The Problem with NAMB with Michael Clary

Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, Sean Harris. We have a guest with us today.

He's actually been on the podcast one time before, and that is Pastor Michael Clary. He is the pastor at Christ the

King Church, which is in Fort Thomas, Kentucky in the Cincinnati area. He's also the author of now at least two books.

I know we had him on to talk about God's good design, which is about sexuality and what the

Bible teaches on male -female relationships, but he has a new book coming out. They don't have a title yet, but it's coming out through Canon Press, so keep an eye on that.

That's going to be about loser theology, so I'm excited to hear more about that. He's also a Southern Baptist pastor and a contributing scholar, one of them at the

Center for Baptist Leadership. I thought he'd be a great person to have on to talk about not just the

Southern Baptist Convention but also the North American Mission Board. As we unfold the program, we will both reveal more about why the

North American Mission Board has been such a concern for Southern Baptists. Really quick, for those who don't know,

Southern Baptists have various entities, meaning they have seminaries and missions organizations.

NAM is a church -planting organization in North America, so they actually go and plant churches in areas that presumably don't have a gospel witness or a solid gospel witness.

They give some church revitalization and those kinds of things. They are one of the entities that I think

I hear more about than any of the other ones, even the seminaries. I hear more about the problems going on with NAM, but often those things are from people who can't tell me details publicly.

They don't want me to share their story. They won't come on the podcast, or it's, I heard this from someone.

I was like, what do you do with that? Well, there are some things we can sink our teeth into, and I think it's important we talk about them.

Michael Clary has just written an article at Christ Overall, which is called More Money Than Men, the

NAM Church -Planting Problem. We're going to start our conversation there. Welcome, Pastor Clary. Thank you for helping us understand this issue.

Happy to be with you, John. Thanks for having me. Really quick, before we even get started with this, share with us a little bit about where you're at with the

Southern Baptist Convention. Do you sense some hope? What can you tell the folks who are Southern Baptists out there who maybe still want to continue, but they're questioning whether or not this is wise?

I'm hopeful. I'm an optimistic guy, so that's part of my disposition. I tend to be hopeful.

I can blackmail sometimes, but when it comes to the Southern Baptist Convention, I think the pieces are in place for good reform, because it's a

Bible -believing convention. I think the problem with the convention is not –

I mean, in a convention our size, you have all kinds of problems across the board, but I think the primary issue is people are largely not really informed about what's happening, and they're trusting people.

They believe that the convention's doing good work. I trust the entities, and I give the cooperative program.

That's been the Southern Baptist way for as long as I can remember, but I'm hopeful because they are

Bible people. They are generally conservative. I think if you rank and file

Southern Baptists new, and we're looking at hard evidence, this is what's happening, and this is what we can do about it.

I think reform would be very possible, but I think it's hard to get the information out, and the people that are presenting the information are perceived as just being shrill, or they're just fault -finding and being negative, but it's like, no, they're doing good work, and we need to listen to them, but I am hopeful.

Yeah. I mean, with all the institutions that have lost credibility, not just Southern Baptist, but everything, it seems like there's this part of me that's reticent to jettison all authority and hierarchy and stuff, right?

Obviously, you're not saying that either, but it's like at some point you want to trust someone that knows what they're doing.

I think that's why what you're doing is so important. You are a Southern Baptist pastor, and you're just saying, here's the facts.

Here's what's going on with the North American Mission Board. You be the judge. You look at this, and I'm hopeful that someone like yourself and maybe some others who have been really good and admirable in this whole fight for the last few years can gain some ascendancy within the convention.

I don't know if you're even seeking that, but if Willie Rice gets in and things go well this June, we may see a new crop of trustees and various leaders coming to fruition that maybe can be trusted more again.

I am hopeful, and it sounds like you are a bit as well, so I'm glad to hear that. Tell us about NAMM.

Tell us about this article you wrote. It's kind of a provocative title, More Money Than Men. Why did you title it that way?

It sounds like you're trying to imply that the Southern Baptists are maybe wasting their money or putting it into an effort that's not yielding the results that we would normally expect.

Yes. You have to be a little provocative when you title things to attract attention, and so I'm fine playing that game.

In the content of the piece itself, I strive to be fair. I don't want to straw man or to disparage good people doing good work, but I do want to just present facts, and I'm not

Megan Basham. I'm not an investigative journalist, and I've got all these receipts. I'm just an ordinary pastor that has observed things over the years, and what

I've observed are a mixture of some good things and some things that were eyebrow -raising at the in some that were more alarming, but NAMM on the whole,

I think NAMM is good. There are good things that NAMM is doing, but I think you have a proportion of corruption.

In any big institution, you're going to have some corruption. You're going to have problems to deal with, but I think the proportion of corruption and the proportion of things that are concerning seem to be increasing, and the reform efforts have been thwarted, but from my own experience,

I'm just a NAMM pastor. I first started receiving funding in 2008, so 218 years, and my church wouldn't exist without NAMM funding, and so I'm a product of North American Mission Board, and I know tons of pastors and tons of churches that were planted in the same way through the

North American Mission Board, so we are products of it, and so I wouldn't say, well, let's just throw the thing off because it has the potential to do so much good, but if we're creating more problems than we're solving, then it becomes a risk -reward scenario where we have to make some really hard decisions, and so where I landed the piece that I wrote is basically the convention creates incentives with its demand for church planting because we believe in it, and so we fund it, and there's lots of money that goes to NAMM, and NAMM has been entrusted with this church planting mandate, and that creates an incentive to just crank out church plants, and whenever you're cranking out church plants that are not led by qualified pastors, then you're funding your own demise because you are seeding the

Southern Baptist Convention with error, with compromise, with heresy, and now we're dealing with the fallout of that because it has been about 20 years, and I think the last 20 years in evangelicalism on the whole has been pretty disastrous.

It might be too strong a word. I don't know, but it feels to me like it's been fairly disastrous. We're not in a better position than we were 20 years ago.

When I first started 20 years ago, I felt very, very optimistic, very hopeful just about the state of the church and about the world and about how there seemed to be really good hope that we could make some positive change, but since then, in the last 20 years or so, it seems like it's gone downhill.

Tell us a little bit about the incentives because that's what I hear all the time from people. One of the things

I should say, there's a few things with NAMM, but that's one of the main ones that they actually have a tier system where some churches can get more money from the

North American Mission Board to do church planting if they reach certain goals, and so this incentivizes churches to count things that maybe technically aren't churches as churches or to try to sort of cook the books.

I know that's a bit of a provocative statement as well, but make sure that they can have as many church plants as possible in order to reach a certain goal.

I know of churches—this is just from my own personal experience—that have 50 or 60 people, and they'll be like four guys on staff getting

NAMM money with various Bible studies in various places surrounding regions or even in the same city. They'll have a

Bible study, and I don't know if NAMM is counting all of those as separate churches, but it's a very odd thing to me.

I think you can't just go on for years with three or four pastors at a church that cannot sustain that many staff members.

What's going on here? I've scratched my head, and I've assumed just circumstantially that that may be related to these incentives.

What do you know about that incentive structure? Well, I can tell you what

I've observed at the street level with incentives. So you've got your lead pastor, but then there are—I've not heard of NAMM just giving money to, okay, let's give money to the lead pastor, let's give money to the worship pastor, let's give money to the associate pastor and the groups pastor, the operations guy.

I've not seen it just sort of mirror a traditional church structure. The money has to be tied to church planting in some way, and so what

I've seen is that it is tied to development of future church planters, and so you could have somebody who's a church planting apprentice, and there was a separate funding arm of church planting apprentices, and of course, an apprentice is not a church planter yet, and so they're learning.

They're in a position of being evaluated for their aptitude and potential to plant churches in the future, and so with that, you might have a church that would have two or three or four apprentices on staff that are being funded, and they're being funded maybe not fully, like a full salary, but enough to where they're able to make a living if they combine it with some part -time work elsewhere, and so you've got several pastors on staff, and these guys, in my experience,

I've seen a lot of these apprentices are not guys that would qualify as lead pastors. They're guys that are good support staff.

They're number two guys. They're worship or groups pastors, but they're receiving money under the auspices of being a potential pastor in the future, and so NAM is funding this, and what that does is that you have small country churches that would love to hire a second or third staff member but just can't afford it, but they're giving money to NAM to support church plants that don't have a track record.

They're brand new, and they've got more staff than some of these established churches have, and so it creates an imbalance in terms of how they're staffed, and so I think

NAM has money to spend, and it's incentivized to spend it on things that can be tied to church planting explicitly, and so for that reason, they're funding all kinds of things.

One of the things I get into in my piece too is there's these other roles within the church planting ecosystem that are also considered church planting roles.

I mean, you've got your DOMs, directors of mission, and that sort of thing, and you expect that, but you'll have mobilizers and strategists and trainings and things like this that are supposed to be worth supporting and helping church planters, but I mentioned

Vance Pittman's recent resignation from being SEND North America's president to take a different job within NAM to be a mobilizer or something, or maybe it was a catalyst.

I can't remember the title, but the title is like, what exactly is that doing, and how exactly does this connect to church planting because the description in the

Baptist Press article sounds like it's a personal ministry. You're launching a personal ministry. Great.

John Harris has a personal ministry. I'm glad for that, but it would be a little weird if NAM were funding your personal ministry under the auspices of church planting, and I think we've seen there's a lot of these arrangements that are happening right now, and that's just one example.

Yeah, well, I've heard of liaisons and things like this that are, you wonder what does that mean, but specifically, the

SEND Cities, SEND Network is an undername for those who don't know, and SEND has its own initiatives, and one of them is

SEND Cities, which is supposed to reach urban areas that have been de -Christianized,

I guess, for lack of a better term, and just from my own experience years ago, I remember being told that I could plant churches.

I'm about, where I am right now is about an hour and a half, two hours north of New York City, that that would qualify because it's within commuter distance.

There's people who will go every day down to the city and come back, and that this is, you could get money, essentially.

You could be funded through NAM through the SEND Cities to plant churches, and I thought that was a little odd to me at first.

I was like, well, I'm glad there's money for doing this, but I'm so far outside of the city.

I don't really understand how that's directly related. It's sort of tangentially related with the commuter description there, but I went to one of the trainings, and I was really surprised at how focused it was on personality types.

The entire training was just a weekend, but the entire thing, it was really more of an assessment.

Are you someone that we would want to fund to do this? I would say about 80 % of it was personality.

Let's observe you in group scenarios to see how you interact and whether you emerge as the leader, and then let's give you some tasks like finding a place to meet, calling hotels, walking around the community, asking them, what does the community need so you can title your church according to the need of the community, things like that.

There's a little bit of a competence there, but that was it. There was no biblical elder -type qualifying stuff.

I don't even remember it being mentioned in passing, to be quite honest with you. It was just personalities.

I remember at one point, we had to walk to various sides of the room, various corners, depending on what personality we thought we were.

I just thought, this is weird. I feel like I'm in 12th, not even 12th. It's like eighth grade because they titled them with different animal names.

I don't remember exactly what they all were, but are you a gorilla or are you a lion? I'm like, what am I doing here?

I don't mean to say that. I mean, some of these people doing it, I think some of them are very well -meaning and they take this very seriously, but it was all business -type metrics.

I don't even know if that's business. It was just these modern leadership techniques. It put a bad taste in my mouth.

I just thought, I don't care if there's money. I'm out. I'm not doing anything with this. I am glad there are good people such as yourself,

Michael, who have been able to get resources from North American Mission Board to do what you're doing.

I know there's some good work. I don't want to say anything against that, but just from my own observations, something's seemed very wrong to me about the whole thing.

There's been a lot of complaints I've received over the years from people, especially, I'll just point this out, especially in the

Maryland -Delaware area for some reason, but I'm not sure if it's unique to that area, but people saying they're using metrics to approve church planters based upon ideological things.

Are they going to be more woke -friendly? Are they going to appeal to the demographics we're trying to reach here more than just biblical fidelity?

If that is true, that is a problem. I don't know if anything I said sparks anything in your mind or examples or things that you can point to to say, yeah,

I think you're right, John, or I think maybe you're off, John. I think about assessing a potential church planter.

There's a difference between somebody who's a pastor and somebody who's a church planter. Every church planter would be a pastor.

That is what often gets obscured, I think, in the overall assessment process because they assume all the pastor parts, but what they would need to assess is do you have the aptitude to start something that is new.

That's where there's a lot of focus. The personality thing, there is something to that. You need to have a certain command where people will listen to you when you're not surrounded by institutional support that can tell you.

If you walk into a church building and it's First Baptist Church of whatever city, the fact that you're walking into a building called

First Baptist and there's 150 people there and there's a choir or all the things you might expect, and then if you have a guy who's more mild -mannered and more soft -spoken, his credibility is lent to him by the environment that he's ministering in.

But whenever you're a church planter, you have none of those advantages. And so you're going to assess people for can this man go from zero to something based on the strength of, and I hate to use this word, but really there's no lack of a better word, it's like the strength of charisma or force of personality to where it's like this man walks into a room and he stands out.

You do notice him. I mean, when I've gone to the convention before, you have pastors and they'll come and they've got a handful of staff members and maybe some members from their church, whatever.

But generally, I can look across and I'll see a half a dozen people there and I'm like, that guy right there with the red tie, he's the lead pastor.

I get to spot it. And I think you generally, somebody who is the senior leader tends to stand out and church planning assessments will assess for that sort of thing.

But what I think maybe what you're experiencing is that they're assessing for only that thing and they're assuming the pastoral qualifications, the elder qualifications and his aptitude to shepherd people are already in place.

When very often what I've seen is you have serial entrepreneurs that are being given the church planning mantle and handed funding, but they don't have the shepherding skills, they don't have the doctrinal theological skills.

And so yeah, they can start things. The thing that people fear in the church planning world is a church plant failure.

And that's a tragedy. What I fear more than that is a church planting success that is heterodox.

We've got a leader who's very successful and very charismatic and he's funded by name. He's got the money rolling in and he can build a great big thing.

And then when he puts a microphone on his head and he stands in front of God's people, what he's teaching is woke nonsense or worse.

But he's doing so with the label under the banner of the Southern Baptist Convention. And that creates expectations of what the

Southern Baptist Convention is. And so whenever people see that, I'm like, if this is what Southern Baptist Convention is all about,

I'm out on that. And they don't see all the good that happens because the good is obscured because they don't get all the accolades and the celebration.

A lot of times they're the ones that are toiling away in relative obscurity. And that's the heartbeat of the

Southern Baptist Convention is more rural, small church pastors.

And so I think that the issue is that NAM has money to spend, and all of those small -time pastors are expecting churches to be planted.

And NAM is sitting on this treasure chest, this war chest of church -planting dollars. And then under the influence of guys like Tim Keller, who made the case convincingly, and we all bought it.

Not everybody, but most people bought it. It's like the cities are the way to reach the lost. And so we're like, well, we have to plant churches that cater to the sensibilities of the people who occupy the cities.

And those people are going to be secular elites, and they're almost always going to be leftist in their orientation.

And so we're contextualizing to those people. And now we have churches that are left contextualized at best or just leftist at worst.

And we've made that our primary church -planting strategy the last 20 years.

So when I signed up for NAM funding through the

Nehemiah Project, that predated the Send North America Strategy by a couple of years, maybe a year or so.

And about a year in is when Kevin Eazell was brought in to be president of, or I don't remember his exact title, but he's the leader of the

North America Mission Board. And they launched the Send North America Strategy. And then there was a USA Today article that talked about the top 25 urban centers and how they're transforming

America. And those were the exact 25 cities that were identified as Send North America target cities.

Cincinnati was one of them. And so now all of a sudden my city is getting lots of attention. People are relocating to Cincinnati.

They're flooding it with lots of money and a mandate from the convention to plant churches in this urban environment.

And they're causing all kinds of chaos because these men are not qualified. Many of them are not qualified.

And I've seen more failures of the various kinds I described earlier than I've seen successes.

I've not seen nearly as many successes. And so we're funding the very mechanism that's killing the convention.

And then we're hiring consultants and mobilizers and strategists and trainers and coaches to fix the problem that we've already created.

And that's what I see is this sort of self -perpetuating problem that NAMM is at least in charge of.

I think the blame is partly on NAMM. Partly I think it was a strategy that didn't work.

I wouldn't describe nefarious motives top to bottom, but I think there's probably some bad actors in there. But I think a lot of it is just like, hey, this is what we tried and the results were not good and we should change course.

But then the convention itself has asked NAMM to do this. They say, hey, NAMM, we want you to give us churches.

That's your job. And we'll give you a bunch of money to do it. NAMM says, here's our strategy. Here's the cities. We're going to do it.

We've got money to give. And then whenever you've got a lot of money to give and a reputation for funding people without as rigorous assessment as other organizations will require, you're bringing in everybody.

You have people that have zero loyalty to the Southern Baptist Convention and they have loyalty to the church that they're planting and NAMM is just a convenient partner to get the money.

And so they're taking money. And I've seen it's like a NASCAR phenomenon where it's like you've got, let's say, so -and -so community church and they're actually 29.

They're getting money from actually 29 churches. They're Southern Baptist and they might have another network affiliation that is also giving them funding.

All three of those organizations are reporting a church plant back to their organizations and celebrating it.

But really, it's one church with three different NASCAR stickers on it. That has been a massive contributing factor to a lot of the carnage that we're seeing over the last 20 years because a lot of these churches just aren't good churches.

Well, you do write about a few of the examples. You don't name names, but you just say people I know basically, and I just want to let people know about it by reading a little bit.

You said you visited a NAMM church in Cincinnati. The pastor had no theological training and he played a video of Stephen Furtick instead of preaching.

He resigned after a few years. If you're going to play a video, at least play somebody better than that. Right. Another NAMM planter in Cincinnati stepped down from ministry before his marriage was falling apart.

So they had character issues, but basically he was a fraud. And then another one, you said a friend of yours,

NAMM planter in Massachusetts, your church supported him, but ended up denying the faith, becoming an outspoken atheist.

And then the most disturbing one you say is a man who said he had recently moved his family to Cincinnati to plant a church.

And there were a lot of red flags with him. He had been assessed by two different church planting networks and was turned down, but he was approved by NAMM.

And he's now a homosexual as a homosexual affirming congregation. So it's just funny, all the conservatives

I've heard over the years, you can't seem to get funding from NAMM, but this guy gets funding. There does seem to be something odd going on.

And anytime you have money, which you point out they have between 140, $150 million, you're going to have people that want to cut of that.

That's just attracts people naturally who might not always have the best motives. What's the solution here?

What do you do to fix these leadership problems? Presumably financial waste that maybe should, maybe

I'm presenting the solution here a little bit, but maybe they should be audited. What would you say should happen with NAMM? If I could wave my magic wand and have things just the way

I'd want it, I would start with something like, remember Danny Aiken's axioms of a great commission resurgence message he gave to the convention.

I remember this because I was fresh out of seminary, and this was right around the time that, so he gave a message that was like a call to arms to plant churches around America.

And it was a, and what he laid out in that talk at the convention was a, was a, it was like a, almost like a presidential state of the union address, here is bullet points.

Here is our action plan. And then right after that is what kind of launched the send strategy.

And so if I could wave my magic wand, I would have somebody else needs to present to the convention.

This, this is the current state. Like what is the current state of affairs? And let's put away the pom poms and the, and the banners and the celebration.

And let's deal honestly and accurately with where things are. Here's the good, here's the bad, here's the ugly, and this is where things are.

And then here's a way forward. So the convention needs to hear and all in the same room at the same time, acknowledging the same information, and then have some, a prescription for a way forward, which the, one of the, one of the things

I argued in my piece is that money scales, but leadership doesn't, at least not at the same rate.

Leadership resists institutional acceleration. And ultimately leadership is a, is a matter of God's calling.

And so you can't just, you can't just have more money and expect that to buy calling and gifting.

And so we need to, we need to just acknowledge that no amount of money is going to give us, you know, we can't just say, okay, we want a thousand churches.

And if that costs a hundred million dollars to plant, then we just raise a hundred million dollars and voila, we've got a thousand churches.

No, because you're assuming that there's going to be a thousand men to lead each of those churches. And we cannot make that assumption.

That is something that is completely independent of our financial incentives that has to be developed. And so there needs to be some kind of understanding, possibly cooperation or partnership with seminaries and other end assessments to say, here are very hard criteria that we require of church planters.

And we're not going to deviate from it. We're going to set a high standard, a high bar and make sure that nobody gets

NAM funding that does not meet this high bar. And that will mean for certain, we're going to have fewer churches planted, but I think there should be an emphasis on better churches and just, just let go, release this idea that more money just buys more churches because it doesn't.

I've heard, I know you may have heard things like this too over the years, John, where you have a handful of people in a given area and like, we don't have any solid churches here, but we have 50 people that we've got the money where we'd love to have a church.

We just need a pastor. And I'm like, I mean, you could have $10 million and that's not going to necessarily guarantee that you're going to have a pastor because God has to call a man to that congregation.

So it would need to be fewer churches that are better, healthier, stronger, and better assessed planters.

And that would be a tough pill to swallow for NAM, or for the Southern Baptist Convention, rather.

It'd be a tough pill to swallow because we want to see those numbers and we get excited about those numbers.

And that's not an exciting thing to sell to people. And the other thing that I think we need to have is we need to know where money that we currently have is going.

Because as the money has continued to climb and we've got good money coming in, but the number of churches being planted overall is declining.

It peaked. There's a chart on my piece, I don't remember the year, but there was a year where the church plants peaked.

And then it's been declining, the number of churches we've planted since then. But the money has held pretty steady.

And so I think there's been a greater allocation of money being given to coaches, consultants, mobilizers, catalysts, whatnot.

They've been getting a greater proportion of it because they're trying to fix problems that were created during the church planting gold rush that preceded it.

So I think financial transparency, we've got to know where the money's going, and we got to deal with some of the sweetheart deals, golden parachutes that people might have.

There may be jobs in NAM that just aren't necessary. And so there's going to be an asymmetry between the money coming in and the men that are prepared to plant that has to be addressed somehow.

What do you think about Will McCraney's complaint over the years about property? Is that a fit under the potential audit?

Because apparently NAM, he's concerned NAM has gotten into buying property and they shouldn't really be in the business of real estate.

Do you have any thoughts on that? I remember hearing about this because in Cincinnati, somebody reported to me just that NAM is buying houses.

And the idea was it's expensive to live in the city. I know because that's what we did.

And if you could attract a church planter by saying like, hey, not only can you be funded to plant a church in this neighborhood, but we've got you a house set up, three bedroom house in a desirable location.

You're all set up and you can live there for three years while you're getting your church off the ground. Just the naked facts of what

I just said, I could see a legitimate case being made for that. But you always have to consider what incentives are you creating and how might that go wrong because those things can go wrong.

It could be like, well, I could see three ways that it could go right out of 10, but I could see seven ways where it could go wrong. And we can't just ignore those seven ways that it could go wrong.

And so I don't think NAM should be in the real estate business. I think it would be better for us to be in the, we're about the kingdom.

We're about assessing church planters, training them, building them up, sending them out. I'm all for that. I want to do that. My church wants to do that.

But there are some things that are just beyond our control. And in those areas, like, hey, your housing is up to you, bud.

And I hope you do well and I can connect you to an agent or, you know, we can network around to find some possible places for you to live, but we're not going to just buy you a house and put you in it because after three years, what are you, what are you going to do?

It's like, well, the church is kind of limping along. We're right there on the edge, but boy, it'll be great to stay here for another year or two.

And then like, what is NAM going to evict people? You'll have squatters. Yeah, that would be an awkward situation.

What do you think about every year? It seems like the Southern Baptist convention, Kevin Eazell gets up there and he gives you this amazing talk.

So everyone that is hearing this, hearing your message, Michael, who may be attending the convention, they are going to hear this again, probably in June.

And he always presents it like everything's a success. The numbers are going up. He doesn't,

I don't know what year it was, but he doesn't see a peak. He sees that we're just ascending. He always presents it that way.

Your money is getting the gospel forward. There's just amazing things happening. And here, you know,

Michael Clary comes and says, well, actually it's not all sunshine and roses. It's not going as well as he says.

I mean, you obviously don't buy that message. And I I've always seen it as somewhat of a rah -rah kind of manipulative thing, but how do you communicate that to people who are going to be in the room that don't listen to that?

What would you say? It's hard to counter that because that is a powerful platform.

And the convention is a commercial for itself. Largely, there's not much business that happens at the convention.

There is a, but there is a lot of selling the convention to the messengers to keep giving money, to keep coming back, to keep the machine going.

And so let's say, just to use a round number, Eazell reports, we planted a hundred new churches last year.

And there's, you know, or maybe that number is too low. Maybe they say a thousand, but there, but there's whatever number it is, it's a number that excites the convention.

What the members typically are thinking, what are they thinking? Okay. That means in cities and country all around the

United States, there are a thousand elementary schools and community centers where people are coming in, they're setting up chairs, and there's a hundred people or 75 people and they're preaching the word of God and people are being saved and they're being baptized and they're being discipled.

They're in small groups, lives are being changed. You're assuming that, but what actually are those a thousand churches?

You might have a third of those that are like the description I just told you. You might have another third that is not a church in any sense that we would recognize.

It might be a church in the ecclesiological sense where two or three are gathered and you've got elders and the word and sacrament, but that's eight people in somebody's apartment and we're calling that a church.

And I'm like, well, biblically speaking there, you could legitimately call something like that a church, but to claim that as among the thousand that is creating this impression that there's this massive success, it's like, you got to know what's actually happened.

There's not a realistic assessment. And that's why I say there needs to be something that is more honest and straightforward direct accounting of that.

And then you might have another significant number of those churches that they care nothing about the Southern Baptist Convention.

They have no intention to stay in it because they're embarrassed of it. They'll cash the check, but they find

Southern Baptist backward and embarrassing, but they'll take the money from them if that money is offered. And whenever the money runs out, they'll ditch it and they'll join

ARC or they'll join some other network that is more suitable to their taste.

And many of these cases, I mean, I kind of know these guys. I mean, a lot of these guys are just not doctrinally sound.

And I'm not saying you have to be some genius. I'm just saying the standard of orthodoxy should be very obvious and clear that we can assess people for, assess these men for.

And a lot of these churches aren't. I mean, like you say, you look at the reports that come out, the state of the church or state of theology, pardon, the state of theology comes out every year.

These people have, you know, there's so much doctrinal error in the American church. And many of these errors are being taught in Southern Baptist churches and we're funding them, hoping, thinking that they're producing doctrinal sound churches when actually we're funding error, we're funding heresy, we're funding scandal.

Because you have guys that just weren't ready, shouldn't have been planting churches and they are. And so that, I think that there needs to be some accounting of all of that.

So I think that the convention needs to hear that message. I don't know if they will. Yeah, but a lot of them are how, how it would be brought.

It sounds like we, you might need to win an election first. You might need a new president before you can bring these things to the platform to for serious discussion.

So I would just recommend, hey, vote when, if you come vote, vote for a, at this point, it looks like Willie Rice is your most conservative option.

And and he, I think would be accommodating to your message and trying to make sure that there's real victories here and not just AstroTurf stuff.

One of the things that, I don't know, did you, did you watch the David Platt documentary at all? Oh yeah. Did you?

Okay. So I, it was, it was well done and man, I was fuming. Well, I mean, we want, we want a little bit of that.

Yeah. Yeah. Like it was, it was heartbreaking. One of the things in that documentary that is revealed is that David Platt at his church

McLean Bible had a city to city church planting initiative. And so this is not

NAM. This is their own church planning initiative. Now to whatever extent NAM is involved, it's a little mysterious.

They may not, but they, there, there was also in the emails, evidence that obviously

Platt was trying to reach some kind of a, a goal marker in order to receive money from the

Southern Baptist convention. And so that that's in the documentary, you can go look at that, but here's the, what, at the point

I wanted to get to, I believe it was the treasurer church treasurer or I should say it was,

I think it was the, cause they've always big church, all these different positions. It was the guy on the elder board who was in charge of finances.

But anyway, he, he knew, knows what he's talking about. He he's interviewed for the documentary and he basically says this, we were saying we had all these church plants and I look them up and I can't find half of them.

They're not 501c3s anywhere. Uh, we're counting the Spanish church as a church or this

Bible study here. Is there like what's going on? And no one really knows the right hand doesn't seem to know what the left hand is

Now I'm only bringing that up to say human nature is if you're trying to impress people and gain funding and, and, uh, pre just present yourself as a success.

You don't have to be Nam, right? This is just sort of across the board. You will try to twist things, uh, that suit you in order to show that you're doing more than you're really doing.

Uh, I think we've all witnessed this at our own jobs at times, right? Working for a corporation or something, you know, the employees who will try to do this and seeing that happen on a small scale.

I think, man, how much bigger with 140, $150 million budget on a national level, the incentive structure is so much more prone to corruption on that level.

Just like the federal government has more corruption than state governments and, or I should say local governments and they have plenty of it.

So, um, I just, I think I resonate with what you're saying. I think this needs to come before the convention.

And I think the thing you said that stands out to me the most, and I hadn't thought about this much, but it's the spiritual angle.

And you're so right that it really is a man who's called by God to lead a flock.

It's not something you can just pay for and manufacture. And when you do that, you do risk, uh, putting people in these positions and they're just not the man that God has called.

Um, and so I wonder whether or not some of this stuff, um, if it was functioning properly, it would be beneficial, but if it's not, whether it's just to punt this stuff back to the churches, because it's the church's money anyway, it's like your taxes, like it's your, it's just a reconfiguration of the money that you already have.

They're like, they're not getting money from a vacuum. So, um, churches can do this too. You know, I don't know, have you planted churches through your church yet?

Or have you, I mean that, right. So like churches can do this. You can take your budget and not give it to Nam and just actually do that thing.

Cause you had identified the guy who's God called in your community. Um, I'd like to see a lot more of that too, uh, going on, you know?

Um, so what's, what's your, yeah, go ahead. I was just saying a lot of churches don't,

I think that that's what they rely on Nam for. A lot of churches might feel like, well, we don't know how to plant, plant churches.

We're, we're first Baptist and we've been here for 150 years. We, we've not done this before. Yeah. Let's, let's trust the experts to do it.

Um, and I get that. I mean, I, I'm sympathetic to that because there's a, um, there, there is a particular, um, way of assessing leaders that we know that is, that is good and effective and local churches might feel at least like they need some assistance in that endeavor.

Um, but that said, I think for churches that can do it, um, it'd be great to just do it. Um, it, it's good to have, it's good to have the assistance and cooperation from a healthy and well -functioning

Nam. And I think that is a great way to do it, to partner with the local churches to, you know, you, you're getting some funding and training from Nam, but you're sending from a local church.

I mean, that is, that is a great cooperative effort in my opinion. But, um, at this point, um,

I, I can't say that I blame churches that feel like they can't really trust just undesignated money sent to the cooperative program if they don't really know where it's going and the product that they're seeing produced is concerning at least.

So I, I, I'm not surprised that a lot of churches are making that decision. Well, it seems like in the new Testament, Paul goes and plants churches.

He even will pay for it sometimes himself through tent making and so forth. And then he, uh, connects with people in the community, stays there for a time, trains up leaders and moves on.

And that's kind of the model. And then some of these churches will contribute to his efforts in these other places, right?

Very personal. Um, and, and the more personal seems like the more accountable, the more, the better, uh, you, and so if there's a way to like, make it that way, uh, somehow it would be more successful.

Uh, but I think of these experts coming in because I've tracked this with the, the, the three major church documentaries

I've done, uh, or been part of the one in FBC, Naples, the McLean Bible church, and then this one first Baptist Nightdale.

In each case, you had some type of a consultation. You had Oxano in Florida.

You had the unstuck group in North Carolina. And then in Virginia, it was not a consulting firm, but it was

David Platt had a friend who was a business consultant himself who came in to, uh, give advice.

And in every situation, it seems like they did very similar things. They wanted to get rid of traditional church stuff, you disband the choir or get rid of, uh, paint the walls, this color, it was all aesthetics and you take out the

American flag that might offend some people. Um, we're going to go more casual here.

We're going to get rid of the children's program here. And, uh, in each case, the, the two things

I noticed was getting rid of tradition and then consolidating everything under the purview of just a few leaders at the top.

Whereas you had had these faithful Sunday school teachers and children's workers before doing good work, and now they're gone.

Um, and, uh, and that's, I'm not saying all experts do this, but that just seems to be what the experts bring to the table is these innovative business model things.

And, um, and I think what you said is so true. We need just the man of God who's been called by the spirit using the tools that the spirit has given us.

And that's where the success comes from. And, uh, so I appreciate you saying that and reminding us of that.

So, uh, any final words you have for Southern Baptist who might be listening, who resonate with what your message and they're thinking, what can we do?

Like I said, at the beginning, um, I do believe in the Southern Baptist convention. And I believe that there is a, there's an opportunity to, to bring reform, needed reform to our entities.

And I mean, we live in turbulent times. There's a lot of change going on and the

Southern Baptist convention is, is that we're more grounded. There's, there's stability there.

There's history. Um, and it's, you know, the most conservative, conservative denomination, even though we've been concerned about some, some drift in that regard, but I think there's plenty of reason to hope.

And I mean, my, this, I wouldn't prescribe this for everybody, but I could tell you what

I decided to do with my church and what I would, would be my recommendation for anybody who cared to ask is to, is to not leave it.

Um, you can stay in it for minimal cost. And so let's say you, you think like, Oh, the Southern Baptist convention is hopelessly and I don't want to support it.

You can, you can be a contributing member. You can, um, you know, come and vote at the convention every year with minimal financial costs.

And, and I would say stay in that state, stay with it and be a part of reform efforts that can gain momentum.

Um, so I, I know some people feel the need to jump out. Um, and I, I don't fault people for doing that, but I, my recommendation is to stay in if you can and, and join the reform efforts.

So there, and there, there are good people that are behind this. William Wolfe is a friend of mine and I think he's doing good effort.

Um, Willie Rice, I would, I would love to see him, uh, win the presidency this year. I think he's, he is the right man that, um, well, that seems to have a finger on the pulse of what's needed in the convention.

And there, there are a lot of other people, I couldn't, couldn't name them all, but top to bottom, they're just a lot of good people that are in the convention doing great work.

And you never know what sort of, if you just, if you just look at the reality on the ground at any given moment, a snapshot, um, you might feel discouraged.

Then I get that. But over, over a longer time horizon, there's, God does things that we wouldn't expect.

Things can change. There are black swan events that radically change and kind of awaken everybody simultaneously. And so I think you, you want to have as many solid conservatives in the convention as possible to take advantage of those opportunities that God may providentially present to us.

Um, and it's happened before. I mean, it was the, you know, the conservative resurgence that, that took place, um, was that in the eighties or seventies?

Um, it, it, it's happened before. And I think the tools are there. I'd say we, the

Southern Baptist Convention possesses the tools of its own reform and they've not been abandoned. I just think there needs to be, there does need to be more awareness and more of a commitment.

And I would say one last thing, um, and I would say this to people that would might maybe consider yourself normies.

You don't really want to, you're not really fighters. You don't really want, you don't like the drama. You just want to preach the gospel and love people and shepherd souls and do discipleship for, for people like that, that I would affectionately called normies.

And I say that cause I am one of them. Um, we have to steal our resolve and just, just pray that God would give us the stomach for, for fighting and fighting.

Does it always have to, just because you're fighting, doesn't mean that you're disobeying God or you're being quarrelsome or you're being ugly.

Um, all of our heroes of the Bible were fighters and they, there's always a different battle in every day and every generation.

And in the Southern Baptist Convention, this is a fight worth having in our day. So I would appeal to ordinary backyard grill on Saturday afternoon, kind of conservative

Christians, stay in the fight and steal your spine and, and be willing to, to fight and to support people that you might find a little unsavory, but they're fighting the same fight that you're fighting.

Back these men up, don't abandon them. They're doing good work. Um, and even if you find them a little combative, a little provocative, trust

God that they're fighting a good fight, they're doing a good work and stand behind them. And so personally,

I, I, that, that has been my approach. I want to stand behind guys that I think are doing good work and, and together we are moving the needle and hopefully we can move the needle fast enough to where we can, things can coalesce at the right moment and we can see real lasting change in the

Southern Baptist Convention, hopefully starting this summer at, at the, in Orlando. That's a great word.

Uh, Michael, I appreciate you saying that for those who are in the Southern Baptist Convention. I, I would encourage you guys,

Hey, at least stick out, stick it out until June. Okay. We got a big decision coming up.

I'm doing everything I can to help with that by exposing the woman pastor issue. There's so many things that, uh, so many battle lines, uh, that have been, uh, in that denomination over the last few years.

But, uh, I think there's an opportunity here and, and folks like yourself are leading the charge on that, Michael. So, um,

God bless you. And if anyone wants to check out Michael's sermons or go to, uh, his church, what is the website?

I didn't write that down for your church. Uh, the church is Christ, the King N K Y .com.

And my personal website is D Michael Clary .com. How'd you get that domain?

You must've been early. D Michael Clary. Oh, no, I think you're probably the only

D Michael Clary. I mean, the Christ, the King .com that's pretty well. Christ, the King N K Y for Northern Kentucky.

Oh, I see. I see. Oh, N K Y. Okay. All right. I don't know why I missed that. All right. So yeah, that's okay.

Not as impressive, but, uh, Christ, the King N K Y and, uh, and then check out, uh, Canon Press be looking out for the next, what, two months.

You're going to have a book coming out there and, uh, it's the summer. Yeah. And it's on, um, maybe just give like a one sentence description to wet people's taste a little here.

Um, the, we don't have a title yet that, uh, the working title just that I've been using is loser theology, because that is the main thing that I'm opposing.

Um, but the book has a, the first half is about diagnosing the problem that we're seeing where Christians feel more righteous when they're passive and kind of above it all, and being pietistic.

And so the first half of the book is about diagnosing that very, very, uh, precisely why do we do this and to critique it.

And then the second half of the book is what does it look like to move out of that and to pursue high agency

Christianity, even things like authority and power, the goodness of those things and how God uses those things to bring a reform of redemption.

And those are, those are healthy expressions of Christian discipleship that are needed in our day. Um, so high agency, rugged

Christianity is the prescription, but it is very practical. I mean, I, I, I write very practically.

And, uh, I think there'll be something for, uh, for people to be like, okay, I can, I see,

I see things in myself that need to be corrected and I have a path forward for what to do.

And that's what the book will, will present. And I'm, I'm really excited about it. It should be out, uh, this summer, hopefully.

All right. Look out for the book. Don't be a loser coming out soon for Michael Clary. All right. God bless