I am here for another interview and today I've got someone I wanted to speak with for quite a long time. Hello Eugene. Hey brother, great to be on. Thank you so much for the invitation. Super excited about today. Yes. I spoke to Bethany from the UK office a little while back. I said, do you want to talk to Eugene? Yeah, that'd be great. So here we are. So let's just go right to back to Jerusalem. It's not an organization that necessarily everybody's heard of. Just give us a really broad overview. What exactly is back to Jerusalem? Back to Jerusalem really is the great commission. So if you're familiar with the great commission in the Bible, the idea of taking the gospel to the unreached areas of the world, that is back to Jerusalem. We call it the great commission of kung pao flavor. It is a vision of the Chinese church that started in 1921 as far back as we can trace it. Anyway, and in 1921, there was a pastor by the name of Pastor Jean in Chandong province that had a vision that God wanted the Chinese church to take the gospel and complete the great commission from China all the way back to Jerusalem going from the China, Chandong office where they were at the time to all of the nations in between China and Jerusalem. Okay, and you're you're involved with back to Jerusalem. It goes a little well back, but let's just go right back for you just so we can set this in if you are. What's your faith journey? Is it is it church background? Was it sort of a pool on the road to Damascus amazing experience? What's your encounter with God and how have you come then into back to Jerusalem? I have quite the sinful journey. So I didn't grow up in a Christian home at all. Did not grow up with Christian parents. In fact, my real dad died when I was about a year old or so. And my mother married and remarried about five different times. So I have three younger sisters that are all from different fathers. And so I grew up in that environment, an environment that was not necessarily stable at least to start off with. And then it was around the age of 14 when I had been getting in quite a bit of trouble, arrested, brought home by the police, put on probation that I found Christ and just a radical transformation at the young age of 14. And not a lot of options for someone that did not like school like myself. So the military appealed to me. So at 18, I joined the military and that kind of brought me to nations around the world doing special operations. So I did two tours in the Persian Gulf, where quite a bit in Africa, Australia, was able to see much of the world, especially Asia specifically, my first time to China was in the US military when I arrived in Hong Kong in 1996. And so that was a special trip for me, fell in love with that area of Asian never thought I'd be moving there again. But that's where I was in the mid 90s. So you were in the military, if I remember correctly, you were in the US Marines, is that right? Yes, I was I was in the US Marine Corps, started off as a as infantry, ended up as a scout sniper. And today I'm I'm pretty proud as a as a father of a an officer in the Marine Corps. So my oldest son is also in the Marines is an officer. And as an enlisted man, I was a sergeant. I offered him his first salute a couple years ago, when he pinned on his lieutenant rank. I saw some photos about that. I got quite emotional, just looking at it. I don't know. I've never met you. I've never met your son. But I watch out and thought, that's got to be you've got to be. It's got to be such an amazing moment. That's salute. It really is. You know, I didn't really know my father have a relationship, not just with my father, but with my father's family didn't know who they were at all. And so when I had my own family, it was very special. When I had my own boys, it was very special. And so to be there that day was a time that I'll never forget. And I can remember it because it's a part of the ceremony. You have to as an officer, you have to find someone to offer you your first salute before you do your graduation from the officer school. OCS, the officer candidate school. And so I was that individual. And it was it was very special for us because, you know, and I wasn't a strict father, I would say, but there was one thing that my boys always have to had to do. And that is anytime I told them to do anything. This started from the time that they were very little. Anytime I told them to do anything, they always had to respond. Yes, sir. If that did not come out, then I knew that they either didn't hear me or we were going to have some problems. And so if I said, you know, clean your room, make, watch the dishes, read your Bible, go to church, whatever, the response was always automatically. Yes, sir. So it was very special on that day, because I said all of these years as you were growing up, you always had to call me sir. But now as I offer this first salute to you, I have to call you sir. So it was a it was a it was a tear jerking moment to be able to see your son in a position that was much higher than anything that I would ever achieve and to salute him as my superior officer. That's so cool. And that emotion came out and just photos I saw on Ding Dash. Now let's just go on to Ding Dash because this is how I first kind of got to know you better. I've met some amazing outstanding people from around the world who I now call my dear close friends. I'm not going to mention the names because that would be unfair. But people from Italy from across the US, across parts of Asia, and it's been a fantastic thing. So just give us a bit of an overview. What's Ding Dash about? What was the heart behind it? And what's what's your best favorite joy about Ding Dash? Yeah, so you know Ding Dash for us was something that I never saw being developed at all. In 2020, if you remember that time we were very much. I mean, I know that you're in the UK right now, but you guys are in elections right now. I just watched a I just watched a UK morning show this morning. Frage was on there talking about the new campaigns that you guys are in the middle of right now need deep in your elections. Well, 2020 in the US four years ago, we also were knee deep in our elections. And one of the things that we saw in the United States, which alarmed us, was that whenever anybody would put anything on social media, it was blocked if it wasn't accepted by the authoritarians in charge of social media. And so and it didn't just have to do with politics, but it also had to do with COVID-19 when it eventually, you know, started to blow up. So everything that had to do with politics or COVID-19 that was not according to the those that were in charge of social media. If it wasn't a part of the mainstream narrative, then you were blocked or ghosted. And we saw major warning signs for Christians in that way that if they can do that so easily to the president of the United States and deplatform him and remove him from all of his followers. And and if we can see individuals that are medical doctors be deplatformed on YouTube, if we can see experts, remove deep platforms, shut down and even threatened with jail because of what they've done on social media, we need to be aware of that. And and adjust accordingly as Christians, because if it happens to people because of medicine, if it happens to people because of politics, Christianity is in that same group. And it doesn't matter where you stand politically. And it doesn't matter where you stand on COVID-19. It's just an observation that we had that if you do not go with mainstream, and you might have been with mainstream at that time thinking that it was a good thing that the president of the United States was removed from social media. It was a good thing that COVID-19 was monitored and controlled because maybe you agreed with the mainstream. But if you don't agree and you find yourself on the other side of that, what you would find is quite a bit of not just deplatforming, but there were a lot of other things that we were concerned about because once President Trump in the United States was taken off of social media, alternative social medias began to pop up. And this is where we learned our real lesson. There was there was a social platform by the name of parlor. They popped up. And within only a few weeks, all of the big conglomerates of these massive companies came together and basically created their own government structure that shut down parlor about as soon as they started. And how did they do that? They went after their servers. And after they got so they started to grow, they exploded overnight. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of people began to register. Millions of people did an exodus off of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and they went to parlor. And what happened then was that parlor was deplatform. Their servers were shut down because they were hosted by Amazon. So that taught us a lesson. Do not host with a big corporation like Amazon, which was actually difficult. I began to learn things about that. That was that was extremely manipulative. But very good business practice for Amazon. For instance, Amazon will host your company at a loss so that you will go on with them and get your service long term. And anybody that tries to host you for a profit will actually be shut down eventually because they don't have enough customers when you have such a dependable, great company like Amazon hosting you at a loss for themselves because they can get so many different funds out of you through other services. So that was one. The other was that your hosting address would then be attacked. So go daddy.com began to remove any individual websites that did not fit with the mainstream media. Then we saw the big players come into play. Visa, MasterCard, American Express, all of a sudden they refused to take payments to or from parlor. So parlor was being ostracized from the community where they weren't able to pay for anything. They weren't able to host. They weren't able to even keep their address. And they lost everybody overnight. And by the time they got up and running again, even individuals like myself that really wanted to stay with them just already lost the momentum. And so we have a hackers conference that we put together every year with hackers from around the world brought them together. And I just threw out a dream because it's a time where we often dream about ways of breaking into the system, breaking into different countries, bringing the gospel. And we have hackers from CIA, NASA, Facebook, Google, European military intelligence, NSA, we have, we have a really big players that will come, including, you know, individuals that show up to the hackers meetings in their pajamas because they just arrived from their grandmother's basement. We have all kinds at our hackers conferences. And I said, you know, what would it be like just to start our own Facebook, just to start our own Twitter? And within a couple hours, and I thought that this would never happen, it was a dream. Because if you look at Twitter, if you look at Facebook, I mean, they have tens of thousands of employees without exaggeration. So I think Facebook alone has something like over 50,000 employees. If I just take a shot in the darkened guests at the number of employees. And there so I mean, how do you how do you have like two or three hackers create a type of social media platform? And what they did was they created dingdash.com and dingdash.com is hosted on our servers. Dingdash.com doesn't operate on any finances at all. It's all volunteer. We don't we don't really pay for anything on dingdash.com. And we have an absolute free speech platform, where we believe in total free speech. Now, one of the things that has made us less active right now is that we have some great competitors. Gab is a great competitor. They came up after we started dingdash all around the same time. Gab is great. Parlor is now a truth media is now up. And then we also have Twitter, which was just taken over as you know, probably by Elon Musk. And so Elon Musk took over once he took over Twitter, there's been a lot more freedom of expression that's allowed on social media. And so an absolute free speech platform like dingdash is not as important, but it was in 2020. And so what we do now is we maintain dingdash. It's kind of our break in case of war social media. We don't advertise it that much. We don't have we don't put a big push or big focus on it at the moment. We just keep it as a special setup. If Christians ever find themselves in a situation where they can't communicate with one another, even in the West America, Europe, England, then this is an alternative platform that we can all go to and begin to communicate quite freely. Does that make sense? There was a long, long answer to your question, but hopefully it made sense along the way. No, it's good. I love dingdash because it definitely is freedom of speech. There are people who are just thinking, you know what, I don't want to hear what you have to say. But here's the thing, people. I cannot have to interact with them. And I cannot comment. And I cannot be offended. There is that sheer wave interacting with people interacting with them. You don't agree with them. It's okay. And you can still go on with your life. Now, the hackers conference, I wanted to come back to that anyway, because it was one of the things I wanted to come up. You talk about Christianity, talk about loving Jesus, talk about faith. And you've got a hackers conference. Now, I know a tiny portion of what goes on there. I've heard some of the stuff that comes out of it like dingdash. But how, how did you first think, you know, let's let's have a hackers conference. This is going to be good. The hackers conference was actually born in the UK. What happened was myself. And one of our, one of our product design individuals from Holland is one of my good friends. And, and we had been working on small devices that we needed to be able to get the gospel into North Korean. We've been working together for many years. So whenever I had an idea, I would always take it to him. And so we had this idea of basically creating an e-bible, an e-reader, a small e-reader about the size of a credit card. And this e-reader would, we would take it into North Korea. And it was a game, it was a little game console, a really small size of a credit card game console that you could give to people and children. And then they could play different games. And the game that we had used was Snake. I don't know if you've ever, if you remember that from the phones in the late early 2000s. Yeah, super simple game. The great thing about North Korea, what I love about working in North Korea is that when you come out with a new device, there's not much competition. So even if it's a clunky, old, antiquated, electronic piece of equipment, it's still pretty cut on the edge in North Korea. And so the people are pretty easy to entertain. It's like, you know, putting on a play for the Amish, right? You don't have a lot of competition. So everybody loves what you're doing because, you know, there's not any real competitors that are doing better than you. And you, you can be in Chinese, we say a little mama hoo hoo, which means not so good, not too bad, just kind of, you know, in the middle. And that's where we were with our little gaming devices. Our gaming devices use Snake, which is a very simple game that you can play. And you have this line that you can, you can manipulate and use and control with just a couple of buttons. And so we had this little device and this game player. And what was great about it is my friend had developed a console where the energy consumption was so low that you could play the game and read the Bible on this device for about five years without charging or changing the batteries. Yeah, it was insane. And we felt that so we'd given them out and basically anybody, any North Korean that got this device, they could play the game. And it was just a game console. And each time they completed a level, though, they'd get different parts of scripture. And if they knew a special code, a sequence of buttons, so it'd be like left, left, up, right, left, something like that. And you, it would open up to the Bible and then you could read the Bible and you push any two buttons simultaneously again. And it goes back to the game console. Well, we had a desire to create better games. What if we could create more exciting games that don't just work in backwoods North Korea, but could work in other nations as well as game consoles. Maybe we could use these in Uzbekistan or Pakistan or Sudan or Somalia. And we got in contact with the vice president of a company called EA Games. And I don't know if you've ever heard of EA games. Yeah, they're the largest game producer from my knowledge. And the world and the VP lived just outside of London. And he was a believer and he said, or at that time, he was a believer. And so he invited me and my, my, my friend from Holland to his personal home to discuss this idea of, and when we got there, he did not believe that we could create a console that would last five years without changing or charging the battery. He would need to see it. So we thought, all right, let's do this. So we traveled to his home. We showed him the device. I showed him specifically a device that I've been carrying at that point for more than three years. And using it quite often, not reading or playing the game, but using it to show to people traveling with it, it was quite a solid piece of equipment and it endured all of that travel and still worked very well. And he was impressed, or at least he pretended to be. And we really enjoyed our time with him. And so we were asking, would it be possible for us to rip off some of your games? Like, what if we used Tetris, you know, and did like a simple Tetris game or something like that, that you guys had? And he said, we might have some games that would be very low energy consumption that you guys could use. We also have a lot of techies that would be very interested in helping with this. And we got excited. Me and my buddy, we got quite excited. We were in his living room. We began to dream together. And he said, you know what, guys, I host, you know, EA Games has this massive conference every year. Why don't you guys come in, introduce your challenges in places like North Korea, Sudan, Somalia, Iran, and see if there's not some of these gamers that would be able to help you specifically. And I thought, Oh, that's an amazing idea. Yes, let's do that. But what would be the ability for us to put together like an NDA, a non-disclosure agreement with the attendees at your conference? Because if we're going to talk about items that we want to use in North Korea, we need to make darn sure that this isn't talked about on Reddit or social media or broadcast, you know, on on a YouTube channel. And he said, yeah, unfortunately, we wouldn't be able to do that. But what you could do is just host your own conference of that nature. And that seemed like a bit out of our league, but all of a sudden I got back in my car. And I felt like the Holy Spirit began to just download into me. I called up my buddy because we drove separately. And so we split apart when we walked away from his home. And we were a little bit down when we left because we felt, Oh, we came here for a connection and it looked like we didn't get the connection. But as we left, I got this idea of hosting a hackers conference. I was like, dude, let's do this. And so I was like, I don't know if anybody will come. Let's just see. And we got more replies on that conference than almost anything else that we've ever done, people from around the world with impressive resumes. We didn't know if anybody would show up. And it ended up some of the most out of control individuals with salaries that we could never afford ourselves ended up coming and being apart. And these were all believers. And all a part of the vision to want to get the gospel into close countries. So that was how we started our very first hackers conference. And that is cool. I love how as humans, we think, okay, so EA games, let's go there. They're big, they've got resources. They can help us. And I definitely understand that idea of we need them to help us. And then actually, God's got a different plan, which is better because we don't need lots of other resources to do what God's want us to do. We don't need money to do what God needs us to do. We just need to trust. And then when the Holy Spirit gets involved, all of a sudden this small offering, you know, the widows might perhaps, it's suddenly become something much greater because God's God involved. And I know that the whole, is it that the it's right little pill Bible thing? Is that right? Is that something else that came out of it? Because I've heard about that one a little bit. Yes. So we developed what is called the hologram Bible. It's a pill Bible, a pill sized Bible that is a completely independent operating device, which means it's the size of a pill. It doesn't have anywhere to plug it in because it doesn't need to be plugged in. It doesn't have any buttons because you don't need any buttons. It doesn't have any place to take it apart and change the battery because you don't need to change the battery. It is motion powered, motion activated, motion operated. It's the size of a pill, literally the size of a pill. So if you think about a vitamin that you might take a multi vitamin that you might take on a daily basis, it's either that size or smaller. It's sometimes smaller than some of the bigger pills that are out there. You got some people that take like these big horse vitamins, you know, it's smaller than that. But it would be bigger than, let's say that if you take an iron tablet, for instance, every morning, it's going to be a little bit bigger than that. So it's a small device about the size of a pill that illuminates the air in front of your face as a hologram. And you can read the entire Bible from Genesis to Revelation on that device. And not only can you read it, but you can have several people read it together with you. I've actually demonstrated it's not comfortable to have 50 people or more reading from it, but I've done it. I've had more than 50 people. I love going into churches where people, you know, are excited about seeing it and I show it to them. And I love hearing the critics that write me on a regular basis and say, it's not possible. I work in this field and what you're talking about doesn't exist in modern day technology. And I just laugh and I say, not only does it exist, brother or sister, critic, but it has we've been using it now for six years. So and they're like, well, you know, show it to me. No, I'm not going to postpone it. I'm not going to put video of it. I'm not going to show you how it works. I'm not going to explain it. Because in order for me to satisfy your curiosity and be like, Oh, okay, yeah, you're right. Thank you. Now, the entire world would know kind of the secret of how it works. The great thing about the device itself is that in the countries where we use it right now, we use it mainly in Western China and North Korea, as if a government official or any authority found it, they wouldn't know what it was or how to use it unless somebody showed them how to use it. It is a very special piece of equipment that would not have come about if it were not for our hackers. I think quite often of this there was in the 90s, there were some really awful Christian adverts where they just ripped off stuff that's seen elsewhere. There was one for Coke, even better than the real thing. We know the slogan. So someone said, okay, that's great. So they got a picture of a coat bottle and they switched it to Jesus, even better than the real thing. No, that's true. But I remember as a teenager thinking, come on, God made the heavens and the earth and all we can do is rip off an idea. Can we not do something even better than that? Because we're made in God's image, right? So we can do some amazing things. Let's do better than just copy and paste. And that's what I love about what I'm hearing from what you were saying. I follow BTJ as well online, so I get to hear some of these things. But I love the creativity that goes into what happens. I love how God took who you were, growing up and transformed you into who you are, and all that stuff you did, which as a Christian, you might look back and think, well, that was a waste of time. What's that got to do with it? You look back and think, yeah, but God's using this and God's using this and God's using this. Let's just talk about closed countries for a while, because it's a phrase that perhaps doesn't mean a whole lot and probably needs to be unpacked just a little bit for folk. So when we're talking about a closed country, North Korea, for example, what exactly is that we're trying to discuss here? When we're specifically talking about closed countries, we call them creative access countries. We don't really believe that any country is really closed. But if you look at how many countries actually don't allow the Bible, for instance, I think it's like 52. I would have to look and see what the current number is. But if you look at the number of countries around the world that do not allow free access to the Bible, that's probably already kind of along the lines of what we would call a closed country. If you look at most of the nations between China and Jerusalem, most of those are closed countries. And to be quite honest, every country that doesn't have a Christian Judaic foundation is basically a closed country. So if you look at those that are outside of Christian foundational beliefs, even if they're even if they're considered secular today, right now I'm sitting in Sweden. So as we're talking, I'm sitting in what is categorized as one of the most secular nations in the world. But I would debate anybody that would make that claim, because Sweden is probably one of the most religious Christian nations in the world. I mean, for goodness sake, they have a flag on their freaking flat or they have a cross on their flag. And they keep that specifically because it's a cross. They do things that you would never do in America or Canada. I don't know if it would be legal in the UK or not, but I'm sure it probably is more close to the UK system than it is the American system. But in the US with the separation of church and state that we have indoctrinated in our foundational laws, in Sweden, the government pays for church clergy messages to be broadcast on TV radio. I can be driving at any time on it will take me a while to find a radio station that's not playing certain religious programs on Christmas, or that we have a very special holiday that the whole world stops to celebrate called Saint Lucia, which is this celebration of a Christian woman who fed persecuted Christians on a dark island and kept them surviving for a very long period of time. We celebrate that every year here in Sweden. And the whole nation stops to recognize and reenact this this heritage, but in nations that are not foundational Christian, that are Buddhist, like Nepal, Bhutan, those nations actually see quite a bit of persecution against Christians and they're close to the gospel, more so Bhutan than Nepal, but still closed. When you look at Hindu nations like India, India is more open than their neighbor Pakistan, but still there are challenges. In fact, I believe on the voice of the martyrs map, they fall into India falls into like number 20. They're in the top 20 top 30 of nations persecuting Christians. They line up right up with China, which is arguable, but still that's their scale. When you look at communist nations, a lot of people are like, can you, you know, imagine a nation with no religion, what if we had no religion, what if we got rid of religion, then we would get rid of all of this kind of nonsense that we find in Christian nations, Hindu nations, Buddhist nations, that's absolute BS, because when we look at communist nations, they're the worst violators of religious rights. Cuba, China, North Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, Ethiopia, when they were communist or when they tried to go communist. So basically any country that tried to follow after atheist Marxism was one of the most brutal, not just against Christians, but against their own people. And we've seen a correlation of that. So if you look at Muslim nations today, you can see that that correlation and causation very closely connected, which is once you adopt a religion that's open to everything, they always exclude Christianity. We see that in Hinduism, we see that in Buddhism with Islam, Christians suffer because of persecution, and their laws follow their religion. And that makes them closed. That's what we would use as a definitive kind of structure to to think of as a close nation or used to describe as a close nation. And we see that not just closed on religious rights, as it has to do with Christians, but once you close down religious freedom, you actually close everything else. Economic freedom falls behind. Academic freedom falls behind. Human rights, women's rights, and those type of human rights freedoms fall behind. All of those major indexes start to shrink and go to the lowest levels. Once the religious freedoms are taken away, there's a correlation and a causation between those things. Freedom of religion does open the door to all other freedoms. And that's what we would say is one of the most identifying characteristics, and it's measurable for close countries. Religious freedom being first and foremost, being low on a measurable scale, but also all the other freedoms that fall in behind religious freedom. Close countries represent the bulk of those religious persecuted nations. And if you look at a map and just tell anybody off the street, ask anybody off the street, if you felt if you looked at the most restrictive nations in the world, no matter how you looked at it, whether you were a woman and looked at women's rights, whether you were a homosexual and looked at homosexual rights, whether you were a business owner and looked at economic rights, if you were an educator and looked at educational rights, no matter how you looked at it, which would be the worst place in the world to be, where they would put their finger on a map would be probably the area that we would say is the 1040 window, the area that is made up of close countries, the area that is in between China and Jerusalem. Thank you. I know one of the things about some of the wording that we have, perhaps in the West, it's quite a naive, perhaps in some ways to think about it, but a close country, it's like, well, it's close to us, but it's not closed, it's just we need to look at it differently, but here in the UK, we're closed in some regards and we are definitely very much Judeo-Christian kind of roots, and yet you've got people who are losing their jobs because they don't agree with a particular narrative, whether it's COVID-19 back along or anything else that's come up, we're not a close country in the UK at all, I wouldn't say, but there are definitely parts that are closed, and I guess in a sense that's really what we're talking about, there's open and there's closed, but you know, the amazing thing about God who always finds a way, and I love that sense of obedience, if God doesn't need us to be multi-skilled or multi-talented, he just wants our heart, and with our heart it is a stunning what he can do, and your hackers conference is absolute testimony of when we bring to God something, look at what he can do, whether it's the credit card game with the Bible, whether it's the hollow Bible or whatever, so what's your kind of, I think, normal day to day, you travel quite a bit, but what would be a normal kind of work for you, I mean, you're traveling, is it, are you encouraging, are you, are you preaching, are you sharing the ministry, what is it that you actually do with BTJ? I am a back to Jerusalem janitor, so anything that they need to have fixed, anything that they need to have taken care of, any messes that need to be cleaned up on aisle five, they called me, and I tried to do that, I travel around the world mainly working as a multi-skilled individual that will do whatever is needed, when it's needed, I don't control, or I'm not in charge of any house church group or network, I'm not in an administrative role for setting visions or plans or platforms, I take my instructions from the underground church, they set the agenda, they set the vision, and then I go about my life in the best way possible to assist them in accomplishing the goals that they set in fulfilling the vision that they feel that God has given to them, so I've kind of found my place in serving the church, the underground church, the persecuted church, whether that means helping start a business in a closed country, that would provide a platform for a pastor, an evangelist, a missionary, whether that is writing an article to share about the challenges that nobody else really is sharing about, whether that is doing a podcast, like we're doing right now, to share information that maybe many people within the underground church or the persecuted church or the Chinese house church would not be able to do because of security barriers, maybe language barriers, maybe giftings may not be one that is able to communicate in a clear or concise or understandable way, these are the little kind of missing links along the way that I've seen as a servant of the church where I can play a small role apart, hopefully, and maybe try to direct energy and resources and prayer towards some of the needs of some of the most precious servants in the world today, the underground church, so my day-to-day changes, it's never the same, my day-to-day has changed over the years, my role has changed over the years, but it's always been the basic same idea, where do you need me coach, put me in, I'm ready, so that's kind of where I try to live. Which is really the best place that any of us can live regardless of where we live in the world, just coming back to China particularly, I've just as it happened before we set this up, I've just finished reading Brother Ian's book again because I find quite a lot of what he struggled with, not the physical torture, although I've been physically abusing the passengers or his Christian in different ways, but I can certainly understand some of the personal attacks, the fact people don't believe what's gone on, but here's one that makes me believe because I just finished reading his book, we were just trying a church and it was one of his first speaking appearances ever in the UK, there's Brother Ian, now I believe even more, and just coming back to what we were talking about at the start, people were saying well show me and I'll believe, that's the basis of faith, isn't it? Prove to me that God exists and I'll believe, but it's the faith that underpins the difference between us and any other religion as Christians, it's not about what we do, it's about who did it for us, and I think that's one of the things that I love, I just want to talk about momentarily because I think Brother Ian is worth talking about because that's a man that I love and have never met, I respect him, I just think what he did was phenomenal, I know without having ever met him, he would say I was just following God, but how did you first meet Brother Ian, how has he impacted the work, the life that you do? I met Brother Ian in the 90s, when he first came to the US, he had been released from prison and so I was in California, I was no longer in the military, I was actually working for San Diego, North San Diego County Police Department in a place called San Marcos, so I was working the graveyard ship for a police department at the time and he came in with his translator and also pastor, known as Uncle Tong, many people call him Uncle Tong or some people will call him Brother Ren, which is a play on words because Brother Yun means the heavenly cloud man and Brother Ren means the earthly man, so Brother Ren always says that I'm the communicator between heaven and earth from Brother Yun to the rest of the world, so when Brother Yun is preaching he's often the translator for Brother Yun, so whenever Brother Yun has gone into the UK for instance, for the most part Brother Ren has been his translator and so Brother Ren came who's actually also my father-in-law, Brother Ren arrived in California together with Brother Yun in 99 and so I met him for the first time and his message really did transform my life. And the book we're talking about by the way, referencing here is called the Heavenly Man, Brother Yun is a chap who lived in China, found faith in the most miraculous ways, if you've not found the book go find the Heavenly Man, I would definitely encourage you to read it, I read it every so often, it's a hard read, it talks about some of the reality of the brutality that he went through physically, which in the West we might struggle to believe as he can possible, but it's his testimony, his story, right, so this is what he went through. I haven't met him personally, I just saw him at the church and thought this guy's for real, that's all I can say on that. Yeah, he really is an authentic individual, nobody like him, in fact his authenticity annoys me, so when we travel together the same pastor that is on his knees praying for everybody at the front of the altar is the same pastor that you travel with at restaurants and airplanes, so because I like to sleep on airplanes, I don't like to talk to other people, and he's unable to speak English, so he likes to use me as his interpreter to minister to the people next to him on the airplane, so when I get our tickets, I will often put myself on one end of the airplane and him on the other, completely opposite, because I don't want to translate for him, I don't want to be the person ministering to, I just want to be in my own world, I admit my sinfulness, I want in my selfishness, I want to go to sleep, when we go into restaurants, so many restaurants, especially if the staff speaks even one word of Chinese, I can promise you, he's going to be preaching to them, ministering to them, and before the night is over, have them on their knees, 90% of the restaurants that I go to with Brother Yun ends up with prayer for the staff, and many of them on their knees, given their heart to Christ in the restaurant itself, that's the kind of person he is, 24/7, it is an authenticity, it's who he is, that is Master Level 10, Black Belt Christian, I'm still in the yellow belt, white belt range, so I have to say, I watch him in all. I think after 40 years of walking with Jesus, I can finally see the bottom run of the ladder, I can see it, I think at last, no the top, I can just see the bottom, I just go into the Chinese language thing, because you clearly are not Chinese, you don't look Chinese, you don't sound Chinese, you speak Chinese, and I'm reminded that one time, my granddad, he was actually born in India, we were in a restaurant, he wanted his 80th birthday, I want to go to a curry house in the UK, so he took him, and these guys were serving, I would have just said Asian, that's as far as my knowledge can go, he started talking to this, this old pasty, thick, glassy, white guy in their native tongue, from a really bizarre part, I think it was a Burma, where he fought in the war, we got very good service last night, because they didn't comprehend that he would speak not just any other language, but their specific regional minor dialect thing, because he was born in India, so he spoke other language, and how did you get into speaking Chinese, because my very small understanding is it's not the easiest language in the world to learn? Yeah, it's not a language that I wanted to learn, China's not a place I wanted to move, I was very much against the idea of moving to China, I didn't really see any place where my skills or my experience translated into things that I could do on the mission field, all the missionaries that I had ever met, went to Bible school, they were pastors, they were evangelists, they were trained, they were youth pastors, they had some background in miseology, whether they stopped at Bible school or university, seminary, I had none of that. I also don't, I do not have a gift for language, I grew up in a very rural farm area in Indiana, northern Indiana, we have, I mean, you know, it's not a place where we use, I actually feel quite at home when I'm at our office in Rotherham, just because even though the accent is much different, you know, the language is just as bad, the grammar is atrocious, the way that my hometown people massacre the English language is in art, and so I have never been good with language, in fact, when I was a small child growing up in the farm community that I grew up in, I had to go through special classes because I was not able to keep up with the rest of the class when I came to reading and writing, and so I was, I was behind my classmates, and so I needed special attention in order to stay afloat and, and keep up with my grade level, and when I joined the military, I chose the one branch that relies more on bronze than brains, the Marine Corps, and, and we're known for eating crayons, not using them to write sentences. So it's, it's, it's a running joke, you know, in the, in the US military branches that the Marines are the jar heads, as we would say, not so bright in being able to, you know, speak, read, write, but something interesting happened when I arrived in China, even against my desire to stay, I felt that God was calling us there for me to stay there. I did not see a way that I could learn the language, but I wanted to give it a try, and so I went and enrolled into a university in Kunming, which is southwest China, just north of the Vietnamese border, and I went to a place that was called Yunnan University, and there, when I enrolled, they only had second year level. So they, they didn't have any students for first year level, which means beginners had no place to go. And all of the students were Chinese, meaning that they were, they were Chinese Thai, Chinese Korean, Chinese, Japanese, but they were Chinese by birth, born in another country with weak Chinese language skills. So all of my classmates were Chinese by, by heritage, and by exposure, their families also spoke Chinese. All of my classmates, all of them could read and write Chinese. I had never, I had never. So at any point, the professor could not speak English, the professor could only speak Chinese. So if there was anything that the professor said that the class didn't understand, the professor would write what she was trying to say in the Chinese language, and the whole class would say, oh, now we understand because we can read what you wrote, but I was even more lost. So the very first week, it was clear that I was, this was not going to be a help for me. However, I had a dream on the very first, the very first week I started on a Wednesday, humiliated myself on Wednesday and Thursday and Friday, Friday, I went to bed that night, including me, I remember very clearly, had a dream where I just began to speak Chinese. And it just flowed. And that's happened to me many times. Like, I would try to work on a math problem that didn't make any sense to me. And it'd be like extra credit or something and it just wasn't working. And I'd go to sleep. And in my dream, I would solve that math problem. I learned how to snowboard from a dream. I went snowboarding. I was not, I just couldn't get the hang of it. Had no instructor. I was too proud for an instructor. So I just put it on my feet and just went, you know, barreling down the hill. And I got beat the tar out of. And then that night, I found this groove in my sleep. And I woke up thinking, I wonder if that's how I do it, this left to right groove. And it just came naturally to me. The very next day, everybody that was there can attest. The very first morning, I put the board on my feet. And I just began to understand snowboarding. And I felt the same way with the Chinese language. The words just started coming to me. The intonations, the flow, the grammar, the structure, the character that you kind of develop. I don't know if you speak any other languages or not, but when you learn another language, you almost adopt a different personality. So, you know, I speak barely speaking English, Chinese and Swedish. When I speak Swedish here in Sweden, I adopt a completely different personality with my language that comes out than what I do with my English speaking or Chinese speaking personality. Same thing with Chinese, my intonations are not just different, the way that I'm thinking changes. And it's like, what the heck is this? And I picked up my book the next day, my second year level Chinese book, and just began to read from it. I understood the characters, I understood the language, I went to class, I still had to learn, I still had to study, but that entire, it's almost like that entire first year of Chinese was downloaded. And when anybody hears me speak Chinese, when a Chinese person hears me speak Chinese, they assume that I know more Chinese than I do. Because I'm still not discussing Shakespeare, but I can preach, I can talk and speak about any subject that I want. I'm very clearly an English speaker, so I have an accent. But I don't speak like a normal American speaking Chinese, there is a difference. I have a different flow to my language, and it comes more naturally to me than Swedish, even though Swedish is closer to English than Chinese obvious, for obvious reasons. I read my Bible every morning in Swedish, I watch Swedish programs every day, but my Chinese actually comes more naturally. And if I've been out of Sweden for a while, when I come back and somebody speaks to me in Swedish, I have to be very careful replying back because it goes automatically to the foreign language section of my brain, which is more dominant Chinese than Swedish. Wow, I barely spoke French. I was told by French speakers, I sounded French, they didn't know I was English at all. The problem was in French, although I could sound French perfectly accent apparently. My grammar was just shocking, my teacher would be, what are you doing? But the French people said the thing is Andy, when you speak French, we know what you're trying to say, but all the people that you're with, they might be speaking it perfectly, grammatically correct. We don't know what they're saying, they don't sound French, and it makes no sense. So I spoke French, I say that very loosely, because they understood me, but it wasn't good. But that isn't my skill base. So that's fine. Thank you. I spent a lot to talk to you. I mean, we are scratching the surface of some of the stuff that you do, and it's exciting. I need to draw this to a close. How would you encourage people just really briefly as you can? How would you encourage people where they are to do what God is asking them to do without having to go to the likes of a massive organization to help them? How do you encourage them just to go to God and do it anyway? The best advice that I could give to anybody is learn from the pioneers that have done it. Read their stories, read from their biographies, find out what happened to them, find out what mindset they had, what they adopted, how God spoke to them, and how they reacted to the call of God, the overwhelming majority of the heroes of the faith that I study about, read about, write about, are individuals who just said yes and didn't know what that meant in practice. Two days ago, we came out with a book. It's called "Under the Thread of Death," about a woman by the name of Shagufda. Councillor, she was on death row for eight years in Pakistan. Just a mother, janitor, cleaner, maid, very, very poor, found herself at the forefront of the war against Christians in Pakistan, was thrown in prison, and God used her in a mighty way. She didn't even see a coming. I think reading stories like hers, reading stories from pastors like Brother Yun, for instance, I think that that's one of the best places to start, and the best advice that I can give is to learn from those heroes of faith. Sometimes, we are motivated by their stories, and God uses that motivation to work in our own lives. Amen. Eugene, thanks so much. How can we find out more about back to Jerusalem? What's the website for that? The best way is to go to the website back to Jerusalem.com spelled out exactly as it sounds, so back to Jerusalem.com. There you'll find our newsletter, our latest articles, books, and podcasts. Eugene, thank you. It's been a pleasure. I've been looking forward to this one. And I could go on for hours. We've got to try and keep it within an hour, just. So thank you, and I hope you have a blessed rest of your day. Thank you, Eugene. Thank you. God bless you, brother. Did you know, Pure 24/7 Radio has a shop? Well, we do. 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