Parent Compass Radio

Lucas Miles: Although there’s a lot of pain, God has been doing some tremendous things. TPUSA Faith is stronger than ever before, not in spite of Charlie but because of Charlie. We’ve had to lean into together, we’ve had to hug each other, cry together, laugh together, just really draw close so that we can keep forward motion of what’s happening here. We know what time it is, we know what season we’re in, we know what needs to be done, and we are doing our best to keep that moving forward with tremendous results.

Real Christian Families: Today we have the senior director of one of Charlie Kirk’s organizations, Turning Point USA Faith. Pastor Lucas Miles is a trusted voice in the American church who has addressed some of the most challenging topics in theology, politics, and culture. Lucas is a senior pastor of Influence Church and founder with his wife, Krissy, of Miles Media, Inc.

He is the host of The Lucas Miles Show and The Church Boys podcast. Known for his bold leadership and biblical teachings, Lucas is dedicated to helping people live with purpose and impact their communities with the gospel. So glad you're here.

Lucas Miles: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Real Christian Families: I know this has been such a really wild time. Help us make sense of the world and the times we’re living in. There’s so many people out there in pain, and I know you have answers for us. How did you manage what happened to Charlie?

Lucas Miles: I think we’re still managing. It’s not something that goes away. It’s not something that gets fixed overnight in any capacity. I knew Charlie since 2020. I actually met him here at the National Religious Broadcasters. We had a slow build in our relationship over the next couple of years but ended up becoming dear friends.

He had reached out to me at the start of the summer in 2024 about joining the team at TPUSA Faith. I was already pastoring a church for a long time in South Bend, Indiana, just outside of there, Influence Church. He said, "Hey, what would you think about quitting everything, moving to Phoenix, and leading the faith department for Turning Point and overseeing all the faith operations?"

I knew as soon as he uttered the words that it was a God assignment, but I didn’t know how it was going to happen. I came back to him about a week later after praying about it with my wife and talking to a lot of our team, and I said, "Look, I’m in, but I don’t think you want me to quit my church. I think that if I’m going to call on the nation’s pastors, I’m going to be much more effective as a pastor still myself and with a pulpit myself."

It’s more work for me, but I go back and forth, and if you’re okay with it, we’ll make it work. So that’s what I do. Before Charlie’s assassination, I had about 15 months with him, and it was an incredible time period. I often get flashes of dinners that we had, conversations that we had, phone calls, and texts. Charlie was a one-of-a-kind human being. He was a great leader, a good friend, a good husband, and a good father. I got to see him in a lot of different capacities.

There’s a tremendous void in the world now in his passing. Honestly, people didn’t understand what all Charlie was doing until he’s gone. I don’t think this is an exaggeration: he was holding a lot of things together. I don’t mean that to ascribe some sort of divinity to Charlie, but relationally he was so interconnected. If somebody got out of line, he’d shoot them a message and he’d say, "Hey, stay with the program. We’ve got to be on mission here. We’ve got to work together." He would call people back to unity.

In his absence, you’ve seen a lot of disunity happen. It shows you how much unity he was keeping together during his lifetime. We are navigating the pain. I often describe it as life having this cataract of grief that you look at the world through. On the other side of this, although there’s a lot of pain, God has been doing some tremendous things.

TPUSA Faith is stronger than ever before, not in spite of Charlie but because of Charlie. We’ve had to lean into together, hug each other, cry together, laugh together, just really draw close so that we can keep forward motion of what’s happening here. We know what time it is, we know what season we’re in, we know what needs to be done, and we are doing our best to keep that moving forward with tremendous results.

Real Christian Families: Help me with how TPUSA Faith started, why, and how that incorporates with TPUSA, because I know they also have Action.

Lucas Miles: Underneath the ecosystem that Charlie really designed and developed are a couple of different entities. You have Turning Point Action, which is a 501(c)(4). That’s the political arm built to be able to chase the vote and support campaigns. You look at the 2024 victory for Trump; Turning Point Action was really at the helm of a lot of the success of that. That’s run by Tyler Bowyer, and he and Charlie just worked tirelessly in that space together. Tyler’s doing a great job continuing that work.

We also have what’s known as Turning Point USA, and that’s the broader arm, sort of the big tent aspect of Turning Point. It’s a 501(c)(3) geared towards big tent conservatism. It’s a wide mouth of the funnel. We want as many people to come in and think conservatively, to vote conservatively, although it’s not a vote-driven or political-driven arm. The belief is that if we can get people to understand and embrace conservative cultural ideas, that’s going to trickle down eventually into the ballot box. It’s an indirect way of affecting culture in many ways.

TPUSA Faith is the faith division of that arm. We are an exclusively Christian division. We focus where a lot of times people think of Turning Point and they think of young people. My team’s average person we reach out to is a 57-year-old pastor in America. That’s our main outreach. So I have a team of about 40 staff members across the country that are calling on pastors all over the country.

We grew from about 3,200 pastors when I came into the organization to now we have almost 10,000 pastors that we work with. We are really working into deepening those relationships, strengthening the pastors, getting them to stand stronger for the gospel, and to really teach their people how to think biblically in the boardroom, the bedroom, as well as at the ballot box.

Real Christian Families: What issues have you really dealt with that have been at the forefront in the time you’ve been there?

Lucas Miles: Within my team, which I can speak to with more expertise just because it’s what I’m doing every single day, we are really trying to help people with understanding primary Christian doctrine. If we talk about this just at a high level: God as creator, the lordship of Jesus, the Trinity, heaven and hell, the depravity of man, the return of Christ.

We might have secondary differences. You and I might disagree about eschatology and when and how Jesus is going to return, but we would find agreement in the fact that we both believe Jesus is going to return, hopefully as Christians. That is the point of unity.

What we’re seeing is we’ll see people say, "I believe that God is creator, but I have a different view of marriage, sex, gender, sanctity of life." We’re trying to help people, give them language for some of these things. Everything from immigration to sexuality to the authority of God’s word, we’re really focused on that space and trying to equip pastors to be able to navigate these things.

Real Christian Families: And what is your personal story? We’re a life and family show, actually, too.

Lucas Miles: I grew up in a great Christian family that loved the Lord. My parents are actually here at this event. I’m a middle child, older brother, younger sister. I got very involved in youth group as a junior high and high school student. I was very thankful for that time. I grew up in a bit more of a traditional church, and I eventually found my wife and my salvation there and a real love for the word.

I navigated away from that in my early 20s as I had gotten married, but I’m always grateful for that time that I had there. I ended up having an encounter with the Holy Spirit that really forever changed my life and it set me on a track. My wife and I started a church now called Influence Church. This is our 21st year pastoring that church in October. I’ve been at the same church that entire time, planted it when I was 24 years old.

Most of my career has been as a senior pastor. I started writing and put out my first official book in 2016 with Worthy Publishing called *Good God*. I released several books after that, like *The Christian Left*, *Woke Jesus*, and most recently my book *Pagan Threat*, which had a foreword by Charlie Kirk written just before he died. That holds a special place in my heart as a result.

The book has done super well. It was number four on the New York Times bestseller list and really has catapulted me in a lot of new opportunities, which I’m grateful for. I’ve been with Turning Point now for about 18 months. I knew Erica a little bit before Charlie was killed, but really being able to spend some significant time with her since then, she’s an incredible human being. There’s a real grace on her life.

People always ask what they can do for us, and just pray for her and the family and the kids. There’s such a grace on her life for it. It's a "now" moment, and I think she understands really what she needs to do. She’s doing a great job leading the organization. My wife and I don’t have kids of our own. We’ve lost a few along the way and battled infertility. I know a lot of couples out there can relate to that.

As a result, our nieces and nephews get really greatly spoiled. So we’re happy to spend a lot of time with them. We utilize the extra time that we have without having children for things that we believe matter: the state of the church in America, the state of the people in our church, pouring into our own leaders and our staff members. That’s really how we focus our attention.

If we have hobbies, that's what they are. Charlie Kirk once said that he had fun once and he hated it. He was always on mission. I don’t know if I’d go that far, but fun for us right now is getting stuff done and staying true to our calling. We realize, especially after Charlie’s death, that the days are evil, life is short, and there’s a lot of work to do. So we’re very dedicated to that.

Real Christian Families: So where do you see as far as the future since this has happened?

Lucas Miles: For Turning Point, we are in great hands with Erica. We’re in a really strong place as an organization. We’re grateful for our supporters, our donors, our sponsors, people that have really stood with us through this time of turmoil. It’s going on six months now since Charlie was killed, and it doesn’t even seem real to say that it’s been that long.

But the organization has really stabilized. Our team is solidified. We’re growing. I’m hiring probably eight new positions right now at TPUSA Faith just to handle the increased need. Our faith department has doubled, almost tripled in size. So there’s a lot more pastors to need called on. We used to do one pastor summit a year; we’re doing three pastor summits this year.

We’re doing 30 tour stops with what we call our "Make Heaven Crowded" tour. That was a phrase that Charlie and Erica used to share with each other a lot. You can go to makeheavencrowdedtour.com to find out more about that, but we've got 30 unique sites that we're going to: Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, Washington state, Texas, Florida. We’re all over the place. Indiana, we’re really trying to hit as much of the US as we can.

These will probably kick into 2027 as well. I have a feeling we’ll be doing this for a while. Turning Point right now, about every four days, we’re doing an event with over a thousand people. You think about the scope of putting on—for most organizations, putting on one event that has a thousand people would take them six months to plan. We’re doing an event like that every four days. The pace that our teams are running at is remarkable. I’m proud to be part of the team, and it’s an honor to serve there.

Real Christian Families: Now there’s so many people saying, "Be a Charlie Kirk," or "I’m a Charlie Kirk." So what is it—which is really everything that parents deal with. How does a Charlie Kirk or—

Lucas Miles: How do you become a Charlie Kirk?

Real Christian Families: That's probably giving too much glory when he would point to Jesus Christ, but how do you become—

Lucas Miles: Charlie should be emulated in the same way that Paul says, "Follow me as I follow Christ." I think that there was something about Charlie’s life that was unique. The number of people he reached, he did more in 31 years than most people do in three lifetimes, or could do in three lifetimes. It’s really remarkable. He deserves recognition and dignity of acknowledgment of what God did in him.

Of course, he’d be the first to say stay humble, it was God. I can just hear him say those words anytime somebody complimented him. He would just say, "Hey, we’re going to stay humble." And certainly nobody's looking to deify him or anything like that. But I do think that there’s a model there to look at. Being a Charlie Kirk does not mean that you’re going to have 11 million followers and a daily TV show.

Of course, somebody could have that and it’s good to have desire to do big things, but I think being a Charlie Kirk is bigger than that. It’s more important than just the externals of the impact that he made. I think that at a core level, if this were a show called *Becoming Charlie Kirk*, I think that he became Charlie Kirk first and foremost by really strong character formation.

Charlie had a tremendous education despite the fact that he didn’t go to college. He was well-read, he had great mentors, and he sought them out vigorously. People like Bill Montgomery or Foster Friess and others. Later, his relationship with Donald Trump; I think he learned so much about leadership by watching the president. Charlie was a sponge for information. He was constantly learning, constantly asking questions.

I would also probably want to spend a little time with parents and say how do you become the opposite of Charlie Kirk? Because I think in order to know how to become a Charlie Kirk, you need to know what to look for that could take you the other direction that we would worry about. That is that this generation has experienced more trauma and isolation than really any generation, at least in recent history before it.

You look at things from the Twin Towers to increase in school shootings at Columbine. You have gender indoctrination and ideology that crept in. You have Marxism that’s creeping in. You have riots. You have division between races over things like BLM and George Floyd. Cities are being burned down. There’s a lot of negative things that are happening, and that’s affecting young people greatly.

For any parent out there or grandparent or youth pastor, whatever it is, it’s really important to recognize that this is a generation that has a tendency towards trauma and a tendency towards isolation. We have to start working on really breaking those cycles. I think having strong communication, taking time to ask questions, being a little bit more patient—let’s take an issue like radical environmentalism.

It’s very easy as a conservative to see somebody that is going full on the environment to say, "Hey, you’re getting into some crazy ground." I think that there’s a better response. I think the response in those instances is saying, "Hey, first off, I love your passion. I love your passion for nature and the environment, and do you know, in fact, that God’s word says a lot of amazing things about the environment?"

Actually, one of the things it talks and teaches about is that we’re to be stewards of this earth. We’re to have dominion, we’re to oversee it. The world was not—man was not made for the world; the world was made for man, but it’s our job to steward this and that there’s something about that responsibility of caring for the thing that we have. But we remember that the world is not our god; the world points to our god.

All of creation declares the goodness of God and points to these eternal attributes of God, which it teaches us in Romans. So it’s redirecting that passion to say, "I think you’re onto something here, but let me help you polish that a little bit and take you back to a biblical framework." That might not happen in one conversation; that might take time to build.

The goal is to help redirect these empathies and these feelings and these responses to trauma back to a biblical ideology rather than push it away and flat out rebuke it. I think that we’re going to get further with that. You would see that in Charlie's dialogue with students as he would say, "Pick up the microphone. All the dissenters come to the front. I want to hear from you first."

He would say, "Why do you think that way? What’s an example of that? Why do you feel that way? Have you ever thought about this?" When the whole crowd started booing the person because they were a blue-haired liberal, Charlie would go, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. This person was made in God’s image and they have dignity. I’ve listened to all you guys. I’m going to take the time to listen to each person. Let’s hear what they have to say."

He would give dignity to that person, and he would treat them like a human being. He would love them, he would respect them, and Charlie won so many people over that way. I think that there’s a lesson in there of how we can operate to really win this generation.

Real Christian Families: You had an experience with the Holy Spirit.

Lucas Miles: I knew you were going to mention that. Let me say a couple things first off as a caveat to this. I grew up, first of all, in a cessationist church, meaning that they didn’t believe in the gifts of the Holy Spirit. They didn’t believe in really the activity of the Holy Spirit other than that he was sort of a stamp of our salvation.

I always joke that in my church growing up, the Holy Spirit was almost viewed like that weird uncle that you hope doesn’t show up to the family reunion because you never know what he’s going to do. He was really seen as a lesser person of the Trinity in many ways. At least my perception was that at the time.

At TPUSA Faith, my role is helping to steward and foster these 10,000 churches that we have. We have churches across the whole spectrum. We have cessationists and we have swinging-from-the-chandelier charismatics. We have Calvinists, we have Presbyterians, we have Baptists, we have Southern Baptists, we have Church of Christers, we have non-denominational guys, Calvary Chapels—everything you can imagine in the Protestant world.

We have to find a way to have unity despite secondary differences. I do believe that although the Trinity is a primary doctrine, our view of gifts of the Holy Spirit, our view of things like speaking in tongues, those do become secondary positions. We have to find unity beyond the micro-doctrines that are within there.

For me personally, I am now a continuationist. I believe in charismatic theology in the sense that God is good, he loves us, and he’s given gifts to man. I think we see a lot of abuses in the charismatic world, and that’s something I’m really trying hard to fight against because we’ve seen, especially here recently with some of the work people like Mike Winger and others who have done, who's a friend of mine, they've done a great job of exposing some wolves in sheep’s clothing when it comes to gifts of the Holy Spirit.

It’s always important to recognize the dangers that are there and some of where this can go if not in check. But while there's pastors that claim, especially in the charismatic world, they claim these great revelations—"God took me up into the third heaven" and "God did this in my life" or "an angel stood at the foot of my bed"—I don’t have any of that.

Here’s what I have: God showed me how messed up I was. The Holy Spirit showed me that depravity was my experience with the Holy Spirit. I had a moment in my life where the Lord showed me what I deserved apart from him. It transformed my life. I saw at that moment the grace of God and the necessity for that and my need for it in a way that I’ll never forget.

That’s what allows me to be able to love people, because it’s easy to walk through life and have judgment towards other people or feel like you have some sort of moral superiority or that they just don’t meet your standards. The Holy Spirit has really—the way he’s ministered to me has shown me that apart from Christ, I’m no better than the worst enemy of the gospel.

I deserve hell apart from Christ as much as Adolf Hitler or Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein or fill in public enemy number one there. I have no righteousness of my own to stand on. That’s the revelation that the Lord gave me through the Holy Spirit. That changed my life. It gave me a hunger for what I would call the gospel of God’s grace and it shows me that I need to rely on him every single day.

So I believe in the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, all of those things. But it’s rooted in the personhood of the Holy Spirit and the gentleness of the Father and really the love that we see poured out through Christ that in that Trinity of the fellowship of the Godhead that I see what God has brought us into as believers to be able to have fellowship with him for all eternity. We get to participate in the love that the Trinity contains within himself. That is a very remarkable thing.

Real Christian Families: Tell me about the book, *Pagan Threat*.

Lucas Miles: My newest book, *Pagan Threat*, is a New York Times bestseller. Charlie did the foreword for it. You go back and you read his foreword, and it was written just probably maybe a month and a half before he was killed. In many ways, it feels prophetic in the sense that Charlie just understood the danger out there better than anybody. I think he understood what I would call this pagan threat.

Ultimately, I believe it’s the pagan threat that took his life. What I mean by that is it’s this indoctrination of the current, this younger generation with a post-Christian worldview or a pagan or Marxist worldview that has corrupted their minds, diminished the love and dignity for society, for humanity.

Human life doesn’t have value anymore in many of these individuals' lives. They become detached through digital spaces and video games. The average kid has seen so many murders on TV or livestream or even literal murders, not just entertainment TV shows or video games, but they've seen literal murders on platforms like X or YouTube.

It’s desensitized this generation. Ultimately, it was that desensitization and I think just the deception and the indoctrination of the enemy that brought this level of vitriol to cause somebody to pull a trigger and take Charlie’s life. So this book is really—although I wrote it before he was killed, I really dedicate the success of this book to Charlie’s legacy.

I have a roadmap in the back of the book for pastors and moms and dads and grandfathers and grandmothers that is sort of a roadmap for where we go from here to save this next generation. It's a seven-step plan, and I hope people can get it and benefit from that.

Real Christian Families: Can you give us a quick few of the seven?

Lucas Miles: I'll see how good my memory is. First off, this generation is going through this level of trauma; they’re also more disconnected than ever before. Growing up in the COVID eras, there’s sort of this ingrained isolation. Personal relationships—when I was younger, people went on dates and they met people and they did things. That’s less common today. A lot of it’s digital relationships first, for sometimes an extended time before they would have those types of interactions.

I’m a fan of courtship and not traditional dating, so in some ways that might be a good thing. But I think in many cases it’s because of anxieties that it’s creating that, or depression that it’s creating that. So the book—a couple of the steps—churches especially, they have to have a renewed focus, if not a first-time focus if they’ve never done it before, on digital evangelism.

We have to be in that digital space doing ministry. If there’s a pastor out there and he’s like, "Oh, I don’t know how to use my smartphone, I’m not very good on the computer," you have to find somebody in your church to do some sort of digital evangelism. Whether that be through social media, livestreams. What if a church had somebody on TikTok Live every single night talking to people in the community about the gospel and was hashtagging all your cities and everything else that’s nearby in your geography, inviting people to church, answering questions about apologetics?

If every single church in the country—we have 350,000 churches in the country right now. If we had 350,000 Christian livestreams every single night on TikTok, it would change the face of the planet. All it takes to win the whole world is if every Christian in the world were to lead two people to Jesus this year, the whole world would be saved. That’s all it takes. A third of the population are Christians.

So that’s our challenge. You’ve got to go out and lead two people to the Lord. So there’s a lot of things in this as I unpack it. But for parents and grandparents and youth pastors, I think more than ever you need to know what your kids are also getting input on from media. There’s so much out there. It’s so easy to get plugged in. There’s a lot of negative stuff very quickly at people’s fingertips with cell phones. I think that we need to really be on top of that and make sure that we are giving this next generation the support that they need.

Real Christian Families: So the book is *Pagan Threat: Confronting America's Godless Uprising*.

Lucas Miles: If you want to find out more, they can head to lucasmiles.org. They can also go to tpusafaith.com. Or if they want to find out more about our tour, they can go to makeheavencrowdedtour.com in order to find out more there as well.

Real Christian Families: Thank you so much for being here.

Lucas Miles: Appreciate having me on. Thanks.