153: Christ is Worthy of a Healthy Church with Dr. Justin Miller

to the Ruled Church Podcast. This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased.

He is honored, and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better, because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas?

You see that one in Pechote, Mexico? Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres, down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it.

The church is not a democracy, it's a monarchy. Christ is king. You can't be

Christian without a local church. You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the

Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible -believing church, and spend your life serving

Jesus in a local, visible congregation. I know people listening to this get tired of me asking this question, but here's one of the first questions

I ask. Justin, did you ever in your life imagine that one day you would attain to such a status that you would be featured on the

Ruled Church podcast? I can honestly say, my friend, it never popped into my mind. I feel very blessed to be here, brother.

I'm really grateful for your ministry and what the Lord has done through you. And I love your emphasis on how every place should have a biblically healthy church.

And so I'm honestly honored to be here. Well, amen, brother.

It's good to have you. Welcome to the Ruled Church podcast. My name is Alan Nelson. I'm one of the elders at Providence Baptist Church in Perryville, Arkansas.

And we're recording today in the underground bunker next to Toadstuck now. But with me,

I have Dr. Justin Miller. That's right, Dr. Justin Miller, correct? Yeah, I mean,

Justin's okay. The brothers here at the seminary like to call me doctor because they know it gets under my skin.

But yeah, Justin's good, brother. Well, tell us just a little bit about yourself. Yeah, so the

Lord and his kindness saved me at 23. I grew up in a home that was secular.

I'm the first Christian in my family. Someone actually gave me a Bible when I was 11 years old.

And I read that Bible every day of my life up to 23.

I just didn't understand its central message. I understood the law. Everyone says we should be afraid to preach the law.

Well, it's the law that really plowed up my heart for 12 years and really made me tremble before the likeness and the reality of God.

And so I read the Bible every day, read it through 13, 14 times, and just didn't understand it.

And then at 23, I was hearing the gospel preached on a radio podcast, or not a podcast at the time, but a radio show, or whatever it is.

And it was Adrian Rogers talking about the substitutionary atonement. And it was like lightning that struck my soul.

I saw Christ in a way I never had seen him before. Previously, I saw him as like a judge that was harsh and cruel and set a harder standard than the

Old Testament, even, like Luther, kind of like what Luther thought. And then when I heard about Christ did, it was just, everything changed.

And I got involved in a biblical church that preached the gospel, and went verse by verse on the evenings and fell in love with Expository Preaching.

During that time, I was married to my wife, Jodine. God saved her at a Share Your Faith workshop.

And she went to learn how to share her faith, and then God saved her. And so we're a young couple, newly married, over a year or so, and we're both now

Christians. And we just wanted to be involved in the church, serve the church.

I didn't have any foundational, really, things. And so I was just pouring into scripture and doctrine.

And as I was doing that and growing, people began to recognize a gift in me and encouraged me to consider the ministry in the future.

And I made a list of three reasons why I should never be a pastor. And I talked to my pastor, and he let me kindly read the list.

And then he took the list. He threw it in the trash can, and he told me he was gonna invest his life into me. And so I'm the product of a pastor who loved souls.

And he taught me how to be a husband, a father, a pastor, and what it meant to follow

Christ in all of life. And so he raised me up in the ministry. I went to seminary while I was being raised up.

He wanted me not to go away from the local church while I was in seminary. He didn't like the model where a person would depart from the church and go off to seminary and really not be involved.

He wanted me to be involved. He wanted me to learn to preach in the church, how to do theology in the church, and all those sort of things.

And so I was doing seminary distant, and he also raised me up in the church to be a pastor, eventually sent me out to where I'm at today, which is

First Baptist Church, Puxico. And it was a Southern Baptist Church that became a confessionary for a

Baptist church over time. As I reformed in God's kindness, so did they. And you know how that is, brother.

We met with our trials and tribulations along the way, but the Lord has been immensely faithful. And every season of difficulty, it's amazing how you look back and you think,

I never want to go through that again, but I would never trade what I got with Christ during it. And so that's really kind of a summation of our story.

Yeah, so your church, you know, that's amazing. By the way,

I'm immensely grateful for Adrian Rogers. Maybe some people would be surprised to hear me say that, but I mean,

I think he was phenomenally gifted preacher, and I think that his ministry bears a lot of fruit, even still.

And do I think he was wrong about a couple of things? Sure, but I'm so grateful for that.

And so the church, you were saved, and the church you were in was SBC? Yeah, it was.

So the pastor, it was actually a mega church. It was a really, really large church, but the pastor there was, he was the real deal.

He still was the real deal. We're still pretty close. He loved

Christ, and he was doctrinally faithful in many of the things. We don't agree on every single jot and tittle.

But he loved preaching. He was an exposer of the word. He cared for souls.

He was a true pastor, and he poured his life into people. He poured his life into me for all those years.

It was a blessing. So he set me on the path that really would lead to what the church and I became, because he always,

I'll never forget it, you know, and he would critique my sermons, or he would, and he was very, he was not afraid to confront me.

That's something that I think is lost today. Young men need accountability in a great way, and he was not afraid to say the hard things to me.

I'll never forget one time I was complaining about how hard ministry was, and then he listened. And then about 10 minutes later, he said, are you done, my brother?

I said, yeah. He said, you know I love you. I thought, oh no, what's coming next?

And he goes, put the big boy pants on and get to work. Of course this is hard.

And you know, the irony of it is, it's like jolting, but then it's like, yeah.

It had the effect like, okay, yeah, I need to put my big boy pants on, of course this is hard.

And it moved me from a, you know, looking at myself like a victim to going back into the battle.

This is, it's gonna be hard. And so he was a faithful mentoring friend, and he was a

Southern Baptist pastor. He wasn't a convention animal. And he wasn't one of those guys who was convention animal.

Therefore, that passed down to me. When I went to the SBC stuff, I'm not a politician.

This is not my thing. I'm a local church guy. I'm a churchman, and I just,

I could not go into and buy into what the SBC had become with its pragmatism, with all its, and this may be controversial, but one of the greatest concerns

I had in the SBC is when I went there the first time, I remember thinking at the convention, this reminds me of the corporate world as a

CPI came out of. It was just so corporate. It reminded me of going back to those seminars and all those corporate events, and it just was eerie like that.

It wasn't, in my opinion, what you would see in the New Testament with the prayerful, pious, godly example put forth by the

Apostle Paul and his band, and so it just wasn't a good fit, and we eventually left the

SBC because of the wokeism and all the other things, and we joined the Reformed Baptist Network, and we have loved being part of that network.

Amen. I'll tell you what, it was a lot of similarities, and I grew up, I was saved at Southern Baptist Church Camp, baptized in a

Southern Baptist Church. My parents, I always say moral home in the sense of just not gross, open wickedness.

I mean, it was ungodly, but moral, conservative type home, but not Christian home, and then, yeah, so I have a lot.

I started out seminary journey at Southern, so Southern Baptist Seminary, and went to Southern Baptist Church Camp, so a lot of great memories and gratitude

I have for the SBC. It was in 2021 when I went to Nashville, and I don't even care.

People can look it up and find names if they want, but I'll just say the person that was leading that meeting, they didn't want a certain person to be able to be on stage, so they changed the program to have a prayer meeting, and at first, you think, oh, we're gonna have a prayer meeting, but then when

I realized what all went down, I was like, we just used a prayer meeting. We just politically maneuvered a prayer meeting, and I'm like, that's so wicked, and then in 2022,

I went to Anaheim because I'm friends with Tom Askel, and I'm grateful for him.

I think he's a dear brother. He's a good brother. I'm grateful for founders, and I'm very supportive of Tom run for SBC president, so we went out there, and of course, he got beat, but something else that kind of happened at the last minute was the

Conservative Baptist Network, which I'm grateful for. I'm friends with many of those brothers, but there was a couple of people.

Again, names aren't necessary, but there's a couple of people in that. At the last minute, they didn't like Tom's Calvinism, so at the last minute, they put someone else forward, and when

I saw that, and I was just like, we're not the politics, because I was frustrated, and I do think there's an egalitarian underbelly in the

SBC, and maybe it's not so much underbelly anymore. It's out in the open, and then also the wokeism, and you have guys that they were woke, and then now it's like all of a sudden, maybe they're not woke, but it's like, are they just putting their finger in the air and testing the winds and whatever, so anyway, brother, similar, but we stopped giving the cooperative program in 22, and then we officially left in actually not till 25.

We just kind of let things sit. We were going through some stuff at our church, but anyway, so what year did you guys come to Puxico?

We came in June of 2011, yeah, 2011.

Okay, yeah, and when you came to, so you talked about SBC Church, but now you're confessionally reformed.

Tell me about your journey first, so when you came there, what would you describe yourself theologically?

Expository preaching, conservative? Yeah, so I mean, I wanted to preach verse by verse, book by book.

I was having, I was pastoring for that as part of First Baptist Church Arnold, a satellite church there.

I don't agree with that model anymore, by the way, and even though I don't agree with that model, what they were doing was amazing work in the sense that they were trying to reach a very unreached area of St.

Louis, impoverished, drug -ridden, and I was working there, but I was going book by book there.

I just loved expository preaching in that sense of book by book, verse by verse, and so when

I came to Puxico, I was a, I would probably classify myself as, in my soteriology, confused.

I would hold to the tenets of the doctrines of grace, but I wasn't quite understanding every aspect of it, and I was more pragmatic in the sense that I had no problem with certain things in the service if it would attract people, but as I was, you know, started there,

I was definitely more doctrines of grace, definitely more leaning towards, you know, reverence and holiness and all those sort of things, and I wasn't a pragmatist in what you would see in the

Candy Land thing, not in the sense at all. I just wasn't regulative. I didn't know what that even was at the time.

I was operating from the mindset of a normative principle, even though I wasn't doing the normative stuff that most people do, but I was operating from that principle, and I, you know, we did things like Easter patches and et cetera.

Yeah, let me just, I'll just interject real quick, just so it's simple to listen in. So normative meaning that if it's not, if the word of God does not forbid it, then it's okay.

So if you're doing, you know, it doesn't say you can't do, where does it say you can't do Easter pageants?

Well, it doesn't say that. So, okay, we can do that. So anyway, just for clarity, for those who may not know, keep going.

Yeah, perfect. And so as I took the church,

I began to go verse by verse, and I fell in love with really the reality of the sovereignty of God, the holiness of God.

I was in awe of God as I saw him just jump off the pages, and then it hit me as I'm preaching verse by verse, book by book, that God's holy, and we are to worship him per his word.

And the regular principle, which is, you know, worshiping God per his word, not going no further than the word, is kind of my basic summation of it.

Amen. It really became not just something

I knew, but a conviction. And so the church, we began to really go that direction. We got rid of unhelpful things in the service.

We wanted just the biblical elements of what scripture puts forth.

So what year is this? This is about three, four, well, about five years in. So I started to get there earlier, but I was always taught as a pastor, you let the grass grow by your feet.

And what my mentor meant by that is, you doing the right thing at the wrong time can sometimes be very wrong.

And that you're a shepherd, and you got to take the marathon view. You want to move them over time to a biblical approach.

And, you know, Tom Askell, it's interesting you mentioned that brother. He was kind enough to take my phone call one time, and I asked him about these things.

And he just said, I'll never forget. He goes, teach, teach, teach, teach, teach, teach, and then teach some more. And then when you do all that, then you maybe can move them over.

And so I never forgot what Tom said about that. And so I just started teaching, teaching, teaching, teaching, teaching.

And about five to six years in, we kind of really moved that direction. It became more regulative.

And then it just kept going there. At that time, I discovered the Puritans, and I fell in love with the

Puritans. Not because it's like the popular thing for our camp to do, but man, they got to my soul.

They got to my affections. I found in their writing what I missed in most writings of our day.

They're not shallow. They're not evangelical type kind of writing.

It was very deep and abiding. And it had doctrine in every aspect of life.

And so I discovered the Puritans. And so I decided I wanted to go and study the Puritans more.

And so around that timeframe, I probably, I enrolled at Wales. It was right before COVID hit.

And I was going to go get my MTH and go over there three times in the next year.

And COVID hit, I was allowed to do it all on Zoom, but I studied, got my MTH there and studied John Owen and the fathers and all this stuff.

And then, but after I even graduated there, I went in more. And so I went to Appledorn for a year, and then eventually went on to Whitfield to finish.

But all of that to say is, I had this insatiable desire to learn. I wanted to pastor the church of God faithfully like the men of old did from the scripture.

I didn't want to be like a man of our time. I didn't want to be like every other Southern Baptist pastor

I saw. I didn't want to have a ministry that was just defined by numbers, baptisms, and a budget.

I wanted it to be a faithful representation of what the scripture says. And so I looked to the fathers, the

Puritans and the reformers to figure out biblically what that looked like. And so all of that shapes into us becoming a confessionally reformed

Baptist church. We adopted the new constitution, I think, five years ago, five or six years ago, and it became officially confessionally reformed.

And since then, we've had our ups and our downs. We've had our prunings. We've had the

Lord adding to our number day by day. Those are being saved. And when I look across the landscape of the local church now, in our local church, it's amazing to see what the

Lord's done. It's amazing to see the people there who just love Christ, love each other. We're imperfect, but we're growing, and it's really become quite a delightful place.

Wow, brother, that's great. A couple of questions. One, had you ever... Okay, what is your experience before you guys became confessionally reformed?

Did you have any experience of actually being able to see a healthy church?

No, I felt alone. I felt like I was the only person in the world that had these convictions and I had no idea who to fellowship with or who to talk to.

It's one of the reasons we do the conference we do, is I want guys who were in the situation I was in to know that they're not alone and that we're with them.

We're here to help. We're here to pray for them. We're here to help them in all the pitfalls and the things before them that they're gonna face.

And so I didn't know of any healthy Reformed Baptist Confessional Church. And so I was reaching out desperately to anyone who would take my phone call.

One of the men who did eventually take that phone call was Paul Washer. And he was gracious enough to come down to one of our first conferences.

He helped us, answered our questions. When the elders, we had a meeting with him and he talked to us about what it meant to be a biblical

Reformed church. And not just a church that knows these doctrines but practices them.

And he talked to us about missions, how that's local church based, all those things. I'll never,

I mean, I remember sitting and looking at my elders as Paul's expounding to us through Zoom, all these things. We're looking at each other.

I know what we're all thinking. We got all this wrong. We got all this wrong. And so as Paul's expounding that, it really was helpful.

And then eventually Dr. Beeke came to our conference and learned a lot from him.

Dr. Waldron, he took my call. Learned a lot from him.

Jeff D. Johnson from Conway, learned a lot from him. He was so gracious to come up and help us and to preach at our conference.

And then he's become a dear friend and mentor. It's just, and Dr. Schneider, he's become a dear friend and mentor.

So I just was so desperate to find men that could help give me practical understanding of how these things look in a local church.

Well, as you said, Dr. Schneider, I don't know if I shared this with you before, but my first experience of seeing a church, like healthy church.

So I was a pastor in DeWitt, Arkansas, and we had a youth pastor and he said, look, there's this conference coming up in New Albany, Mississippi.

There's a guy named Richard Owen Roberts is going to be there and you need to go.

And so we're like, okay. So we went and this was all this. Imagine just jumping out of this

SBC, like 100 % SBC world. And all of a sudden we go and a couple from the church host us, which is weird.

I mean, it's kind of strange. Like we never met them. They never met us. They just hosted us. And so at that point in my life, that was like, well,

I've never experienced people doing this, you know, and then the church, you know, and seeing how the church was.

I'll be honest in my first initial reaction, my wife and I was like, this is kind of weird. You know, we're like, what's good?

What is, I mean, because we're just, I'm young. I mean, I'm like 24 or 20, almost 25.

And like, this is, this is, this is strange. You know, and then Richard Owen Roberts is basically,

I told him I'm preaching through Philippians and he probably doesn't say it like this, but basically he's like, that's dumb.

You should preach on the glory and holiness of God. You know, and so I'm just like, I'm just shell shocked, you know?

And so I got that kind of experience, but, and then used to, I don't know if you were like this ever, but we used to go to places when

I was here and this church here was in a, not a great place, but when we go to other places that were healthy, it was like, oh, such a reprieve, you know, and we want that at in Perryville.

And, you know, by God's grace, that eventually happened. But yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting.

You begin to have this hunger for what a healthy church should be. And you just may not have a lot of experience, but you're just like, where we're at is not what the church is.

She's too beautiful, you know? Yeah. And then I, I'm kind of covetous, brother.

I would love to see Christ Church, New Albany, Mississippi with Richard Owen Roberts is preaching and have that kind of example.

Cause we, we, I feel like we were watered in the dark. Well, I didn't appreciate as much as I should have been, but I mean, it was like, this guy preaches an hour and a half, you know, and it's just, it's just, yeah.

And so, yeah, it's pretty, yeah, the Lord's been content. So it took years before that came, you know, before that kind of mentality happened here.

And I'm going to say something about your church. I saw it too, you know, there's something about, you can kind of tell, it doesn't matter what a church is, says their doctrine is.

If, if you don't see it, love and hospitality and service, like, man, that was beautiful.

That was on display at the conference. It was really, really amazing. I think you should, should be encouraged. Hope you are encouraged by just how well your, your folks just served, you know, and I was just coming up there to help run a books, the

Free Grace Press book table, but man, they treated me so kindly. And that was, that was very encouraging.

Yeah, that is very encouraging because, you know, as a pastor, you know how this is, my friend. Sometimes you lose the forest for the trees.

Yeah. When you're in the forest, it's, it's hard to see the things the other brothers see. And it's amazing to me.

I've heard people come in at the conference and they see our church and they'll go to our church, our Lord's Day service.

They'll see the people serving and they'll say those things. And it's immensely a blessing to my heart to hear.

Probably of all the things, it's the most, most helpful because it, it helps you to step back and see the good things the

Lord is doing. Because in pastoral ministry, you feel like you're going from one, one counseling situation to the other, one issue to the next, and you're trying to be faithful to the

Lord. And sometimes it's those, those heart wrenching situations that consumes your thoughts. And then it helps to step back and see what the

Lord has done. So that, you don't know much that means. That means a lot, brother. So, amen, bro.

When you say, we don't have to, this could be its own episode, but when you say your church, you've said a couple of different times, and we're the same way.

We're confessionally reformed Baptist church. Could you just give me like a definition, just a couple of minute definition?

What do you mean confessionally reformed Baptist church? Yeah, so we, we hold the, the 1689 confession, meaning that we believe it's the best representation of what the

Bible teaches. And so we, we as a church hold to these doctrines.

We, as elders preach these doctrines, we're held accountable to these doctrines. We are a church that wants to confess this faith, meaning that we are unashamedly standing forth on these truths in that confession as a representation from the scripture, and we live by them.

It's not just something we acknowledge, we live by them for the glory of God. And part of that is in our ecclesiology, which is what

I think makes us so weird to people around us, because, you know, membership and discipline has been lost.

Yes. The last 40, 50 years. And when you do, when you, when you're a confessionally reformed

Baptist church, you're going to hold to covenant membership. You're going to hold to church discipline being done as a purified element in the church, but also as an act of love to the offending party and a call for them to repent.

And so we, we hold those things and hold them unashamedly with the intention that we hope to glorify

God and to see his church prosper under his hand. Yeah.

Amen. So what about guys that right now listen to this and they're where you were, you know, 12 years ago or whatever, they're like third year in, you know, like what, what kind of, do you have some counsel?

Like, well, even what, what, what would you tell the Justin back then? The Justin now, what would he say to the

Justin then? And how, how can you, because they're, they're church planning, I believe is a, is a, is a calling and it's a, it's a difficulty and it has its own challenges.

And so there's those guys and I'm grateful for those brothers. But there are also guys, a lot of guys out there right now that are in situations where they're not,

I haven't planted a church, they're seeking to revitalize or reform a church. So like, what's some things you'd say to them?

So, you know, by God's kindness, we had a seminary here that for the last eight years, we trained up about 20 some plus pastors, 30 pastors in our church.

And then now throughout the Midwest, but most of those guys are going to, or are in revitalization efforts, like we were.

Church planting is hard laborious work. I'm not, not gonna deny that.

But I think church revitalization is something that could kill you. And what

I mean by that is when you go into a situation, especially if you're in the SBC realms I was in, you're going into a situation where the membership roles are probably five to six times what the attendance is, maybe more.

A lot of the people who are there are there because if you're a rural context, it's their family church.

They were there for generations. And there's a lot of things that are not in line with scripture.

And so when the pastor comes in, and a young guy comes in and he really wants to serve Jesus and he's zealous for Jesus and he wants to honor

Christ and pour his life out for the local church. I think there's this idealism that a guy has coming in initially that the

Lord oftentimes kills because it's hard and it's long and it's laborious and it's difficult.

And I'm not saying that in a way to demean or to dissuade a person. It's one of the greatest things to give your life to.

But I want guys to know and I wouldn't want my young self to know this. Strap up.

Get ready. Yeah. Because this is going to be something that literally takes all of you.

It's going to be something that you really have to lay your life down like your Lord did for the good of this church, for the good of future generations, for the glory of God.

And it's worth it. But you have to have that eternal call and that external confirmation because you have to know your call because you're going to want to run.

You're going to want to flee. You're going to want to not stand fast and firm when you're attacked, disliked, slandered, misunderstood, or misrepresented.

It's worth all of those things. And honestly, if you're faithful, you'll endure those things. You can't avoid it.

I've not met any pastor that's done revitalization faithfully who has not endured that. Not one.

And you're going to have to stand firm. So I would encourage them, know what you're getting into, know

Christ is worthy of it, and give your life for that work knowing that because of that,

God may indeed bless your labors and because of those labors, a biblical church will be there for generations to come.

Amen. Amen. That's so good, brother. I think that what you said earlier about having the marathon view, the big picture, and that's 100 % true.

100 % agree with that. The only thing I'd add is based on what you just said is that sometimes

I think guys think I'm going to be able to do this without ever having that conflict moment.

And the reality is maybe you can have a smaller conflict moment, but the reality is you're never going to turn the corner without that conflict.

And if you just say, well, I'm going to do everything possible to shepherd these people and never bring it to a point of conflict.

Well, then you're going to shepherd for a long time and never, and actually wind up being unfaithful because there are times you have to, and you're going to lose, you're going to lose the people that you're going to lose are not the legacy members.

It's the people that's coming in and they just can't, you're never pushing over the hump, as it were, and they're going to go on and find something stronger or the whole church is maintain a lower level, as it were, just because I'm rambling.

But the point is, if you're afraid of conflict, if you're afraid of it, not talking about being wise, amen.

But if you're just afraid, then you're going to have to get on your face and repent, ask for the

Lord for courage. Yeah, I would even say to young guys, I say this to the young guys in our seminary.

One of the greatest pieces of advice I ever got was from Jeff Johnson. This was Jeff B. Johnson.

And he got this from Sam Walden before him. He said, you have to be the place in life if you're to be a faithful pastor where you're not afraid anymore.

And if it's just you on a milk carton with your family and a couple others, you're okay with that.

And he said, you got to the place, you're not afraid. You have to be willing to face the darkness down and stand in the power of Christ.

You have to be willing to love people who are lovely, to love the hardest member, to be gracious, but yet bold.

And a lot of guys, they have this idealistic position, like I'm going to come in and be

Spurgeon. And they don't know what Spurgeon went through. They don't know about the attacks, the criticisms, the hatred, the betrayal, even his own family.

They don't know the pastors he trained up that later turned on him. The man was so depressed at times he could barely get out of bed.

And then they say, well, I want to be Lloyd -Jones. They don't know what Lloyd -Jones went through either. These men all paid serious costs.

I mean, I think of Charles Simeon and all every faithful pastor I read about in history. And this is why I think, again, another thing

I would tell young guys read biographies, read biographies, because you'll find that every faithful pastor before us and every faithful man of God before us, what shines about their life is not the high points.

It's the trials and the valleys they went through and they got Christ in it. They realized they were stripped bare of this world.

The praise of men became nothing and Christ became everything. And then they pushed through by his strength and for his glory.

And God did wonders. And I think just the resolve too, it's like, praise

God for those brothers. But for every Martin Lloyd -Jones, which yes, the

Martin Lloyd -Jones biography, the Ian Murray biography is phenomenal. It's really, I actually got that at, did you ever go to the

T4Gs? I actually got that at T4G one day. I never, I was never, ironically, we do a conference, but I was never a conference person.

Yeah, yeah. And yeah, so I, those guys, amen. And, but also like,

I'm just telling my own, this anecdotal here, but like, I had to get to a point of really, cause

I was kind of moving along with some SBC stuff as far as like, you know, the resistance as it were, and really, and even kind of spoke at some things and really kind of feeling that.

And I was like, I had to get to a point, I was like, you know what, are you okay to be Quatro Nelson, one of the pastors of this little church in Arkansas, is that enough for you?

And not that my identity is there, Christ is enough, but I'm just saying like what he's called me to is, am

I okay to be this? And I had to get to the point where I say, you know what, if this church dwindles down to five people and I have to work some other job, you know, in order to help feed my family while I'm pastoring, can

I do that? Am I okay with that? And the Lord had to bring me to that point. Now that's not saying I want to do that.

And where our church is now, praise God, but we're just a rural area, which we're actually a little bit bigger than Puxico.

We're 1 ,300 people and I was surprised when we rolled into town, it was like 800, 900, 800 people.

You're at Metropolis compared to us. I know, I was like, wow, now it's really rural, you know, but really just being set, like I would say that to pastor, like, is it enough?

Is this high calling of pastoring, this little precious church that Jesus Christ bled for, like, is this enough for you?

Like, what is it that you're, now if God, I have no problem with big churches. I love Jeff D. Johnson, which

I met Jeff B. Johnson for the first time at the conference, seems like a great brother. Jeff D.

Johnson is a friend and I'm very grateful, you know, that their church, their church is like 400 people.

So I don't have a problem with church being big. It's just that there's a lot of churches that are going to be small.

They're going to be, but, and they need faithful shepherds. And can we be okay with saying, okay, Lord, this is enough.

This is enough. You know, it's interesting. One of the things I discovered when I did John Owen's, well,

I did my work on him in my post -grad. He pastored for the large section of his life after he fell out of favor with parliament and all those sorts of things.

The Church of Leaden Hill, it was 30 people. It was 30 people. And Owen and most of the

Puritans, when you look at the churches they pastored, these men did not pastor large churches, but they pastored faithfully the flock before them.

And their focal point was not primarily on numbers like it has become, I think, in the

SBC realms. I'm not trying to be harsh when I say that, but it was on being faithful and trusting the

Lord to give the growth. And then at the same time, they were also optimistic in the sense they desired to see what

Daniel Rowland would later see. And in this little village that's smaller than both your town and my town,

God changed Wales with this man preaching from this one, and he hardly ever left there either.

Everyone came to him and he preached this little, little, little village, which

Laidle Lloyd -Jones would actually live in that little village for a time. But this little, little village, smaller than Puxico, smaller than where most pastors find themselves at, and the

Lord changed the country from this little village. And I even think about Wittenberg. Wittenberg, people misunderstand it.

It's not a huge place. I think some estimates say 1 ,000 or 2 ,000 people lived there in time of Luther, which, you know, that time was different.

But yet this wasn't Geneva, which had 20 ,000 people. But, you know, the

Lord did wonders through the, you know, the Reformation started with Wittenberg. And so the Lord delights to use Nazareth.

He delights to use the small in contrast to human wisdom. And so, but at the same time, some of the most faithful scholars, theologians, pastors that we read their works,

I think we'd be shocked to realize that they didn't pastor big churches. They pastored faithful, faithful groups of people who just love

Christ. You know, as I get older, I care more about the purity of the church than I do about the numbers.

I want to see people saved. I want to grow. I don't, but I want it to be a true church.

I would much rather pastor a true church than a large gathering that is not biblically faithful.

I just, I'd rather give my life to those sheep than a group of people filled with a lot of tears because they're allowed to be tears without being addressed.

And I just, in my early dynamics, you know, the idea of huge crowds was appealing, but now it's just Christ's church is beautiful.

She's worth suffering for. Amen. I think that's, yeah, I think

I do want to caution reform guys, you know, go the other side. Like you don't care about numbers at all in the sense of like, well,

I don't even care if anyone gets saved. Well, no, we're not there. Like what you just said was a beautiful balance. Like we want to see people converted, but at the end of the day, if it's a choice between the church getting big or the church staying pure, it's not even a choice.

We're going to stay. And that's why, you know, the confession is important. And that's why when people come into the church and I would encourage guys, like you have to be careful.

Like there'll be a temptation. Well, here's this great family. But there's a temptation like, well,

I'll just bend to this family. We'll bend the church to this family. So this family will be part of the church.

And you just can't do that. You know, you've got to stay the course. And we have this saying here, and I hope it's more than just a saying, but it is

Christ is worthy of a healthy church. And so staying the course. So, well, brother, we've taken up enough of your morning.

Anything else? I mean, so many questions I'd love to talk about, you know, your membership process, what your

Sunday morning looks like. And, you know, the fact that you still do, you guys still do two services, which we do as well on Sunday.

So I like that. And so there's a lot more left on the bone as a word that we could talk about sometime.

But anything on your heart, you just want to mention before we shut it down?

Yeah. One, brother, I love that saying that you said. I've heard you say that on Facebook. I've seen you say that before, but Christ is worthy of a healthy church.

I would piggyback off that and encourage brothers with that very truth. The local church is worth suffering for because it's

Christ's bride. And suffering for the local church is suffering for with Christ, suffering for Christ. And there's no better thing to give your life to.

I mean, my mentor used to say all the time, if he became the president of the United States, it'd be a step down.

And so pastors who are listening to this, deacons, church members, orient your life around the local church.

You won't regret that a billion years from now. Christ is worth it. Amen. That's good, brother.

If you could wrestle with that, you know, if I can look back, if the Lord allows me to live to be 80 years old and I can look back and say,

I gave my life to these people here. And sometimes they don't believe me, brother, because they're like, you're going to go somewhere.

You know, this is my hometown too, you know? And I'm like, the Lord would have to, you know,

Elijah me somewhere. This is where God has called me. And if I can look back and say, okay, well, our church stayed around 35, 45 people, members for 40 years of ministry.

Well, I started when I was 30. So 50 years of ministry. Could I be okay with that? Well, that would be a grace.

That would be a kindness of the Lord. You know, I would love to grow bigger than that. But at the same time, we just want to stay the course.

And amen, amen. So, so lock in, be willing to suffer. It's not going to be easy, but Christ is worthy.

Well, thanks for coming on today. Thank you guys for joining us on this episode of the Real Church Podcast. We'll have to get

Justin back on sometime and we can talk about some other things. And the

Lord bless your day, brother. And you guys hope you have midweek service too. Yeah, yeah.

Amen. I hope you guys have a great Wednesday night. All right.

Catch us next week on the Real Church Podcast. If you really believe the church is the building, the church is the house, the church is what

God's doing. This, this is his work. If we really believe what Ephesians says, we are the poemos, the masterpiece of God.