Hi, this is Jonathan Lehman, and welcome to this episode of Nine Marks Pastors Talk.

Nine Marks exists to help pastors build healthy churches learn more at nine marks.org.

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Today, I'm having a conversation with Samuel James.

Samuel is an editor at Crossway.

What's your official title?

I'm now director of content development.

Okay.

And he does a good job directing such content development.

I've been in his hands for some of the content I helped put together, and this brother was helpful to me and improved the work I was doing, and so I'm

grateful for him. He wrote a great book called Digital Liturgies and also has a blog column

by that same title, or a substack column by that. And I'd encourage you to read it. And what I want to do with

him today is actually just walk through a recent article back in February, 2025, he wrote,

called Does Maturity Still Matter? I don't typically do. We don't typically do Pastors' Talks

this way. I'm just going to work through this article, Samuel, with you. And have you ever

listened to Al Mueller interview people like I'm thinking in public? Sure. Yeah. Have you ever

noticed he doesn't ask questions? He says something and then pauses and waits for you to respond.

Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of, I'm always like, howl, ask a question.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Everyone's got their own style.

They sure do.

I was, I was on that with him once.

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