May 6, 2026 Show with William Shisko AND D. Scott Meadows on “Albert N. Martin: A Loving Tribute in Memory of the Gospel Lion of Montville, NJ”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs, chapter 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 with whom we converse and directed to have a view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnson.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this sixth day of May 2026.

Before I introduce to you my two guests and our topic today, I want you all to mark down on your calendars that Thursday of next week, Thursday, May 14th, we are going to be joined for the first time by my guest, Jonathan Blair, who happens to be the actor that portrayed George Whitefield, the 19th century evangelist, in the new film, A Great Awakening.

And Jonathan is a Christian, and we'll be hearing more about his personal life and how portraying George Whitefield has had an impact on him, and many more things that we don't know about him, and perhaps even that we don't know about George Whitefield.

And we'll be joined that day with my co-host, Kurt M. Smith, who is a Reformed Baptist pastor in Alabama, and he is a biographer of George Whitefield. Kurt and I, not long ago, conducted a review of A Great Awakening on this program, and I'm thrilled that Jonathan Blair will be joining us for further review and promotion of this wonderful film.

And so please make sure you tune in on Thursday of next week, that's May 14th. Well, on April 7th of this year, 2026, the church lost one of its modern giants. That would be Albert N. Martin, who for many years was pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in Montville, New Jersey, and he went home to be with the Lord that he so faithfully served for so many years.

And today we have on the program two men who knew him well, loved him greatly, and benefited by his mentorship and friendship. And I am looking forward to this program with bated breath. Both men have been on my program before, and if you listen regularly, you will no doubt recognize their names.

We have, first of all, joining us to discuss the life and legacy of Albert N. Martin, a loving tribute in memory of the Gospel Lion of Montville, New Jersey. We have joining us William Shishko, founding pastor of the Haven Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Comac, Long Island, and a friend of mine for decades, since the 1980s.

It's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Trip and Zion Radio, Pastor Bill Shishko.

Great to be back with you, Chris, and I'm like you, I'm very excited about the topic we're dealing with today and the man we're dealing with.

Amen. And we also have joining us today another friend of Pastor Albert N. Martin, D. Scott Meadows, who is author and pastor of Calvary Baptist Church of Exeter, New Hampshire, and it's great to have you back on the program as well, Pastor Meadows.

Thank you very much, Chris, for the invitation. It's an honor to speak about Pastor Martin to your hearers.

Amen. And before we begin to hear from my guests, I want to play a clip of a sermon by Pastor Martin that will, I think, whet the appetites of our listeners to learn more about him and also to look up and listen to his sermons on Sermon Audio and other places.

He is no doubt one of the most powerful voices for the gospel and the doctrines of sovereign grace in modern history, and I'm going to play this clip, which was his first sermon after the tragic events that occurred on January 28th in 1986, when the space shuttle known as Challenger exploded, killing all of its passengers.

And we're going to hear just a brief clip of Pastor Martin addressing that issue on the following Sunday of that year, and I hope that you are blessed by it. And here we go.

During this past week, God in a very sobering, dramatic, and captivating manner has drawn the attention of our nation and much of the world to just how fragile and uncertain life.

Is.

He did this by the events clustered around the launch and then the sudden destruction of the space shuttle Challenger this past Tuesday morning. Now, while we seldom allow current events of any nature to dictate the subject matter of our pulpit ministry in this assembly, but rather are committed to consecutive, expository ministry of the word of God, there have been over the history of our almost 20 years as a church a few occasions when events of such magnitude either within the church or within the world have so captured our minds and our spirits as to demand that the teaching of the word of God, respecting those issues, be brought to bear upon them in the assembly of God's people.

Now, the precedent for doing this is clearly set by our Lord himself, who, according to Luke chapter 13, took as an occasion to underscore some vital biblical truths to shocking current events in his day.

We read in Luke 13 in verse one that there were some present at that very seeing season who told him of the Galileans whose blood piloted mingled with their sacrifices. We know nothing for certain about this incident, but apparently there was an incident involving some Galileans who were either as imposters or perhaps as innocent worshipers who had some political alliances that were threatening to pilot were nonetheless in the midst of offering up sacrifices in a place of worship, brutally slain so that their own life's blood was mingled with the blood of the sacrifices that were offered.

It was the tragic, sudden, brutal death of some Galileans. And then we read in verse two that Jesus said, Do you think that these Galileans were sinners above all the Galileans because they suffered these things?

I tell you no, but except you repent, you shall all likewise perish or. And now he takes a second current event or a recent event in which there was the tragic death of 18 people crushed to death when a tower in Siloam fell upon them.

Here was an event that caused a thrill of shock to go through Jerusalem when people heard that a tower fell upon 18 so-called innocent victims and they were snuffed out in a moment of time. Here, our Lord takes a second current event that captured the attention of men and women and used it as the occasion to bring to bear upon the living some vital biblical principles of the moral government of Almighty God.

And that's just during the introduction to his sermon. You can imagine, those of you who have not yet heard Albert and Martin preach, how that built up to an even more bold and powerful crescendo. But if anybody wants to look up that sermon, it took place on February 2nd of 1986, the Sunday following the tragedy that occurred in the late January of that year, January 28th, when the Challenger space shuttle exploded.

So I hope that you look that up and listen to it in its entirety and also other sermons by Pastor Albert and Martin. Well, Pastor Bill Shishko, I recall, even though I was not a pastor since I was employed in the Christian radio industry, you used to invite me every year to your pastors' conferences at the Orthodox Presbyterian Church at Franklin Square, where you were pastoring at that time, before you planted the haven in Comack.

And I just remember how blown away I was by Pastor Martin's preaching. It was my introduction to him. And if you could explain what you know about Pastor Albert and Martin and why he.

Became such a valued mentor of yours. I'm so thankful, Chris, for this opportunity. I've thought of the text Proverbs 10 and verse 7, the memory of the righteous is blessed. And that I think over and over again, as I think of a very dear friend and mentor, Pastor Martin.

I've had privilege to have four big mentors in my life as a pastor, but clearly he was top of the list as far as a pastoral mentor. And that sermon, some biblical perspectives on the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger, without exaggeration, I think that's the most powerful sermon I have ever heard in my life.

And I'd urge people to listen to that. Well, Albert and Martin, just to give some background here, Pastor Martin was raised in Christian home, and actually he was one of 11 children, but he wasn't converted until his senior year or his years of high school.

He did have a very sensitive conscience and a fear of God's judgment. But you're talking about the conversion of a man who's been described as having rightly considerable native intelligence, zeal, and energy, devoted to his conversion to schoolwork, football, and baseball.

But for the rest of his long life, these things would be harnessed for the cause of Christ. And this was a man whose mind and heart were captive to the Word of God. He studied at Bob Jones University and Columbia Bible College, graduated magna cum laude in 1956 from Columbia Bible College, was married to his first wife, Marilyn Hart, in June of 1956.

They were married for 48 years and blessed with three children. Later, after Mrs. Martin was called home in 2004, Pastor Martin married Dorothy Chansky. She pre-deceased him in 2020. But it's a minister that we know him, and Pastor Martin had an itinerant evangelistic ministry from 1957 to 1961.

And then when his first son, Joel, was born, he realized that he needed to be home more. And so in September of 1962, he received a call to be the pastor of a Christian missionary and alliance church in North Caldwell, New Jersey, which is about an hour from New York City.

During that time, he was befriended by the late Ernie Riesinger, who was to become the first U .S. trustee of the Banner of Truth Trust in 1967. And the Lord used Ernie Riesinger to get Pastor Martin reading classics of the Reformed faith.

A .W. Pink's work, the one that was so influential with him as he wrestled with the doctrine of the atonement, the death of death and the death of Christ by John Owen. And it took about a decade. Pastor Martin wrestled for these issues and came to Reformed Christianity as his conviction and served in that church in North Caldwell from 1962 to 66.

But he really was not able to stay in the Christian missionary and alliance. They had different views, particularly about the continuance of the special gifts of the Spirit. So they disbanded as a church and actually reconstituted in about a year or so later, in September of 1967, after Pastor Martin took, I think, about nine months just to go through biblical doctrine, what a church is, and so on.

And they were reconstituted in 1967 as Trinity Baptist Church, committed to the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith. Pastor Martin was pastor there for 46 years. And just a note on this, we'll come to this a bit later.

You cannot understand Pastor Martin apart from his high view of the church. There are those that rightly emphasize the doctrines of grace, what's called experimental Calvinism, and the Christian life.

And, of course, Pastor Martin shared all of those concerns, but he was a churchman. And that's important to understand. There's many other things you could say. I think probably the most telling story, and I actually heard Pastor Martin mention this with tears in his eyes, he had been invited to preach in Leicester, England, at the Banner of Truth Ministers Conference.

He was only 34 years old at the time. And Professor John Murray had been invited to speak for those three evening meetings. This was in 1967. When he knew Pastor Martin was going to be there, Professor Murray knew of Pastor Martin, and he said, if Al Martin is to be there, I really think he should be asked to take the three evening services you propose for me.

This is Professor John Murray, who was revered at Westminster Seminary, where he taught for many years and over in the United Kingdom. Professor Murray said, Pastor Martin is one of the ablest and moving preachers I've ever heard.

In recent years, I've not heard his equal. My memory of preachers goes back 60 years. So, when I say he's one of the ablest, this is an assessment that includes very memorable preachers of the past and the present.

And that's exactly right. Pastor Martin was in a category all of his own as a preacher. I go so far as to say the finest of the preachers that we had in the United States.

In the latter part of the 20th century. Amen. And your particular friendship with him. I mean, I know that you are a diehard Presbyterian, and yet one of your most valued mentors.

Was a Reformed Baptist. Tell us about this friendship. Yeah, it's been fun reflecting all of this. In fact, when I was at the memorial service, I thought, wow, I didn't think I knew this man more than those that spoke there.

But I first heard Al Martin on a cassette tape. I don't know if your listeners know what cassette tapes are anymore. The Mount Olive Tape Library that emanated from Mississippi began sending out tapes from the Trinity Pulpit that began in 1971.

I was in college, and I'd come to the Reformed faith in my sophomore year and somehow heard about Al Martin and got those. And I actually corresponded with him, probably somewhere in my file. He was an avid correspondent, and I don't know how he could keep up with everybody.

But I'll never forget the response that he sent to me. He had at the end, yours in the gracious bonds of Jesus Christ. I thought, well, what a beautiful, beautiful way of expressing things. And he was a wordsmith.

When I was in college, I lived up in Connecticut. I would be up in Connecticut during that time. And my mother and I actually drove all the way down to Essex Spells, New Jersey. I think it was, oh, it was toward the end of the year 1973, I believe.

That's when the Trinity Baptist Church met in what they called the Cracker Box in Essex Spells, New Jersey. By then, I'd become a Presbyterian. And wouldn't you know, that Sunday morning, he preached on baptism as for believers only.

And I teased him at the door. It was the first time I actually met him personally. And I teased him at the door. I said, I drove all the way down from Northeastern Connecticut as a Presbyterian to hear this message on baptism.

And he said to me with his robust voice, only for the veracity of the scriptures, my brother. During seminary years, I was at Westminster Seminary from 1976 to 1979. And periodically, my wife Margaret and I would drive up to New Jersey.

Then they were meeting in a huge gymnasium as they were trying to get their the facility that they were in now built. But it was really in 1991, I'd been called to the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Franklin Square after doing a short stint as an organizing pastor for a church in South Carolina.

I gave him a phone call, and he said to me, paused a bit, and he said, you've been called up to New York because he was where Pastor Martin was in Montville, New Jersey, lived in Verona. But where he was was the other side of the two rivers that demarcate Manhattan Island.

So we were a couple of rivers apart. But the cultures are very similar in many ways. And I remember after I told him I'd been called to Franklin Square, he paused a bit and said, Bill, within six months, you're going to start wondering whether you're crazy or called.

And there will be some days that you won't know the difference. He was all man, he was all hearty. And then from there, that's when I actually began to listen. I'm looking forward to hearing Scott talk about his pastoral theology series.

But I, with many, many other young ministers, we cut our teeth on his cassette series on pastoral theology, which I think ended up being about 70 cassette tapes or so. And connected with that, I'd visit, go to a study in Verona, New Jersey, usually a couple of times a year, just with loads of questions about church discipline, about church government, about handling pastoral cases, and so on.

And I was amazed at this man who was so busy, would take the time to be with this Orthodox Presbyterian minister. But all that material was foundational for me. In fact, what's interesting, and Scott, you'll be interested in this, when I was asked to teach the Reformed pastor class at Greenville Seminary, which I did from 2001 to 2016, and also asked to teach similar material for the Ministerial Training Institute of the OPC, I got Pastor Martin's permission to use a lot of his material.

I mean, Pastor Martin was like a vacuum cleaner when it came to material on pastoral theology. He had absorbed all of these things, and I was able to build on that. It wasn't anything that I'd read that he hadn't read.

And actually, that material that I gave there, I called it a Presbyterianized version of Pastor Martin. He graciously gave me permission. But I must tell this anecdote. Scott, I don't even think you know this one.

It's a lesser-known anecdote about Pastor Martin. He would come each year to minister for the Reformed Ministers Fellowship, which I think, Chris, you attended sometime, that we'd have at Franklin Square.

And it was a real delight after that time. I had him for myself. He'd come to our house, and he'd toss the football with our boys. We had five sons, and I think three of them were about the age that they could throw the football then.

And then we would take him and Marilyn out for dinner and chat, and those hours together were absolutely priceless. But I must tell this story. I was so thankful for our elders in Franklin Square. When it came to those that filled the pulpit, so long as they obviously held to the Reformed faith and particularly the doctrines of grace, the pulpit was open to them.

We didn't draw the line at church government and baptism. The elders wanted to have a united front about commitment to the biblical gospel. So, with a certain amount of temerity, I'm not sure when this was.

It might have been about 1993 or so. We were hosting what's called a Presbytery Meeting, which is a regional group of Orthodox Presbyterian churches and their ministers and elders from what was called Presbytery of New York and Wingland.

And so, I asked our elders, I said, we had a worship service that evening when Ben would gather on a Monday evening, and I said, may we have Pastor Al Martin come to speak for our Presbytery Meeting? And there was no dissent.

Because they knew of him, and one of our elders was actually quite close with him, and they knew certainly that he wouldn't deal with baptism or church government, but he would preach the gospel. And so, he came, I think it was a September 1993, and he preached for an hour and 10 minutes, which is really something for Orthodox Presbyterians, and he preached on the distinguishing traits of effective preaching.

There are ministers today that I still work with who were at that meeting who will say they were permanently impacted by that message, the distinguishing traits of effective preaching, but a couple anecdotes connected with it that are humorous, and they'll give you a window on Pastor Martin.

One will give you a little window on certain things that happen in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, but a couple of the ministers were, in fact, a number of ministers were very upset. One minister said later, I can't believe that you would subject us to a lecture from this Baptist, to which I responded, and he was a father in the faith, and I was respectful, but I said that was not a lecture, that was a sermon.

We needed to hear that. Anyway, there were two ministers who were very, very upset that Pastor Martin was preaching, and in the middle of his sermon on distinguishing traits of effective preaching, they walked out, left the front doors of the church open so they could be seen by Pastor Martin as he preached there at the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Franklin Square, and they each smoked a cigarette and came back in.

At the very point, Pastor Martin was dealing with the minister's life and the uses and abuses of Christian liberty. Now, this is how attuned this man was in preaching, as intense as he was, he could see these guys go out.

And of all things, he was dealing with the use or abuse of Christian liberty, and as they walked and sat down, he said, Now men, I would not take away from you for a moment your right to enjoy a glass of beer or a glass of wine or even a cigarette, but if it's your liberty and not your vice, give it up for three months.

What? You talk about the situational application. And then at one point, he blasted Robert Schuller, who started this positive thinking kind of a ministry. Schuller was very popular at the time in his book on the so-called New Reformation, but Pastor Martin just blasted the heresy of this man, which it was.

And there was a minister that was visiting that night, and he was kind of a simpering type of fellow, and in the talk, he said, Pastor Martin, I appreciated your message, but I think you were a little bit too hard on Robert Schuller.

And Pastor Martin says, My friend, until that man repents of his heresy, it would be better that the floor would open up and swallow me up if I didn't call him the heretic that he is. And that was the man.

Now, and I'll stop for a moment. I've got your ads coming. I keep going. But if you only knew Pastor Martin, I think Scott will agree with this. If you only knew Pastor Martin as a preacher, though, you really didn't know the man.

A powerful preacher, committed, but godly, gracious, gentle, kind. I mean, he was no holds barred when it came to departure from what the Word of God taught. But that man was a shepherd. So I'll stop my, as you put it before, Scott, bloviating from it.

But boy, I've got some more stories to tell you when time comes.

Great. And by the way, I thought it was profound when Pastor Martin, your ongoing Reformed Baptist speaker at all of your Reformed ministers' fellowship meetings, could no longer continue being your speaker.

I can't remember exactly what the reasons were. Might've been his age, might've been his schedule just getting too packed. But you stopped having the annual Reformed ministers' fellowship meeting when he could no longer do it.

That was the highlight. We had four of them a year. He would always come, I think, in September. And that was always a highlight. We had several dozen ministers that would be here to hear him. I remember at one point his topic was character of a Reformed ministry today.

And his line was, he said, Brothers, if you're going to be a true minister of Christ, your life will be a gradual self-immolation. And every time you minister, some of you will go, and it will not come back.

I don't know that I've ever heard a comment about Reformed ministry that has been as impacting as that one. But that also epitomizes that man for whom who did nothing.

Half-heartedly. And we have to go to our first commercial break. If anybody would like to join us on the air with a question about the late Albert N. Martin, please restrict your questions to the subject of Pastor Martin.

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On the air. Welcome back. If you just tuned in to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, we are paying tribute to the late Albert N. Martin, who I have nicknamed the Gospel Lion of Montville, New Jersey. And we have as our guest today two friends of Pastor Martin who both viewed him not only as a great and close and cherished friend, but also as a valuable mentor to each of them.

Bill Shishko, founding pastor of The Haven, an Orthodox Presbyterian church in Comac, Long Island, and D. Scott Meadows, who is an author and also pastor of Calvary Baptist Church, a Reformed Baptist congregation in Exeter, New Hampshire.

And let's pick up with Pastor Scott. How did you first become aware of Pastor Martin, and what would you like to add to the conversation in regard to any background on Pastor Martin and also to anecdotes just like Pastor Bill has provided?

For some reason, Scott is on mute, and we're waiting for Scott to reconnect. All right, I'm back. By the way, you don't have to do that during.

The commercial breaks. I mute you on my end. All right, thank you. I really appreciate your choice of topic for this broadcast, Chris, and also for inviting my longtime friend Bill Shishko as well to be a guest on it.

We met each other actually in connection with Al Martin's annual conferences at Trinity Baptist Church of Montville, probably back in the middle 90s when I started to attend that conference. If you might indulge me to give a testimony about my own development briefly, I was raised in independent fundamental Baptist or Bible churches in my teenage years and early 20s, and they were dispensational and not particularly Calvinistic.

But as I studied the Bible and got some good literature, I turned toward the doctrines of grace, at least in an inconsistent way in the early days. And the Banner Truth magazine was very helpful to me to come to more of a Reformed conviction about theology and church history, appreciation for that.

And so I started in the pastoral ministry at Exeter in 1991, and I was seeking a more like-minded fellowship of ministers than what I had enjoyed up to that point. And I came to be aware, first of all, of the Reformed Baptist Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the early 90s, and I was so captivated by their philosophy of pastoral care to the congregants.

It was a close personal pastoral care they practiced there. I had never been in a church that had that kind of intimacy between the pastors and the members, so I took a trip to Grand Rapids with a pastor friend in 1993, and it was pivotal in my own personal Reformation toward confessionalism and identification with Reformed theology.

And a year later, I had come to adopt the 1689 as my own understanding and confession of the faith. My stumbling block was especially Sunday as the Christian Sabbath or the Lord's Day. Of course, that was not believed in dispensational circles where I was.

And so Grand Rapids was my first sort of connection with Reformed Baptists, but it's a 17-hour drive from New Hampshire. So I found out about two Reformed Baptist pastors fellowships in my region. One was in upstate New York, brethren with whom I still fellowship to this day, and the other was in Montville, New Jersey.

And so I attended both of those, but I can't explain exactly why except maybe it was Pastor Martin's attractiveness to me. I chose to go regularly to the Montville, New Jersey pastors' meetings and conferences, so that would have been in the middle 90s.

And I have to say, now that I've been shepherding the congregation of Exeter in New Hampshire for 35 years next month, no one has been a more important mentor to me, both as a Christian, first of all, who seeks to live with integrity, and as a pastor, secondly, than Albert N. Martin, hands down the most important mentor I've ever had, spiritual mentor, in my life.

Yeah, he was an interesting man, and even though I had not been hosting my own radio program at this time, I was still working as an account executive and airtime salesman for WMCA, 570 AM in New York.

I worked there for 15 years before I launched Iron Trip and Zion Radio. On the several occasions where I met Pastor Martin, since he had been sponsoring his program God's Word to Our Nation on WMCA—that was not my client, they were already on the air before I got there—but he knew that I was the only Calvinist at WMCA.

And on the few occasions that I would see him at a conference or something, he knew, he remembered exactly who I was. You're the Calvinist at WMCA. You keep up the good work there. We need people like you in every sphere of the Christian life.

You know, he was going on and on. And I can remember him saying to me, you know something? I don't understand why everyone is making such a big deal about this Harold Camping fellow. That man drives me nuts.

Now you, you have timber in your voice. You should be running that radio network. But what a blessed time that was to get a compliment like that from him. We have a listener in Brooklyn, New York, named Andrew, and he says, if Pastor Martin were here today, what Bible passage would he be most eager to preach to our nation?

I love his series on God's Word to Our Nation from the 1980s and also 1990s. But what, I mean, obviously this would involve you to be prophets, but do you have any comments on, Pastor Bill, we'll start with you since we heard from Pastor Scott last.