The World and Everything in It: January 16, 2026

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Good morning!

Today on Culture Friday: Moral certainty, misplaced conviction, and what happens when online narratives collide with real life.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Maria Baer standing in today for John Stonestreet. Also today:

AUDIO: Well, I know a lot of smart guys and a few honest ones and you’re both.

What classic film noir reveals about good, evil, and the human heart. Max Belz has a review.

Later, Wordplay, George Grant on the linguistic accidents that made it into everyday speech.

And a new leader for the PCA.

BROWN: It’s Friday, January 16th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

BROWN: Up next, Mark Mellinger with today’s news.

MARK MELLINGER, NEWS ANCHOR: U.S. to Iran: All options are on the table » President Trump is delaying his response to the killings of protestors in Iran.

WALTZ: He has made it clear all options are on the table to stop the slaughter. And no one should know that better than the leadership of the Iranian regime.

That’s Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, Mike Waltz, speaking at a UN Security Council emergency meeting on Iran Thursday.

Demonstrations in Iran, sparked by a poor economy and frustrations with the country’s dictatorial leadership, have been going on for more than two weeks. The U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency reports thousands of protestors have been killed in the Iranian regime’s crackdown.

WALTZ: Iran says it’s ready for dialogue, but its actions say otherwise.

Waltz says Trump is still considering a U.S. military intervention. But Israel and Arab countries in the Middle East are warning the White House such a move could destabilize the entire region.

Iran says if the U.S. launches a strike, it will retaliate.

Machado meets w/Trump, gives him her Nobel Prize » Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado met with President Trump and U.S. senators in Washington and told reporters she presented Trump with her Nobel Peace Prize medal.

MACHADO: I presented the president of the United States with the medal of the peace- the Nobel Peace Prize.

Machado says she presented Trump with the medal -which he has longed to be awarded himself- Thursday to recognize his unique commitment to Venezuela’s freedom. It’s not clear if Trump accepted the medal.

Machado spent Thursday discussing her country’s future with Trump. The visit comes less than two weeks after a U.S. raid ousted Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro from power.

Trump has so far dismissed Machado as an immediate option to replace Maduro, instead opting to work with acting President Delcy Rodriguez, who was Maduro’s vice president.

Minnesota mayhem latest » As the clashes between protestors and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents rage on in Minneapolis, President Trump is threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act and send in the military to restore order.

The Insurrection Act allows a president to deploy military assets to restore civil order. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem says she’s talked with Trump about invoking it.

NOEM: He certainly has the constitutional authority to utilize that. Um, my hope is that this leadership team in Minnesota will start to work with us to get criminals off the streets.

Protests have been going on for more than a week now in response to an ICE agent’s fatal shooting of protestor Renee Good. The White House insists the shooting was in self defense because Good was driving a vehicle toward the agent at close range, actually striking him. Protestors dispute that the agent’s life was in danger.

A second, non-fatal shooting of a protestor has led to even more heated demonstrations this week.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz Thursday asked protestors to express their frustrations peacefully and asked Trump to back off his threat to send in the military.

Democrat state legislatures start ICE restriction push » Several Democrat-led state legislatures are now pushing for new restrictions on Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity.

Lawmakers in states like California and New Jersey are proposing bills with a wide variety of provisions, ranging from blocking state police from cooperating with ICE, to forbidding local and state officers from holding second jobs with the Department of Homeland Security.

Chris Swanson, who’s running in the Democratic primary for Michigan governor, says clashes between protestors and ICE in Minnesota have the nation on edge.

SWANSON: The country is uneasy. They are not at peace. There’s a better way to do all of this, and that’s not happening. And we continue to have these conflicts- this is not going to be the end of it.

Meantime, deep-red Tennessee is going the other direction. Lawmakers there are proposing bills in full support of President Trump’s immigration crackdown… including checking the legal status of people who apply for public benefits, professional licenses, or try to register vehicles.

Trump unveils new health care plan » He's calling it "The Great Healthcare Plan."

President Trump Thursday unveiled his administration's answer to rising healthcare costs.

At its core, the plan would create a policy sending payments directly to American families to cover their healthcare costs. That's instead of the current system, which sends federal subsidies to insurance companies on behalf of those families.

TRUMP: The government is going to pay the money directly to you. It goes to you. And then you take the money and buy your health care. Nobody's ever heard of that before, and that's the way it is. The big insurance companies lose and the people of our country win.

But critics say the plan falls short of addressing rising premiums. Trump called on Congress to quickly take up the plan and pass it.

Mortgage rates hit lowest level in three years » The average long-term U.S. mortgage rate is now the lowest it's been in more than three years.

The 30-year fixed rate mortgage dropped to just slightly over 6 percent. One year ago, that rate averaged more than 7 percent.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt says the market still has a long way to go:

LEAVITT: President Trump knows America is strongest when it is a nation of owners, not renters, and he is determined to unlock that opportunity for as many Americans as possible.

The president has floated a number of ideas he says are designed to increase the purchasing power of potential homebuyers.

Those include blocking large institutional investors from purchasing houses and the idea of a 50-year mortgage to decrease monthly payments.

I'm Mark Mellinger.

Straight ahead: What happens when online narratives collide with real life. Maria Baer is here for Culture Friday. And later: What the film noir genre reveals about good, evil, and the human heart.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday, January 16th. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I'm Nick Eicher. It’s Culture Friday! Joining us is journalist Maria Baer! You’ve heard Maria voicing commentaries for WORLD, telling stories here on this program, and if you’re a Breakpoint This Week listener, you know Maria as John Stonestreet’s cohost. So with John away this week, we thought we’d call up Maria. So welcome, and good morning!

MARIA BAER: Good morning, Nick and Myrna. I’m honored to be here and I promise not to poke too much fun at John while he’s away … [laughs]

EICHER: But enough!

Well, Maria, I wanted to make sure you’d heard a recent Allie Beth Stuckey podcast, and you had … and you found it as interesting a take on the sad situation in Minnesota as I found it to be.

But to catch up the listener who may not be familiar I want to retell in brief Stuckey’s attempt to explain to her conservative audience why the woman shot in Minneapolis by an ICE agent [why she] acted as she did.

Stuckey retold the Renee Good story from a sympathetic point of view—by reconstructing the moral world Stuckey believed that Good was living in. And in that telling, Good had absorbed a steady stream of online narratives portraying immigration enforcement as a replay of history’s darkest chapter—America as 1930s Germany, ICE as kidnappers, and silence as complicity.

As Stuckey told the story: Good may have been convinced that history was testing her, and she believed action was required of her—but certainly not because she was seeking violence.

Allie Beth Stuckey told this sympathetic story over about four minutes; I’ll just play a few seconds of how she delivered it, to give you a flavor of it.

STUCKLEY: If evil is to be stopped, good men and women must do something. Renee knew this. She had been involved in protest before. As a queer woman, she felt fidelity to everyone who fell outside the norms of the cis, hetero, white patriarchy—and she felt obligated to lend her influence to the cause of equality. She was a mother. A wife. A fierce defender of progress for the sake of her children and her country …

Maria, this is one of those scenarios where you perceive you’re in a moment of history and you want history to judge you well. You want to be on the “right side of history.” And moral certainty hardens into obligation to take action. What do you think … does that sound about right?

BAER: It’s a great question. I was really compelled by Allie Beth’s characterization of the situation, and grateful for it, because I think, in her words, what she wanted to do was help those of us who maybe are a little bit more skeptical or trying to understand the situation from both sides.

I want to be clear I’m going to speak in generalities here, because I, of course, did not know Renee Good. I know Allie Beth didn’t pretend to know her.

I think there were a couple things at play here.

The first one is given the way we live our lives right now, which is increasingly online. I think a lot of interactions like this one feel less real to us than they are. I was struck by that after seeing this video, which I frankly wish I hadn’t seen.

You know, right now, our definition of “doing something” more and more means saying something online, and I think that that has had a real impact on how we perceive the situations we’re actually in in the real world.

I remember feeling this way after the shooting of Charlie Kirk, and in reading some of the text exchanges between the alleged shooter, Tyler Robinson, and his friend, or however you’d characterize this other person, afterwards, and I felt the same watching Renee Good.

I think in the moments before her death, she was—you could see her kind of dancing in her car. She didn’t seem to understand the stakes that she was in a truly life-or-death dangerous situation. She was not acting like she was in that situation.

So I think that’s really important to understand her actions. First of all, Allie Beth’s characterization was of a valiant woman charging into battle like ready to lay down her life, and I just don’t think most of us think about life that way. I don’t think that’s where her mind was.

The other part of Allie Beth’s characterization was that Renee Good’s actions can be somewhat understood by this phenomenon called “misplaced mothering.”

Now Renee Good was, of course, a literal mother. She had children, which adds to the tragedy of the situation. But there is, you know, this idea floating around that as we have more we have fewer children in America, women in particular are built with this innate design and purpose towards nurture and care for children, and when they don’t have children, that that design and desire gets directed to something else, and it, as Allie Beth said, it could be pets or plants or political causes, but in this situation, I’m not sure that that applies.

And here’s why, you don’t see people like Allie Beth was describing, the sort of archetypal liberal, progressive woman who is, you know, an activist you don’t see them typically doing the actual work of nurturing the people that they say they’re caring for. And that’s the distinction I’m drawing.

If this were really an issue of misplaced mothering and the desire to nurture being misdirected, we would see actual nurture, and that’s not what we’re seeing.

BROWN: Maria, my ears perked up when I heard you mention earlier that women—our innate desire to mother, which fits perfectly to this question that I have for you: Married motherhood. We’ve talked about this before on Culture Friday, how depression rates are generally lower in married moms, how rates of personal satisfaction are higher in married moms.

Still, some young women today see married motherhood as as low status. I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you think is behind that and how we can change it.

BAER: I think about it all the time. I think you’re right that marriage and motherhood, particularly stay at home, motherhood, is perceived as socially low status right now.

I think there’s a lot of factors as to why that is, but I definitely think that has contributed to the lower birth rates and lower marriage rates that we’re seeing. And I don’t think that’s a positive thing.

When I talk about the innate desire of women to nurture and that that needs an outlet that is a deeply human desire and a human need. Nothing provides that more than becoming a parent, nothing requires the sort of relentless laying down of yourself like becoming a parent does, and it turns out, we need to have, we need to have the opportunity to rise to that challenge.

It’s a paradox because, you know, some of the same surveys that show higher levels of satisfaction and meaning in married moms also show much higher levels of stress and lower levels of sleep, and all of the above for married moms, which seems like a paradox, because we we tend to think of happiness as pleasure, but all of the happiness research shows it’s not actually pleasure, it is meaning and satisfaction, and nothing gives us that like marriage and motherhood, which is why it is so sad that it’s been perceived as low status.

I’m fascinated as to why that’s happened. I do think one of the reasons is pretty basic, and it’s that it’s not something that you’ve proven that you can do, that nobody else can do, and therefore you’ve made your mark on the world.

But again, paradoxically, being a mom is one of the most unique individual things you can do for the world. Because many, many, many women can be mothers, but no one else, but you can mother your children.

And I think it’s a lie from the enemy that it’s it’s commonplace or somehow boring, or it’s less impactful to be a married mom.

I’d love to see the social status of being a married mom rise. I think one of the best ways we’re going to do that is by becoming married moms and making it look cool, and that is my personal goal. So … (laughs)

BROWN: Well, we talked about poking a little fun at John earlier, and so now we get to do it. I didn’t bring this up last week talking about CCM, because CCM is not John’s thing. So I thought I have a chance now.

So we’re talking about Amy Grant. Last week, on January 6th, she released a new single, and it is called January 6. You’ve heard it.

Part of the lyric, I hear the words John Lennon said, asking me to “imagine,” referring to his anti Christian worldview song, Imagine.

A lot of chatter on this. Christians split down the middle, different sides. Some people say, you know, they’re rushing to her defense. She’s being viciously attacked. And then others say, Well, anybody who believes that Woodstock or John Lennon’s Imagine are things to celebrate has truly lost their way.

So Maria, does this sound like someone simply wrestling with pain and division through artistic expression?

BAER: I love this question, Myrna, and I am going to dedicate myself to finding a way to bring this up on breakpoint this week, just so I can see John’s side eyed glance at me, which would signify we are not going there.

I have heard the song. I have to say. It made me nostalgic for riding in the car with my mom, listening to the radio and hearing her sing. She sounds incredible.

This song is strange. Myrna, I, you know, when January 6 came and went this year, I did have a moment where I was like, oh my goodness, that’s right, this was supposed to be the day that ended everything, and that, you know, our democracy just flew away in the in the middle of the day, and we all, you know, we woke up to a new world the next day.

And it just remarkably does not feel like that.

And I thought of all the other things that felt so much more serious, like the fact that during covid, we had wild west zones in cities like Seattle and Portland, where there was no rule of law, except mobs that had taken over full city blocks.

And somehow that’s not part of our conversation about, you know, the challenges to democracy.

But this song to me, more just it felt again, like the desire to be seen as the right kind of person, to be seen as the person who cares about the right kinds of things and says the right code words.

I mean, to bring it all back to what we were talking about at the beginning, so much of this is posturing. It feels like a game. It’s sending the signals that you’re the right kind of person and you think the right things, and you’re in the right club, and the wrong kind of people will not like this song, and therefore I’m the right kind of it’s hard not to, you know, again, be cynical, but to see it that way, just because it was such a melodramatic song, and it still seems strange to me, given the state of our at least somewhat functioning democracy at this point to point to January 6, as being anything other than an embarrassing riot.

EICHER: Maria Baer is a journalist and cohost of Breakpoint This Week. Enjoyed the visit, Maria, thank you.

BAER: So good to see you, Nick and Myrna, thanks for having me.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Friday, January 16th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: one of America’s great movie styles, film noir.

You’re likely familiar with the tell-tale signs: the private eye, the femme fatale, the double-cross, the unsolved crime.

BROWN: Perhaps most well-known is the film The Maltese Falcon, from 85 years ago starring Humphrey Bogart.

AUDIO: You have any conception...I know the value in human life you people put on it.

WORLD film reviewer Max Belz now with a few worthwhile examples of the genre.

MAX BELZ: Film noir is French for “dark film.” Italian movie critic Nino Frank coined the term to describe American crime movies in the 1940s. One notable example is a movie from 1947 called Out of the Past.

CLIP: That Bailey who burns you up, he runs the gas station? You know him? I might have, once. If he keeps mooning around Jim’s girl, nobody will know him and that’d be too bad.

The movie opens in Bridgeport, California at the foot of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Jeff Bailey, played by Robert Mitchum, works at a gas station and we meet him picnicking with his girlfriend next to a sparkling mountain lake.

CLIP: You’ve been a lot of places, haven’t you? One too many. Which one did you like the best? This one right here. I bet you say that to all the places.

But a visitor comes to town looking for Jeff and tries to pull him back into his murky past: Jeff’s past invades his present.

CLIP: That guy that showed up today? Yes? Want to take a ride with me up to Lake Tahoe? Now? Yes, now. I want to tell you something. Alright, Jeff.

A long flashback reveals that a gangster named Whit Sterling had hired Jeff to find his missing girlfriend, Kathie. Jeff found her in Mexico City and, fatefully, fell in love with her.

CLIP: Then I saw her coming out of the sun and I knew I didn’t care about that 40 grand.

They try to run away from Whit, but he uses his clout to win Kathie back. The timeline of the movie then returns to the present. Whit forces Jeff back into a web of blackmail and betrayal where he finds Kathie again but this time he’s wary of her. Jeff is groping around in a dark world all alone.

CLIP: So, I just followed that 90 pounds of excess baggage to Mexico City She had been at the Reform and then been gone. I took the bus south like she did.

Jeff wants to start over in this idyllic small town, but unsavory characters from his previous life draw him back into a life of coercion and secrets. He wants to shed it all, but the struggle for survival is real.

CLIP: Find her, Jeff. Bring her back. Why me? Well, I know a lot of smart guys and a few honest ones and you’re both.

Much of the movie hinges on the great performance and loose ease of Robert Mitchum. Heavy lidded, his face shows little, and his attitude is relaxed even as he bears his burdens. As one of the characters notes, “Buddy you look like you’re in trouble because you don’t act like it.”

CLIP: Let’s go down to the bar. You can cool off while we try to impress each other.

The source material for film noir was often the hardboiled crime fiction popular in America at the time. Postwar prosperity is well-documented, but the movies of the 40s carry a heavier weight than the madcap films of the 30s. Perhaps the grave losses from World War II made people more sober.

CLIP: Don’t you see you’ve only me to make deals with now. Well, build my gallows high baby.

The camera in film noir drew on the shadowy photography of earlier German movies. The faces of the characters drift out of and then back into the light. Whole portions of the screen are in darkness. The lighting fits the shifting moral ground the characters travel.

The light can be warm but also foreboding, as it catches the outline of a face or the brim of a hat. It’s not clear right away whether the person means good or harm. Cigarette smoke diffuses the light and even small amounts of light reveal big actions.

The settings are clearly American: people in suburban neighborhoods living normal lives like Fred McMurray’s character, an insurance salesman, in Double Indemnity, another highwater mark of the genre.

CLIP: I killed Dietrichson. Me, Walter Neff. 35 years old, insurance agent, unmarried, no visible scars, until a little while ago that is.

Or in the lesser known Detour from 1945, the main character Al Roberts assumes the name of a man who mysteriously died.

CLIP: There was no time to lose. Every minute I had to be Charles Haskell was dangerous. Hey, you. This your car? By that time I’d done just what the police’d say I did even if I didn’t.

Al is down and out, and the rip current of life pulls him under. Again, we have a desperate person exposed to the ugly side of human deception.

CLIP: You know you’re rather charming yourself, but I’m afraid I don’t quite understand you. Well, if you’d drop this junior league patter, we may get the conversation down where it belongs. You worried about something? I don’t know, should I be? Not if you do what you’re told. That’s why I’m here. I do what I’m told. People trust me. Do you?

By all appearances film noir characters are often ordinary people, but when evil forces emerge, they are lost in a scorched moral landscape. Frequently, as in Out of the Past, the scrambled timeline shows the psychological side because the moral struggle can be expressed inwardly through the voiceover monologue.

CLIP: Now the first thing I want to get off my chest is my name isn’t Bailey. It’s Markham. Markham? Jeff Markham? I should have told you before. I meant to, but I kept putting it off.

Whether it’s greed or murder, film noir thrusts people into moral quandaries. Though the physical reality shows a calm exterior, guilt and temptation course beneath the surface.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said that “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” Film noir is a visual expression of that struggle against evil, making these movies worth revisiting.

I’m Max Belz.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Well, we’ve done all the totaling up and double-checking on the December Giving Drive—and it adds up to this: we owe you a word of thanks. You’re always there for us, each of these giving drives just proves it, and it’s what keeps us going.

To every single giver of every single dollar in our December Giving Drive—thank you.

BROWN: Once again, you showed up in a big way. Your generosity strengthened this work as we’re off and running into a new year, and it’s been such an encouragement to our entire staff.

EICHER: So whether you considered your gift large or small, whether it was one time or ongoing, it’s going to make a real difference for us in 2026!

Up next on The World and Everything in It: mistaken meanings that stuck.

BROWN: From printing mistakes to mispronunciations, George Grant has a look at the linguistic accidents that somehow made it into our everyday speech. It’s Word Play for January.

GEORGE GRANT: According to Mario Andrew Pei, the renowned Italian-born American linguist, “Of all the words that exist in any language only a small minority are pure, unadulterated, original roots. The majority are coined words, forms that have been in one way or another created, augmented, cut down, combined, and recombined to convey new needed meanings. The language mint is more than a mint; it is a great manufacturing center, where all sorts of productive activities go on unceasingly.”

Sometimes, though, that linguistic manufacturing process goes awry and new words are produced, not by design, but by mishap. These accidental terms are sometimes called ghost words. They generally originate from typographical errors, misprints, misspellings, or mispronunciations. If the errors are widely repeated, ghost words can then enter into legitimate usage, taking on lives of their own. Examples abound:

The word apron comes from the Medieval French naperon. English speakers mispronounced a naperon as an apron, and over time the misunderstanding persisted. Algorithm comes from the Medieval Latin, algorismus. The word was simply a bad translation of al-Khwarizmi, the name of a pioneering Arab mathematician. The word sneeze was originally spelled with an F, not an S—fneeze. In early typography a lowercase F could easily be confused with an uppercase S. Eventually, this ghost misreading became normative.

In Middle English a single pea was called a pease. It was often misinterpreted as a plural word however, due to its final S sound. As a result, a singular version of the word came into common usage and the old plural, pesen, was abandoned. The word varsity was originally versity, an abbreviation of university. But somewhere along the way a combination of mishearing, mispronouncing, and misspelling gave us a whole new ghost word. The French term nompere, meant “one without equal.” Spoken aloud, a noumpere was erroneously heard as an oumpere. Over time the mistake morphed into our word umpire.

Tornado is misrendering of the Spanish term tronada, meaning “thunderstorm.” Over time, perhaps due to sloppy syntax, the R and O were inverted creating the modern ghost word tornado. An ekename was an Anglo-Saxon term for a secondary or unofficial name, literally an “also-name.” Inevitably, an ekename was misheard and repeated as a nickname.

A host of other ghost words have found their way into our everyday conversations: squeeze, ammunition, sashay, okay, expediate, culprit, ingot, abacot, and gravy.

Though the story is perhaps apocryphal, my favorite ghost word is pumpernickel. It supposedly comes from a quip of Napoleon who dismissed the dense, earthy German bread as, “C’est pain pour Nicole!” meaning, fit only for his horse.

Perhaps James Joyce was right, declaring that, “Mistakes are but portals of discovery,” even when it comes to our vocabulary!

I’m George Grant.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

BROWN: For decades, the Presbyterian Church in America has grown while many mainline denominations have shed millions of members. But a rare leadership rupture at the top of the PCA last summer has now put that record under strain.

BROWN: With the nomination of Fred Greco as the PCA’s new stated clerk, church leaders are looking for steady, behind-the-scenes leadership to restore continuity and trust. WORLD Associate Correspondent Zoe Miller reports.

ZOE MILLER: The stated clerk is the top executive officer of the PCA. It’s a career position with enormous influence, and in the PCA’s 50-plus-year history, the first four men who held the job served decades at a time.

The fifth one lasted just five years.

AUDIO: Those are the names of the scandalizers…

The opening came after the abrupt departure of one of the PCA’s most prominent figures: Bryan Chapell resigned the stated clerk job last year after a podcast appearance in which he falsely accused more than a dozen well-known figures of being what he called “scandalizers.” Chapell claimed each had left the faith, left his family, or taken his own life, which was demonstrably untrue.

The incident triggered formal complaints, strained relationships with sister denominations, and ended Chapell’s tenure prematurely.

CHAPELL: In an unanticipated moment, I responded to a question in a way that did not accurately, or well, represent individuals, my church, or my office.

Chapell apologizing at the PCA general assembly last summer. Ever since his resignation, an interim has served in his place, while a search for his replacement was underway.

Now, the PCA has nominated Pastor Fred Greco to take the job—pending confirmation this summer.

DUNCAN: Fred was above and beyond the best candidate. There was no question.

Lay elder Mel Duncan is one of the men on the committee that recommended Greco—considering him a stabilizer.

DUNCAN: I also think there's just some trust problems in the PCA

The PCA has work to do to restore church health after the damage of the Bryan Chapell episode. Duncan believes Greco has the institutional knowledge to do it.

DUNCAN: That was just a very awkward time for him and for the denomination and I'm very grateful for his legacy and he's done a lot of good for the church, but I'm very excited that Fred is now in that chair.

George Sayour is with the PCA’s Mission to North America and works as a pastor with Ministry to State, its outreach to governments.

In his mind, Greco is a big shift in the right direction because he understands the history of the PCA, and has the nuance required for the application of doctrine.

SAYOUR: Two stated clerks ago, Roy Taylor, just universally respected…he had a knack for explaining things without giving his opinion on those things. And that’s very important for the Stated Clerk’s office. So yeah, I think Fred Greco knows how to do that well, and that’s why, again, he received just universal acclamation for his job as our moderator a couple years ago.

For Sayour, Greco’s nomination is a direct result of his performance at the 50th General Assembly. He served as Moderator, the man tasked with navigating the PCA’s complex rules of order. Greco turned what could’ve been a fractured, contentious meeting into a masterclass in leadership and discretion.

SAYOUR: Fred Greco was universally hailed as one of the best moderators we’ve had in recent history. In what could have been a very contentious General Assembly, he just showed great adeptness at and fluency with our polity, adeptness at applying it in the moment. He does it with levity, he does it with strength…he’s going to be great, I think.

Some of the conversation surrounding the PCA’s leadership transition has played out online. In a social media post, Danny Morgan, an associate pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Austin, welcomed Greco’s nomination while raising a concern about whether denominational governance could begin to eclipse mission and evangelism.

Still, in the minds of many, Greco is what the P-C-A needs going forward after a rare and public failure at the top.

Greco himself told me he hopes he lives up to the hype.

GRECO: One of the main things that the stated clerk is to do is to serve as that practical function, as the ligaments that bind the body together, if I can use a Pauline analogy. And that helps the advancement of the church.

He says the church needs to be forthright about the roles and responsibilities of their elders and deacons, how they are accountable, and be transparent about that.

GRECO: We need to be forthright with people. They need to know what their responsibilities are. They need to know what the responsibilities of their elders and their deacons are and how they are accountable. And if we continue, I think, to emphasize these things and be very transparent, I think it will continue to be a breath of fresh air in our society.

GRECO: We have one church. We have one standard. We have one goal, and we work together as the body of Christ in a broader sense than just in a local congregation.

At a time when the PCA is growing in number, the way church leaders conduct themselves bears directly on the trustworthiness of the message they preach. For Greco it’s a matter of stewardship.

There is a lot at stake. The PCA’s legacy is one of standing for Biblical doctrine against a tide of mainline liberalism. It did, after all, grow out of the mainline Presbyterian movement.

Half a century later, there have emerged very real divisions under the surface in PCA leadership and Greco’s moment is about navigating them—and holding firm to its founding.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Zoe Miller.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s time to name the crew who contributed to this week’s programs:

Mary Reichard, David Bahnsen, Mary Muncy, Travis Kircher, Elizabeth Shenk, Bethel McGrew, Juliana Chan Erikson, Hunter Baker, Onize Oduah, Cal Thomas, Claire Wilkerson, Emma Friere, Maria Baer, Max Belz, George Grant, and Zoe Miller.

Thanks also to our breaking news crew: Kent Covington, Mark Mellinger, Steve Kloosterman, Travis Kircher, Daniel Devine, and Christina Grube.

And thanks to the Twilight Techs, the Moonlight Maestros, the Overnight Outfitters—serving up the program each week-day bright and early: Benj Eicher and Carl Peetz.

Harrison Watters is Washington producer, Kristen Flavin is features editor, Lindsay Mast is producer.

And I’m Executive Producer Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio. WORLD’s mission is Biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

The Psalmist writes: “The LORD is my chosen portion and my cup; you hold my lot.

The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.

I bless the LORD who gives me counsel; in the night also my heart instructs me. I have set the LORD always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken.

Therefore my heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices; my flesh also dwells secure.”

—Psalm 16:5-9

Let the peace of Christ rule in your heart and let the word of Christ dwell in you richly this weekend as you worship with your brothers and sisters in Christ, in church on the Lord’s Day.

And Lord willing we’ll meet you back here on Monday.

Go now in grace and peace.

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