October 26, 2015 Show with Thabiti Anyabwile on “Reviving the Black Church” AND Karim Shamsi-Basha on His Conversion From Islam to Christ in His Book “Paul and Me”

Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

Now here's our host, Chris Arnton. Good afternoon,

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming.

This is Chris Arnton, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Monday on this 26th day of October 2015.

And I'm very excited to have an excellent guest from the old Iron Sharpen Days back on the program, and he's on the program for the first time as far as the new

Iron Sharpens Iron is concerned, Thabiti Anyabwile. He is a pastor with the

Anacostia River Church in Washington, D .C., and he has served as senior pastor at First Baptist Church of Grand Cayman in the

Cayman Islands. He blogs at the Front Porch and is a council member with the

Gospel Coalition. He's also a prolific writer, and he has written such books as The Decline of African American Theology, From Biblical Faith to Cultural Captivity, and the book that we're primarily addressing today, his new book, hot off the press,

Reviving the Black Church, A Call to Reclaim a Sacred Institution. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron, and for the very first time, welcome you to the all -new

Iron Sharpens Iron, Thabiti Anyabwile. Hey, brother, it's so good to be with you again, and such an honor to be on the new show and the new format, so thank you, brother, for having us.

Yes, and I often boast to people that one of my greatest accomplishments in life is that I'm one of the rare people who can actually correctly pronounce

Thabiti Anyabwile. But you see what happens when you learn to pronounce Thabiti Anyabwile, you can't say accomplishment.

That's right. And you'll hear much better. You become some things, you lose some others, brother.

Yeah, and you'll be hearing a lot more of those failures during this program, I'm sure. And it's also great to have back in the studio my co -host,

Pastor Ron Jorlach of the First Baptist Church of Brooklyn, Maryland, and he has been a guest and a co -host on the all -new

Iron Sharpens Iron on several occasions, and welcome back to the studio, Ron Jorlach. Yes, Chris, it's good to see you again, and I just was wondering, have you ever had so many syllables in one show?

Well, I will bet you anything that I am the only person on the planet Earth that has ever had two people on my program named

Thabiti Anyabwile and Ron Jorlach. And let me just let our listeners know something about this book we're going to be discussing through two men who have endorsed it.

First of all, many of you may recognize the name Mark Dever, who is probably most well -known for his

Nine Marks Ministries. He says about this book, Reviving is

God's work we know, but the appearance of a book like this suggests that he is at work doing it even as we ask.

Read this book and pray in hope. And that's Pastor Mark Dever, Senior Pastor at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D .C.,

and also Tony Carter, Lead Pastor at East Point Church in East Point, Georgia, says,

Reviving the Black Church is both timely and refreshing. If you love the Black Church like I do, you will want to read this book and hope our beloved church's obituary has proved false.

And as I said, that was Tony Carter. And it's great to have you back on the program,

Thabiti, as I said. And tell us, before we go into your book, tell us something about Anacostia River Baptist Church.

Well, thank you, brother. We are a brand -new church plant. We've been meeting just a little over six months now.

We launched on Easter Sunday of this year. And a wonderful new family of God, a new outcropping of the kingdom here in southeast

Washington, D .C. And so for folks who are unfamiliar with Washington, D .C., there are two rivers that cut through it.

One is the Potomac River, which many people will have heard of. A lesser -known river is the

Anacostia River. And it divides what most people think of in Washington, D .C., when they think of monuments and the

White House and those things. It divides that section of the city from a section of the city, which we call east of the river, which is literally east of the

Anacostia River, that has not enjoyed the kind of revival that D .C.

has enjoyed economically and socially, but continues to be an area of the city where wonderful people live, facing significant challenges in terms of just financial challenges, social challenges, and the like.

And so we are trying to live on the block to bring life to the block. We want to make disciples of the

Lord Jesus Christ from the four corners of the block to the four corners of the globe. And we've been having a great time at it so far.

LAROUCHE Great. And also, Pastor Ron Jour, if you could tell us something about First Baptist Church in Brooklyn, Maryland.

First Baptist is very similar to Anacostia River Church in that we are in a neighborhood that is cut off by a river.

You've got the Patapsco River in Baltimore that cuts off pretty much greater

Baltimore from where we are. We're still within city limits of Baltimore. But much like the

Anacostia area in D .C., Brooklyn did not receive a lot of the economic benefits and so on from what's going on on the other side.

We're literally about 10 minutes away from M &T Bank Stadium, Camden Yards, Inner Harbor, and all of that.

But that 10 -minute drive is basically a travel to two different worlds.

And we're serving the Lord over in Brooklyn. You've got a lot of folks that feel a bit of disenfranchisement and so on.

But it's a very ethnically diverse area, generationally diverse area. And we're striving to be faithful to the gospel and faithful to our community as well.

And I'd also like to inform our listeners that both Thabiti Anyabwile and Ranjour Locke, they're both

African -American pastors. And I say that because since the black church at large is going to experience some critique today, as well as some encouraging news,

I thought it best to have at least one other African -American in here.

I didn't think it would be appropriate for three lily white guys to be critiquing the black church necessarily.

Not that there would be anything innately wrong with that, but just for the fact that we want to avoid any appearance of racism or anything like that.

Well, first of all, the book that you originally wrote before the book that we are discussing today,

Reviving the Black Church, A Call to Reclaim a Sacred Institution, the book, a very controversial book that you wrote,

The Decline of African -American Theology from Biblical Faith to Cultural Captivity.

How is that different from what we have in our hands today, the Reviving the Black Church? Was that a controversial book?

Well, you know what? It's funny, man. The first book I set out to write 15 years ago is the book that's just come out,

Reviving the Black Church. I didn't have that title in mind. I just knew I wanted to write something that would be appreciative of the

African -American church and also hopefully biblically instructive in terms of my love for the church, being expressed in a desire for the greatest possible health and strength in the church.

And when I was working on that book 15 years ago, I wanted to find just a good reference, a good historical theology that told the story of how the church has come to be what it is theologically, which is diverse.

There wasn't one. And so I set this book down to work on what became

The Decline of African -American Theology. You know, it's interesting. Most people don't realize or don't remember that just before The Decline came out, there was another book that came out called

The Faithful Preacher. And so those two books together, coming out within a month of each other, they were sort of holding in separate volumes the sort of whole heart of the author, which is in this volume.

And as I say, those two books together, The Faithful Preacher was an appreciation for the faithfulness of African -American pastors and leaders from bygone eras.

And The Decline was meant to be a constructive, sort of honest critique of some things that have gone wrong.

And so Reviving the Black Church, the attempt is to hold the whole heart together in this one volume and say, here's one way forward that I believe to be marked out in the

Bible, I believe to be, would be a path to greater, deeper biblical health in God's church.

And not just the African -American church, but insofar as the things are biblical than any church.

Well, before, and by the way, Pastor Rondra Locke, you could chime in at any time with your own question.

But before he does that, I'd like you to begin to answer a question which is asked on the back cover of your book.

Is the Black Church dying? I think it depends on who you ask, and I think it depends on how you measure life.

So we opened the book with picking up the question that Princeton professor Eddie Glaude asked a few years back in the

Huffington Post, where actually he didn't ask the question, he gave the answer. In his view, he said the Black Church is dead.

And as you can imagine, that touched off a firestorm of reaction. Now from Professor Glaude's perspective, the church is dead because it's lost its kind of political prophetic witness.

In his view, the church is not doing what it ought to do with regard to a lot of social and political issues, from joblessness to homelessness to education and so on.

So that's viewed from that perspective. You know, he's at least one person who makes the argument that it's dead.

Others will want to make the argument that there are, if the Black Church as a whole is not dead, that there are dead churches.

So Pentecostals say that about non -Pentecostals. Charismatics say it about non -charismatics.

You know, everybody thinks the other church is dead, but not their own, right?

And my own take, my own take very simply is this, is that the African -American church, like the white evangelical church, like our

Hispanic brothers and so on, that what you're going to find in any church, any swath of churches, is a mixture of very strong churches to some very weak churches.

A mixture of very vibrant churches to some churches that we might properly call dead.

And for me, a dead church is a church where the gospel is not preached, where the word is not central, and where the evidences of that in terms of Christian love and mission and evangelism are absent.

Well, there I think you have a dead church. And this book sort of says, even if she is dead, she can live again by the reclaiming of the word.

So you would say that even a church that may be packed to standing room only with thousands of people may have vibrant worship, may have talented musical performers and the music team and the choir, and they may have the most prominent political figures candidating from their pulpits, that could still be a church that is dead as a doornail.

Yeah, we ought not confuse a crowd with a church. So it's easy to draw a crowd.

And all you would need to do is do some of the same kinds of things you just mentioned. Have a slamming choir, have a slick children's program, maybe have a few of the hoi polloi involved in the life of your church.

And create a slick web presence. And you can draw a crowd. But there are arena -sized gatherings in this country where the gospel is not preached or not preached clearly, where Christ is not named or exalted.

And those are not churches, not in any historical Protestant sense of the term.

At least they're not healthy churches. And so one thing we don't want to do is mistake activity for life.

You know, even a chicken with its head cut off has some activity that goes on for a few minutes after. And so we want to understand that the life that we're talking about when we talk about revival is that life of God imparted to the souls of His people that overflows as a consequence of our union with Christ, as a consequence of our abiding in Him, and as a consequence of His word abiding in us.

That's spiritual life. And a church can be alive and not particularly political, as in the case of Edith Glaude's perspective.

Or a church can be alive and be quite effective on social issues. But the social issues and the religious activities as such, that's not what defines life.

Christ is our life. Amen. And perhaps I'll ask both you and Ranjour this question.

If you, in your daily walk as you, the

Lord and His providence, as you in different places speaking, or just in your neighborhoods and so on, going to the grocery store, or wherever you may be walking or living and going about your business, uh, if you meet a black pastor, is he more than likely to be someone who truly understands and preaches the gospel or not?

Wait, you mean that at Ranjour first or myself? Oh, you could go first, and then I'll have

Ranjour chime in. Yeah, I shouldn't say anything. I should just let Ranjour go first. Well, I'll go ahead and answer.

I'll go ahead and answer. More than likely, in my neck of the woods, more than likely, if you are an

African American pastor, you are very much versed in terms of social commentary.

You may have a lot to say in terms of politics. You may have a lot to say in terms of poverty and so on.

But by and large, just, so let me just preface, I'm not talking, you know, sweeping the nation or anything like that.

I'm just talking about in my particular context, my neck of the woods. You're hard -pressed to find a guy who is thoroughly engaged, you know, theologically, who, you know, who handles his

Bible well. And there are a lot of different reasons for that. You know, so in a lot of ways,

I'm sympathetic to, you know, to that brother. But at the same time,

I would say probably not. You know, I would go in expecting him to be lacking theologically.

And Thabiti? Yeah, I think I'm similar. I think, and as Roger said, there are a lot of reasons for that, and we could get into it.

Yeah, sure. But I think, in my neighborhood, I think I would find a couple things, maybe two or three different stripes.

When we first came back to D .C. and began to work on the plan, of course, we began to visit other churches and to try and get to know other pastors and get to know the lay of the land a little bit.

And if I went to 10 churches, then I think in seven of those churches, eight of those churches,

I encountered people who were brought, meant to be broadly evangelical, meant to be gospel -believing.

But in most cases, I would say, assume the gospel. You could hear allusions to the gospel and allusions to the work of Christ, but in those churches, you weren't hearing either the exposition of the scripture or the sort of declaration in fulsome terms of the gospel itself and the call of the gospel for every man to repent and to believe.

So I think I would meet a lot of people who would be sympathetic to the gospel, not necessarily centered on the gospel.

Now, that group of folk would be folks who would be well -meaning, but as I said, just kind of assuming, not self -conscious and intentional, but not hostile, to folks who are in that group of folks who use the language of the scripture and the language of the gospel and the language of the church, but who are in fact, as a consequence of either their conviction and or their education, who are in fact liberal, that they don't hold an evangelical view of the gospel, though the people in their pews do.

And so I would, of the 10 churches on average, seven of the 10 folks would be sort of in that category.

The other two or three would be persons that I feel like I could cooperate with in the gospel, who hold the same view of the gospel, who intend to be preaching the gospel and discipling people in the context and have been endeavoring to be faithful in the context.

And you said that you could lay out some reasons you think that that lack of gospel centeredness exists.

Sure. One is, again, just by no nefarious motive, simply assuming the gospel and assuming that gospel preaching entails either including or tacking on at the end of a sermon, a few words about Jesus and kind of getting your life right.

Another reason for that would be some of these men have been trained in colleges and universities and seminaries and divinity schools that long ago tacked left.

And for a good part of the country's history, it was only the liberal and progressive schools that opened their doors to African -American pastors for further training.

And so there's a good chance that if he's trained academically, he's been trained in left -leaning theological schools.

And so that's part of it too. The other part of it is what Ron Jewel was alluding to a moment ago. Guys who have majored not on the exposition of scripture, not on evangelistic or doctrinal gospel preaching, but have majored on social issues, social justice, the needs of the community, all of which have their place, but not the central place.

And so guys have, in many cases, drifted from the main thing as they have sort of cared about and given attention to these other important but secondary things.

This is probably going to get some people upset, but I think that it's important to bring this up in a discussion like this.

I believe that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. should be revered as a great

American hero, but unless he repented of some of his theological heresies,

I read his doctoral dissertation some years ago, and he was denying the basic tenets of Christianity, like even the deity of Christ and the virgin birth, the resurrection, and so on.

I don't know if you're aware of any change happening in his life, but I was wondering how common that is in your experience with African American clergy.

Is that a common thing for those who profess to be Christians and are even Baptist pastors? Well, this is what

I mean by having a pretty typical sort of liberal education. So King shows evidence of denying some cardinal

Christian doctrine as early as his undergraduate studies down at Morehouse, and certainly by the time he gets to Boston University and Crozier, he's getting very self -conscious, very aggressive liberal theological training, much of which he adopts.

Interestingly now, he doesn't adopt a sort of liberal, the high liberal view of man. His anthropology feels and looks very biblical, and that's in part because he's looking at the depravity of man almost every day as he's leading marches and encountering segregation and racism of the

South of his day. I'm not aware of King's sort of any published format reversing those views that you find in his dissertation or student papers in undergraduate and graduate school, but some folks would look at what they call his kitchen table experience during one of the boycotts in Alabama, I think it was in Montgomery at the time, where King recounts what he regards as a profound experience with God that some folks would liken to a conversion experience.

Now, that's the optimistic view. We'll leave it for Christ to let us know who it is and who isn't, but I think you're right.

Certainly, if you look at what you find of his theology in the body of his student work, there you're going to find essentially a liberal view of Christianity.

And how common is that extreme form of liberalism in regard to Christology and so on?

How common is that in the clergy in the black church today? That's a tough question.

Honestly, I think you find it more often in the academy, among African -Americans in the academy.

Again, I think you're going to find a general evangelical view in the clergy, intending to be evangelical.

But you will find increasing numbers of self -consciously liberal folks occupying the pulpits, from Raphael Warnock down in Atlanta at Ebenezer, succeeding

King of the Kings down at Ebenezer, to many of the high -profile clergy from the civil rights movement,

Jesse Jackson, Al Shaffer, of course, to here in the Baltimore, Washington area,

Delmon Coates, who has been leading much of the work on sort of pro -same -sex relationships.

So that's a growing quarter of the church. I don't know that it's anywhere near the majority of the church, but it is a growing church and certainly stronger in academic circles.

One of your chapters is a call for a reform of Black preaching, a case for biblical exposition, if you could expand on that.

Yeah, I think that if... I think that our view of the Bible itself informs, or ought to inform, our view of preaching.

So that if we believe that in the Bible, what we have literally are the inspired words of God, the

God -breathed words of God, that holy men wrote these words as they were carried along by the

Holy Spirit, I think that that should lead us to think about preaching and the main task of preaching as explaining and applying what the text actually means via the original authors and in its context.

That's what we call expositional preaching, where the main point of the sermon is taken from the main point of the passage.

And the preacher's job is to stand under the text, not over the text, or alongside the text, but to stand under the text and to herald what doth say of the

Lord. And it's that kind of preaching that has, I think, the beneficial effects we all want to see.

It makes the mind and heart of God clear. It brings about the purposes of God.

Think of Isaiah 55, his word goes forth and it accomplishes whatever he pleases, the salvation of sinners, the hardening of the reprobate.

It edifies the church, it disciples the church, it strengthens the church. So we want that kind of preaching as the main diet of our local congregations if we want to see that life which comes through the living word of God imparted to the people of God.

Pastor Roger has a question for you. Sure. Pastor Thabiti, as I was reading your book, one of the things that I thought particularly interesting, and perhaps even interesting to some of our listeners over here who aren't a part of a black church, is that really you could take black off of the title and just say reviving the church.

There's so much overlap in terms of what's going on, what you kind of prescribe for black churches, really you could prescribe for any church.

And so that kind of led me to kind of a twofold question. Number one, if you could explain a little bit about those similarities in terms of reviving the black church and really any church in general.

But then also, if you could give some of the differences, like some of the things that are unique to black churches where there's particular need for revival in that content.

In fact, Thabiti, if you could pick up after our station break, it's going to be brief, and you could answer

Roger's questions when we come back. By the way, if those of you listening want to join us in the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com.

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Please give us at least your first name, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the

USA. Don't go away. We'll be right back with Thabiti Anyabwile in a discussion of his book,

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Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in, our guest today is Pastor Thabiti Anyabwile.

And we are discussing his latest book, Reviving the Black Church, A Call to Reclaim a Sacred Institution.

In studio with me as co -host today is Pastor Ron Jorlach of the First Baptist Church of Brooklyn, Maryland.

And prior to our station break, he asked two questions of Thabiti Anyabwile.

And if you want to restate those in a summarized fashion, just so Thabiti can answer them now.

Sure, sure. Again, ultimately it was twofold. One was, what are the similarities between reviving the black church and reviving any church of any type?

And then the second part was, what are the things that are specific to black churches, specific particular needs of revival and for revival within the black church?

Yeah, that's a wonderful question, brother. I think a few replies. One is to say very simply, there's nothing that ails the

African -American church that doesn't ail the rest of the church. And that's why I appreciate your comment earlier that you could almost drop black from the title when it comes to just sort of thinking about the importance of the word of God being central to the life of God's people.

And we would expect that, right? If the solutions are biblical, because we understand that the scripture is not culturally bound, is not culturally owned by one ethnic group or another, but that God in his wisdom speaks through his word to all of us in our particular locations and settings.

And so this fight to be gospel -centered and theologically robust and faithful to the truth and yet gracious in our time and place, well, that's a fight that all

God's people have to take up no matter their sort of social, cultural, economic location.

But then there are some things that are particular to our social and historical and cultural location, at least in terms of the expression and sometimes in terms of the actual issues and factors themselves, right?

So just a moment ago, you guys were asking about preaching and expositional preaching. Well, there are a good number of African -American pastors who take the view that exposition just isn't appropriate to our cultural context, that there are cultural forms of preaching that at least ought to be respected and, in some cases, would argue are necessary to effective ministry in our churches.

So there are some traditional things that we've got to think through, keeping in mind the

Savior's words when he tells the scribes and Pharisees of his day that your traditions have made the word of God of no effect.

And so the main concern, biblically, is that the word of God comes through clearly and powerfully, even if it doesn't come through in these sort of culturally ensconced ways.

Or if you think about, for example, there's a chapter in the book that deals with sort of reclaiming

African -American men as a step toward reclaiming and restoring families. Well, the sort of the onslaught of pressures and problems that have affected black men in this country and continue to when you think about over -incarceration, things of that sort, that makes sort of ministry to men.

That requires that ministry to men, in some ways, take on a different shape and a different intensity than in comparison to communities that have not had their men so constantly challenged and attacked.

And then I think about the chapter in the book that's on missions. The African -American church is largely unengaged in international missions.

That's not always been the case. Historically, the African -American church has been a very missions -minded church.

You can go to the mid to late 1800s, early 1900s. But with the rise of segregation and colonialism in Africa, where African -Americans had a particular concern and a disenfranchisement of African -Americans, alongside the immense problems that the community faced after emancipation and going into Jim Crow and Reconstruction, all that good stuff, that effectively took

African -Americans off the mission field. So there's some historical and political antecedents there that have to be kind of thought about and dealt with if we're going to properly understand how to do the same things we would do in any context, in this particular context.

Can you be a little bit more descriptive when you say, like, in your chapter,

Reform Black Preaching, Part 2, a defense of exposition in a non -white context?

If you could be a little bit more descriptive about what that is. Sure. As I said, alluded to a moment ago, some people think of exposition as, quote, white preaching.

I never forget being in the Middle East, preaching a church in the Middle East. It's an international church, diverse church, probably some 80, 90 nationalities in this one church.

Preaching for my good friend there, and preaching the exposition in some text in Matthew. And I go to the back of the door to greet people, and you guys have probably had this experience where people who, they sort of stand off to the side, lurking for a while to everybody else's, their platitudes, and they want to have a conversation at the door.

And this gentleman comes up to me at the door, it happened to be a white, southern gentleman, and tells me where he's from, introduces his wife, and he looks at me with this sideways smile, and he says, man,

I thought you were gonna bring up some of that good old black preaching. And I played country, dumb,

I knew who he was talking about, I played country, dumb, and I said, what kind of preaching is that?

I thought you were gonna whip the people up, you know, and that kind of thing. And so, he had a certain expectation as to what black preaching is.

And African -Americans, many African -Americans do as well. Um, and so, you know, the question becomes, can you do faithful exposition in context that are quote -unquote non -white?

And what I try to show in that chapter is that actually, if you take Nehemiah 8 and other passages of scripture, you're seeing a good definition in the scripture of exposition.

Read the text, explain the text, apply the text. And then I make this point, that the people being talked about in the scripture doing that are not white people, as we understand it today.

That the text of the scripture itself is non -white. And the people who are doing the preaching in that context would not understand what we mean by white preaching, black preaching, so on.

It's just biblical preaching. And in the chapter, try and show that, you know, there are answers to the cultural objections, the objections to the idea that it's too intellectual and things of that sort.

That those things don't really hold water. And that if we give ourselves to preaching expositionally, we will cultivate different tastes among the people.

And in fact, I think when I go to most churches, the people in the pew already have this taste for the word of God.

It's usually the preacher who's more attached to that cultural style of preaching than are the people who want to understand their

Bibles. Yes, but something that you said reminded me of my dear friend who's now in heaven with the

Lord, Dr. Robert J. Cameron. I don't know if you ever had the privilege of meeting him, the

BT, but he was a black Presbyterian pastor in New Jersey, started out as a

Reformed Episcopal and wound up first a PCA pastor and then finally an

OPC pastor. For a number of years before going home with the Lord. But he said that a lot of black folks who would visit his congregation or visit his worship service would tell him before they left,

I'm sorry, I'm not coming back here because you're not black enough. Because he was not doing the typical thing that they were expecting, like whooping and, and, you know, getting the audience revved up in an emotional way.

And he was basically an expositor and they didn't care for that.

How much of that area of homiletics that does involve style and so on, how much of that do you think is completely appropriate to retain as a black preacher of the gospel or even a white preacher of the gospel who enjoys or has a gift for preaching in that fashion that we have come to view as perhaps a stereotype?

But how much of that do you believe is acceptable to retain from the pulpit as long as the content of the message being preached is orthodox?

Yeah, that's the operative phrase, right? So I'm happy for all of it to be retained. If what's being really signaled and what's really triumphing in the preaching and what's really coming through clearly and accurately in the preaching is the word of God.

And so in that sense, what I want to say is sort of style matters are secondary to substance matters.

And so if a guy is Jonathan Edwards, almost stoic, reading his manuscript or if a guy is in flights of fancy, like the pastors that I grew up listening to preach.

Reverend F .D. Betts pastored my little church back home for 55 years and was a hooper and could soar.

That really doesn't matter to me as much as whether or not there's something in the hoop that is biblical, that is clear, that is driving home the text in ways that people who then leave the sermon, they leave it with the ability to understand that text better than they did when they came in that morning.

If that's happening, I don't have any qualms about style issues. But what I fear is the case, more often than not, is that in many places, it's style over substance.

There's gravy, but no meat. And there is oftentimes or sometimes, in fact, the distortion of the meaning of the text and the sort of clouding over the meaning of the text with the celebration, whether it's hooping or tuning or what have you.

And I would assume that coming from a Reformed Baptist background that you think there is some kind of a danger with anybody, no matter what race they are, who is a pastor whose presentation of a gospel message or so -called gospel message borders on being entertainment -driven.

Or theatrical. Well, absolutely. But the dangers abound on every side.

Right. So I think it's as problematic for a guy to be boring.

Yes, yes. For a guy to, you know, give a lecture in the pulpit.

Yes. There's got to be a prophetic point to preaching. Yes. And it doesn't have to be dressed in the same garb or the same style.

But yeah, I think they're dangerous. I mean, preaching is one of the most dangerous things you'll ever do. And one of the most vulnerable things you'll ever do.

And to do it well means to leave it all on the court, so to speak. And to be honest and transparent and fully human while pointing at things that are divine.

And doing that, recognizing that you're standing there suspended between heaven and hell with a group of people listening to you.

There's nothing more important than preaching. And nothing, therefore, more costly or high stakes than preaching well.

And so I think a guy who's going to give an account, we're going to give a more strict account as those who teach.

I think a guy who honestly understands that accounting ought to tremble every Sunday and ought to cry out with Paul, who is sufficient for these things.

And remember Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 4, 1 and 2, it's required of stewards that they be found faithful.

Not that they'd be found flashy, not that they'd be found funny, not that they'd be found, you know, erudite, but they'd be found faithful to the word of God.

And that's what we want. If we're Christians, that's what we want in our pastors. And hopefully if we're preachers, that's what we want in our ministries.

Yes, Rondre, you have another question? Yeah, Pastor Thabiti, one of the things that I noticed also in your book is that you emphasize, you really kind of pointed the arrows at two particular people in reviving the black church.

The first one you pointed to were the leaders of the black church, the pastors. And the second one were the men.

You have a very big emphasis, especially towards the middle, towards the end of the book, on strong biblical leadership and on the place of men and the role of men, both in the home and in the church.

Could you elaborate on that a little bit? Yeah, with regard to pastors, you know, sometimes you guys open up the segment by saying, you know, that the decline of African -American theology was controversial.

For some people it was controversial because they thought I was talking about the church as a whole.

They thought I was aiming at black Christians, the rank and file, which couldn't have been further from the truth.

One of the things I learned in conversations coming out of the publication of The Decline is, no,

I need to make sure that people understand that my focus is more sharpened than that. That the fulcrum of change in a local church is the leadership.

You know, the fulcrum of change and progress and so much of the health and faithfulness of the church depends upon the men who lead it.

And so the critiques in this book and the critiques that were meant to be offered in The Decline were really offered at leadership, not ranking file, because I think we have a higher responsibility and give a greater accounting to God for our leadership and how we shepherd the sheep he's purchased with his blood.

And so therefore, there's this sort of corollary than focus on men, because believing the scriptures teaching about gender roles, it's clear in the

Bible that God calls qualified men, men of particular character and competence to be the ones who lead in the church and lead in the home.

Now that's explosive for a lot of people, but it is what the Bible teaches. It is simply what the

Bible teaches. And the Bible teaches nothing that is not for our flourishing. That's not for our well -being.

So I embraced this gladly. And so the focus on men then really is this acknowledgement that in many respects, as go men, so go to church and so go to family.

And I think we've had, Roger, maybe you can attest to this, but I think we've had now a generation of people saying things like,

I don't need a man or I can do, my mama used to put it this way, I can do bad all by myself.

And so I think we've had our experiment with trying to do family and do church without men.

And it's an utter failure. And the social science on that is clear. And the Bible on that is clear.

And so that's why the emphasis on reclaiming men, not to the exclusion of serving women and honoring and protecting women, but right now that's the piece that's missing in my view.

We have a Christian in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, who asks,

I know that you were a convert from Islam. What was it about the

Christian upbringing that you had that you needed to look elsewhere for religious fulfillment?

Yeah, I think this is related to Ron's Jewish question in some ways. The Christian upbringing

I had was a nominal Christian upbringing. I grew up in the Bible Belt. I grew up like a lot of people who think of themselves as Christians, but couldn't tell you who

Jesus is, honestly. And couldn't tell you, couldn't repeat the gospel to you in any sort of clear way.

And I grew up in a church with lovely people whom I think loved the Lord, but for much of the time really assumed the gospel.

And so like a lot of people in my generation, there was a sense in which I was socialized into the church, but I wasn't born again into the church.

And my dad left when I was 13. And, you know, at that pivotal period where you need a strong fatherly hand guiding you,

I was like a lot of teenagers, you know, without that and trying to figure out what it meant to be a man, you know, on my own and in the streets.

And so when I came into contact with Islam and Muslim men, here were African -American men who appeared very strong.

We're talking about the importance of a clean life, a moral life, importance of marrying your women, raising your children, contributing to your community.

And I was like a moth to flame. I knew I needed discipline in my life. And Islam is nothing if it's not a system of discipline and works and law.

And so my first attraction to Islam was to these strong looking men and to the discipline and the simple claims of the religion.

That would all unravel in about four or five years time. But that was what attracted me.

And was that Orthodox Islam or were you ever a part of the cult that claims a

Muslim background, but in reality is not Muslim in any way, the nation of Islam? I had many friends in the nation of Islam, but I was a

Sunni Muslim and so never part of the nation. Yes, and I remember we had that interview a number of years ago on the old

Iron Trip Bazaar. I would love to have you back to address that whole experience again at some point in the near future.

I'd like you to, in the 10 minutes or so that we have left, really get involved in some practical ways that you envision the church to be actively involved in to help restore a biblical pattern for the black church at large.

Yeah, we just want to, as a church, because you're right, these things don't mean anything if we don't bring them home and practice them at home, right?

So we mean to be, as a church, a new church plant committed to five things.

We call these our five M's and we extract these and summarize these from the book of Titus, which is the closest thing to a church planting manual,

I think, that you will find in the New Testament. The first M is the message of the gospel itself.

We want very much to have the gospel at the center of all we do, this good news about the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ, the

Son of God, the crucifixion of the Son of God as an atonement for our sins on the cross and the resurrection of the

Son of God for our justification. Opening up to all men everywhere, the possibility of eternal life and forgiveness of sins and everlasting righteousness through repentance and faith in Christ.

We want that to drive all that we do and so we endeavor for that to be preached in every sermon.

We have teams of folks, this really encourages me, the Lord has sent us some really zealous little evangelists, man, who go out every

Saturday, door to door, block to block, sharing the gospel, inviting people out to our services.

But we just mean to be driven by that message. Second M is mercy.

And so we want to bear witness through deeds of mercy in the community. And sort of paradigmatic for us is

Luke 10, 25 and 37, the Good Samaritan. We want to be good neighbors.

We think a justified life looks like a merciful life with those who are around us and whom we see in need.

So the message of the gospel, mercy in our community. The third thing is the multiplication of pastors and plants.

So we want to be involved in training men for the ministry and not just for our church, but to send them out for the work of the gospel in other churches and new churches that are started.

And so we just want church planting and pastor training in the DNA of our church. The fourth

M would be the sort of maturing of men, women, and families.

And this is where we want to take a hard look at how do we reach men in our community? And how do we sort of repair the breaches in family formation and family functioning that the grace of the gospel might be brought to bear on the home.

And then finally, the fifth M is missions, international missions. We want to see the gospel go from the four corners of the block to the four corners of the globe for the glory of Jesus Christ.

And as we commit ourselves to those basic biblical things, we hope to be able to lock arms with churches of like precious faith and encourage anybody along the way, just as we have been encouraged by the scripture and by other churches.

And by the way, Christian in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, if you could email us back your email address, you're going to be receiving a free copy of Reviving the

Black Church, a call to reclaim a sacred institution by Thabiti Anyabwile.

That's free of charge, compliments of BNH publishers. Do you think that it is at all racist or to be a be putting too much emphasis on race for churches, for instance, to have conferences where they specifically single out more capable, biblically orthodox black preachers in order to effectively reach the community?

Some people, some Christians, I think are like ostriches with their head in the sand, and they very piously say that any kind of a thing like that where you're intentionally picking people by race is racism, even if it's in a backhanded way.

But would you agree that there's nothing wrong with that strategy, in effect, might be even a good one? I would agree that that would be a good strategy.

And in part, all you're simply trying to do is model the diversity of the family of God that the scripture itself calls for.

And you're trying to, I think in some ways, proactively, positively, remedy or redress some of the exclusion that's happened historically.

And so you can't have that conversation absent the sort of broader historical context from which this need arises.

So we ask ourselves the question, where does the African -American church come from?

Well, one of the things I think if we're honest, we have to say is, well, it comes from racism.

There was no independent, institutional denomination until you get

Mother Bethel in Philadelphia, Absalom Jones, and Richard Allen, and a group of African -Americans who were forced into a segregated situation in a church that they had helped to build and had worshipped in for years.

And as our white brothers took that sort of segregationist stance, thus was birthed the sort of institutional denominational level

African -American church. And so if we're going to remedy that, we have to be intentional, we have to be self -conscious, and we have to be honest.

And we are not, in my experience, and maybe you both have a different experience, but in my experience, you don't drift toward unity.

You know, Ephesians 4 says, do everything to maintain the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace.

And sometimes that means recognizing affirmatively the sort of ethnic and cultural differences that exist, and recognizing that God has been at work in those other ethnic and cultural locations, and that that work that God has done in those locations is meant for the blessing of the whole church, right?

And so it becomes a very good, positive thing to do to benefit from others, to learn from others, to include others, and not assume that, actually, everything you need for life and faith is just sort of given to your own ethnic people.

It's not true. We need each other. We need each other, the entire body of Christ. And it's just good and wise of us to find appropriate ways to learn from each other.

I mentioned before a pastor who's now in heaven, Pastor Robert J. Cameron, who wrote a book,

The Last Pew on the Left, which is titled that because that's where he was, all blacks were forced to sit when they attended mass.

He was raised Roman Catholic in the South, and he wrote a book addressing the racist issue, and he evenly applied it.

He brought up the fact that he had a saying that he was quite fond of repeating, that racism is a sin problem, not a skin problem.

And he accused both blacks and whites equally of being guilty of this sin.

And because of that, a very major Christian publisher whose name you would very quickly immediately actually recognize, told him in a rejection letter that it was the finest unsolicited manuscript that they had ever received, but they were uncomfortable publishing anything that criticized the black church.

But what is your opinion about that? Do you think that the black church is still harboring a sin of racism just as much as whites may be doing?

And are sometimes those of minority races catered to in regard to their racism because they have been victims of persecution more recently in our past and even in our present.

And I always go back to the New Testament where even though the Jews had been persecuted in very severe ways by Gentiles and Romans and so on, they were still very harshly rebuked for racism against Gentiles.

But anyway, what is your comment on that, Thabiti? Well, you put a lot in that question.

You put a lot in that question. Yeah, Brother Cameron was a good man.

I did have the privilege of meeting him. And it tells you something about what's needed today when a publisher, a well -known publisher, would say it's the finest unsolicited manuscript we've ever received, and yet we're not going to publish it for fear.

Yes. If we're ever going to stare down racism and the wrong thinking and theology and practice that leads to it and supports it, it's going to take people of courage to tell the truth in love everywhere the truth needs to be spoken, to whomever it needs to be spoken.

So my opinion would be that the African -American Church has actually been, while no doubt you can find racism in the

African -American Church and racism in the African -American Church and hard feelings and unforgiveness and bitterness, that's not been the character of the

Church. I mean, to go back to someone we mentioned earlier, Dr. King, you know, the defining ethic of the civil rights movement is love.

And to be more contemporary, to go down to a Charleston, South Carolina, and see the shooting that took place there and to see in the immediate aftermath of the shooting this very

Christian and very gritty and very gripping act of forgiveness, in my understanding, that's been characteristic generally of the

African -American Church. Doesn't mean there aren't challenges to be made and it doesn't mean there aren't persons who don't play the race card or play on white guilt or things of that sort.

And that needs to be challenged inside and outside the Church from people inside the Church and from people outside the

Church in the same way that racism in the white Church or the Asian Church or Hispanic Church needs to be challenged from within and without.

But as I read the history and as I understand the Church, here's a place where I think Christianity has been faithfully lived among African -Americans.

When the Lord tells us to forgive our enemies, bless those who persecute you,

I think when you read black Church history, you're going to see a whole lot of that as opposed to a whole lot of reviling and a whole lot of retaliation.

And I just, I look at that and think that's a mark of the Holy Spirit among this part of the vineyard of God.

Amen. And in your final words, do you care to emphasize your meaning behind the subtitle of your book, a call to reclaim a sacred institution in regard to the black

Church? Yeah, I think the Church is holy. In all of her manifestations, all of her ethnic manifestations, wherever you have the

Church, there you have a called -out people of God, there you have a people participating in the holiness of God and belonging holy to God.

And so that sense of the sacred institution, not in the sense that the sort of some of the cultural things and distinctives are sacred, though God works in human culture and in human time.

And the call to reclaim is just a reminder that I think right now and for a long time, really, there's been this quiet warfare going on for the soul and the heart of the

African -American Church. You've got word -faith, charismatic, prosperity preachers involved in this war.

You've got liberal, progressive, liberationists involved in this war. You've got evangelicals and you've got a growing number of reformed evangelicals who are jousting in this battle.

And this is just a call to say, hey, it's the gospel people who will win, and it's the gospel people we should rally with, and it's the gospel that we should make plain so that we might win the hearts and souls and the imagination of what we call the

Black Church. Well, I know that you said you could only be on with us an hour, and I hope that in the future you can return for...

because I think that we have a lot more we could address with this book and in this subject, and I eagerly look forward to you returning to the program.

Well, that would be a real joy, and I'm grateful to have been on for this hour and have had the opportunity, and we'll look forward in God's timing to sharing again.

That'd be a great joy. And I know your website is anacostiariverchurch .org, that's a -n -a -c -o -s -t -i -a -riverchurch .org.

That's a -n -a -c -o -s -t -i -a -riverchurch .org. Thank you so much to BTN and Wiley, and we hope you come back soon on Iron Sharpens Iron.

Thank you, brothers. I look forward to it. The Lord bless your labors. The Lord bless you. Thank you. And we're going to be going to a break right now.

If you'd like to join us on the air with a question for Ron Jorlok, our co -host who is now our guest on Iron Sharpens Iron.

Some of you were looking forward to hearing Kareem Samshi -Basha give his testimony regarding his conversion out of Islam.

Well, Kareem could not make it on the program today, so we have to reschedule his interview.

But thankfully, in God's providence, I do have Pastor Ron Jorlok of First Baptist Church in Brooklyn in studio with me.

And we're going to continue the discussion that we began with the BTN and Wiley on reviving the black church.

A call to reclaim a sacred institution. Our email address is chrisarnson at gmail dot com.

chrisarnson at gmail dot com. Don't go away. We'll be right back with Pastor Ron Jorlok of First Baptist Church in Brooklyn, Maryland.

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That's lindbrookbaptist .org. Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen. If you've just tuned us in for the last hour, we had been interviewing

Thabiti Anyabwile who has written a new book, Reviving the

Black Church, A Call to Reclaim a Sacred Institution. Thabiti could only be on with this one hour, but in studio with me is my co -host and now my second guest,

Pastor Ron Jarlock of the First Baptist Church in Brooklyn, Maryland. And it's my honor and privilege to have you now as my guest on Iron Sharpens Iron, Pastor Ron Jarlock.

Yes, sir. Yes, sir. It's good to be here and good to be able to continue the conversation. Yes, and the

First Baptist Church of Brooklyn, Maryland. Another thing that kind of breaks stereotypes about it is that it is a

Southern Baptist church. And if you could tell us more about that. Yes, we've been

Southern Baptist from the inception. We started in 1916. So it's an old church.

Of course, I haven't been there. But the church has been around. Next year will be the centennial.

And the church has had a long standing relationship with the Southern Baptist through thick and thin, through the less happy years,

I guess you could say, during the time of theological decline and so on, even to now where there's been a lot more fruitfulness and faithfulness in the convention.

The church has weathered all those storms together. And you happen to be a believer in the doctrines known as the doctrines of sovereign grace.

They're known as reform theology, and they have also been nicknamed Calvinism, correct? Yes, yes.

And there's a long standing history, even within Southern Baptist, of a strand, not obviously the entire convention, but there has been a strand from the beginning that has adhered to the doctrines.

And I would definitely find myself in that stream. And tell us something about your own abbreviated fashion.

We did deal with this once before on our program. But your own Christian testimony of coming to Christ and then coming to the doctrines of grace.

Sure, I came to Christ, actually. My folks, mom and dad, were believers.

They came to Christ not too long after I was born. So I don't really have a time in my life where we weren't a church -going family.

I was only just a, I don't even think I was a year old when my parents came to faith. So they wanted, from day one, from the moment that they came to faith, they were committed to raising their children to know

Christ. So we grew up, I grew up, myself, my sister and brother, we grew up going to church every

Sunday. We grew up in Christian school. My parents just kind of went on a full -court press to make sure that we were trained and we were understood, that we grew to understand the scriptures and to understand the gospel.

So I never really had a time where I was outside of the

Christian culture, if you will. But I think if I were to be able to pinpoint when I personally came to faith in Christ, I would say it was probably around high school.

Even though I had made a profession of faith, it was one of those, those who are familiar with the

Christian subculture probably cringe when they hear stories like this. But I remember the days in Sunday school as a young kid when there was someone who the

Sunday school teacher would say, okay, well, who wants to accept Jesus into their heart? And of course, every child is going to raise their hands.

Who wants to go to heaven? Everyone raises their hand. And so I made a profession of faith in Christ, but I really say it was in high school where the claims of Christ really were impressed upon me, when

I was engaging with the scriptures and when I was seriously pondering and contemplating, meditating on who

Jesus was and what Jesus did, that God really did that. In terms of the doctrines of grace, that was a while later.

I don't hear a lot of folks who are right around the time of their conversion, they came to faith.

Usually it's almost like a progression, and it definitely was a progression in my life. My family, at least not to my knowledge, would consider themselves

Calvinists, at least in the historical sense. But it was right around college.

I had a professor who's a friend of yours and a friend to this show,

Eric Redman. And we had class, and he would begin every, just about every class with a reading from John Piper, one of the

Piper devotionals I had no idea who Piper was. I had just started listening to John MacArthur, but I didn't know anything about Reformed theology to be able to pinpoint that about MacArthur.

So it was more a Piper thing for me. He would say things about God that I just never heard before.

And that summer, summer of 2000, was really the summer that changed things for me.

As I was reading Piper, I decided I was going to read Pleasures of God that summer.

And as I was reading that, and he has in there the pleasure of God and his elect, new categories for me.

I had no idea what he was talking about. But as I was reading that and studying the scriptures, then that fall,

I went through John six. And as I was meditating on John six, again, I'm realizing no one comes to me unless the father draws him and so on.

It was just a life -changing thing for me when I started to realize that God is the one.

God is the initiator in salvation. He's the primary actor in salvation. And sure, we do have a responsibility.

We are called to come to faith in Christ. We are called to repent and to trust in Christ. But when we realize, as Paul says in Philippians two, that we are to work out our salvation in fear and trembling for it is

God who is at work in you, both to will and to do his good pleasure. So the willing and the doing of God's good pleasure is the work of God in us.

All of those things were just coming like a freight train to me. And I couldn't argue.

Theologically, I guess you could say I couldn't resist it. But God and his grace was just very clear to me.

And I was sold. And the fact that you are a

Southern Baptist pastor now, when did the Southern Baptist denomination become a part of your

Christian experience? Yeah, that was actually after college. I went to college in Maryland.

I was raised in Maryland. When I was going to college, there was a group of folks at the school that were regularly attending

Capitol Hill Baptist Church over in DC. It was just a trip down the interstate for us. So I would go down there and I would listen to Dever and his hour -long sermons.

And that was my entrance into Southern Baptist life.

And that's interesting because for most people, that's not what you think of when you think Southern Baptist. But that was my entrance into that world.

Afterwards, I learned more about the history of the Southern Baptist Convention. I was very much impressed by their resolve to get the gospel to the ends of the earth, their resolve to start

Baptist churches all over the place, from downtown to the plains and even to the far reaches of the earth.

And all of that just really was impressive to me. Their resolve to evangelize and to get the gospel as far as possible.

Sure enough, Southern Baptist, just like every family, has a few crazy uncles. So they're there and they're fun.

But at the same time, you definitely see a people who are united together around the spread of the gospel and whatever it takes to get the gospel to as many people as possible while we still have breath.

That was just a very big thing for me. And I became a

Southern Baptist pastor and have been for the last almost four years. And so you are a double minority in the

Southern Baptist Convention because not only are you black, but you're a Calvinist. And as we said, you hinted at before, there is a lot of Calvinism in the history and roots of the

Southern Baptist Convention. But today, they are a tiny, struggling minority within the group.

Yeah, historically, I mean, you could trace it historically. There's always been a diversity when it comes to that.

I mean, you have certain Baptists who were very much concerned about educating.

They were concerned about making sure that ministers were trained to preach the gospel.

And most of the time, the ones that were concerned about that, they were the ones that were more on the Calvinistic side and more on the reformed side.

And then you have strands of folks that were more on the revival side, the revivalistic side.

And they tend to focus more on evangelism, more on getting the gospel out to as many people as they possibly can.

And so you have this, really, from the beginning, from 1845, when the Southern Baptist started, you just have this kind of hodgepodge of folks who are on one side that are serious about the sovereignty of God and are serious about training people to, you know, training them in thinking in terms of Calvinism and in terms of the sovereignty and kind of a high view of God, if you will.

And then you have others that will definitely be more emphasizing on free will and emphasizing on man's responsibility to respond to the gospel.

What's always brought the Southern Baptist together, though, is the gospel, the primacy of the gospel, and ultimately, the primacy of the gospel in shaping the church, shaping the church to train people and to make disciples so that they would, too, go out and spread the gospel as well.

How would you react to someone, perhaps they would be a black individual or maybe not black individual, perhaps just a liberal, white individual, or they might not even be liberal, but have a sensitivity towards racism.

Mm -hmm. How would you react to someone who would say, how could you be a pastor in an institution like the

Southern Baptist Convention that has a history that is filled with racism and racist attitudes and it was pro -slavery and for many decades pro -segregation?

Mm -hmm. How do you respond to that kind of a retort to your

Mm -hmm. proclaiming and identifying yourself as a Southern Baptist pastor?

Well, first, I mean, I don't have anything to refute or anything like that.

It's true. You know, Southern Baptists began primarily over the issue of slavery.

They separated from another group of Baptists over the issue of slavery.

The main issue was, do we support missionaries, slave -owning missionaries as they go onto the mission field?

And you had the churches in the North that said no because they understood owning slaves, at least from the way we do it here in America, as being sin, that the institution of slavery, the

American institution of slavery was sinful. And the churches in the South said, no, we don't have a problem with that, largely because it was such a big influence on their economy and so on.

And so if they were to say no to that, they would have completely derailed their economy. And in all honesty, that was a sinful thing that they bought more about their money than they did about the people that were in the institution.

And then they broke off and they started their own convention, the Southern Baptist Convention. So the first thing is,

I'm honest about that. Yeah, of course they did. What I'm also honest about is they weren't the only ones.

Right. Virtually every denomination had their divide over race and over slavery.

And that continued on into the next century, into the 1900s, when you were talking Jim Crow. Virtually every denomination had their group that was segregation, that there were segregationists and they had their group that were non -segregation.

So really, honestly, if there are people that would come up and they would say, why are you a part of the

Southern Baptist Convention when they have such a racist past? My answer is really the question would be probably more broadly, why am

I a Christian in America? Because just about everyone had those issues.

Or even why am I an American? Exactly, why am I an American? Because it's so much a part of the story of our country and the story of our history.

Now, the Southern Baptists have made some great strides and I do want to be clear about that.

For instance, if you look at the resolutions of the Southern Baptist Convention, when they gather together every year for their annual meeting, they have a time, it's just a one big glorious business meeting and they'll have resolutions.

And if you look through the history, you can see the many resolutions that were passed regarding racism and denouncing racism as sin.

In 1995, the church, the convention published an apology where they publicly repented of the sins that were committed during the convention's history.

You could even talk about just as recently as the previous Southern Baptist president.

The current one is Ronnie Floyd, but the president before him was Fred Luter. He was the first African -American president of the

Southern Baptist Convention. There's a lot of work that needs to be done on the ground level, on the church level.

But what I'm noticing just with my own set of eyes is that the convention is doing a lot of work, a lot of proactive and intentional work to mend the divide that they really helped to create over the last few centuries.

And I guess another thing that you could say is, what do you want the Southern Baptist denomination to remain an all white institution?

I mean, do you want to foster a segregationist spirit?

Obviously, if the Lord is doing something restorative and has transformed that denomination in some ways, that there's nothing wrong with being a part of that to visibly demonstrate that as an

African -American pastor. Now, just out of curiosity, I have friends who are fundamentalists, fundamentalist independent

Baptists in particular, who think that you should never be a part of a denomination that has rampant heretical problems, not only the liberalism, but that has for the most part been expunged from my knowledge that used to be at one time rampant though, even at Southern Seminary, which is now a bastion of conservative

Calvinism. But how do you respond to that being unevenly yoked would be the charge that you're in a denomination?

There's a lot of easy believism. And I'm saying this, I'm not a

Southern Baptist, but I'm saying this because of the reports of biblically faithful men

I know who are in the Southern Baptist denomination, men in founders ministries and others affiliated who say that there is a lot of nominal

Christianity that is inbred, if you will, in that denomination, because testimonies of conversion are so easily accepted as being genuine just because of the recital of prayers and so on.

But how do you respond to that? Yeah, first off, the fact of the matter is in every denomination, you're going to have churches that are unfaithful.

That's nothing new. If you remember, we're

Protestants, and what was the birth of Protestantism? The birth of Protestantism was an unfaithful church.

You had people that were unfaithful. Well, we started Protestant churches and guess what? Protestant churches became unfaithful in some way, shape, or form.

And so then thus starts the spider web, if you will, out of all these different denominations and so on.

We're all striving, at least we want to strive, to produce healthy churches within our denomination and across denominations.

The fact of the matter is, at least from my standpoint, when I look at the Southern Baptist Convention, especially being a convention, and by that what we mean is we are a partnership of autonomous churches.

So as a partnership of autonomous churches, you have to ask, what are the things that we partner on?

We partner on the gospel. We partner on evangelism, getting the gospel to the ends of the earth.

We partner on education, so training up men and women in the gospel so that they can be faithful in their churches.

All of these different things are what unite us together as a Southern Baptist Convention. And so if there are unfaithful churches, there are unfaithful churches.

So what do we do? Well, we get back to what we're about. We're about the gospel.

And what we do, we go and we train up people and so on so that they can go into those churches and they can help to reform those churches and to transform them.

That's what we want to do as a Southern Baptist Convention. Another way of saying it is this.

If there are problems that are going on on the ground level, that's one thing.

If there are things that are on the institutional level where you look and you say, okay, there's something wrong with this, there's a disease in the bone, if you will, of this convention, then that's a different problem.

If there are problems on the ground level, then those problems,

Lord willing, can be resolved as we continue to train up guys and continue to work them through and so on and then send them out and be faithful in the churches that they go to.

If there are problems in the bone of the convention, like there was, say, a few decades ago, then there's a bigger problem.

We've got to do some reworking here. We've got to go to a break right now. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question for Pastor Ron Jurlock, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com

c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com and please include at least your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the

USA. We still have a few more books to give away. The book by Thabiti Anyabwile, Reviving the

Black Church, A Call to Reclaim a Sacred Institution. If you have a question that's good enough to be read on the air, the question cannot be, can

I have a free copy of Thabiti's book? You have to actually have a question that is relative to our discussion.

chrisarnsen at gmail .com chrisarnsen at gmail .com Don't go away.

We'll be right back with Pastor Ron Jurlock, the First Baptist Church of Brooklyn, Maryland.

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Welcome back. This is Chris Arns, and if you just tuned us in, our guest currently is Pastor Ron Jorlock, who is the pastor of First Baptist Church in Brooklyn, Maryland, not

Brooklyn, New York. And we are discussing, we're continuing the topic that we began with, the

BT Anyabwile, reviving the black church, a call to reclaim a sacred institution.

And CJ in Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York wants to know if even our discussing on a

Christian radio broadcast, the notion of black Christians and white Christians just helps to promote the concept of racism, even if it's more subtle.

You know, that's actually a good question. If I could frame it a little bit, it's kind of like what we have on the national level right now regarding Black Lives Matter, All Lives Matter.

You know, is it really right to even talk in terms of Black Lives Matter? The way that I frame, the way that I understand it personally is yes, you know,

All Lives Matter. And yes, all, you know, all Christians matter.

And we should be thinking in terms of what can we do to help all Christians? But by definition, just logically speaking, if I'm talking about all

Christians, then I've got to be also be talking about black Christians. The fact of the matter is, if you see a particular need in a particular context, you don't have to address that need at the expense of all of the other needs.

You know, addressing one need doesn't mean I'm not, you know, I don't care about anybody else or anything like that. What it means, at least what it should mean simply, is that I recognize that there's a need in this particular context and we need to do something to meet that need.

In particular here, we're talking with black churches and black Christians. We're not meaning, and I know that Thabiti wouldn't mean the same thing, wouldn't mean this either, that to talk about black churches, you know, doesn't mean that that no other churches need revival or that no other churches are, you know, should be, you know, should be of our interest or of our focus or anything like that.

All that Thabiti's saying and I would agree with him 100 % is that there's a need in this particular context and there's a declining that's happening and we as Christians, because we're talking about brothers and sisters here and we're talking about the sake of the gospel and the need of the gospel in this particular community, we need to do whatever we can to make sure that the gospel continues to go forth and that people within the black community are continuing to hear and be discipled and are growing in Christian maturity.

And C .J., you'll be getting a free copy of Reviving the Black Church, a call to reclaim a sacred institution and you'll be getting that in the mail,

God willing, very soon. Now, the congregation that you pastor,

First Baptist Church of Brooklyn, that really technically wouldn't be under the heading of a black church, would it?

Because it's integrated, right? No, no, no. Never historically has the church been predominantly black.

In fact, for the vast majority of the church, I'd even say even today, the church has been predominantly white.

The church also is a part of a history in Baltimore and particularly in Brooklyn.

There has been racism in the past, both in Brooklyn and in our church, in past generations and so on, segregation and thus forth.

There's a neighborhood that's right next to Brooklyn called Cherry Hill. And Cherry Hill is very, has historically been predominantly black.

And there had been racial tensions over the decades between Cherry Hill and Brooklyn and so on.

And we see kind of the residue of that even today. But with a lot of the changes that have happened in the city, the ethnic makeup of the city isn't as distinct and segregated as it used to be.

So you're finding a lot more blacks, a lot more Asians, Hispanics in Brooklyn than probably ever before in the neighborhood's history.

And one of the things that I am striving to do as pastor is to not just navigate the sociological changes there, but I also want us as a church to recognize that this is the providence of God, that God is bringing these people into our neighborhood with their different stories, different backgrounds, different experiences and so on.

But perhaps God is bringing them into our neighborhood so that we can make disciples and we can start thinking outside the box from what we've been doing in ministry and so on and start thinking about all people and reaching all people with the gospel.

Obviously your neighborhood was the focus of news reports on television screens probably globally.

In fact, not even probably, they were the subject of news reports globally for quite a while due to the

Ferguson, not the Ferguson, I'm sorry. The Freddie Gray. Right, right.

And the riots and so forth. What do you have to say to those who are very prone to call for activism and very often that activism results in violence and so on?

What is your response to that in addition to the distrust and apparent hatred that seems to be rampant against the police departments of our country and in our cities and so on?

Yeah, a lot of the unrest goes a long way back.

This wasn't something that happened overnight. These are things that have happened for decades, particularly in Baltimore.

Baltimore is a city that adopted a lot of the mass incarceration laws and so on.

If you can go back, you have President Reagan with the war on drugs, President Clinton, who wanted to be tough on crime and tough on drugs.

So he called for more imprisonment measures and so on. And Baltimore is a part of all of that.

Baltimore has a very vibrant drug culture, if you could even use that term.

There's a lot of money involved in all of that. And so one of the ways that the city officials wanted to deal with that was with incarceration.

So basically, if you look suspicious, you're going in. We'll ask questions later.

And that's a lot of the culture. One of the things that I personally lament with all of this is there aren't a lot of people that are asking simple questions like, why?

Why are there so many people involved in this drug culture? Why are there so many people that are involved in gang activity and gang culture?

What's going on there? And there are a lot of different issues. So a lot of the tension that you have in the city is ultimately because you don't have a lot of people talking to each other.

A lot of people trying to understand the other person. So you have police that come in and they are naturally afraid and naturally suspicious and naturally on edge.

And you have residents who are naturally suspicious and they're naturally on edge and so on in return.

And what you have and what happens when you have these two people who aren't, or these two sides who aren't really talking to each other and not really seeking to understand each other, they just kind of look at each other as the other, then you're going to have fodder for a lot of tension and a lot of unrest.

And even as we saw or in recent months, a lot of violence. But fundamentally the issue is from a

Christian perspective, the issue is anthropological. Are we created in the image of God?

Are all people created in the image of God? If all people are created in the image of God, then there ought to be a level of respect for the poor, lower class, section eight lady or man who are struggling to get by and they're trying to figure out how to get on their feet and so on.

And they are feeling the temptation, say the ladies may be feeling the temptation from prostitution. The men are feeling the temptation from drugs and from gang culture and all of that.

And they're trying to figure out how they're going to feed their babies and how they're going to feed and how they're going to make their ends meet and so on.

Well, we as Christians, we should have something to say to them. We should have a message that's right, that's perfect for them, for their worldview, for the way they see things, for that culture.

And at the same time, for the policemen, they're created in the image of God as well. They're tasked to protect, to serve and protect just as we hear over and over again.

And so there's a Christian response to them as well, in terms of making sure that they are doing their jobs well, making sure that they are, that they're promoting justice and not seeking injustice, you know, and things like that.

So a lot of the tension that we see here, I think as Christians, we have an opportunity to inject the light of the gospel into that world and into that culture.

And perhaps by God's grace, be able to bring some type of reform. There is a,

I don't want to identify his name for the mere fact that I don't have his quote right in front of me.

So I don't want to misrepresent something he said. But there's a very well -known reformed black pastor that you're very familiar with.

I don't know if you know him personally, but you know who he is. He's an author and so on. I'm not Thabiti, it was somebody else, who after the riots,

I'm not sure if they were in the ones in Baltimore or in Ferguson, but he basically, when he was being urged to give a response, being a black

Christian and a prominent leader in the community, he was being urged to give a response to this.

And he said that he felt hesitant to be criticizing the white establishment or the police force before he first asked the

African American community, what are you going to be doing about children growing up and fatherless families and the murder rate of blacks murdering blacks soaring through the roof and that kind of a thing.

What is your response to that? Especially when you will have other

African Americans perhaps hurling the accusation of Uncle Tomism or treating that kind of attitude as being a traitor to one's people.

Yeah, I look at it honestly as I look at it from a comprehensive sense. If we, going back to anthropology, if we are all creating the image of God and so therefore all of us have a level of value and dignity that's embedded into us as image bearers, and yet at the same time, if we are sinners and therefore embedded into our nature, embedded into our humanity is depravity as well.

So you have this tension of dignity and depravity that's in every single person.

Then it should not surprise us that there are problems at home. It shouldn't surprise us that there are problems in the neighborhood.

It shouldn't surprise us that there are problems even on the political and civil judicial levels as well.

Sin is rampant everywhere. Sin is rampant in our courts. Sin is rampant on the police force.

Sin is rampant in our congressional buildings and so on, congressional offices.

Sin's rampant in the bedroom. Everywhere you look, there is dignity and there's depravity.

So I try not to split up the discussion because you have some folks that say, well, it's a responsibility thing.

So we have guys that are not being responsible at home. They're getting ladies pregnant before they're marrying them.

And then once they have babies, then they leave and all that. Yes, that's an issue. That's a huge issue. And then you have people that are on another side that say, well, no, it's a systemic issue.

We have people that aren't representing us well and they're not coming down and listening to the particular needs that are going on in our communities and things like that.

Well, that is a serious issue as well. It's not an either or thing. It's a comprehensive thing.

Depravity abounds everywhere we look. And so as Christians, I don't think that we should necessarily pick and choose which is more depraved than the other or anything like that.

Or nor should we think, well, this part over here is dignified, if you will.

But this part over here is depraved. Well, no, it's a little bit of a mixture everywhere you look. And we've got to be faithful to deal with the issues, the depravity that's going on in the homes, especially in minority communities where single parenting is much higher and where you have more abortions and you have a lot more issues on those levels.

But we also, as Christians, have to deal with what's going on on the systemic levels as well because depravity is there too.

We have two questions that may just force you to wrap up the program with that because we have less than 10 minutes left.

But we have two questions, very good ones, from Susan in Newville, Pennsylvania.

The first question she asks is, how intertwined do you think African -American

Calvinism and slavery are? And second part, what gets you excited about the topic of African -Americans and the reform tradition?

And I don't know if I should speak for the questioner, but I'm wondering if she means slavery in regard to the sovereignty of God over that occurring as a part of his ordained plan.

As a Calvinist, you would agree that even all the evil acts of the world are a part of God's plan.

And some people are horrified when we say that when evil things occur, how could you say that's a part of God's plan?

Like even the Holocaust, which is always the worst example that people can think of.

And I hope I didn't misinterpret our listener's question. Well, that gets into the issues of providence and theodicy and so on.

I believe that God is sovereign over all things. Thus, he is sovereign over the good and he's sovereign over the bad.

A great example of that is if you read in the book of Job, Job 1 and Job 2, where Job himself attributed all the things that were happening to him to God.

And twice in Job 1 and Job 2, it says in all this, Job did not sin with his lips. He didn't say anything wrong.

So I take the biblical writer to be correct, because of my understanding of scripture being

God's word and being inerrant. I take that to mean that Job was absolutely right. This was, you know,

God was behind all of this and God was the one who gave the green light to Satan and so on.

At the same time, you know, when you start looking at issues of slavery and so on, you know, there are significant evils that happened during that period.

Many of which, many of the repercussions and the implications are still around even right now in 2015.

We're still dealing with the effects of those years. At the same time, when you look at it and you see

God's providence in all of this, you know, God worked all of these things for good.

You know, Genesis 50, what man intended for evil, God intended for good. You look at how many believers there are here in the

States, you know, African -American believers that are here in the States. You think of even what Thabiti was saying in terms of missions and how many missionaries were sent globally from black churches black

Christians who have their roots at least here in the

States. The roots of their salvation, the roots of their conversion really came from whether they be slave owners or whoever, you know, that were there.

You think of even some of the traditions that we have and some of the theologians that we revere who are very sinful in their, you know, they own slaves and so on,

Jonathan Edwards probably being one of the more notable names and so on. And yet at the same time, you can see how, you know, even in, you almost want to say in spite of the sin and so on,

God has done great things and accomplished great good for the glory of his son in the redeeming of his people.

So I, you know, abhor the evils that were done to, you know, my ancestors and so on.

And I, you know, it was shameful. It was dehumanizing. It was wicked.

And yet the irony of God's providence, I'm here and I, you know, trust in Christ as my savior and I'm even able to pastor a majority white church and all of that.

And so all of this is connected in terms of God's story and what God is doing and redeeming his people from every tribe, every people, every nation.

Now, in terms of the second question with, you know, reformed theology and what gets me excited about reformed theology and among African -Americans, honestly, what gets me excited is

I'm seeing people reading their Bibles. You know, yeah, I mean, that's amazing to me.

I cannot tell you, I like to call it, you know, you have people that say

Calvinism. You have people that say reformed theology. I like to call it big God theology. I cannot tell you how influential it has been to me to recognize that it's better to have a big

God than not to have a big God. It's better to have a God who is in control of suffering.

It's better to have a God who is in control of evil and who is not surprised by it, but who is in control of it and works all of it together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose.

It's good to have a God who works from before the foundation of the world so that he's not surprised by anything.

And he, you know, like I know Piper will say repeatedly, God never says oops, you know, or anything like that.

But all of this is a part of his plan and all of this is a part of his purpose and to see more people, especially of my ethnic heritage, that are getting that and are rejoicing in the bigness of God.

That thrills me as a pastor and it thrills me as a preacher of the gospel. And when all is said and done, don't you think the duty of every

Christian is to have their greatest allegiance to God, his word and his people far above any commitment or viewed brotherhood of someone of the same race or ethnicity?

Absolutely. Our family heritage, we do have an ethnic family heritage and so on.

And we do see the sensitivity to that. You know, for instance, Paul in Romans nine and Romans 10, where he's weeping over his brothers, you know, the

Jews. And yet at the same time, his great longing wasn't just, you know, regarding their

Jewish heritage, but the fact that they weren't saved. He wanted them to be saved so that they could be a part of, if you will, his forever family, the family of God.

And I really share that same sentiment. You know, I've preached before on a typical

Sunday and I've said, you know, your family, you know, you're closer to people of different ethnicities who love

Jesus than you are to the people of your own ethnicity. But we want to see people of every tribe, every nation, every language come to faith in Christ.

And any way that we can do that, whether it be among Blacks or Asians or Hispanics or whoever, we want to do whatever we can to make sure everybody knows

Jesus Christ. And if you could let our listeners know your website and other contact information.

Yes, sir. Firstbaptistbrooklyn .org is our website. You can find me on Facebook and Twitter and all of that.

Just find me somewhere. I'm probably there. R -O -N -J -O -U -R.

And the last name is L -O -C -K -E. Thank you so much for being our guest again, Pastor Ranjour. I look forward to having you back.

And I want our listeners to always remember for the rest of their lives that Jesus Christ is a far, far greater savior than you are a sinner.