He continued:
After the George Floyd thing, we had Michael Lawrence write an article [titled], “What To Pray on Sunday,” and it was a good article—”Hey, pastor, here’s what you can pray this Sunday.” Then when the Charlie Kirk thing happened recently, Alex [a staff member] said to me, “We should do something equivalent along those lines, like what to pray this Sunday.” Now, it’s funny, the Charlie Kirk thing—I was oblivious to it. I had literally never listened to him until literally that week…until that week, my wife happened to send me something: “Listen to this. It’s really good.” And I listened to it and the next day he was shot. Just, Charlie Kirk was not on my radar screen. And Alex said, “Well, listen, we did George Floyd. Why shouldn’t we say something on Charlie Kirk?” And I was just like, “Uh, I kind of wish we hadn’t done anything on the George Floyd. I…just sort of stayed out of it.” And so, I just want to stay out of this one, too. And then sure enough, guys were calling attention to that on Twitter. You know, it’s like, “Oh, you did that. Why did you do this?” So it’s maybe that was the wrong judgment call. Maybe we should have done something on both rather than just one. But in many ways, that’s me just like, “9Marks does not need to be your political commentary shop.” I want to talk about expositional preaching, church membership, church discipline, church leadership, the gospel, so forth. We are an ecclesiology think tank. Now, so questions come up like, “Okay, pastors are going to be struggling this Sunday. What should they pray?” My pastor asked me, with the Charlie Kirk [assassination], “What should we pray?” And I gave him my personal counsel of what I thought he should pray. But that stuff just sucks the oxygen out of the room.
Leeman shared that those situations have taught him to “make sure we’re staying in our lane talking about these things. I’m also doubling down on [that] I want us to be disciple-makers first and foremost, not culture warriors.”
