Patrick Slyman Interview

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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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

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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.

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In short, if you like smooth, watered down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.

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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

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King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth.

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Our slogan around here is always biblical, always provocative, always in that order. And on Wednesdays, I like to have special guests, but in light of our guests today,

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I think I should call it Christian Roasting Wednesday so we could roast our guests. No, I wouldn't do that.

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I have a friend on the line, Patrick Slyman, pastor up at Pigeon Cove in Massachusetts. Patrick Slyman, Master's Seminary graduate, author, speaker, camp speaker.

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Patrick, welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. That's great to be here, Mike. Thanks so much. Tell me about the church that you pastor, probably near the

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Perfect Storm, right? That's where you are, the Perfect Storm Church. It is, yeah. Perfect Storm was filmed out of Gloucester.

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We are in Rockport, which is just east of Gloucester. So right now, my office overlooks the

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Atlantic Ocean. Patrick, I am so green with No Compromise envy.

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The church sits basically on the ocean, doesn't it? It does, yeah. We have what we call the ocean lawn.

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And so after church, we have some fellowship time outside during the spring, summer months.

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And it's just great. We're looking at God's creation. We're looking at, just a couple of weeks ago, when that blizzard came through, we're looking about 25 foot swells that were coming up halfway to the church on the lawn.

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So it's absolutely amazing. Great spot, suffering for the Lord up here on the water. Patrick, tell us about the church, in case anybody's on the north side of Boston or near Gloucester.

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Tell us about the church. What are you known for? What are some of the things that you focus in on in your preaching?

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Well, first of all, if you wanna ever get here, you have to drive to nowhere. We're two miles from nowhere on the end of Cape Ann.

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We're pretty much as far east as you can get here in Massachusetts. So right there on the water side.

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But the church has been here for about 160 years. I was here for six and a half years now.

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And the church history is very varied. The one point we had a federated,

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I guess you'd call it federated congregation where you had two denominations meeting, two churches meeting at once.

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One of those churches was a Unitarian church. That was about 100 years ago. People were really nice though.

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Super nice. And we are as far from that as you can get today. About 30 years ago, it was very charismatic, very, very charismatic.

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They were exercising demons and doing all sorts of stuff. How can there be a demon on the ocean?

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Or maybe they seek, I thought they seek dry places. Dry land, that's a good question to ask that pastor.

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And then for 25, the last, let's see here, 25 years before I came, a single pastor was here.

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He's really the pastor that stayed the longest out of the entire history of the church. But now

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I'm here, six and a half years. There's been some change that the church has gone through.

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But if I was to describe the church, two things I think that describe it would be. One, it is a great love for Christ and his word.

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And then two, they love each other. The church here loves one another. It's a blessing, seriously, it's a blessing to be the pastor of the people here.

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Patrick, do you preach verse by verse? What book are you in now? Yeah, verse by verse, we're right now in Colossians.

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We're coming to the end of Colossians chapter three. Started when I came in Mark, wanted to highlight the glory of Christ.

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That really was my main focus, didn't really wanna go into what is the church supposed to be, anything like that.

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I just wanted to highlight the glory of Jesus. And so we're there in Mark for three and a half years, went then to Titus, looking at what a healthy church looks like.

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And now we're in Colossians again. And as you know, that's the preeminence of Jesus.

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So that's what we've been highlighting. Patrick, how long do you preach? What's a typical sermon length for you?

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Anywhere between 45 and 50 minutes. All right, is there a big stopwatch in the back of the church? No, not a stopwatch, but we have some people back there that look at their watch and give me the heave -ho if I go too long.

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Well, what I would like to do if I would ever go preach there is set up a bunch of mirrors so then

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I could look out and based on how high the tide was, I would know if the sermon was over. We have, you can't see the ocean from the sanctuary, but the back of the church, that's where we have our adult

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Sunday school classes. And so I'm teaching those and we have windows right behind me.

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And I know if a boat goes by because I'm seeing, everyone looks away from me and they just scan the horizon and I have to bring them back.

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But I'm thinking about switching where I teach from so I can look at the boat. Now, Patrick, there at Pigeon Cove, you have some students from Gordon -Conwell that make their way over.

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How does that work with an egalitarian school like Gordon -Conwell and a complementarian church like yours?

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How does that coexist? Well, we only get the complementarian students. Okay. Yeah, you know,

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Gordon -Conwell, it's probably 18 to 20 minutes from the church here, so it's right down the street.

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And Gordon is so wide, as you know, so wide when it comes to their theology and philosophy of ministry.

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So the students that we get are more on the conservative end. One student right now that I'm mentoring, they have what's called a mentored ministry program.

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And so one student that I'm mentoring right now, the first time I met him, I asked him a little bit about his doctrine.

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He goes, you can boil it down to two things. I think the Bible is sufficient and authoritative and I think Jesus is

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Lord. And he's been here for three years and it's amazing to see how he's grown being a part of a church, not so much at the seminary, though that's important for his training, but being at a church and ministering.

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And so putting those things that he is learning into practice, so important to learn within a church environment.

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But we've had students throughout the years and quite frankly, what happens is those who are in alignment with the philosophy of the theology here and at least just see them grow and excel, it's neat to see.

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The church loves it too. Church loves to see young guys coming into the ministry and then being able to send them off. Patrick, now that you're talking a little bit about discipleship, let our listeners into a pastor's mind when he thinks about discipling men.

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Should guys who are in churches here locally go to their pastors and say, I like to get discipled.

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What is discipleship? Hold me accountable. I mean, what's your philosophy of trying to train up the next generation of young men for gospel ministry and just ministry in a local church?

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Well, first of all, my thought on that is that it's absolutely needed. If I take a look at the

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Evangelical Church here in New England, now my wife and I grew up in New England, so - Where's your accent?

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Where's your accent? Where's your accent? We grew up in Connecticut. No accent there.

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We can pull it out every so often if it's effective, but yeah, we grew up in Connecticut, but when we went out to California and came back, we knew what we were coming to.

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And one thing that we don't have are strong, at least in this area, strong men holding up the gospel.

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When I first came to Rockport to be a pastor, there's seven churches here. Four of the seven were pastored by women.

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So that's the area. And so it's needed and so very intentional in trying to disciple men within the church to be able to teach.

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But even more than that, I think training men up to be able to, first of all, lead their family well.

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That's where it begins. If you don't have a family, if you don't have a testimony within your family,

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I should say, really your ministry with other people isn't gonna be effective. And so first and foremost,

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I wanna train guys to be the husband they need to be, to be the father that they've been called to be.

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And then from there, take it to, now let's broaden this out as a man of integrity, broaden this out to the church body as a whole.

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So that's really what we're trying to do. We just took a few guys over to the Shepherds Conference out in California, and they are not right now official leaders in the church, but they are growing and they are looking to lead their family well, to live that life of integrity, which then in the future,

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Lord willing, will translate into leadership here at the church level. Well, I think one of the men that you brought out to the

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Shepherds Conference introduced himself as bishop, so I'm not really sure how that worked out. Hey, Patrick, you are close to Southampton, aren't you?

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South Hamilton, rather? Well, South Hamilton, yes. Okay, well, I just noticed that here your focus is upon Christ -centered expository preaching, discipleship, local body life, and the

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Wall Street Journal just reported under an article called Some Church Folk Ask What Would Jesus Brew, and it actually has

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Christ Church in Hamilton, Massachusetts. They have a little beer group there, and it says here, if you have a high concentration of young adults,

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I think things like this work well, says Father Patrick Gray of Christ Church. I just like to drink beer and hang out with people, says the 42 -year -old.

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Wow, that's, I've never met him. I just like to drink beer and hang out.

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Well, No Compromise Radio has a stand on alcohol, and that is, in and of itself, it's not bad.

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Drunkenness is bad, but alcohol isn't bad. I think somehow that I don't need to promote beer drinking in my local discipleship group because people do that on their own.

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I don't take people out to movies either, Patrick, because they do that on their own. I like to teach men, here's what it means to be a man, according to the

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Bible, and now let's throw you into ministry so you have to cry out to the God you say you believe in to get through this ministry opportunity.

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Doesn't that sound better? Yeah, yeah, I don't know what I would say to this guy.

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Do you know anything about the church, how long it's been around? Oh, no, I don't think so.

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I didn't read the whole article, I just focused in on the Massachusetts deal. Tell me about the book that you're writing.

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This is the area. Yeah, there you go. Tell me about the book you're writing. Why are you writing a book? What's it about?

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Why is it important? The book title is called As the Father Sent Me, and I finished that up a few months back.

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And really what the purpose of it is is to look at the way Christ ministered and the reasons why

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Christ was sent by the Father. There's a passage at the end of John where Jesus looks at his apostles and he says, as the

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Father sent me, so I send you. And there's so much confusion of what it means to be a pastor, so much confusion of what it means to be a church.

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Obviously you have just cited one of those things over there in Hamilton. And so I'm looking at the purpose statements that Jesus claims for himself.

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I was sent for this purpose. I was sent to do this by the Father and applying those purpose statements to us who have been sent by Christ.

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And so I just finished it up. It was a great study for me, really solidified a lot of my role and just made it so much more clear for me of what my duty is, what my responsibility is to the flock that God has given to me.

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Patrick, tell us the website of Pigeon Cove up there and so people can listen to you on the radio on the sermon audio, if they'd like.

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Yeah, pigeoncovechapel .org. Pigeoncovechapel .org. Patrick Slyman today on No Compromise Radio.

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Patrick, help our listeners assess the new trend with Francis Chan, David Platt, Kevin Eidelman, Shane Claiborne, Christianity Today has an article called

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The New Radicals and Calling Comfortable Christians to Extreme Discipleship.

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What's your take on all that? How extreme do you have to be? And I'll tell you what I'm looking for ahead of time.

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How can a mother pregnant with three other kids to watch be a housewife and how can she be radical for God?

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That's where I'm gonna end. But tell me what you think of these guys first. Yeah, you know, I mean, the call to radical discipleship, if I take a look at what

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Jesus is calling us to, it's obviously to follow him and to deny myself. And I think that's a radical call in and of itself.

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Thinking about how to do this, does that mean that you must as Francis Chan did, give everything away and go and minister into the inner city?

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Perhaps, but for the one who's here at this church and they come to me and say, what does following Christ mean?

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I'm gonna say, you can be radical in your job where you're at. You can be radical as the example that you just brought up.

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You can be radical in raising your kids, bringing them to see the glory of Christ on a daily basis, allowing them to see the worldview through scripture.

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That's radical, I think. I don't know if that's what you're looking for, though. Yeah, we have

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Francis Chan and Platt and these guys critiqued in the article here on Christianity Today.

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And interestingly, Matthew Lee Anderson says this, let's see, who is he? He writes, he's getting his

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M. Phil at Oxford. He writes this, I thought it was interesting, Patrick. It's really hard to read these books one after another and then confidently declare yourself a

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Christian at the end. And I think what he's getting at is if you're not this radical, then are you really a

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Christian? And so I just think of myself behind the scenes here in New England, a small church, along with you ministering.

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Maybe I might be a little more well -known just because of this radio station, although it's, how many watts do we have?

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Like negative 500? Is that how many we have? That's why sometimes I just have to turn up the volume just so it goes out a little bit farther.

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But certainly, Patrick, we have people sitting in the pews who probably are called to full -time ministry and they're just dragging their heels and they don't want to bring their family along and they don't wanna be a missionary, they don't wanna go into seminary, whatever those things are.

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But there are people here that just are faithful. Like you said, we need good policemen, good policewomen.

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We just need faithful men and women. And isn't it radical enough to deny self, pick up your cross, and follow

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Jesus? Isn't Christianity at its essence radical? That was my thought. Yeah, I mean, faithfulness is radical.

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To be bombarded daily with the world system, to be bombarded daily with these temptations to sin, trials that you're involved with that James says will come, to remain faithful during those times, that's a radical, that necessitates true saving faith.

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Again, to measure your Christianity by the miles and distance that you have gone on a missions trip or something like that.

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Like, it's dangerous, very dangerous. But I mean, we've been called to be faithful in the field that Christ has put us in.

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Well, in real time, Patrick, this is the day after the new pope, but by the time this goes on No Compromise time, yes, it's a little later.

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Tell me, did you fast and pray for God's will for the conclave of the 115 cardinals?

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Well, you know, I didn't, but I was too busy, worried about who was going to be interceding for me when there was no pope.

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Well, you know, the good thing is Jesus can never say no to his mother. Either can

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I. Tell me about your wife and kids. Speaking of mothers, your wife is a mother as well.

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Tell me about your wife and kids. My wife is wonderful, so supportive of me. My wife and I have known each other our entire lives.

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We grew up in the same town. Our families knew one another. We grew up in the same church in Connecticut.

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And so we got all of our fighting out of the way at age 10. Went our separate ways for a while, and then around college time, met back up, became best friends, and got married a couple years after that.

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We have two beautiful kids, two daughters. My oldest is nine, my youngest is seven.

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And probably the greatest thing right now is my girls, they love coming to church.

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They love it, it's just great to see. We're talking to Patrick Slyman today, No Compromise Radio.

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In the middle of Christianity Today, it's interesting, Patrick, it says, what classic spiritual discipline needs the most renewal among American Christians?

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And so we have three here offered. Silence is by Dallas Willard, and I wish he would just take his own advice, but that's another point.

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Fasting by Jonathan Wilson Hartgrove. And then here, the one that I wanna talk about now, listening to Jesus by the most gifted

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Graham sibling, Anne Graham Lotz, who is an evangelist, author of Just Give Me Jesus, Daughter of Billy Graham.

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Those are the only three offered. Those are the three offered. Oh, it was funny, some no -co listener wrote to Christianity Today and said, we think you should have

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Mike answer one of these questions underneath this village green section. But so far, I haven't, no one's called my agent.

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So here's what she says. Tell me, if somebody said, Pastor Patrick, we want to listen to Jesus, how should we listen to Jesus?

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Is this a complicated thing? How do you listen to Jesus? Yeah, the way

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I listen to Christ is I go to his word. I think God is still speaking today, absolutely.

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He's speaking to us through his word. We are guided by the spirit through the word.

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You see Colossians, we let the word of Christ richly dwell within you. You have James, that we are brought forth by the word of truth.

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You know all these, Second Timothy three, you have the word that is sufficient for everything in your

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Christian walk, your life. It gets very dangerous, doesn't it? Very dangerous when you're trying to listen, hear voices, read signs, you become the

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Christian, not the horoscope, or what do they do? Well, it's just as bad as this horoscope.

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R .C. Sproul said, if someone tells me that they've audibly heard from God, I question their mental capacity. Yeah, well, you know,

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I'm just reading a systematic theology by Gerald Bray, and he's going through inspiration.

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He's talking about how God has revealed himself, and he has a section at the very end that explains how

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God still speaks to individuals today. And he's very, very clear that there can be small voices.

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He uses the example of a small voice that's gonna tell you to go to the grocery store and buy a loaf of bread.

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And if somebody tells you that God has spoken and told him to buy this loaf of bread, you cannot disagree with him.

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Bizarre. Well, Patrick, I know you preach through the gospel of Jesus Christ according to Mark, and here

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Ann Lotz says she likes to read the word. Mark 9 -2, after six days,

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Jesus took Peter, James, and John with him and led them up to a high mountain where they were all alone.

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There he was transfigured before them. So that's Mark 9 -2, no argument there. After reading the text,

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I look for lessons to be learned. After six days might imply a weekend retreat.

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I'm not making this up. Oh, come on. Jesus took shows he wants to spend time with me as much as I want to spend time with him.

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Led them up a high mountain, it can be a difficult and challenging thing to draw aside from the beaten path of daily responsibilities.

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And all alone means he wants me to give him undivided attention. I have no words.

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Yeah, you know, it's interesting. She sees herself as either Peter, James, or John.

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What's to say that she actually are the other nine apostles that didn't go up with Jesus? You know,

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I mean, no, it's just, you know, you're picking and choosing what you want to see. Terrible hermeneutics.

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That becomes normative for your life and craziness. Patrick, when we're for something, we're against something else.

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That's just the nature of propositional truth. Being against mysticism, being against a canon that goes on forever and ever.

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We're really for, though, the Bible being sufficient and authoritative and a guide, a light to our feet.

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And that's what we're after. When we attack these things, we are after the sufficiency of scripture.

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Why is the sufficiency of scripture so important for listeners today? Well, if you don't have the scriptures and you don't have a standard that never changes.

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If you don't have the scriptures, you don't have God's own instrument for sanctifying your life.

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Sanctify them in the truth, your word is truth. So if we think that the, if we come to the scriptures and we want to handle them or manhandle them as some of these things that you've described.

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Or womanhandle. Yeah, yeah. You don't, you're missing God's instrument,

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His means that you will be changed. And so, yeah, we hold up the scripture as the final authority.

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We hold that up as God's word to us. Patrick, when someone comes to you and says,

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I'd like to start reading good Christian books to supplement my Bible reading. Give me your top five

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Christian books as a new and growing Christian that I should read. Give me a few in the top five.

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We've got about a minute and a half to go. Yeah, well, if you're looking for a biography, I would look at Ian Murray's biography on Jonathan Edwards.

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I'm probably partial to that because of the New England area. If you're looking for something to explain the true gospel, probably the gospel according to Jesus by John MacArthur.

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Those would be two of the top. Man, it is hard. It's hard to have anybody who's alive as an author, huh?

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Definitely, As the Father Sent Me by Patrick Slyman. That's right. When do you think that's going to be published?

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Probably won't be. Probably won't be. But feel free to email me and I'll get you a copy.

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Well, then how can I promote No Compromise Radio with pastor and author and radical follower giving all of his money away, moving to San Francisco with the poor people?

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Patrick Slyman. Listen, I'm going to give all my money away, all the proceeds I make from that book.

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Okay, yes, so then just throw that out and then if you sign a big deal with Crossway, then it's okay. It's all right.

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All right, we're talking to Patrick Slyman today, pastoring here in New England, loves expository preaching, loves

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Christ Jesus, loves his wife, loves the elders there at the church and the people. Patrick, we're super glad you're ministering alongside of us, a comrade in arms with Bethlehem Bible Church and No Compromise Radio.

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Thanks for being on today. Thanks Mike, I appreciate it. If you want to get ahold of Patrick, you can email me at info at nocompromiseradio .com.

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No Compromise Radio with pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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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.

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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.

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You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

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The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff or management.