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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said, but we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.
In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.
Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.
Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. My name's Mike Abendroth, I'm your host, and if you don't know, soon it'll be podcast only, Facebook only, tune-in radio only, no WVNE 760, so make sure you make that mental note as well.
And today is part two of the NoCoEver video. Flew in Carl Truman from Westminster Seminary, flew in Phil Johnson, grace to you, MacArthur, flew in James White, Alpha and Omega Ministries, and asked them questions about the Elephant Room, asked them questions about James McDonald Driscoll, and are they thinking rightly about T .D. Jakes?
How should we approach this? And this is part two of NoCoEver .com, you can go to that video, NoCoEver .com. Part two will be out sometime in the near future, part three and part four, so today is part two, NoCoEvervideo .com.
My name's Mike Abendroth and I'm your host, info and nocompromiseradio .com. Problem is, maybe you guys are middle-aged, white, and reformed. I think James, you, are you middle-aged?
Okay, white? Yeah, I'm younger than James McDonald and only slightly older than Mark Driscoll, I have to say.
Well, Brian Crawford Lourdes had some pushback and he basically said, we're hearing from reformed guys, I think all three of you men are reformed, we're hearing from these reformed men, and he said, quote, but to be honest with you, right now, I'm really embarrassed to be reformed,.
Lowercase r. The loudest voices in the conservative evangelical world are middle-aged, white, reformed guys. Does this have anything to do with being middle-aged or white or this kind of subtle racism thing?
Well, I would immediately hit back on one point there, to use the trendy PC language, the ageist comment. When Paul talks about qualifications for eldership, he makes it very, very clear that elders are to be men of good reputation in their community, they're probably going to be family men who kids have grown up.
He has to say to Timothy, because he's young, let no man despise you because of your youth. It is very clear that Paul considers the church will be run by middle-aged to old-aged guys. There will be the occasional exceptional young guy coming through, but by and large, being middle-aged to old-aged, that's one of the qualifications for being an elder.
So if you have a problem with middle-aged guys calling the shots, then you need to go back and read Paul, and I think you need to repent of your attitude towards older men in the faith at that point.
So the first point to make is the ageist comment simply shows how far from the biblical standards of church leadership some of these men have drifted. Color is utterly irrelevant. Thabiti Anwabile came back, he broke the sort of the code of silence at the Gospel Coalition on this one and came back all guns blazing.
Thabiti is a former, I think, black Muslim. There is nobody who understands racial issues from an evangelical perspective in the United States, probably as well as Thabiti Anwabile does. So what are you going to do?
Are you going to call him an Uncle Tom because he's called these men out? Thirdly, age and race don't enter into it. I object to T .D. Jakes because he denies the Trinity, and I object to him because he promotes the prosperity gospel, and by giving him this platform in a broader evangelical world, you are intruding him on my congregation for whom I have to give an answer at the end of time, and I will speak up in that context.
You can dismiss me as a middle-aged, balding, I'm not quite as bald as James, but I'm certainly moving dramatically in that direction. I don't have Phil's genes, obviously. I might be a middle-aged, balding guy, but I can spot a con man when I see it.
Phil, other comments about the elephant room in general?
No, I think the racial comments were definitely a cheap shot. Racist, I suspect.
Yeah. Doesn't that sound like the cultural left? I think James, you blogged about that, the same arguments that the cultural left uses. Yeah, absolutely, and you could. They're using.
You could turn that argument against them. I mean, James McDonald sponsored a men's conference the week after the elephant room, and he had engaged Votie Balcombe to be one of the speakers, and when Votie showed up, because he's a black pastor who had also written some serious concerns, grave concerns about T .D. Jakes and his theology, they pulled him aside and said, we're not gonna let you speak at this conference.
They sent him back to the airport and sent him home. And now, would I say that was racially motivated? I don't believe it was, but if I said that, it would have just about as much validity as their complaint that my criticism of James McDonald is motivated by some hidden racial agenda that I have.
The very idea of raising the issue of either age or race in this issue is further illustration of the fact that for these folks, they do not see themselves standing in the history of the church. I mean, you could not minimize this subject in this way by making it somehow racial if you just recognized the tremendous controversies that have taken place in history and the suffering that has taken place in history over these very issues.
I mean, Sabellianism, Modalism, that was before Arius. That was one of the first things that was dealt with even before the issue of the deity of Christ was. And so, it again illustrates how important it is.
Most evangelicals, church history, ancient church history is Billy Graham. Okay, that's as far back as it goes. And that's a tragedy because we stand on the shoulders of giants. And if we don't know what they went through and if we don't know what they said, we are impoverished ourselves.
Now, I'm not one of those people that's gonna invest some kind of special inspired utterances and things like that. But if we don't realize where we've come from, we're going to have elephant room twos and threes and fours and fives.
And the energy of the church is gonna be sapped away into this kind of stuff rather than, look folks, we have a rising secular totalitarianism in Western culture. We have the challenge of Islam. We have these things coming at us.
And elephant room two infected people cannot give a reason for the hope that's within them because they're not really sure what they believe anymore anyways.
That's the problem. Piggybacking on what James has just said, Council of Nicaea, three, two, five. If you'd been at the Council of Nicaea and had looked out at those men there who were laying the foundations for what becomes later Trinitarianism, you'd have seen men there with limbs missing, eyes missing.
Maybe some of them had been completely blind. There'd been terrible persecution in the Roman Empire in the previous 25 years. Those men were willing to lose body parts for this. And yet we're willing to sell it so cheaply and then cry racism when anybody criticizes.
It is simply pathetic. And I don't know the individual who made that statement, but he should repent of that.
And none of them were white, middle-aged guys.
Probably Turkish, at least. It seems to me there's a pragmatic element as well. Listen to what MacDonald said to Jakes. I'm so weary of people thinking they know, they just don't know. I think you honor us and you humble us.
A man of your stature and commitment to the gospel and fruitfulness would come and sit with us in this room, let you ask and me ask him what he believes, like he's getting baptized or something. What's the definition of fruitfulness?
So we're saying Jakes has 30 ,000, 40 ,000 people attend his so-called church, then he must be fruitful. He can teach us something about practical ministry. I think that's a fallacy as well.
Phil? Yeah, and that kind of fawning language offered to a man whose distinctive is he corrupts the gospel and denies the trinity. I just find that so offensive. It's hard to think of any possible pure motive for using that kind of language in that kind of situation.
But it definitely leaves the impression that what impresses him about Jakes is the size of his audience and the reach of his influence, which those things shouldn't impress us at all.
If somebody at Grace Life was reading Thou Art Loosed or a Joyce Meyer book and you saw them reading it,.
What would you do as a pastor? Well, I would ask them, why are you reading that? If they think they're being edified by it, I would be concerned and I would ask to speak with them about it. And I want to correct that tendency.
Yeah, we have elephant room too.
And then the people are saying, he's a brother, listen to him because he must be doing something right because of the fruitfulness. Driscoll said the same thing when he reflected about the elephant room afterward.
He said, I say this not to brag, but to show how wonderfully complex it is to try and steward so much of God's grace in so many people. Nothing changes until the leader changes and I have a lot to learn.
While I can do and learn a lot theologically from my tribe, other, I guess, four point Calvinists, the truth is there are not many evangelicalistically fruitful churches in my tribe and there are not any churches larger than ours I can learn from, so I have to go outside of my theological tribe to learn certain things.
I've got the biggest reformed church, nobody's bigger, who can I learn from? I guess a modalist.
I was gonna say, he might learn something about the Trinity if he chatted to those of us who know about the Trinity, but pastor smaller churches, one obvious suggestion. But again, I think you're putting your finger on it that it's the, again, I'm gonna sound ethnically insensitive at this point, I guess, but it's the American worship of size and success rather than faithfulness that's permeating at this point.
Now I've gotta ask, what can I learn from T .D. Jakes about pastoring my congregation? What can I learn from Mark Driscoll? Somebody in my congregation is taken ill and I get a call in the middle of the night, let's say, and I've gotta go and sit at their bedside.
What can I learn from these guys? Have these guys ever done that? Do they know their people by name? Do they have anything to say to somebody who's dying of cancer? Certainly, what can T .D. Jakes say to somebody who's dying of cancer, to somebody who's poor?
It's their fault, it's their problem. That's pastorally very cruel stuff that he teaches. So I would throw the question back and say, what do we have to learn from you guys? Your model of church, your notion of faithfulness as success, that bears no resemblance to me to what I read in the New Testament and no resemblance to my own experience of what it is to be in a church.
In those quotations you read, they don't define what they mean by fruit. But the clear implication there is that it's all about numbers, which is not what Jesus meant when he said, by their fruits you shall know them.
He certainly was not saying, look and see who has the biggest following and that's who you know is right. And yet, that does seem to be the sole criteria for the elephant room, both years. The common denominator of all of those who are invited to participate is that they pastor large megachurches or they minister in an environment where they've got extremely large followings, inordinately large followings.
Think about Finney. Did Finney, from the external, seem like he was fruitful? I guess the answer would be yes, but then you have Asahel Nettleton, who was much smaller in the scale, but following up 50 years later, the people who were converted under his ministry through the gospel, they were members of churches, serving, and what happened in the burnout district with Finney, just gone, done.
So, to me, fruitfulness. Even looking at biblical examples, look at the Apostle Paul and just trace what he writes chronologically. And you can see that towards the end of his life, he had fewer and fewer ministry partners.
People distanced themselves from him because to be aligned with Paul was to be subject to extra scrutiny and extra persecution. And as you get towards the end of his life, it seems as if virtually everyone has forsaken him.
If the criterion for fruitfulness were large numbers of followers, we might judge Paul to be a massive failure, but we know better than that because what is the fruit of Paul's ministry?
Right, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Christ himself. If fruit is numbers, then no wonder when we go to pastors' conferences, the first question they ask you is what? How large is your church? Why do we do that? And what's the response to, well, how large is your church?
You think it is a distinctively American problem? I mean, I see that even. No.
Even other parts of the world. I think America has a distinct cultural proclivity that way. I think it's part of human nature. But I think wherever you go in the world, people are gonna be interested in how large your church is.
But it's more, maybe you guys are just, you guys, maybe America is just more honest and open about it. That would be a positive way of putting it. But I do think the commercialization of the church, the worship of raw numbers, is more on the surface and more open and more obvious here than perhaps it is back in Europe.
In Europe, of course, the issues are different. And a church of 500 in Europe is a very large church these days. So wouldn't it be lovely to have a church of 1 ,500, 2 ,000, 3 ,000 in Europe? That would be great.
But I think the temptations and the cultural proclivities are slightly different, which means the problem manifests itself in a slightly different way.
And for a lot of evangelicals, though, when they ask the question, how large is your church, and you answer honestly, and not inflating the numbers, it will have a major impact on the weight that they will attach to your words.
There is absolutely no question about that. I mean, look at the three of us here. Phil would be a representation of a very large church,.
But... But how many in the fellowship group that you pastor? About 400. Okay, so 400. Okay.
That's huge. Yeah, but us Reformed Baptists in the OPC, we practice the church shrinkage movement, and we don't do that purposefully. But I would say, I would probably describe my church as a mature, steady church, in the sense of I've known people there for 20, over 20 years since I've been there, and there have been people there for 30, 40 years.
And when we talk about fruitfulness, and I'm sure that Carl has the same conversations amongst the elders there, how do you measure fruitfulness in a church that is steady and that is focused like that?
Well, we ask, do you see growth in godliness? Do you see Christ being formed in the people in that congregation over the past year or something like that? Do you see that kind of thing happening? And that's not what is being discussed in those quotes, is that kind of fruitfulness.
Because there's no way you could even judge it because you never meet the vast majority of the people. How could you even know if there's been change.
In their life and their godliness? You wouldn't know. That's right, and you go back to Jesus' statement, by their fruits you shall know them. Which do you think is a more important criterion, the number of people who follow you or the soundness of the doctrine you teach?
Which do you think Jesus himself.
Would have weighed more heavily? John 6 seems to answer that question.
And some of his disciples followed him no more.
Well, yeah, they went back from following him.
I know, and what I love is at the end of John 6, after Jesus has taught all of this hard doctrine and people have, all the multitudes who had followed him because of the miracles left him because of his doctrine, and then he turns to the 12 and says, you guys want to leave also?
He's not begging people to stay. The fruit he's concerned about there is sound doctrine. And we want our churches to grow.
In respect to maturity and the maturation of the saints.
That's a good way for a church to grow. Well, even in terms of numbers, we all want that. But to manufacture numbers by compromising doctrine is to sacrifice true fruitfulness.
I mean, it's patently obvious from those questions that Mark Driscoll asked T .D. Jakes that he does have something to learn, and not necessarily from people in bigger churches. The size of church is irrelevant.
He's got to learn some basic questions about the Trinity, the kind of things that he's got to ask his people, he's got to ask his elders, and he's got to ask people like T .D. Jakes when he gets an opportunity.
So there is something for him to learn from, frankly, within his tribe, because he's clearly not grasped all the theology that is available within his tribe.
When I'm overseas or speaking someplace, and a person will ask me, well, how big's your church? Just delivered a message. How big's your church? I started saying 3 ,000, and I try to keep a straight face.
You could see their face somehow reflect, wow, he must know what he's doing. He has authority now. And then I have to tell him, well, I just was kidding, you know, 300 to 10. But when we think of big, we think there's credibility that goes along with it.
And I think if we would look at some of the faithful pastors that no one will know about except the Lord knows. I think of one man here in Massachusetts. He's been pastoring for 40 years, preaching the Bible verse by verse.
A blind man, and I think, you know, I have a lot to learn from that man about faithful ministry behind the scenes, preaching Christ crucified week in and week out. Men, what would you say to pastors who are maybe pastoring smaller churches, but you'd want to encourage them in light of all the big numbers and multi-sites, and God's only blessing you if your church is large.
How would you encourage those men?
Well, I think if they'd been in the pastorate a long time, I would not encourage them so much as ask what I could learn from them. Many men have been in the pastorate 30, 40, 50 years. And I think the younger generation have a huge amount to learn from those kind of men who epitomize and model the faithfulness of the criteria of ministry.
So I would want to learn from them and encourage them by praying for them. But I'd most of all want to sit and listen to what they have to say.
My fellow elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church has been ministering in that church to that flock for right at 40 years. And I think we have about 52 members. So by worldly standards, I guess, at least as I was taught in seminary, there is something wrong with us or him.
And yet what I see there is the very model of consistent biblical faithfulness that I want to point everybody to. And as far as encouragement, the encouragement is going to be well done, thou good and faithful servant.
That is something you look forward to. And, but to me, I am just so thankful that when I stand before the people of God and preach behind that pulpit, I never have to give a second thought to the consistency of what I'm saying and what my fellow elder has said.
Because we already have that. And the people of God there are, I think, blessed to have that kind of consistency in the proclamation. And if you're a part of a church where you know when you go there on Sunday morning that the word is going to be handled correctly and God is going to be worshiped and honored and men are not gonna be lifted up, but the gospel's gonna be lifted up, you have something there that is far more precious than I think most American Christians realize it really is.
Because we have many brothers and sisters in the world elsewhere that would give anything to have access to something like that. Phil?
Yeah, amen to all of that. I mean, both of these guys pastor small churches and teach in small venues. And I have nothing I could teach either one of them. I just wanna learn from them and hear from them.
And, you know, when I teach on a passage, I frequently, after I've prepared my outline and gotten my basic sermon structure down, I like to go on the internet to the sermon audio site, which has hundreds of sermons from mostly unknown pastors.
And I'll look for another pastor who's dealt with the passage I'm doing and download that sermon. And it amazes me how much good preaching there is out there in obscure venues. And in fact, I'm convinced that most of what God is doing in our culture today is behind the scenes sort of ministry.
It's a fulfillment of what Jesus said when he said, look, you wanna be first, be a servant, you know? And that's the kind of men he's using, men who are willing to be faithful in thankless venues. And every now and then you see that, the reality of that.
And, you know, it makes me ashamed, frankly, that our culture and our nation is so easily swept up in hype and commercialism and size and numbers and all of that, because none of those things really matter.
What matters is faithfulness, the soundness of our teaching, the depth of our devotion to Christ. And those things are not measurable by the size of your audience.
Doesn't MacArthur always say, if you take care of the depth of your ministry, God will take care of the breadth. That's right. Carl, I think you wrote on Ref 21 just a short time ago, when students come into a theological seminary, they have all these expectations and they see large churches and what is success versus faithfulness.
How do you manage expectations or what does a seminary do for young men who, if they would go to Calvin's seminary in Geneva, would be quickly dispatched to France and then die? Yeah, I think it's difficult.
It's one of the problems of theological education. Instilling, if you like, the right aspirational model of ministry to students who come to the seminary. What I've done, because in Westminster, we have 500, 600 students.
There are too many students to get to know on an intimate, personal level. I tend to focus on the students who attend my church and get to know them. And in some ways, the modeling of what I think should be their aspirations to ministry comes in the local church that they're in.
Many of them, if you ask them, who are the preachers who've most influenced you, they'll say John Piper or Tim Keller guys or John MacArthur, guys with big churches. But I think encouraging them to realize that what they're experiencing at the local church level, that that's more likely going to be the norm for them when they go out and take a PCA church or an OPC church.
We have some Baptists come through or a typical Baptist church. It's going to be the church of between 50 and 200 people. They're not going to have a great staff to help support them. They're going to have to do a lot of their own administrative work.
I think just giving them a reality check on that front through the local church is the way that I've tried to do it at Westminster. I'm convinced that the high burnout rate among young ministers is in part because of the false expectations they have.
They think they're going to go out, they're going to take the world by storm, they're going to be the next Tim Keller or John MacArthur.
No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life transforming power of God's word through verse by verse exposition of the sacred text.
Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at six. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.
The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff or management.