Idiotic Pastoral Search Committee Questions

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Mike Abendroth, and it is good to be back in the studio. I have some sniffles.

I don't know what the sniffle thing is, but maybe it makes my voice more Vader -ish. Who knows?

Anyway, you can write me, Mike, at NoCompromiseRadio .com. I read all those.

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YouTube channel, No Compromise Radio. We are on the air in Wyoming and Alaska, thanks to my friends.

And I just get on the show and try to pontificate a little bit. I was at the Shepherds Conference last week and talked to many friends, met lots of people.

Several came up to me I'd never met, and they said, thanks for No Compromise Radio ministry. We're encouraged by it.

That's one of the things we want to do. We want to encourage a little known fact in the book of Hebrews.

We sometimes forget the ending because the beginning and the middle is so great.

Here's the ending of the book of Ephesians. So that you may know how

I am, Paul says, and what I'm doing, Tychicus, lucky or chance, that's his name, the beloved brother and faithful minister in the

Lord will tell you everything. I've sent him to you for this very purpose, that you may know how we are, that's the first part of the sentence.

I'm just going to give you an update. I know you want to know how we are in ministry together, that they may know how we are, and that he may encourage your hearts.

Here's the message, circular letter, and to the church at Ephesus, and how do we encourage them?

So anyway, that's what we want to do because we talk about the Lord Jesus here. In the old days it was no compromise because we don't want to compromise, and we still don't, but we want to talk about the one who doesn't compromise more than how we don't compromise.

Get that? See the whole duplex gratia? Christ for us, Christ in us. We have to say that every single show. It's the duplex gratia show.

Welcome to duplex gratia radio. If I was going to start a new podcast, that probably

DP would be it, a DG. That'd be desiring God, though. That'd be different, wouldn't it?

Saw lots of friends. I didn't go to one session. My sessions were the people behind the scenes.

I said, Lord, I would like to encourage people, and if I need any encouragement, could you please use these men to encourage me?

So both happened. I had a good meeting with Peter Sammons, and Richard Barcelos, and Steve Meister, and Steve Cooley, and Luke Evendroth, and Jason, I forgot his last name.

That was good. I saw people like Mike Riccardi, and I told him I was glad he was hired at the seminary, and he told me he now, per my suggestion, is using

Fesco's book on justification. I was happy about that. What else was I happy about?

All kinds of things. Anyway, Mike Evendroth, No Compromise Radio Ministry. Lots of people said, we've been praying for you.

We're glad you're alive. I had this shirt on. I tried to go wild with the shirts, and I had one shirt on that was very blue, long -sleeved, and it had white splotches like clouds.

When people said, how are you? I said, I'm on cloud nine. To be alive, I'm on cloud nine. My German friend was there, a

Christian, and I said, is there an equivalent? There has to be an equivalent to cloud nine.

I'm on cloud nine in German, and it's I'm on cloud seven. He said, I said, well, that's an American. Probably the

Brits are cloud eight. We're cloud nine. Deutsche, cloud seven. I inspired.

In front of me today, I have Tom Rainer's, not supporting

Tom Rainer, but I do think this makes good church discussion on No Compromise Radio, churchanswers .com,

and he has 25 shocking questions or comments in no particular order that church search committees ask the pastor to be.

This is a church. They're trying to find, these are churches trying to find a pastor, and you want to ask the pastor some questions, and so what would you ask a pastor if you were on a search committee?

Hopefully, it'd be elders who were on the search committee, unless the elders have delegated find these kind of resumes from these students, these graduates, these people with X amount of ministry, then give us the rest, and I hope the elders don't say, well, you guys choose and we just ratify.

I hope it's the other way around. Nonetheless, search committee stuff.

Would you ask things like, do you believe in covenant theology or dispensationalism? What is your view of types in the

Old Testament, types, anti -types? Who's the main author of the Bible when you interpret?

Do you use the human author more? You think about the human author more or divine author? Do you believe in theological covenants?

Do you believe in the duplex gratia? What is the duplex gratia? What is sanctification?

Is it monergistic, synergistic? How do you encourage people to obey? Do you believe in the literal resurrection?

Is Jesus Christ truly God and truly man? What is the gospel?

What's your view of end times? Are you a complementarian, egalitarian, or something else?

The list could go on and on and on. Those would be good questions, don't you think? Limited atonement? Whatever it might be.

Then you could ask, do you look at pornography? Do you love your wife?

How does that work? How's your relationship with your children? How's your relationship with your wife? Could we call the church you're currently working for and ask them about your morality and your finances?

Would you mind if I checked your credit score? I don't know. You could ask anything. I haven't read

Rayner's deal. I'm not looking at it because I wanted to give you one of the things that we would do.

Let's talk about qualifications. Are you qualified by the grace of God? The list goes on and on.

Here, Rayner does a lot of research. He's a Southern Baptist. It says he's had a conversation at Church Answers.

We've taken 2 ,000 church leaders interacting 24 hours a day. That's how it all started, talking.

Then he began to collate comments or questions that people give to a potential pastor.

I'm not going to do all of them, but they're going to be fun. Last pastor preached for 18 minutes. Can you keep it under 20 minutes?

Now I do think most preachers in my realm, my orbit, they preach too long.

They're younger. They aren't very articulate. They haven't honed their skills. How could they?

They've only been preaching five years, and therefore, they go a little too long. It's a little too clunky.

Not enough information on the cutting room floor. It is good to know if things are genitives or objective genitives or subjective genitives.

What kind of heiress does this? What does that make the text mean? That's all fine and dandy, but some things you just don't really need to say.

Can you keep it under 20 minutes, though? Only time I do that is if I'm in a super liberal church.

I'm overseas, and it's an unbelieving church, essentially a mainline church. They say, can the sermon be 20 minutes?

I say, if I can keep their attention, can I go a little longer? They always say yes, and I always think

I can't. Because I don't want to overstep my bounds. I am under their authority, therefore.

Number two, the salary is low, but we can pay you a commission for each new tithing family that joins the church. That's not a question, but that actually happened in Florida, if I remember rightly.

The pastor who went there, I think was disqualified in gospel ministry, but went anyway because some churches hire people like that.

It's not much different than the NFL. Somebody can be a total sleazebag, but they need the person.

Anyway, the pastor said, if you give me a percentage of the giving, no matter how high the giving gets, I'll come.

Now he's making millions. What is your political party affiliation? I don't even mind that question because sometimes

I just want to see how people answer. It's like when the policeman pulls you over, police person, police lady, and they begin to ask you a question.

Where are you going? I just want to see how you're going to act. If you're slurring words, I just want to see how they're going to, what are they going to say?

If they say, I'm a Republican, but I don't agree with all the things, I like President Trump, but he's not qualified to be an elder.

I don't know. Wouldn't that be interesting to you to find out? I do think it is. It's not impossible because people do it, and we have the

Gospel Coalition pushing it, the Russell Moore at Southern Baptist pushing it, all kinds of pushing people to say, vote

Democrat for whatever reason, right? It's a life issue, not just in the womb, but outside of the womb, and they have all their rationale to try to get people to vote for the party of death, the

Democrats. I think that'd probably be important to know. Would you want your pastor being the kind of guy who would vote for Joe Biden?

What is the least amount we can pay you to come? Then the pastor to me should have said, what's the most you can pay me to come?

I have been very blessed at this church. The church takes care of me, my health,

I'm very thankful for that, and when I got to the church, I think basically they said, this is how much we can pay you, and I said,

I'll trust you that I can live on that, and I think it was a mistake on my part. They probably wouldn't have taken me if I would have tried to get more because they didn't have more at the time.

I think giving at the time was, I don't know, 1200 a week, 1500 a week, something like that. We do monthly cleaning inspections of the parsonage.

You will need to make sure your wife keeps it clean. Now, you know what?

The new tithing family is idiotic, making money for that. Least amount we can pay you just sounds dumb, but maybe it's innocent.

This one here, it's over the top. This is what I'd say, sorry, this is not the way we're working it unless I can do a monthly cleaning inspection in your house or something.

That is bad. Would you mind if we have a Christmas tree in the pulpit? What? Well, I guess today is comedy show day today,

Christmas tree. I'm not going to call them Jeremiah trees or something like that. I don't know why it would be in the pulpit.

Maybe it's behind the pulpit, right? Can we have a flag in the sanctuary? You know, that's a discussion that would be good to have.

Your wife can't take a job outside the home because she'll be too busy at the church. Now see, that's a big one.

I think that pastor's wives, of course, I'm biased, but I've seen behind the scenes in my life and then in other people's lives that there's a heavy toll to be a pastor's wife.

There's a heavy toll in marriages to be in ministry. You have your own problems and then you've got everybody else's problems and it's just difficult.

And I have a wonderful wife, Kim, and I said I'd bring her on the show someday. I still haven't kept that promise, but maybe one of these days.

And I've been telling her, you know, the way into young people's lives, young ladies' lives is podcasts.

So maybe she'll do one someday. Not daily though. Maybe ramblings with Kim, duplex scratchy with Kim Aventroth.

But she can't take a job. Now, okay, legitimately, if you say, work her at home, the

Bible teaches that, and we don't want you to have to put your kids in daycare, and so we're going to take care of her and you by paying you a little bit extra so she could be at home.

We think that's the best model for our pastor. This is a big issue in certain fundamentalistic churches, and I think it's important for us, for me in my house.

My wife did work. She woke up at work and I went to work. That's the best way

I could say it because it's true. And she worked faithfully with those children, raising them, and now the children are gone and she picked up a part -time job.

Maybe there's opportunities for a woman to work a night shift as a nurse or something like that. There's all kinds of ways that we could do this.

But to say she'll be too busy at church, I said to the elders, and I would even say it now, my wife will use her gifts at the church.

That's what she'll do. She doesn't work for the church. When my wife goes out of town for the summer for an extended time period,

I know people in the past have said, some people, not many, but it's not good that your wife's gone for so long, and I think she doesn't work for the church.

Now short of the secretary and Steve and I, she probably works harder than anybody else.

Maybe there are other people, I don't know because I don't see it, but she'll serve, but she's not going to be too busy to do something else, because that's just not the way it's going to work.

Number eight. Finally we get something that I think would be a good question. Are you a Calvinist? What does it mean to be a

Calvinist? It just means that you're more Calvinistic than I am, then now you're a hyper -Calvinist? What is hyper -Calvinism?

Could the man articulate? Hyper -Calvinism is a real thing. It's not five points of Calvinism.

It means things like, historically, there's no love of God for the non -elect. It means that you don't pray.

It means that you don't evangelize. There are certain things to talk about in a historical context.

Will you preach out of the King James Version? Okay, that's a legitimate thing. What's your translation preference, and why?

Right? If it's, I have this preference, I love the elegance of King James language, and it is lofty, and it is

God -centered, and whatever reasons why you like it, it stood the test of time. There are more manuscripts with its,

I can't really think now, but it's based on more manuscripts than,

I'm thinking about the word Byzantine now, versus the Alexandrian text types. Okay, fair question. This next one,

I don't even really want to say on the air, but I will because it's on this thing. What do you think about coloreds in the church?

Then Rayner said, sadly, several racist questions were asked, including one church that used extremely inappropriate racial language.

I mean, I don't even want to give this thing the time of day. If somebody asked me that question, I would flip it around probably and be aggressive to challenge them.

If they want to know something that popular people want to know, gospel coalition people, you know, will

I be driving the ministry for multi, and one of the purposes that I would have would be to have it to be multi -ethnic.

I would say to myself, well, since I'm in Madagascar, probably most of the people there will look like Madagascarians.

I'm in West Boylston, Mass., and 97 % of the people here are white by the census.

If somebody comes here and they don't look like us, will they feel comfortable? Will they be welcome? I think at our church, it's 60 to 70 % white, so we're 10 times more diverse than the city.

How does that happen? Well, the answer is you preach the Jew, the risen Savior, the Lord Jesus, God -man, and whoever the

Lord brings, he does. It's just the stupidest thing you'd ever get asked. What do

I think? I think we're all Gentiles, and if you're especially what we call black or white, you're probably a

Gentile. So what is it different, you know, if you're in Africa and your ancestors are worshiping their ancestors, or if you're in England like me or Germany with my ancestors and we're worshiping trees or something, what's the difference?

I mean, it's just ridiculous. Will you play at least two hymns a week? The old hymns.

Now some hymns aren't any good, even old hymns, but there's something to be said for hymns. I go to churches that sing no hymns, and I think,

I miss those hymns. Here at our church, we sing two hymns to start, two praise songs in the middle, and one hymn to end.

We'll be okay if we parked another single wide by the existing one as a parsonage for your whole family. Oh, okay,

I'll take this one, number 13. Tom Rayner, what do you ask a pastor, a potential pastor as a search committee?

I mean, who has this list? Don't you have a list that you're going to ask people? Do you own a weapon?

Yeah, I carry my two sidearms with me, my forearms and my fist.

You own a weapon? Okay, I guess if you want to know, it's fine by me, ask a question. We want you to preach for a month and see how it works out.

It said the candidate lived out of state. Now, in the old days, we would be asked to send a sermon on cassette so the committee could listen, and even then,

I would tell people, search committees need to ask for 10 sermons. So, by the way, if you're on a search committee and you want to pull up sermons, of course, you can go to websites now unless it's a student that's never really preached much, but even then, they should have preached some, and pull up the last 10 sermons.

If you pull up my last 10 sermons, I think you will find an averaging.

There'll be one or two that kind of bombed, biblical, but bombed my delivery.

Find a couple that maybe were extraordinarily wonderful homiletically, and that's to the grace and praise of God, because of the grace and praise to the

Lord, and then you'll see the rest. The eight are kind of like, hmm, and that hmm, you have to ask yourself the question, if you're on the search committee, could

I listen to those average ones every day? Because for me, I'm coming up on 25 years here, that's a lot of sermons.

What's your position on interracial marriage? It's another really idiotic, stupid question.

What's my position? I have a position paper on that. Sorry, how about gay marriage?

How about homosexual marriage? How about something like that? Okay. What about revoice, and what about side

A, side B, you know, Christians, but interracial marriage? Are you kidding me? I'm all for two image -bearers of the opposite sex to be married in holy wedlock.

Whether they're two unbelievers, it's still a holy ordination covenant, or ordained covenant, or if it's two believers.

Unbeliever and a believer? No, but anything else, okay. If you came here, we would want to fire the youth minister.

Would you be willing to do that? Well, maybe he denies the resurrection or something.

Do you let singers hold the microphones themselves? Yeah, I just don't let them talk before the songs or after.

Have you ever held a rattlesnake? Ooh, it's a Mark 16 church. No, I haven't.

Not a live one. That's a scary thought. Boy, we could talk about that one a long time, but it would be good.

I would like it if someone said to me, what's your view of Mark 16, 10 and following?

10 to 20, 10 to 21, 10 to 22, depending on whatever the ending is at the end of Mark. Why do you think

Mark 16, 8 is the end of the gospel of Jesus according to Mark? That'd be a good question.

Or do you think that? Why don't you think that? What's about baptismal regeneration there, and snakes, and drinking poison?

What about that? Do you think that's for today? And that'd be a very good question. The woman caught committing adultery in John 8, one and following, well,

I think it's 753 and following to 810 -ish. What do you think of that? Is it in the best manuscripts?

Would you preach it? That's a good question. Do you think those are in the original? No and no.

John 8, John and Mark 16, the ending there. Okay, well, then would you do whole

Sunday sermons on them? I'd like to ask that question and like to have an answer to that. That would be pretty good.

Those are the kind of questions I would like. Would you be willing to shave your facial hair?

Well, what if I took a Nash -Rite vow? As we say here, my Indian friends, wow, that's a wow.

Maybe they'll ask me, do you have any Indians at the church? I'll say red or from India. How dumb can we be?

You have to mow the parsonage lawns at the same time they mow the church yard. Well, how about when they mow the church yard, they just mow my yard?

Actually, true story, I moved to Massachusetts and I had a pretty big yard when

I first moved into this rental house by a lake and we hadn't lived there for a long time and somebody said I had an extra riding lawn mower, a rider, and they said, his name is

Dan, I'd like to give it to you, Mike, because then you don't have to mow walking and you can spend more time in your sermon.

Wonderful. That was such a blessing. The pastor's office hours are nine to five, Monday to Friday. What day do you take off?

That's my question. When discovering the pastoral candidate had a physical disability, the person on the search committee said, oh, we don't want a pastor that's disabled.

You have to stand while you are preaching. I mean, doesn't that make you want to throw up?

It makes me want to throw up. It moans me to say words like that's asinine and whoever's on the search committee is disqualified.

Oh, there have been times I haven't stood up in the pulpit. I prefer to stand up, but somebody's in a wheelchair and you're going to go, no, you have to stand.

What are people thinking? I think about Ephesians and kind and gentle and forgiving.

This has nothing to do with forgiving, but kind and gentle, certainly. I get convicted every time

I'm going through those verses and thinking, am I kind and am I gentle? I hope to be that in person, but even online, convicted, kind and gentle.

What are your views on mixed bathing? This is like, I should have done this show with Steve.

We could have had a real laugh. Mixed bathing. I mean, my first gut reaction is, are they married?

Mixed. Oh, boxers or briefs, idiotic.

This last one too, I'm sorry I have to read it, but I'm just going to read it to show you how dumb it is.

How's your sex life? If you want to ask, how's your marriage?

Okay. If you want to ask, do you look at pornography? If you want to ask, how would you counsel someone that has a bad sex life?

How would you counsel a ogre husband who's demanding or a wife who's saying no to manipulate her husband?

Are those legitimate questions? Well, those are certainly legitimate questions, but a pastoral search committee is going to ask a question like that.

I would say, excuse me, sir or ma 'am, that is an inappropriate question. And what if I were to ask you about your sex life?

There's a time and place for everything, and this is not the time nor the place for that. And I'm sure I wouldn't get the job, but I mean, come on.

Anyway, my name is Mike Avendroth. This is No Compromise. I am no compromise. You are listening to No Compromise Radio.

And you know what? If you keep that attitude up with some of these questions, I might have to change the show to duplex gratia radio,

DG radio. How would that work for you? You can write me, Mike at NoCompromiseRadio .com.

No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Avendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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