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Brian Fairchild Interview
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. Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth, and it is probably today outside here in the studios at Burbank probably about 50 degrees and sunny.
I�m thankful for that because it was snowing yesterday. Massachusetts snow in mid-April, I thought that was crazy. So I�m old now because that�s all I talk about is the weather. My grandparents used to have that little weather cube, and you know, they just have it on all the time.
What could they worry about next? So I guess I am them. Well, we love to have people on our show who are in gospel ministry, who faithfully, weakly proclaim the truth. Wednesdays is interview day. So pastors, theologians, sometimes even like today, a pastor-theologian, a doctor-pastor-theologian, Brian Fairchild, welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry.
Thanks for having me, Mike. It�s a delight to be here. I almost said, �Welcome to the Master�s Seminary. That almost worked. So Brian, I want to hear a little bit of your background. One of the things that the No Compromise Radio family loves is when we hear about men who are in essence behind the scenes, you know, they�re not famous, they�re not, you know, well-known.
They�re maybe at a small town, at a small church. But the neat part about it is for us as a radio family, we realize God has planted faithfully faithful undershepherds who proclaim the faithful one, Jesus.
In other words, all around the country, there are people preaching the Bible verse by verse. We just don�t know about them, and so today I want them to be introduced to you. So tell us a little bit about Colonial Bible Church.
Thanks, Mike, yeah.
I am in Midland, Texas, and I am actually a rare bird in that I minister in the same community in which I grew up, and so that�s a special privilege. I was born and raised here in Midland. I spent a number of years away in formal education and then came back and planted Colonial Bible Church in 2002.
In fact, the first Sunday in April, we celebrated our 16th year. That was the first Sunday that we formally met together, and we will celebrate the formal charter of the church later this year in September.
So God�s been very faithful. I always joke and say that, but I�m not really joking, that planting a church was never on my radar screen and on my bucket list for life, but the Lord in His gracious sovereignty led us back here and providentially has built this church.
Now, Brian, as I think about you, because we�re friends and I know how young you look even now, how old were you when you planted the church in 2002? Now, wasn�t there anybody in your life, a Mike Ebenroth, who would tell you, �Don�t do that
You know, I actually got the opposite advice from everyone that I talked to. We had come back to our area with a hope that there had been a lot of changes, and it became clear that we were not going to be able to stay for doctrinal reasons, and so we left.
The men in my life that I knew at that time, to get their advice, they all said, �It sounds like there needs to be a Bible-preaching church. It started there, and my answer honestly was, �Who do you know who would come
And their response was, �Well, why did you go to seminary. So, everyone seemed pretty convinced that we were the ones to begin the work here, and so, by God�s grace, we did and certainly have not been perfect and stubbed our toe along the way, but it just adds to the reality that Jesus is the one that builds His church.
Amen.
Now, tell our listeners a little bit about Sunday preaching and sequential, verse-by-verse teaching. I mean, here's where I'm going, Brian. You plan a church, you're young, you don't know what you don't know, but you start teaching the Bible week by week.
Tell our listeners kind of what has happened in.
Light of all that. You know, Mike, when I started, we started with just a handful of folks here, and when I began going through sequentially preaching expositionally from the Scripture, that was completely new to, I would say, almost at that time.
We had, the one exception would be an elderly couple. He was a retired Orthodox Presbyterian preacher, and they came in the early days of the church, and he would be the only one who would have been familiar with that.
Meeting people week by week, just working your way through it. Probably a common experience everywhere. People are practical, preaching that they're not used to that type of a diet, and so, to be honest, it was a struggle.
The Lord has graciously caused people to come, you know, not everyone has stayed, but those who have stayed have acquired an appetite for that type of preaching, and I think if we were to change that now, they would probably all up and leave or.
Throw me out, one of the two. See, now that is excellence, because when the congregation then realizes, hey, the pastor's doing something odd, let's get rid of him, that's when you know the church understands philosophy of ministry.
Brian, tell us a little bit about early on when you preached, how do you help people understand that the text is relevant, not that you make it relevant? In other words, we're showing its relevancy, or do you have to, you know, have all the PowerPoints and the gladiator videos that you play?
Yeah, I'm.
One who uses zero technology when I preach. I have done that a little bit, you know, more informally in Sunday school or perhaps a midweek Bible study, if it's something that would be helpful to see a map or something of that nature, but in preaching, I don't like aids, they just seem to interrupt my flow of thought.
But as far as showing the relevance, you know, Mike, I think a lot of that goes back to the work of exegesis and exposition. When we really dig into a text, human nature is human nature. Whether it was in Paul's day or Isaiah's day or our day, it really hasn't changed, and so I think nature really builds a bridge into today, and you don't have to go out of your way to try to make it relevant.
Absolutely. We're talking to Brian Fairchild today, pastor-teacher at Colonial Bible Church, and that's colonialbiblechurch .org. If you want to go there, you can watch the live stream or pick up some of the sermons.
Brian, I have a couple favorite students, and you're one of those favorite students. We met because you're a doctoral student at the Master's Seminary, getting a doctoral dissertation, I mean, a doctoral degree, and you had to send me one of your sermons, and then I had to critique it.
But the thing is, I could easily send you one of mine, and you could have critiqued mine. How does that work?
I'm not sure that's true, but you were certainly a help to me, and so I really enjoyed that process, really appreciated your input, and it was a highlight for my time at the Master's Seminary, to be sure.
Well, I've got a copy of your.
Dissertation. Actually, Austin Duncan gave me a copy, a full copy of your dissertation, because he said this is how dissertations should be done at the Master's Seminary. And you've got a chapter, chapter 2, Luther's use of the Lament Psalms in the Pastoral Reformation of the 16th century, dash, because it is a doctoral dissertation after all, a historical precedent for their use today.
Tell us, first, Brian, what was your dissertation on? And then secondly, I want to hear a little bit about Lament Psalms, and then if you.
Think about it, how Luther used them. Okay, certainly. Yes, the title of my dissertation was Weeping and Worship, a Survey of Psalms of Lament as a Guide for Worship in Times of Difficulty for the Church Today.
And that project, Mike, was birthed out of a deep sense of need in my own life and in my wife's life. We have three children now, but at the time that I applied for the doctoral program at the Master's Seminary, we had two sons who we cherish and adore, and our heart had always been to have more children.
And we had prayed for years that God would give us more children, and consulted with numerous doctors as to why that wasn't happening. Long story short, I was accepted into the program on April the 5th.
Exactly one week later, I was in my office here at the house working, and I hear my wife making all kinds of commotion of excitement, and I run in there, and she tells me that surprisingly, unbeknownst to us, only to find out a couple of months later that we lost that child right as I was beginning my studies at the Master's.
Miscarriage was not something we had been through before. I know a lot of people had, and so that was a difficult time just to go back to church and begin to worship, and so I began to think, you know, how do we worship in times when our heart is broken, when you just don't feel like it, when you have so many questions that feel as if they're unanswered?
A driving force to me to say, okay, what are we in the church doing to give even in times of difficulty? And it became, you know, very clear to me that we need more teaching and more instruction on the.
Psalms of Lament. Brian, as I think of this topic, and sorrow and sadness and trials and temptation and lament, it just strikes me. You know, we have worship services on Sunday, and there's lots to be joyful about, and sometimes happy and sometimes exuberance and sometimes praise the Lord, hallelujah, type of exaltation, but behind closed doors we all know how people suffer, and of course as pastors we see it maybe more than other people do.
And then to have a worship service where everything's only happy and peppy and health and wealth and blessings, how does Lament Psalms, or even Lamentations for that matter, how does that factor in when we even think about corporate worship on a Sunday.
Morning? I think the answer to that, for me at least in my study, came when you look at the Psalter, which is heaven's hymn book, according to our friends who are steeped in the tradition of psalmody.
But I think the answer comes when you realize that, and it depends on who you ask, but I would say the average is that everyone is in agreement that half of the Psalms, a hundred and fifty Psalms, half of those are written in lament.
And the Psalter is a guide for worship, it is the worship book, it is the inspired worship book. So I think that we, especially in the West, and this is something in my experience teaching in Eastern Europe, in former, they do have more lament.
I think if you get outside of the affluence of the West, you find that the church around the world has more expression of lament in their worship than we do. And so I think it's imperative that we go back and look at the script, half of its inspired hymn book in the Psalter as lament, if the church around the world who is probably living a more realistic view of life than we have in the Western Church, if they're expressing that, then we need to get back to that as well.
Brian, I was thinking.
About songs that we would sing, besides the Psalms, you know, how many churches don't want to sing, Oh Sacred Head Now Wounded, because, you know, it's kind of like this middle-aged, you know, middle ages, you know, it's kind of a downer, and you know, we don't want too many black keys played on the piano and minor keys.
What do you think of this as a strategy? I'm just thinking out loud. As you're preaching through the Bible verse by verse, having the songs echo what the text is, so if you're preaching through John 14 and Jesus is giving his disciples great comfort, then the worship service is built around that theme.
Or if it's going to be a lament, you're preaching through Lamentations and you're in Jeremiah and there's a destruction and trials, then the worship service is set to that tone or tenor. Would that be a good way to go about it?
I think it would. I think that's at least a good place to start, and I think there's more lament, even in the Epistles of the New Testament, than perhaps we've realized. As you deal with issues of standing our condition in light of the holiness of God, there is always a reason for lament, but I think shaping it around, we tried to do, as a series based on my dissertation, that's what we tried to do.
We tried to build each service. Here's the tragedy, not coming from a tradition myself in which the psalms were used, or our people being all that familiar with them. It's really hard to find that many songs to deal with that.
We really, in our hymnals, have a lack of music that reflects lament.
Well, that is so important, Brian. As I think of the Lord Jesus Christ, of course, we're not docetist. He was a real human, and is a real human now. I mean, of course, He's more than human. He's the eternal Son of God who adds humanity, but you know, there's a lament in the life of.
Jesus, wasn't there? Absolutely, and if I were able to expand that project, I think that's where you have to go next. In fact, one of the faculty at the Master Seminary that I interviewed as being a potential advisor wanted the project to expand beyond what I could do, and in the space I had allotted to draw in the ministry of Jesus from the Gospels in lament, and that would be an excellent follow-up.
But you're right, Jesus Himself gave us a model of lament.
So what do you think, Brian, about Luther, and was it a different culture, was it a different time, was it just because it was pre-medicine antibiotics, was it the culture of spiritual warfare that Luther talked about a lot?
What's the difference between Luther's era and our era when we look at lament? To be honest,.
Mike, I don't think there's any difference. I think the names have changed, perhaps the labels we give to things have changed, but the reality is that we are still facing the same problems that Luther faced.
And I think in a great example, perhaps the overarching example that I use in that chapter, is that Luther was combating a theology of glory within the Roman Catholic Church that conveyed to people at a time when, as you say, there was no antibiotics, death was very, very common, disease, poverty, illiteracy, all of those things, and yet the Roman Catholic Church continued to espouse this idea of glory, that that was God's ideal for at least the church.
The people could never quite attain to it, and yet they continued to try and continue to be beaten down by that type of theology, because nothing changed for them. They came, they did their penance, they gave their money, they bought their indulgences, and their life remained miserable with nothing new to God at all, not even in the gospel, not even in salvation, and so lament was just heavy in the air.
Well today, we have the same effect with the prosperity gospel. It's a theology of glory that tells people that God would have you to have all of this glitter and gold and health and wealth, and it's not true.
And people wonder why they come and they buy into the system only years later to realize they've been duped. It's the same thing Luther dealt with, and as he saw his people, because Luther was a pastor, he was not just a theologian, he was a pastor who loved his people, and so as he saw that, he developed what many have called his theology of the cross, and a theology of suffering as a way that Christians live their life the majority of the time.
And so he was able to go back, and the first sermon series he preached after his conversion was through the Psalms, and he really majored on those lament psalms. Bring the gospel to his people, but B, give them a paradigm for their suffering and an outlet for.
Worship. Talking to Brian Fairchild today, pastor at Colonial Bible Church. Brian, as I was just sitting listening to you, I thought, my favorite students are the ones that I learn from, and I think, you know what, the Lord has certainly gifted you.
I was listening to your preaching, you're talking, and I thought, I could listen to him all day. So if you want to hear, listeners, great Bible preaching, colonialbiblechurch .org, verse-by-verse teaching, can they get on the website, Brian, and find your series that you did for the seminary on lament psalms?
Yes,.
They certainly can. That would be archived on our website, and those were preached, if they want to search by the date, those were preached in the fall of 2017, from the end of August through about mid-November, if I remember correctly.
So if they want to go and set the search parameters that way, or just scroll through, they can find those sermons through the lament psalms there.
Well, you know what, I thought to myself as you were talking, Brian, Facebook just shows the best of everybody's side, you know, and it's got the wonderful pictures and smiling. I think if you and I started with some social media gurus a lament book, I don't think it'd sell very much.
Not much, no it wouldn't. But I will.
Tell you, it would not sell. But to those who are lamenting, nothing would mean more to them than to be able to have something like that. I tell you, I rejoiced. I had no idea how our people would respond to that series, and my nothing has had the impact.
And this is just by God's grace, and it's the Spirit working through the Word, but our people absolutely responded in ways that were convicting to me, that were instructive to me. I learned more about my people preaching that series than I have learned in 16 years.
And so, you know, lament is a weird thing. People look at me strange, like, you're going to work on this for three years, isn't that going to get depressing? But the reality became that this was absolutely so needed that it became a real joy to our Church, even as we dealt with difficult situations in our lives.
Brian, I think to.
Myself, when the psalmist is exuberant, I've had just great times of just praising God, and he has been so good to me, and I identify with the psalmist. And so I don't want to say I don't, but at least anecdotally, personally, as I've gone through trials in ministry the last 25 years, if I read something like Psalm 35, malicious witnesses rise up, they ask me of things that I do not know, they repay me evil for good, my soul is bereft.
But I, when they were sick, I wore sackcloth, I afflicted myself with fasting, I prayed with head bowed on my chest, I went about as though I grieved for my friend or my brother, as one who laments his mother, I bowed down in mourning.
At my stumbling, they rejoiced and gathered, they gathered together against me, wretches whom I did not know tore at me without ceasing, like profane mockers at a feast, they gnash at me with their teeth.
How long, O Lord, will you look on?". And the text goes on. Those kind of identifications, when you're going through something like that, and I don't know if Psalm 35 is technically a lament psalm or not, but that kind of emotion and pathos, I find myself identifying more with that than I do even when there's some kind of praise.
Does that make sense, or is it just me.
Being weird? No, I think that's absolutely the experience of everyone who finds himself in a position that you described and then finds those in the Psalms, it just becomes a real balm to the soul, and becomes a help, is remembered long after perhaps the exuberant praise is forgotten.
Amen. Well,.
We've been talking to Brian Fairchild today, colonialbiblechurch .org, you definitely want to go there to the website and listen to Brian preach, and you will hear a fidelity in the pulpit to God's Word and a real passion as he preaches.
Brian, I, Lord willing, will be there at your doctoral graduation this May, Panorama City Master's Seminary, and it is going to be a real joy for me to call you. I'm only gonna do it one time, but I will call you the first time, Dr. Fairchild.
After that, it's only a d-min, don't get a big head. That's right, absolutely. It's a service degree. And do you think you'll, we're running out of time, but do you think you'll do anything with your dissertation to try to make it a little more non-dissertation-like, so you could publish it or get it into the hands of.
People, laypeople? That is a goal that I'm even working on now, to find a publisher who would be interested in partnering to put that in the hands of people, really in two formats. One would be for people in understanding the thrust of the project, to help people transform their lament into worship.
The second would be for pastorage them and to give them a guide for how to do that in their own local churches. And so I would like to be of service to the.
Broader Church by pursuing... Excellent. Well, it's my show so I can go over. Who's Pat Fairchild? Pat Fairchild is my father. Amen. So he's a deacon there at the.
Church. How is it to serve with your father? It is an absolute joy. I love my dad. He is one of the most godly men that I've ever known. He is not only my dad, but at this stage in life, my best friend as well, and so the Lord has just blessed me with godly parents, and I'm so thankful to have both of them.
In the Church. Amen. Is Colonial Bible Church in the city where, was it George W. Bush was born there in that city? Is that true? That's right. Well, he wasn't.
Born here, but they moved here when he was quite young, and so he lived here in his early elementary days, and then came back later as an adult, and was in the oil and gas. We're in the heart of the oil and gas.
We're 48 states here in Midland, and so he was back in the oil business here, married a local girl, Laura, and they were here for a number of years. So yes, we have some connection. Did they.
Ever attend the church services while you're there? They've never graced Colonial Bible Church. No, they have not. All right. Thanks, Brian, for being on the show. I appreciate you and your ministry. I look forward to seeing you this May.
Dr. Fairchild. Thank you. Thank you, Mike. It's been a privilege to work with you,.
And I look forward to seeing you as well. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth 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.