.

[00:02:29 ] Remy: Yeah. Yep. Please don't kill me, Dr. Cooper.

[00:02:33 ] Gage: So.

I love you.

[00:02:38 ] Remy: That's okay. He doesn't listen to this.

[00:02:40 ] Gage: It's fine.

[00:02:40 ] Remy: As long as no one tags him, we'll be.

[00:02:42 ] Gage: But his wife does.

[00:02:44 ] Remy: Oh, that's true.

[00:02:48 ] Gage: Who is lovely, lovely woman.

[00:02:50 ] Remy: Truly lovely woman. And Dr. Cooper himself is very nice. I have often been within it several yards of him, and he's been very nice.

[00:03:02 ] Gage: So he's talked to me. It's Amazing. Wow.

[00:03:06 ] Remy: Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I. I went up to him at the National Convention this last year, and I was like, oh, hey, Dr. Cooper. I'm, you know, I'm Remy Shepard. And he was like, oh, yeah, you're the guy from.

Yeah. You know, you do good. You do good stuff. And I like, oh, man. You know that. It meant a lot. It meant a lot.

[00:03:25 ] Gage: Is that. Is that what happened when you reached out to Pastor Roseboro, too, about being on the show? It's like, no.

[00:03:30 ] Remy: Roseboro listens to my show faithfully. Rose.

[00:03:33 ] Gage: Rose.

[00:03:33 ] Remy: A big Lutheran answers Stan.

[00:03:35 ] Gage: Okay.

[00:03:36 ] Remy: Okay.

[00:03:38 ] Gage: To be honest, that doesn't surprise me.

Yep.

[00:03:43 ] Remy: Well, hang on.

So, Gage, tell me a little bit more about yourself. How long have you been a Lutheran?

[00:04:00 ] Gage: Well, the short of it is technically my whole life. The long of it is bits and pieces. I can give you the full story if you want, but.

[00:04:09 ] Remy: Yes.

[00:04:10 ] Gage: Okay. So I was born to a family. The Garling Houses have always been Presbyterian for as far back as I can trace.

[00:04:19 ] Remy: Okay.

[00:04:19 ] Gage: Because we married one Scottish lady right before the American Revolution, and apparently she was pretty enough to make us convert.

[00:04:26 ] Remy: Yep.

[00:04:27 ] Gage: So. But we have a history of. Every woman we've ever married is Lutheran.

[00:04:32 ] Remy: Hmm.

[00:04:34 ] Gage: Don't ask me how, but it works out. And it worked out with my parents, too. So I was baptized in the PC USA in the hopes. Yeah. To be fair, the pastor was great. The church body, not so much.

[00:04:47 ] Remy: I'm sure the pastor was a very nice woman.

[00:04:51 ] Gage: I would have been baptized again. Not really. Not actually want to make this clear. Not. But.

[00:04:58 ] Remy: But maybe. I don't know. I don't know.

[00:05:02 ] Gage: Who knows? Maybe she was secretly a Mormon.

[00:05:04 ] Remy: Definitely, definitely would not have been baptized again. Unless.

[00:05:08 ] Gage: Yeah, it's like one of those Roman things where Father has actually been saying the wrong words, and all of a sudden, three generations of a family have never been baptized.

No, I was baptized in the PC usa, But after that, it did not have the intended effect of trying to get my family to come back to the church.

And so my mother went, okay, I'm raising him Lutheran. Well, she was raised in the old alc, so all she knew was the elca. So I spent most of my life in the elca.

And I like to describe the parish I was in is one of the one was in is a parish that the bishop just kind of ignored.

The pastor there was too conservative for her to do what she wanted. So to tell you, the kind of guy he is, he bought me my first book of Concord.

[00:06:02 ] Remy: Oh.

[00:06:02 ] Gage: It's like, this is who Hilariously, the other pastor told me, don't bother with it. That's just a seminary textbook, which, oh, wow. Tells you the attitudes you're dealing with here. But I was in the elca. I've wanted to be a pastor my entire life. This pastor was training me and went to the 2018 youth gathering, which is the one in Houston. And for those who don't know, this is the one where Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton walked out on stage with a trans child and the child's mother and proudly supported it.

That's the famous part. The part that got me when I was there was Nadia Bolsweber came out and took the baptismal liturgy, one of the most beautiful pieces of work the church has ever been able, by the grace of God, to produce.

[00:06:49 ] Remy: Right.

[00:06:49 ] Gage: Completely changed it. Made it the most heretical, liberal mess you've ever heard.

And I got back and I told my pastor, I don't. I don't know what I believe right at the moment. I know it's not that, though.

[00:07:05 ] Remy: Oh, gosh.

[00:07:07 ] Gage: And so he said, okay, I understand.

And I left the elca. And then I never. I like to say I never stopped believing in God, but I definitely stopped believing in the church. I was like, well, if that's the church, I'm good. Yeah, I will find my own way.

But as the Lord is want to do, he smacked me over the head really quickly and told me to knock that crap out.

Still does that regularly, by the way.

And he sent me a girl at the time who was not great on theology, but she regularly attended her church. The one thing she was definitely was a Christian.

And I like this girl enough to go, you know, I should probably figure this whole thing out.

So it gets me to read the Bible for the first time, and I go, great, I believe this. Now let's find some people who believe this.

And then in the greatest act of providence, in a weird way, Covid happens. And so now I have an unbelievable amount of free time to go and research other church bodies. And also everybody's livestreaming their services now, so I can go and listen and watch. Yeah, so I. I watched Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, the whole. The whole gambit.

Unlike you, I never spent any time with the Charismatics, though.

[00:08:31 ] Remy: Oh, man, missing out.

[00:08:34 ] Gage: That was pretty quick out.

I take that back. I think I watched one Assemblies of