164: From Capitol Hill to Chaffee Crossing

The Local Church as Christ’s Kingdom

To the Ruled Church podcast. This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased. He is honored, and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better, because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas?

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

The church is not a democracy, it's a monarchy.

Christ is king. You can't be Christian without a local church.

You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible-believing church, and spend your life serving Jesus in a local, visible congregation.

One of the things I love about the Ruled Church podcast is the conversations I get to have with guys that maybe you have never heard of. I know we've had some well-known folks on this podcast at times, and that's great, but sometimes just getting to know the ordinary, faithful, godly brothers that are out there.

And this we have in the next two episodes with Pastor Blake Boylston. He is the pastor of Chaffee Crossing. I wanna say Fort Chaffee, but Chaffee Crossing Baptist Church in Fort Smith, Arkansas. He's a very wise brother, godly brother, very pastoral.

We are like-minded in many ways. I'm grateful to have met him, met him through a mutual friend who was on the podcast not long ago, Brother Jared Links at Lee Creek Baptist Church. So Blake and I spend, there's one conversation that I'm breaking up in two episodes, no secret, but Blake and I spend time in the first episode really talking about his background and the things that he learned.

He formerly on staff with Capitol Hill Baptist Church there with Mark Devers, so the things that he learned. And then next week's episode, we'll talk more application in the local church and what that looks like.

So I hope that you enjoy these two episodes, and here we go. All right, brother, I'm gonna ask you an honest question. Just a few months ago, could you have even imagined that one day in your ministry, you would actually be on the Rural Church Podcast?

Hey, I'm honored, but I would have had no idea.

Yes, shout out to our seven listeners. And no, I'm grateful to have you on, brother. Welcome to the Rural Church Podcast. I'm Allen Nelson. I am one of the pastors here in Providence Baptist Church, Perryville, Arkansas.

We are, we're a Reformed Baptist Church and we're right in Central Arkansas. And today I'm getting to talk to a, you call yourself an Arkansan? I mean, you live in Arkansas now. No, it's home now. I'm a true Arkansan, pig suey.

Fellow Arkansan, Blake Boylston. Blake, why don't we have, let's just turn it over to you for a few minutes and let's just let everybody know who is this man that I'm talking to this morning.

Yeah, well, thank you for having me on, Allen. My name is Blake Boylston and 41 years old, just turned 41. I'm married to my wife, Julie. We've been married for about 18 years and we have three children.

My oldest son is Noah. He's a sophomore in high school. My middle child is my daughter, Avery. She's 13 in the eighth grade. And then my youngest son is Titus. He's in the third grade. He is eight going on nine.

Yeah, we have a blonde lab. It's about six year old dog. I live in Barling, or technically I live in Fort Smith, Arkansas and pastor at Chaffee Crossing Baptist Church, which is technically located in Barling, which is on the South end of Fort Smith, so.

Yeah, and that church was planted in, you picked a great year, 2020, right?

Yeah, out of all the years you could think about doing one of the most difficult things you've ever done in your life, you picked it almost in one of the most difficult years of our country's history in the last 30 years.

So yeah, the church was planted in 2020 in the middle of COVID. And that's its own story as far as all the different challenges and ways to think through how to meet together, where to meet, how to meet, and then how to plant a church in the middle of a very divided country.

So it was unique to say the least and God has held us fast for six years.

From Georgia to Capitol Hill Baptist Church

What was your pastoral experience before Arkansas? So I know you spent some time right at Capitol Hill. And then like, so where were you before you came to Arkansas?

Yeah, so I was born in Augusta, Georgia, but lived about 10 years of my life in South Carolina, different parts of South Carolina and 19 years in Savannah, Georgia. So Savannah was pretty much my most formative years and I became a Christian when I was 13 years old, never saw being a pastor on the radar, but through a whole series of events for the next probably 15 to 16 years of my Christian life until I was 27, I was working in the family business and there was a little church that needed a cleaning company to clean their building.

And I worked in the family business, which is a commercial cleaning business. And I began being the janitor for Cuoco Baptist Church, a church of about 15 to 20 people. And long story short is they didn't have a pastor.

I had been exploring the cult of ministry for about six years. And I became the pastor there at the janitor toilet cleaning pastor of Cuoco Baptist Church. And I was bi-vocational for two years. And then about 10 months after I stepped away from Cuoco, I wanted to pursue full-time pastoral ministry work.

I don't have an undergrad degree. I don't have a seminary degree. And so my options were fairly limited, but I met Mark Dever at a Nine Marks Weekender, which is basically a tri-annual conference workshop they held at their church for the last 25 years or so.

And I went at 28 years old, about a year and a half into my first pastorate, met him, kept his contact information. And then a very long story short is through looking for other options of where to go, I kept bumping into a lack of like-mindedness with a lot of other pastors to work for or churches that required seminary degrees.

And when I met Mark Dever, he dashed all those preconceived ideas. He said, I don't care that you don't have a degree. As long as you're godly, you know your Bible and you're sticky. People wanna follow you and trust you and they see fruit in your life.

And so we began a friendship from a distance. And then in 2013, we met and then 2015, I reached out to him or 2014, and we began a conversation together regarding what it would look like maybe to apply for their pastoral internship program at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in DC.

And it's a five-month program. It's extremely intense, about 55 to 60 hours of work a week. Reading and writing, observation, you're basically at everything. The church does, the elders do, the staff does, and a lot of observation.

So you're reading and writing, observing and learning. And it was through that internship experience, we moved from Savannah to Washington, DC, left the family business, left my truck behind, sold our house, didn't have anything after the internship to fall back on.

And the elders began talking with me about becoming a pastor on staff at Capitol Hill Baptist Church. And so according to their polity, you need to be voted in or affirmed by the church to be an elder.

And so they hired me on staff with a nine-month, not a probation period, but a nine-month vetting and examination period. And I became an elder there at CHBC and a staff pastor for four years there from 2016 to 2019.

And yeah, so I was kind of the number three preacher behind Mark and the number two guy. And I served alongside about 25 elders in that wonderful church there in DC. So those are my two main pastoring experiences before Arkansas.

Yeah, amen. So I assume that you'd feel like that prepared you pretty well for where you're at now.

Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting story. I almost think you could do a podcast for Cuauhtco Baptist and CHBC, the amount of stories I can talk about. I think Cuauhtco Baptist, that little church, a small church, 20, 25 people, it taught me not just really the importance of preaching, but loving the people you preach to.

When you meet a people in a small, humble context like that, they're not looking for big numbers. They don't really care about keeping up with the Joneses of other churches. They just want to know, do you love me?

Are you going to be there for me? And so the Lord kind of took me in a very humble place, a small place, an obscure place, to be honest. And I learned a lot of hard knocks, my first funerals, sermon prep, how do you harness zeal with wisdom with a young man, with a lot of older saints.

And then Capitol Hill Baptist Church, it was kind of like, and this is, I'm a former football player, so if I use illustrations with athletics, forgive me, but it works. It was like going from playing at a community college, and then I went and played at the University of Alabama.

And whether you want to put Mark Deborah as Nick Saban or not, that's for you to do, but it helped me. My theology, my convictions were pretty set on what I think the Bible teaches on the local church, like elders, deacons, membership, discipline, the aspiration to a pastoral ministry.

The Lord from about 2006 to 2014, my soteriology was being changed towards a more reformed perspective, big God theology. My ecclesiology was changing by reading the Bible, reading a few books here and there.

The number one thing I lacked was observation of seeing this lived out, fleshed out in real time and having been tested over long periods of time. So I needed a season to watch, observe, sit and listen in a safe environment where I could ask questions, I could express maybe minor disagreements, but I could also have my own theology tested and then get thrown into the deep end all at the same time.

And so it was priceless on so many levels, getting feedback on preaching, participating on the elder body, enormous amount of hours in counseling, visiting pastors around the world. And then Pastor Mark, which is a dear friend of mine, he was a weird, strange combination of my boss, my pastor and my friend.

And because of that, it really felt more like a Paul and Timothy relationship than it did an employer and employee. And so that just made it even more enjoyable. And I think what Mark did for me is Mark and I are very different personality wise and different gifting, but he gave me a vision for what I had seen in athletics and I saw in the Bible, but I'd never seen in real time in real life on what it looks like to raise up men for the next generation and to shepherd the flock God's entrusted to you in your context with principles and truths that are universal and objective.

And I just, I cannot tell you like the amount of things that have still shaped me to today where planting a church, though I'd never done it. If you know what a church is, by God's grace, you can plant a church, but you really shouldn't be planting a church if you don't know what a church is.

And I think CHPC rounded off some, maybe some rough edges, cut off some fat that I had, and then gave me confidence in the sufficiency of scripture on a deeper level, so.

That's good, brother. No, that's great. I mean, there's several things I'm gonna ask you. Just a minute, you know, you made that statement. That's very good about knowing what a church is. So I'm gonna circle back and ask you that in just a minute to tell us what a church is.

Before we do that, I thought it'd just be interesting. You know, this is the Rural Church Podcast. I mean, but we love the church. That's why, you know, it doesn't matter the size or whatever. It's just sometimes the rural areas are underrepresented.

I think people focusing on the big stuff, but I mean, that's okay. But the question I have then is culturally, and we live in a tumultuous time period in America, and so I'd just be curious, what do you see culturally main differences between living there in Washington and now you're in Fort Smith?

Pastoral Ministry Across Different Cultural Contexts

Well, having lived in Georgia and South Carolina most of my life, moving back to the South Midwest, Midwestern context, I feel like putting on an old pair of jeans, to be honest with you. So I didn't really go through any culture shock.

I was kind of used to some of the challenges that we deal with in pastoring in our context, Christian nominalism, the idea that just because your grandma and grandpa or your mom and dad, or maybe you grew up in church or you were even baptized, walked an aisle, but maybe a little gospel ignorant, progressive sanctification was kind of under addressed and then kind of really a laissez-faire approach to church.

I was kind of used to that, or maybe traditionalism at the expense of scripture. But I think the biggest difference is that we're a little bit of a whiplash compared to Savannah in Washington, D .C., no, Fort Smith, is I feel like I've been more of a unicorn here on some of our distinctives as a church and some of those labels that maybe your listeners may be more acquainted with, whether it's Calvinism, church discipline, and elders.

I understand those can be scary words, maybe even had some bad experiences, but really I think the longer I've been here, the more people are afraid of what they don't know. And I think in those other church contexts, you certainly dealt with those, but there were more like-minded churches in those areas where if you wanted to grab an association or a partnership of five, eight, 15 different brothers over a span of maybe 60 miles from your church, you could actually do that.

I think here, since I've been here, I have found more guys that are assistant or associate pastors, or they are lay members that have a lot of same convictions, but they don't have the same as their senior pastor.

And so they're kind of quiet on these convictions. So I think here culturally on the religious front, there's just a lot of ignorance. Church history, there's a lot of ignorance of Baptist church history.

So I've had to be very, very slow to assume the average Christian, I'm saying true Christian at this point, knows what these terms mean and just slow down and just teach, explain, teach, explain. And then I think just like culturally, I love it culturally.

It's a great place to raise your kids. I'm never in a hurry. Whatever traffic people say that Rogers Avenue has, if you've never sat in traffic on the Beltway in DC for three hours, you don't know what traffic is.

So I love the slower pace. This is definitely the way God made me. I love fishing. I love being outside. Yeah, it's the natural state. So yeah, and then I think politically, having lived in DC during 2016, during that first election, and then obviously 2020 with COVID and that election, I think the Lord was already preparing me for even the divisions that happened in our own state and our own community.

They're different. This is more of a red state, of course, compared to some of the other places I've lived. And so some of the different challenges are just, yeah, they're just different. But yeah, overall, it's been a blessing.

Amen, yeah.

I share a lot of those. Of course, I was born in Texas, but pretty much spent my whole life in Arkansas other than we lived for a year in Kentucky. So this is home special. And I think, you know, we need the gospel here.

And just because we're in the Bible Belt, I mean, you know that, we've talked about that. But, you know, one thing, and this is really near to my heart as well, but you said earlier, you know, about understanding, okay, what a church is.

Like before we even get to the idea of, like we have a saying here, Christ is worthy of a healthy church. But before we're able to get to that, what is a healthy church? I mean, we got to start with the basic, like what is a church?

So take that for a minute.

What Makes a Local Church a Church?

Yeah, well, I'll give a simple definition and then I'll expand on it. First of all, it's a group of Christians. So it's more than one person that agrees together to live out the one another's of the New Testament in all the ways that Jesus and the apostles and the other writers intended for churches to church.

So for example, the word church literally means the called out ones who assemble. So for a church to be a church, at some point you have to assemble. If you look through the New Testament, it's more than sporadic or random, it's regular.

And throughout church history, Christians have traditionally, ever since the very beginning, met on the first day of the week to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. So in the reform perspective, we often call it the Lord's day.

So the Lord's people in the Lord's house on the Lord's day. Well, then we need to expand that then. So what makes a Bible study different from a local church? What makes 10 friends at a Christian concert versus a church?

So it's a group of Christians who regularly gather on the Lord's day at the very least. And they intend to preach the gospel, to herald the good news from the scriptures about who Jesus Christ is, how to be saved, what he calls of us to do in our life as followers of Christ and to administer the ordinances or sacraments of baptism in the Lord's supper.

And the preaching, of course, as faith comes by hearing, hearing by the word of Christ, preaching is what heralds the truth of God's word to call people out of darkness into his marvelous life. And then baptism is the public profession of faith.

It's the coming out. It's the microphone inside or in front of the mouth of the new convert declaring Jesus Christ as my Lord. I am buried with him in baptism, raised to walk in newness of life. And I'm putting on the team jersey to represent him on earth as one who has the Holy Spirit dwelling within me.

And I intend to be marked out from the world. The Lord's supper is the family meal. It's the regular communing family meal of those who have been baptized in the name of the triune God and those who are communing together to be a local church.

And so when Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 10 and 11, for we all partake of the one bread and the one cup, it's speaking about our unity and our oneness in the body of Christ. It's where the people of God become visible.

And so it's a group of Christians who regularly gather on the Lord's day at the very least, who intend to preach the gospel, administer the ordinances, but within the ordinances, I would say it is imperative that that to be a church, you're making disciples.

This was the great commission. This is what Jesus said in Matthew 28. So what does it mean to make disciples? Jesus is very clear. You baptize them and then you teach them everything Jesus gave us to obey.

So underneath the making disciples is all the one and others, all the commandments, all of scripture. What does it mean to follow Christ? So that would include things like submitting to your leaders or your elders or your shepherds, Hebrews 13, 17.

It would include elders and leaders and shepherds, shepherding the flock of God among you, giving oversight, equipping the saints for the work of ministry, Ephesians 4. You also have things like church discipline.

So church discipline sometimes gets a bad word, but it really just means to be disciples. So there's formative discipline, like what we're doing right now. We're talking about scripture to instruct and edify.

This is a form of discipline, but we often have a negative connotation because that's more corrective church discipline. There's one way to teach a person how to ride a bike by watch me ride a bike, here's how to do it.

And when you don't ride it correctly or you're about to wreck your bike, that's corrective church discipline. So that's correction, reproof, rebuke, et cetera. We're showing people from God's word where we're off in our thinking, our attitude or our behavior.

So within all that, the local church is a group of Christians who regularly gather to preach the gospel, to administer the ordinances and to make disciples of Jesus Christ. And really when all of that's happening together, what we're gonna see is there's a symbiotic relationship.

There's this codependent relationship. Jesus is the head of the church and we are members of his body. He is the good shepherd. We are the flock. We are like living stones connected to the cornerstone.

And as the people of God in a local church, be the church that we are universally and invisibly, but do it visibly and through a covenant commitment or a self-conscious submitting to one another, the world gets to see something of what Jesus is like.

The scriptures are very clear. We're the salt of the earth, the light of the world. And it's through the church, the manifold wisdom of God has now been revealed to those in the heavenly places, but also on earth.

And so really at the end of the day, if you're trying to witness to an unbeliever, certainly share the gospel. You can street preach, you can give them tracks. But as Israel, I think as G .K. Beale once said, Israel was a come and see kind of people.

The church is a go and tell and a come and see kind of people. So we're called to go out and tell, but we're also to invite those to come in and see. And it's the seeing of regenerate church members, regularly baptizing, regularly predicting the Lord's supper, and then living out the one another's is where people get to see a glimpse of what Jesus is like.

And that's why Jesus says by this, all people will know you're my disciples if you have love for one another. It's that one anothering where we see the love of Christ on display.

Amen, that's so many directions I wanna go. I'm gonna see how we can do at the time here, but one thing I think this is helpful to those who listen, but I think about myself 10 years ago, and I think about 10 years ago, everything that you just said, I'm in agreement with, but the question I'll have for my 10 year younger self, how do we get from affirming all these things that you said, and you've got guys that are in, let's say the typical SBC church or typical, just any kind of typical Baptist church.

When I say typical, I'm talking about Bible belt, Baptist church, probably one pastor, plurality of deacons model, and, but they're in agreement, everything you just said, yes, they don't have to be convinced doctrinally, they've got it.

Now, how would you tell them to move from where they're at right now to getting the church in a place that recognizes these things that you've just talked about, discipline, healthy membership, even plurality of elders, what are we doing?

Yeah, it's a great question.

Teaching Scripture and Building Healthy Church Membership

And because I've pastored in very different context and faced different challenges, and I've heard horror stories, and I've been through my own fair share of challenges with this as well. So whether someone's planting a church from ground up, or you are in the middle of a church revitalization, whichever one, I'm always gonna start off with the same answer.

It's one that I think every pastor is gonna go, all right, come on, I know that, but no, but really, it really does begin with teaching the word of God. You can't, you can never think you are going to make your quote unquote church healthy or move it towards biblical health simply by personality, gimmicks, coercion, manipulation, or just striking keys on a keyboard, or just writing things on a constitution and bylaws.

Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ. How is anyone saved? It's by hearing the word of truth. God, the Holy Spirit regenerates the heart, illumines the mind, we receive and believe what Christ has said.

When we're teaching the scriptures, I mean, this was so formative for me when I was at Capitol Hill during my internship. If I put those five months basically within just a paragraph of what was utterly made clear to me, there are three questions you have got to be able to answer as a pastor.

Number one, what is a Christian? Number two, what is the gospel? And then number three, what is a local church? If you don't know those three questions, the answers to those questions, you are not ready to lead your church towards any form of revitalization.

So the first thing is through your regular diet of just teaching and preaching. I'm a big advocate of preaching the gospel in every sermon, not as a tack on, not as an altar call, but showing Christ in all of scripture and not assuming everyone in your church is saved.

I don't care if it's the deacons. I don't care if it's the staff. I don't care if it's the personnel committee who called you. Don't assume everyone's a Christian who's a church member or an officer in the church.

Judas Iscariot, Demas, Simon the Magician, and our own experiences tell us you could be in church leadership. You could be a well-known church member and not be born again. So I think you must continue to present the gospel, but present Jesus, because Jesus, He leaves no neutrality throughout the gospels.

You're either gonna be for Him or against Him. You're gonna love Him or you're gonna hate Him. And so I would say, if you wanna say winning your people, you're not trying to win them towards an argument.

You're trying to win them or persuade them to love Jesus. And because if you love Jesus, you're gonna love what He's inspired in the text. So I think presenting the gospel, presenting who Christ is regularly, I think clearly defining for people what a Christian is.

Now, that's gonna be done through a variety of ways. Teaching, of course, passing out good books, of course. I know some people get really hung up and they think it's a nine marks thing or like a power play or cultish.

I'm not sure how you can ever lead a church to biblical health unless the vast majority of the members of that church are regenerate. They're truly Christian. Right. If you have got a building full of goats and wolves and then maybe a few baby sheep, I'm just gonna say you're gonna be in for a while.

It's gonna be feel like David running from Saul for a while. Right. And so I say this knowing that there's so many different examples that people can answer, but you've gotta make sure what water you're letting in the bowl is actually clean and going to rejuvenate the existing bowl you have.

So number one, you gotta have meaningful membership. Like does your church have a process that has a little bit of teeth to it and a little bit of a bar just beyond raising your hand at the end of a service to become a member?

So we call them membership interviews or membership conversations where you come to a membership class. We have four membership classes in our church. There's nothing in the Bible on membership classes, but it's truth in advertising.

It's being loving and clear. Why do we exist? Our statement of faith, our church covenant, how we commit to live our lives together. And then what is our ministry philosophy on missions and programs and all that kind of stuff.

So when people have a real clear advertisement of what we're about, there's a membership interview by an elder pastor or someone you trust to walk through what is the gospel? What is your testimony of how and when you became a Christian?

Learning about their story. Imagine a sheep pen where one individual sheep is coming into the fold and you are combing through the sheep to see, is this a sheep, number one? And then number two, what are some things that maybe I can be of help to them on the front end, maybe helping them with their understanding of the gospel, helping them work through some really gnarly, difficult sin and suffering struggles right there in the first conversation.

What I'm trying to do is to model for them that shepherding care of what it means to be a member of a church that cares about you. And so as it slowly happens, sheep are joining your pen, not goats. Sheep who love the Savior are joining your flock.

You're gonna see some of them, among them become future under shepherds. You're gonna see that they're disciple making, they're sticky, they're contagious, they're godly. And so I think over time, regenerate church membership, meaningful membership, simultaneously with the identifying, teaching and raising up of truly qualified men who smell like the sheep, but also smell like under shepherds, where they are coming along around you so that you're not the only voice talking about this stuff.

It's other men in the church that are giving wise counsel, teaching good Bible studies and sermons. They're talking about meaningful membership too. So I think that's the first thing is shoring up your membership practices, revisiting them.

And then depending on what you're walking into, I mean, if you're walking into an existing church and you've got bloated membership numbers with 300 people on the roll, 50 in attendance, you first need to find out why these people's names are on the roll.

And that may take some time, but then with the people who are actually showing up, especially if you're in a smaller church, since this is the rural church podcast, I would spend the first two years of your ministry in the homes of these existing members who do come and almost having reverse membership interviews or basically without them realizing, hey, tell me about your testimony.

Hey, where did you first understand the gospel? And hey, do you have any questions about what the gospel is or what it means to follow Jesus now? So you're just basically making sure the people in your church, you're not assuming they're a Christian.

So that would be the first thing, teaching, membership roles.

All right, that's where we're hitting pause this week on the Rural Church Podcast. You'll have to tune back in next week as we continue this conversation with Pastor Blake Boylston and we'll turn more directly to the work of building and shepherding the local church, raising up men, more talk about meaningful membership, discipleship, discipline, patience in ministry, faithfulness, gospel preaching.

Catch us next week on the Rural Church Podcast.

The Church as God’s Workmanship

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

How are you gonna respond?