Vetting Pastors

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said,.

But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you. In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.

By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.

Opening Banter and Program Announcements

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth, and I just saw a bicyclist pedal by. That's a good sign on this New England fall day, almost at the end of September. I have an app on my iPhone, and it is, well, it's an iPhone 4S at the moment, and it's Strava, or as we say here in New England, Straver.

And Straver does a nice thing. It calculates all kinds of things, and then it gives you the sum total for the year, and I like to look at how many hours I've been on the bike this year, because then I remember how many hours I've listened to Esauas Johnson preach about Jesus Christ and Him crucified, because I only listen to Esauas on my bicycle, through my phone, and there are some spots that I use to turn it off, and then sections of prayer sections, territorial demon sections.

Just kidding. Today, it is, I'm going to remind everyone today, Tuesday and Wednesday, Thursday probably, Friday as well, that our last No Compromise Day on WV &E is next Monday, September 30th. It's been a good four-year run.

I think we've had, I want to say, 1 ,200 shows. Can you imagine? Mondays, sermons, Tuesdays, Steve and I, Wednesdays, interviews, Thursdays, something positive encouraging, and then Friday, Woodshed Friday.

And so 1 ,200 and some shows, super glad to partner with WV &E and Gospel Ministry. I really think they consider their radio show a ministry, and lots of good guests on, from R .C. Sproul to MacArthur to Alistair Begg, and so it will be sad, but you can go to iTunes to listen to No Compromise Radio.

We'll still be doing the show every day, Monday through Friday. You can go to TuneIn Radio. We are now carried by Worldview Weekend, and so you can get the Worldview Weekend app, actually, and you can get the latest shows there that are uploaded.

You could go to Worldview Weekend Situation Room to listen to some of the shows, and I'm trying to think where else. You can go to the No Compromise Radio website to listen to the shows, and so No Compromise Radio will still be on, it just won't be on WV &E.

But anyway, thanks again to Dave and the rest of the folks, the two Daves, and Randy and everyone else at WV &E. It's been a great ride, a great run, and when all the people start calling in, where's No Compromise Radio?

What happened to that crazy guy at 3 .30? I will accept your calls at WV &E if you'd like to come back begging to put me on. Four years ago, we replaced, I think it was a financial kind of guy, maybe he was a psychologist or financial guy, and I know Reno would tell me that some people would call in.

We want that other guy back. So now it's time, it's time what goes around comes around. When I'm off the air beginning October 1st, and you turn it on at 3 .30, and you get some other financial aid guy, you call in to WV &E, 1 -800-CALL-THE-MANAGEMENT-V &E right away.

Say where's Abendroth? We hope to do some things at No Compromise Radio with our toned down budget, like an app maybe for the iPhone, would that be good? The only way you can get us now on your iPhone is either if you store it on iTunes, or if you, let's see, how else could you do it?

TuneIn Radio carries five or ten shows, Worldview Weekends app, you can get that. So anyway, that's the scoop, thanks again to WV &E. Don't forget October 4th, 5th, and 6th, Pat Abendroth will be at Bethlehem Bible Church if you're in New England, you'll want to come hear Pat talk about issues on October 4th, that's Friday Night Men only, and with the Q &A that Pat and I will do, and then Saturday Open to All, Behold the Lamb, Worthy is the Lamb, Salvation Belongs to the Lamb, three messages by the Abendroths, and then Pat preaches here in person, October 6th, Sunday morning, both services.

So you can register on bbcchurch .org's website, our new website, and I want to make sure I announce that. Well, what else do I have here for announcements? I'm sure there's something else I have. I've got prayer rugs, I've got tweets, this one here I have in front of me, oh, you can go to No Compromise Radio's YouTube site, and you can get there through our friend's link, John Dawson's link, noco90 .com, N-O-C-O-N-I-Z-O dot com, and you'll get there to our website.

So actually, we've been getting enough hits on the YouTube 90, the NoCo 90, that now they're sending me things saying what I like to advertise. So I can make a buck out of the deal. Maybe if I made some money on No Compromise 90s, then I could send that money to WV &E.

So I guess I could do the beg-a-thon right now and ask for all kinds of money to stay on the station for the essential gospel ministry, but we've always had the thought process, like S. Lewis Johnson, like Mueller, that if the Lord wants us someplace, we'll be there.

And so, when we have the money, we'll spend it, and when we don't have the money, well, we'll charge it. We won't spend it. And so, if you want to support No Compromise Radio, you can. We don't have any donate buttons or donate links or pay here or anything like that, but you can figure it out if you want to get the money here.

We'll send you a receipt. How's that? We'll leave the lights on for you. K-A-S-A. Cars for kids. All right. What do we have here? Yeah, I have this little heel thing. It says, this prayer rug is a point of contact, and I think I've already done something about that on No Compromise 90, but this lady on the back, it says she was blessed with almost $47 ,000 after using the prayer rug.

Now, see, why would it be almost that? I think it should be, you know, round numbers, kind of a Robert Chilton deal. Well, this lady here in Maryland said, Dear St. Matthews, my husband listed seven things that he wanted God to do for him.

This is the kind of God for you, then, small g. He sent it off the same day, which was the second day of February, and last Saturday, God blessed us with $10 ,700. Scratchers. Who doesn't say that? He went out and bought us a car and closes a donation from both of us.

See? St. Matthew's prayer rugs. Isn't that interesting? Why do we need that? What do we have here on my desk? Here is a real letter to a church family. The deacons have met with our pastor several times.

This is January 30th, 2003, to the Good Hope Church family. The deacons have met with our pastor several times on issues that have concerned our people. We've got some concerns. One of the main concerns that hasn't been resolved is his sermon topics and method of delivery.

This was an issue that the deacons were conscious of even when, I'll change his name, Jim was considered for the trial sermon. I guess that's a candidate sermon. After several discussions with the deacons, so you can tell this is a congregational rural church, deacon, deacon board, single pastor.

My guess is Southern Baptist-ish. After several discussions with the deacons, our pastor still leans toward biblical exposition as his form of delivery. Now if we mean by exposition the opposite of imposition, I like that.

I like exposition that exposes the congregation to the true intention of the author of Scripture, the Holy Spirit. That's what we want to do. If expositional preaching means a bunch of data, a bunch of exegetical comments and digests, and not seeing the forest through the trees, not seeing the trees through the forest, which one is that?

And anyway, Ted will tell me of course, hi Ted, then some dry thing with the zero application, with the pastor not doing any exhortation, encouragement, imploring, beseeching, heralding. Of course, I don't want dry, boring stuff, but thereafter something else, by the way, this letter's set up.

Vetting a Pastor Before He Is Called

And first of all, I want to say that if you hire a pastor and he goes crazy or something, okay, you've got to deal with it, but if he's told you what he believes before he gets there, and then you don't like it, well, you should have vetted him better.

This is the deacon's responsibility of this particular church, our elder's responsibility, our congregational responsibility, wherever the authority lies. This is just a guy who wants to come and preach, and you hired him, and then you don't like his form of delivery.

And I have to say as well, I have been preaching now for 20 years. I hope I'm better than I was before. I think I'm a better preacher in terms of style, in terms of cadence, in terms of pitch and voice and eye contact and delivery, and then on the objective side, seeing the big picture in the text, the big idea, understanding context, how it fits together with the last section.

I think I'm better at that. I'm just older, I have more sermons under my belt, I feel more comfortable in the pulpit. But when you hire somebody out of seminary, and you say you're going to pay him 20 grand a year, and you want him to be a seminary student, he's got a wife and kids and all that stuff, you're going to have to learn and grow with him.

And he's not going to be Chuck Swindoll. Actually true story, this last Sunday I preached, and the first service, it went okay. I was preaching Ecclesiastes 3, and the sermon was God's sovereign over everything, that's the way Solomon sets it up in poetry, there's a time for everything, remember those 14 couplets there that talk about a time to be born, a time to die, it's a merism that has two poles listed and everything else in between is covered, so God's sovereign over everything from your birth to your death to everything in between.

So you see, that's a boring merism right there. The second service seemed to be a little bit better, I'm more awake, it's hard for me to preach so early in the morning for the first service, trying to get my preaching legs.

Preaching, Criticism, and Spiritual Gifts

So anyway, I got done preaching the first service, and again, I think it was biblical, I think it honored Christ Jesus the Lord, I think it was textually accurate. Of course it could have been better, I'm sure, actually the second service it was better.

But the first comment I got at the door, somebody pointed at me, and they said, Chuck Swindoll does a better job with that passage. Well, I have lots of responses. The response that I said out loud was, I'm sure he does, except Stoneybrier or Stoneyhengebrier or wherever that suburb is in Dallas is a long way away from Worcester, Massachusetts.

So you get me. I know that's a letdown to people, actually Chuck Swindoll probably 40 years ago was a pastor outside of Boston for one year, I think, two years, three years, something like that. I actually talked to Chuck Swindoll once at Mount Hermon about his experience in Boston.

I think he really was heavily influenced by Bob Thieme at the time. He was a young guy, and he said the problem wasn't the people in Boston, the problem was Chuck Swindoll, meaning he was just a young pastor and he was trying to figure out what to do and couldn't really do it well.

So, back to point, I got greeted with, Chuck Swindoll does a better job with that passage. I'll never forget it. That ranks right up there with a guy who told me he brought his PhD friend who's got a PhD in theology and was super excited to have his friend hear me preach because he really liked my preaching.

Now, this man had only been here a couple times, so he invites his friend, and they were out in the lobby, and I greeted them both, and he wanted me to be introduced to his friend who's a theology professor who doesn't really go to church much, except I guess to critique sermons, but anyway, he attends once in a while.

Anyway, what this guy didn't know, the man who brought his friend, he didn't know that I was going to be talking about spiritual gifts from 1 Corinthians chapter 12 and talking about counterfeit gifts and how people who say they have the gift of, for instance, healing today, they don't heal like those in the New Testament healed, whether it's Jesus or his apostolic messengers or those who had the gift of healing to authenticate the message and the messenger.

And so, I would say that these people were charlatans or phonies or hucksters or, you know, let's at least, at the minimum, say that the people who say they have the gift of healing today don't heal people like they did in the New Testament.

So, if you want to have a subgroup of healings that's a different, it's in a minor key or something, well, at least say that. But if New Testament healings were instantaneous, organic, included making people who have leprosy having no longer any skin disorder, to have blind people see, mute people speak, lame people walk, dead people rise, then the leg-lengthening gold-filling, I got a bad lumbar disc, healings don't move me.

So, I was going through 1 Corinthians chapter 12, and I think I was actually quite nice about it. I actually woke up this morning and I thought to myself, this weird, weird first thought of the day. I haven't said anything negative about Roman Catholics in my sermons for months.

That was my first comment. I'm going to say something in a second about Pope Francis and atheists. Not in a second. So, back to topic here, here's a letter of decommendation from the deacons to the church family.

Then they're going to, you know, they sent this out. And looking back at the past year with Jim, it has been a year of many firsts for him. In other words, he doesn't know what he's doing. Again, this was something that we as a church body accepted when we called him to shepherd us directly out of seminary.

Dig. Unfortunately, it has become more apparent over time that there are some fundamental differences between our pastor, not for long, the deacons, and the church body. Well, you can see what's going to come up next.

No wonder pastors stay at churches for an average of three years in the USA, if I have my statistics right. Probabilities and statistics were never my game, but I can read Barna once in a while. So it's not really working out.

The pastor's discouraged. The church is discouraged. And you know what? We need a new pastor. We need somebody else. This, you know, with the same alacrity, people throw away spouses and they throw away pastors.

Now I know pastors do dumb things. I realize I'm frail and finite and fallen and contribute to some of my own troubles. I understand that. But I'm trying to point people to the one who is infinite, who is holy, who is pure, and who can take wrecks like me and the rest of the congregation and use them to glorify Himself and to show forth His excellencies across the world and the universe so that angels might be dumbfounded, so that public leaders might be repentant, so that the world might shut their mouth.

Who could do that but the Lord Jesus? So I understand that pastors, I mean, I look back at it seriously and think about those first few years and the patience of some people as I was trying to work through preaching, work through my own issues.

I'm sure I overdid the wrath and underdid the love because partly, who knows, maybe I just had never thought about the wrath of God before and was caught up in it, caught up in the topic, that is, and thinking about it.

It's like when I first learned that God was jealous, I just could not—first of all, I couldn't believe it. I couldn't wrap my mind around it. Then I read the verses, and then I had to submit to it, and then I had to tell everybody else about it.

I was sitting there reading the Baker Dictionary of Theology and read that section, couldn't believe it. So the letter goes on, while the deacons firmly believe that Van has the call of God on his life—well, I didn't mean to tell you his name, but it's Jim, misspoke there—on his life, we don't feel that he's a good fit for good hope.

Well, that's on you, deacons. In the best interest of good hope and Jim, the deacons have requested that our pastor concur with this letter of resignation effective today. We have given him a generous severance package, and he may stay in the parsonage until the end of February.

That's four weeks. Okay, it's a leap year. You get four weeks and a day. We hope that his time here has benefited him and his family, respectfully, the deacons. If you want my blood to boil, it would be boiling at such a catastrophe, such a farce.

How Churches Should Treat a Pastor Who Leaves

Here's the thing, I have a little principle that you could use as well, and it proves pretty much effective, I'd say, 90 of the time. There are some times that it's not correct. And here it is. If I go to another church to minister to them, or they call me because there's some church trouble or this, that, or the other, and so let's say they have some elders leave or deacons leave, or people leave, and then they leave in a wrong way.

You know, there are some people that can leave a church worse than they can leave a secular job. Their secular job, they give several weeks' notice. They want to follow up on any things that are on their desk to try to help the transition.

They say thank you. They meet with folks, there's a big party, and off they go. And they realize to themselves, you know, I don't want to burn any bridges, and pragmatically we should probably do this.

And so whatever their motives are, they leave well. I mean, some people don't leave their jobs well, but some do. But then people who can leave a job well, and they leave a church poorly. And so they do the wrong thing in leaving, as they leave poorly, to try to justify themselves, make themselves look good for bad decisions.

And then people from the outside or people from the inside look around. And so when I look at people who do the wrong thing, I don't side with them. I say, you're doing the wrong thing, I'm siding with the other until proven otherwise.

And so once in a while I am, even though the people do the wrong thing, the elders do the wrong thing, the deacons do the wrong thing, but really the pastor was a bad guy. And that'll show up in time, right?

God will bring to light those things. So in this particular case, I know you're doing the wrong thing, deacons, add good hope, because of the way you're treating your pastor. First of all, with this letter, second of all, you hired him and you knew what you're going to get, because you probably paid a whopping $23 ,000 a year for this guy out of seminary with his family.

And now you give him four weeks severance. It takes about six months for a pastor to get a job, sometimes 12 months. And so we want to love our friends, we want to love our pastor, we want to love our enemies.

And you get four weeks to get out of the house and out of Dodge, generous severance. That is unbelievable. That's the first thing I ask people when they say, we're going to get rid of our pastor and we're going to give him a severance package.

Well, tell me how long your severance package is. Oh, three weeks, six weeks. And I say, well, I'm already on the other side. I'm already siding with the pastor in this argument over whatever it is, because the way you're treating him is not proper.

I'd go so far to say that if the pastor at this place or another place falls out morally, you're still obligated to love his wife and his kids, aren't you? You don't give him a big severance package because of the default of falling out.

You give him a severance package because what about the wife? What about the kids? There are many churches in New England that we've had the wonderful opportunity and privilege to help with. And we do pulpit supply.

And if you're listening and you need somebody to preach for you on a Sunday, email us at info at nocompromisedradio .com. We'll send one of the men for a expositional sermon extolling Christ Jesus. And we'll help some of these churches.

And there's one particular church I know in New Hampshire, and they unceremoniously fired their pastor similar to this and told him to be out of the office, whatever it was, in a few days and out of the parsonage in not that much time.

And here's this minuscule severance package. And so we said, you know what? Until you love your pastor and do the right thing, we're not sending pulpit supply. You need to repent. I don't know what has gotten into people just so mean.

If I was an unbeliever and see how some of these folks treated their own, I would be shocked. I would be appalled. And so this lends itself to a lot of lessons. One lesson is you better really vet your pastor.

And if you're a smaller church and you don't have much money, and he's going to have to put up with you, and you're going to have to put up with him, and you're going to have to grow together. And you need to know exactly what he believes before he comes and vice versa.

I didn't vet Bethlehem Bible Church enough, and they didn't vet me enough. Even though I gave them a 12-page paper on I'm presuppositional in my apologetics, I'm a five-point Calvinist, I believe this, I believe that, it was just too fast of a process.

And so the Lord has overridden my ignorance and the church's ignorance and stuff like that. But anyway, there's a way to do things that's right and honorable and above board and glorifying the Lord. And this is one of those cases where I think maybe the church needs to change their name to Bad Severance Church Family.

Isn't the pastor part of the family? This lends itself to if there's somebody within the church gifted and who knows the folks and they know him, send them off to seminary or train them there, and then let him be the pastor, and then they'll at least know what you get.

Closing Remarks and Station Farewell

Anyway, my name's Mike Ebenroth, No Compromise Radio. You can write us at info at nocompromiseradio .com. Don't forget about the conference. Don't forget we've just got a few more days on WV &E. Thanks again to the staff and management of WV &E.

I really appreciate the opportunity to be on here and be curious to see who's on next. I hope they get lots of letters and calls. Mike Ebenroth, nocompromiseradio .com. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Ebenroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life-transforming power of God's Word through verse-by-verse exposition of the sacred text. Please come and join us.

Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400. The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WV &E, its staff or management.