Joel James Interview

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the apostle Paul said, but we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

In short, if you like smooth, watered down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.

Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth. We have a little theme here. The theme is always biblical, always provocative, always in that order.

And we're just trying to produce a radio show, a show that I'd like to listen to. So I want biblical things, and I want them in a provocative way, packaged in 24 minutes, books, guests, issues. And so today I have my friend, Joel James on the line, pastor in South Africa.

Joel James’ Background and Ministry in South Africa

Joel, welcome to No Compromise Radio. Mike, it's a pleasure to be here with you. Thanks for the invitation. Now we have lots in common from Nebraska to Master's Seminary, to ministering together in South Africa.

How did this all happen?

I went out to the Master's Seminary after graduating from the university in Nebraska and was really privileged just to be a part of Grace Community Church, and eventually was sent out by Grace Church to South Africa as a missionary.

John MacArthur had been in the radio in South Africa for many years, the Grace to You program, and was well known there. And so he did some trips to South Africa to do some preaching, and out of that, some church planning opportunities came up.

And in 1995, my wife and I were sent to the city of Pretoria in South Africa to pastor a little church called Grace Fellowship. And we've been there for the last 20 years, pastoring that church and sending out church planners, training up men, South African men, and in the preaching of the gospel and expository preaching and all that sort of thing.

So it was really through the connections with Dr. John MacArthur that we were able to go to South Africa.

Joel, when I was in seminary with you, I was intimidated by you. And now that it's been 17 years, I'm just thankful for you. Is that showing any sign of growth on my part?

Well, maybe I've grown too, I would expect, in the meantime. I'm a pretty small guy, and so I don't know how I could have been intimidating to you, Mike. You're much bigger than me.

Free Resources for Biblical Counseling and Theology

I don't know. Joel is pastoring Grace Fellowship Pretoria, and if you want to get online, it's gracefellowship .co .z, or Z-A. And Joel, what I love about your website, and I use them all the time and try to encourage others to do the same, whether they're in leadership or lay people, you've got great free resources in counseling, preaching, theology.

Tell me your philosophy behind that, because I think people need to go to your website and click on free resources. There's so much information there for everyone to obtain for free.

Well, that's really kind of you to mention that, Mike. And what we saw early on when we went to South Africa, and as I was talking about this with the elders in my church, is that one of the great needs in Africa, and I suppose around the world, but especially in Africa, is men just don't have access to the books that we do here in the West.

They don't have the printing houses, they don't have the resources to purchase them, or libraries, and so Africa's not much of a reading continent either. The materials have to be, without being simplistic, have to be simple and clear.

And so we decided to try to meet that niche and try to provide for the African church materials that would be helpful to them on theology and the kinds of issues that they would be wrestling with. And of course, many of those are the same in the West.

So yeah, through the years, we've tried to write some materials that would be helpful to people, put them up on our internet website so they can just be downloaded for free, because that's what the internet is for, I think, is to just get as much truth as possible into people's hands, and we're not worried about making money on any of that, that's not the issue.

We just want the truth to go out. And so they're on expository preaching, theology, biblical counseling kind of issues, shepherding, pastoring issues, and the missions issue that we're gonna talk about today as well.

Well, for our listeners today, go to this website, gracefellowship .co .za, and click on the free resources, and click on the one, for instance, pornography. I thought that was done well, and we are all, according to Romans chapter 15, supposed to counsel one another, and we're able to do that.

And so maybe you yourself are struggling, maybe your friend is, maybe your spouse is, and you go there and you see, what does the Bible teach? Forget psychology, forget all these other issues, behavior modification, what does the Bible teach?

And I think you'll be encouraged, and if you go to that one, then it will lead you to another. And so, Joel, thanks for putting all those on the internet for free.

Well, it's really a privilege for us to do that.

The Shift From Gospel Ministry to Social Action in Missions

Okay, Joel, I read your article in the Master Seminary Journal spring 2014, and it really was impactful, and I want you to talk a little bit about that to our listening audience. It's entitled, Regaining Our Focus, A Response to the Social Action Trend in Evangelical Missions.

And you and our friend Brian Bedebach wrote the article. What is the article about? Why should it matter? What's the social gospel? Just talk to me about what you were feeling and what provoked you to write the article.

Sure, you know, Brian and I are both missionaries in Africa. Brian's been in Africa, he's in Malawi now for about 20 years, and we've been in South Africa for 20 years ourselves. And so, we've just seen a major and significant, and not at all subtle, transition in missions Western evangelical missions in the last, well, even just the last 10 years, especially obviously for us coming out of the United States.

And that transition has been away from things like leadership training, church planting, Bible translation, kind of the old guard core of what biblical missions, evangelical missions is all about. We've seen a transition away from that to social projects, things like digging wells and healthcare and education kind of things.

And those things aren't necessarily bad, but it just concerns us that as missionaries in Africa, that we see what we believe will be long-term most effective and most important in helping the continent of Africa, the gospel of Jesus Christ and strong Bible teaching churches.

We just see those things starting to be pushed unintentionally, but very really pushed into the background, almost out to the periphery. And so that's a very disturbing trend for us. As I've said to some guys, we're out there on the sharp end of the spear that everybody holding the hand grip on the other end of the spear position is taking place or the significance of that transition.

Why the Church Must Prioritize Preaching, Church Planting, and Leadership Training

Joel, let's say there's a church in the United States and they with good motives and intentions wants to help a church and help a country and continent. And they were to call Grace Fellowship up and say, we've got a team of 20 men and women support system and we'd like to dig some wells and help people.

So we don't just say be warmed and filled. And could you be a host church for us to do that? How would you respond and how would you walk them through the real issues? I guess at the expense of sounding cold or callous.

Sure, and that's always the challenge, Mike, is nobody wants to be known as being against clean water and cute puppy dogs. I mean, I certainly don't. And so it's very much an issue though of folk rather than what is good.

Everything a church can do or missionaries could do doesn't mean that they should do that. There are some things that only the church can do and that includes church planting and the preaching of the gospel and leadership training.

The truth is unbelievers make really bad church planters. And so I just look at it and say whether believers can do, set up water projects and things like that isn't so much the issue and I'm not against everything like that that you could ever do or orphanages or that sort of thing.

But the church is just, as I look at the book of Acts, I see that the church is extremely focused in its mission, the effort is very much Bible teaching, leadership training, church planting. Bible translation wasn't necessary in that context as it would be still in some places in Africa.

So I just look at the church, New Testament church being very focused on that. And what I've seen is if you wanted to say that church should 90 focus on what I call book of Acts kind of missions and 10 coming along and doing some of these social sort of things, okay, fine.

There's a range of, that's no problem. What has happened though is that those numbers have been inverted. 10 of the missionaries coming out are focusing on book of Acts kind of missions and 90 are focusing more on the well digging thing and stuff that you've mentioned.

That is a very, very disturbing trend. So I would try to talk that church through that and really go back to what does the book of Acts tell us about missions and how the early church fulfilled Christ's commission to make disciples of the world because I think that's not just a suggestive thing.

I'm not gonna call it prescriptive, but what the church did in the book of Acts tells us how the apostles viewed and fulfilled Christ's commission. And I think that needs to guide us as well.

Pragmatism, Social Gospel, and the Loss of Gospel Offense

We're talking to Joel James, pastor of Grace Fellowship in Pretoria. Joel, tell me if you agree with my thinking here regarding this, cause you're in the front lines. The modern evangelical Western church probably for reasons.

One, lack of biblical knowledge. We don't know what Acts was teaching. Number two, maybe it feels good to go do these social things. And number three, influenced by Stott early on and then Tim Keller to a large degree now.

Do those three reasons seem to summarize why lots of churches are so for the social gospel at the expense of the gospel gospel?

Oh, I think they definitely do. And I would in fact, add one more to that, Mike. And that would be a kind of a newfangled kind of pragmatism. And what I mean by that is, the church growth movement in the eighties and so on said that to get people to come to your church, to get the unbelievers to like us, which according to the gospel of John seems odd since Jesus said the world will indeed hate you if you're living and preaching out the gospel and the word of God.

But to get the world to like us, what you have to do is you have to set up these kind of Las Vegas style entertainment shows in your church and craft your worship service around that and take out all the theology and so on.

We're all familiar with that, the Bill Hybels, Willow Creek sort of thing. That's kind of passe these days, though there's still a lot of churches doing that. The new trend is saying, well, to get the world to like us, we need to do and be involved in these social action sort of ministries and live for the economic and social benefit of the city and kind of wrap our ministry up in that or at least make it a kind of a 50, all that it seems is tried in the culture, their hatred for us.

And so what happens in those kind of efforts though is the gospel, because it is inherently offensive to the unbelieving mind, the gospel just has to gradually be filtered out and it gradually just, so there's this idea though, that if in the downtown area and all that's fine, but if the church focus on that, somehow unbelievers will pat us on the head and say, well, you're not so bad after all, I guess we like you.

And that makes people feel good, but I'm not sure that's exactly what our mission is as the church. Jesus said, we're a stone of stumbling.

Because he's a stone of stumbling. Joel, when Brian talks in one of his footnotes as he co-authored this journal article with you, that when you lead with a social gospel and you have that as a priority, it ends up taking all your time.

So even pragmatically, once you start dealing with that issue, it just consumes the majority of your time as you're working out the logistics for the social issues. Is that what he was trying to say there?

Oh, absolutely. And that is just so very true. Any group or agency or mission or whatever is trying to say, oh, we're gonna keep this balance between gospel proclamation, the teaching of the word of God and social action quickly finds out that in regard to budgets, staffing and planning hours and just activity hours during the week, they quickly find out that the social side of it swallows up the Bible teaching and gospel preaching side of it.

And that's just inevitable because social ministry is kind of like a black hole. It just sucks up everything within its gravitational reach because it's endless and it's so expensive. And so though people often will start with the very best intentions in trying to keep some kind of balance, what happens is the social aspect of the ministry just really swallows thing up.

Those who read the paper that Brian and I did will see that footnote that you're referring to and it's kind of humorous. Let me give another example since some might go back and read that one. I was talking with a friend here in the States who sent a church planner and evangelist a number of years ago to the Caribbean, one of the islands in the Caribbean.

And he was saying they have learned this lesson themselves because a couple of years ago, he went to visit this guy and realized that he was spending his whole time administrating the case through six or whatever was school that they'd started, administrating the water purification plant, meeting with the government to make sure the water regulations were correct, getting some parts for the machines that had broken down.

And he spent a week with this missionary and he realized that 90 of this guy's week was going to stuff like that. And they just sat down and talked about it and said, you know what? Back to doing what you were sent here to do.

And that is preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ and planning churches. And so they saw that and most people don't see that. They just keep, you might unintentionally be changing your whole approach to missions imperceptibly, gradually, and then faster and faster without even realizing it because the social, the gospel preaching, teaching of the word of God side,.

It's just inevitable. It's happened time after time. Joel, you guys did a good job showing in the article that the apostles, they made sure to keep themselves at a distance in terms of being entangled in the everyday administration for this very reason, because you can't do both things well.

Yeah, I mean, in the article, there's a quote from a gentleman who just acknowledges. He says, you know, this sort of thing is very, very time consuming and missionaries will find this very difficult or church pastors and, you know, but then he just goes on and, you know, basically he just runs up the white flag and acknowledges that the social is going to eat up the word of God and the gospel side of things.

And so, you know, don't even bother to worry about it. And so that's just extremely distressing to me because like most of your listeners, I passionately believe in the power of the word of God and the gospel of Jesus Christ and that that is the solution to man's problems.

You know, Paul would not have defined man's problems, find them on the theological level. And it's interesting in the paper, we talk about the book of Romans and Paul's trip to Rome that he was anticipating in Romans as a test case of this, the city of Rome and, you know, was around a million people when Paul wrote the letter of Romans and it had all the social problems and more that our modern world has to a degree that probably would be unimaginable to most of us.

And when Paul wrote to the Romans, he didn't say, oh, I'm so eager to come and do worst plan orphanages and help get rid of the incredible unemployment and the poverty and the slavery and the prostitution and the trafficking in children and all that was taking place in Rome.

Paul looked at all that, that we knew it was there and he said, you know what, I'm eager to come and preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. And that was a gospel, not of social action. It was a gospel of sin in Jesus Christ.

Paul knew the problems and his soul towards the preaching and proclaiming of the word of God. And I think we need to imitate that because not as much has changed today as people think. We say, oh, things are different today.

Well, no, it's not as good.

The Church’s Mission Is Proclamation, Not Private Charity Projects

Joel, you are a perfect guest for No Compromise Radio and you're nicer than I am. So see, everybody wins. Joel, let me ask you this. If I look at a typical church in America or in the Western world, let's just talk generalities.

They'll have 20 different missionaries. They support some $25 a month, some 20 a year, some 1 ,000 a year, and some are nurses and doctors and people that build wells. So they have all these different people.

The way we've worked at a Bethlehem Bible Church and tell me if you like the idea or don't or how do we get there? We've said, let's begin to support people that do overseas what we do here. That is train men for gospel ministry, train people for the ministry of preaching and proclaiming.

And so let's only support from here on out people overseas that do what we do. So for a long time, you've got social gospel churches. It makes sense for them to send out social gospel ministries. But for us, we don't wanna do that.

And so is that a good cure for the ills of Africa?

I think you're exactly on track, Mike, and that's the center of the target and you've expressed it very well. Let me say it this way. Many of your listeners would be familiar with Gilbert and de Young's book, What is the Mission of the Church?

Which I think addresses some of these issues. What Brian and my paper has tried to do is address it specifically in a missions context. And I suppose you could have called it, What is the Mission of Missions?

And saying, what is on, because it's basically an ecclesiological issue, what the church focuses on in the book of Acts and what I know your church does there in Massachusetts. We need to focus on in missions because that's what the church can do that no one else can do and what the church must do.

No place for within the church, us reaching out with love and concern and mercy. There's a huge place for that. In fact, Brian and I mentioned in our paper that people in our churches there in South Africa are involved in things like training underprivileged African farmers, how to farm better, and then they get food when they're in Africa.

And they're done with that, trash in their neighborhood. And that's fantastic for Christians to be involved in that. It gives them an opportunity to express their gift of mercy. That's great. But the church corporate has a different mission.

The church corporate has a mission to training. And as you said, that's what your church is doing and focusing on. And I think many of your listeners focusing on that. And then exactly the same, the economic and social situations in Africa.

What we need to do is bring the gospel of Jesus Christ within that context to transform lives in that context. Joel, I agree. And I was thinking as you were talking,.

My mother died of lung cancer, my father died of lung cancer, but I don't want the church that I'm pastoring to get involved in cancer research and working behind the scenes for cancer walks. It's an admirable cause.

I hate so many people dying of cancer, but that's my own private thing. If I decide to do something, I do it individually and privately. I'm not saying the mandate of the church is lung cancer, because you're going to die anyway sooner or later.

But the mandate of the church is the good news of Christ Jesus, the God man, who is a sin bearer of all those who would believe and he's coming back soon. That's where we need to be. And I think that's where I want our listeners to be as well.

Yeah, you have a confidence in the word of God and its ability to transform lives and accomplish God's work in this world. And so you want to put that front and center. And those other things you said, I think that the ice bucket challenge thing, I mean, I'm just visiting the States, so I just heard about that.

It's fine for individual believers to do that, but that's not the mission of the church, right?

We're going to have churches doing ice bucket challenges soon enough. I'm sure they will. So Joel, we've got about a minute left or so. Don't you think a lot of the problems stem from our category error of we think we live out the gospel.

We are the message instead of having a message proclaimed about another. Absolutely.

I think DA Carson has said it well. He said, the gospel is never what we do. The gospel is what God has done in Jesus Christ. And so we can't talk about doing the gospel. That's a categorical problem on your theology.

What we do is we proclaim what God has done. And does that make a difference in how we live? Well, of course it does. And we express the love of Christ to people. But let's not get confused about the gospel.

The gospel is what God has done in Christ. It is not anything I do. Amen.

The Gospel Is What God Has Done in Christ

We're talking to Joel James today. I was at Grace Fellowship Church just a few months ago. And Joel, I'm very, very thankful. And I know you rejoice with me as well that a fallen sinful man proclaiming the truth of God can change people.

It transforms them, grants them new life. And I just was pleased to see the work of the Lord at Grace Fellowship and in you and in your people. And we know it's all the word of God, right?

It is. And what a gracious God we serve, Mike. You experience that every day. I do as well. And I'm just still astounded that the Lord would use a man like me. And how can I say it? A man like you, you know, it's just amazing.

And what a privilege it is to serve him. I wanna serve him, used by Christ, live godly, as do all your listeners. And so what a great Lord we serve to allow us to do that.

JoelJamesGraceFellowship .co .za. Joel, thanks for being on No Compromise Radio. It is such a pleasure, Mike. Thank you. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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

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