The 700 Club Interactive: Brandon Gaskin [5:37-10:38]

How does that feel like when that happens? Because I'm sure it hasn't just happened to you, but other deaf individuals. Yeah. I will enter that with the first thing. I love the global church. I love what God is doing. And then sometime from the eighth minute of people that we see minority people with disability, deaf, as lesser than. And so often time when we hear, oh, we can't provide interpreter. Oh, we can't avoid that. It hurts. It hurts because it's communicating to us. Are we not deserving, appearing this gospel? Are we not deserving of having a relationship with Jesus? And so that can hurt some time. But we are, I think, for that there are churches out there that are trying, willing to sleep, working hard to figure out how to provide afterton inclusion to deaf as well. Well, hopefully this interview will help spread awareness and you'll have other churches, other ministries trying to do that as well. You know, you say that we not only have an access problem, but an inclusion problem. Brandon, explain what you mean by that. Yeah, so it's very easy to say we can place an interpreter there. And that's good enough. But that's not really good enough if we have 70 million deaf people in the world, and less than 2% are not following Jesus. Which means we have to do the work of God by mobilizing, equipping them to do the work. So often church should do 4 deaf people instead of doing with deaf people, embodying them into the practice, embodying them to be equipped with it, embodying them to become pastors, leaders, evangelists, missionaries. And so that's where the inclusion problem lies. Yeah. Well, you've also pointed out in many different places that you've spoken as, John chapter 9, which is when Jesus heals the man born blind. How do you think we should approach that chapter in the Gospels, when we're thinking of our deaf and even blind and disabled brothers and sisters? That's a great question. When I think about my friend, like Tania, who helped us reframe our theology of disability, when we look at John 9 and it's like, wow, who sinned? Was it his parent or who, and Jesus did neither? Well, he would create it this way. Why? Because the glory of God might be displayed through him. And it helped us to framework that God made people with disability and deaf people for a purpose, again, for a reason. So that his glory might be displayed through them, through us. And so that really just like reframing our thought that it's not a pity, but it's, oh, God creation means they're involving this work too, yeah. And let me just encourage you, God's glory is absolutely being shown through you. Absolutely. I agree 100%. Brandon, tell us about the deaf millennial project. How did it begin and what's the goal? Yeah, so we started with the pure intention of inviting the next generation to be involved in what God is doing. What we saw a lot of there was no availability to do with nothing for young people after they graduate college or something to get involved with what God was doing globally. And so we just started with the heart of creating these ways for the global church that impact the everyday deaf person's life, the everyday deaf person journey with Jesus. And so we've helped develop conferences, outreach to mobilize the next generation to get involved. Yeah, you and your team mobilized and you guys went to an island off of Madagascar and you've shared that before you guys went, there were deaf individuals but none of them believed in Jesus. But what happened after you and your team went? Yeah, and when I told that story, I think you, I mixed in a lot of things but we have what called the deaf college team from Converting the National Ministry and we, our team through that got sent to Mauritius and what we've learned that there's about 10,000 deaf people on that island and no believer there, a UUPG group of people. And so we began to have relationship and conversation and we were sent people to girls and began to have conversation and sure enough we were meet a guy named Christopher who's about 2021 and he would hear the gospel and understand it and become baptized. Well that next day they would throw a party of about 20 friends and invite them and Christopher would stand up boldly and declare the new UUPG to his friend and several of them would become baptized and sure enough just like last week