God's Good Design (Part 1): Interview with Michael Clary

To the Ruled Church podcast.

The Church Is Not a Democracy but a Monarchy

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.

Guess what, Edward?

What's that?

It's December.

It is December.

I mean, it's not technically December.

But it will be when people hear this.

But when people are listening to the sultry sound of your voice, it will be December.

Yeah, hopefully they've got, you know, those beautiful Christmas tunes playing in their head.

Yeah, I've been doing that since March. Hopefully I'll have the Christmas tree up for two months now.

Yeah, you've got your Christmas lights up. I've seen that on Facebook.

Yeah, I hate to even admit this. At the time of this recording, I don't even have the tree up yet, so. I got the one in my office. Hey, welcome to the Rural Church Podcast. I'm Allen Nelson, with me is Eddie Ragsdale.

And we are joined by a special guest this morning, Michael Clary. Say hello, Michael.

Hello, guys. How you doing?

Michael Clary’s Background and Church Planting in Cincinnati

We're doing good. Grateful to have you. What, you got your tree up?

I do not. I'm one of those heretics that would rather have the tree up after Thanksgiving.

Well, we'll allow that slide. What do you think, Ed?

That'll be all right. We don't get ours up till after Thanksgiving either. But I have been listening to Christmas music for about a month already.

My wife would be in agreement with you guys.

Yeah, amen. Well, we have a special reason that we have Michael on today. Before we get to that reason, why don't you just tell us a little bit about who is Michael Clary?

I was born and raised in West Virginia, Huntington, West Virginia, and ended up through various circumstances planting a church in the opposite of where I grew up, which is the middle of the city, Cincinnati, Ohio.

But I grew up on Route 75, Wayne County, West Virginia, a rural area. But now I'm right in the middle of the urban core of Cincinnati, a bit of a fish out of water in some ways. But God called me here to plant a church 15 years ago.

2008 is when I moved here. Gathered a core group for a year and a half. We launched a church in 2010 and been here ever since. So our church is called Christ the King Church. It's a Southern Baptist church.

And we're more on the Tom Askle founder's wing of the Southern Baptist Convention. So reformed, patriarchal in my theology. And yeah, that's got my wife, Laura, and I, we've been married for 24 years.

We've got four kids that are 18, 17, 15, and 12 are the ages of my four.

Well, like, were you eight when you got married, brother? You looked young.

I was 24 when I got married. I'm 49 years old right now. I've been hearing lately that people don't believe me.

I'm 49. Oh, wow.

You know, we just, we recently renamed our church to Providence Baptist Church. So it's Providence Baptist Church, Christ is King. That's our tagline. Because we almost, we kicked around Christ is King was gonna be our name.

Christ is King, Baptist Church. We were thinking about that.

That's nice.

That's kind of neat to hear. In fact, now that hearing you say that, I've heard that from you before, I believe. So that's good, brother. Eddie, you got any follow-up questions there?

So what led you to Cincinnati?

Yeah, that's a great question. So I went to college at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia. Some know it as the Harvard of West Virginia. Actually, nobody does, but that's just my little joke.

Just a small state school in West Virginia. But I went to Marshall University, and that's really where my faith took off. I was raised attending church regularly with my family, but I got involved in Campus Crusade.

They call it Cru now. Got involved in Campus Crusade crew at Marshall, and my faith just grew like crazy to the point to where I was like, I want to do this with my life. Ended up joining the staff with Cru, and they assigned me to the University of Louisville.

So I moved to Louisville, and while I was there, I started to, a couple things happened. There was my heart for the church just really started to blossom. My experience with campus ministry, I started to be a little bit, I started to question the approach, and whether or not I'm a good fit for the approach, certainly, but the approach itself, I had some questions about that, and I started to see the church really is God's plan A for the world.

And then, I've respected Southern Seminary, and I was excited to go to Louisville because I wanted to take classes there, but I ended up taking classes at Southern Seminary. And meanwhile, I'm helping get involved with the church plant, and the church plant there, they needed a worship leader, so I led worship for them.

I was at the very first core group meeting and led music for them. I was there for about three years, but I helped them launch the church, helped them meet with the staff, and got kind of an insider's look.

And so I'm going to, heart for church is growing. I love the church planting idea, started to, and being able to be on the inside, seeing how they do things was really exciting for me. Getting a seminary degree and knowing that church work was where I was called long-term.

So at that point, I just started to pray, Lord, where would you send me? And my wife is from Cleveland, I'm from Huntington, and we thought it makes sense to be somewhere, it's like a midpoint between us, we have easy access to both our families.

Cincinnati and Columbus, we're both in that range. But we wanted to be in an urban environment. My thoughts on that have changed a bit since then, but at the time, basically I was drinking the Kool-Aid in the city for the city, and everybody was all hyped up about doing urban ministry, so I was like, okay, that's what I want to do.

So we're looking at what cities would make sense. So my Midwestern Rust Belt kind of city, and Cincinnati made a lot of sense, especially because, as I connected with other ministry leaders and pastors, it just seemed like the type of church that I wanted to plant, there wasn't a whole lot of that sort of church around Cincinnati, and it seemed like an opportunity to do something unique.

So that's how we ended up here. We kind of did a parachute church plant, if you're familiar, just like, you don't know anybody, you just kind of move in and see what happens, trust God, and share your faith, and gather people.

I read a book about that one time, it's called Acts.

Yeah, well, I'm no apostle, Paul. Certainly church planting will highlight your weaknesses like nothing else. Maybe marriage will do it too, but planting a church is like, you realize just all the things you don't know, and God has shown me that in abundance over the last few years.

Ohio’s Abortion Amendment and the Failure of the Pro-Life Movement

Well, praise God. I think we love church planting. Obviously, this is called the Rural Church Podcast, but we've said many times, it's just because we don't have a lot of guys, we feel like, in our context, that are talking, and so we just, we like to talk, and like I told you before the show, we, Eddie and I just like the excuse and the accountability to meet every week.

We're 90 minutes apart, really too far to try to meet in person, so we meet and able to talk about things that we find important. So we're grateful for what you're doing in Cincinnati, and really, I think this will segue us into the book, but I can't help but to think about what happened last night and kind of as a pastor in Ohio, to kind of get your thoughts, just walk us through real quick.

I know this is not coming out to December, but what happened as far as the vote in Ohio with abortion? Explain that to us a little bit, and then I have some questions. I think it'll get us into the book talking about that, but what happened last night?

What did the state of Ohio end up deciding when it comes to the abortion issue?

The state of Ohio had a constitutional amendment on the ballot, and in Ohio, the constitution can be amended with a simple majority. So they needed 51 of the vote or anything over 50 of the vote would have passed this amendment.

And the amendment was to, the net effect would be to make abortion at every stage of gestation a legal right. And do so as a constitutional right, which puts it beyond the reach of judicial review. So it is now a constitutional right in the state of Ohio to abort a child.

So there is a distinction before viability, show up at Planned Parenthood and they'll get you an abortion. If the child is deemed viable, then there needs to be some medical necessity. And the medical necessity is defined as the mother's life or health.

And we know how the activists will define health. It's mental health, it's emotional health, whatever. Health can be anything. And so that's after child is viable. So partial birth abortion all the way up to the end, it's all, it's not, I mean, it's not merely legal.

It is a constitutional right because the amendment itself is called the right to reproductive freedom, I think is what it's called. A lot of people were opposing it, vocal about it. I've recorded videos and wrote articles and posted things on Twitter and stuff about it.

Our church has been praying for it. And there's a lot of churches and leaders that were opposing it as hard as we could. But at the end of the day, the vote came in and the people of Ohio, they voted in favor of this amendment.

And there was a lot of misinformation too. And that, I think a lot of people got duped by the emotional rhetoric because all the TV advertising would focus, would say things like, well, if you have an ectopic pregnancy, you wouldn't be able to get medical treatment.

Or if you have some 10-year-old child who was raped, she would be forced to carry this child. I mean, it was this very manipulative language and it played on people and they fell for it. But I mean, the sad thing is, and this is where the pastoral response to me, it's abortion is a crime, it's tragic.

It is an absolute travesty. We've had up until this point, we've been able to blame Roe v. Wade and say it's Roe v. Wade's fault. But now it's not Roe v. Wade's fault. Like God gave us a victory in overturning Roe v. Wade.

And then every state has its own decision to make. And now the people, we're voting murder into our own state. And so pastorally, that makes me sad for the babies that are being killed. But it is, I mean, I feel a little heavy hearted about it.

I'm hopeful, but for the moment, I'm heavy hearted about it because people have voted for this. And I'm like, people who voted for this will have blood on their hands. They will give an account to God for supporting this because they made it legal.

I mean, in our form of government, we bear the sword. We're self-governed, so we bear the sword. And man, we mishandled this one.

What was the percentage again? Did you say?

I don't know. The polling that I saw with about 50 reporting yesterday was like 55, 45, something like that. And they called it. And once they called it, I turned it off. So I don't know what the final tally is.

I honestly didn't have the heart to look at it. I don't know.

So one of the things, and Eddie, you weigh in on this too. One of the things for us as a church, we stopped giving to the cooperative program. We're still technically SBC in the sense that we haven't officially left the convention.

However, it's really something that I feel like the vast majority of our church, we're just done with. We're just tired of playing. And I encourage these brothers that are fighting. And Tom Askle, I consider not just an acquaintance, but a friend.

And I love Dr. Askle and founders. And I'm appreciative of what you guys are doing and other mutual friends that we have. Very, very grateful. Fight, fight the good fight. I think it's a worthy fight in the SBC.

But for us, with things that we've been through and stuff, it was just exhausting me. And so it's just something that we've just felt like we can't give energy to. However, one of the things that led to that, of course we have issues with the North American mission born stuff, but one of the things pertinent to this conversation is the ERLC, where we felt like ultimately the ERLC was taking a stance on this specific issue, on abortion that was actually in opposition.

And I wanna say, I know that there are well-meaning brothers and sisters who are in the pro-life movement who would call themselves, hey, we're pro-life. And I think that they're genuine believers.

I think that they really in their heart of hearts are trying to stand against abortion. However, that being said, I think the pro-life movement as a whole has just shown itself insufficient when it comes to these arguments.

And sometimes not only insufficient, I'm talking about best case scenario. There are some certainly within the pro-life movement who don't want abortion to end because this is the way that they make their money or whatever.

But anyway, Eddie, you wanna add anything?

You know, the only thing I would add, and Michael, it seemed like you were saying this, but I feel like after Roe v. Wade, after the Dobbs decision that reversed that, I think a lot of us, and I'll admit even myself, we kind of sat back.

We maybe spent too much time celebrating while the other team got back and slam dunked on the other end. We kind of said, hey, we won and didn't realize that we're still in the game. We needed to continue seeking to support life and to proclaim the gospel and to help these women in distress not to become now murderers of their children.

And so I think some of this, not just in Ohio, but all over our country, is a little bit on us for not continuing to be as adamant as we were before the Dobbs decision about continuing to call people to repent of sin and to look to Christ and to save the lives of these children.

Yeah. Yeah.

And I know some people, I just wanted to clarify, some of my listeners are like, wait, Quattro, are you not pro-life? Well, I'm very much for life. However, I'm for a consistent view on life, whether you wanna call that being an abolitionist, but the idea is I do believe, biblically, children in our country, all persons in our country, should be afforded equal protection under the law.

That is, if a child is murdered in the womb, I don't care how old this pre-born neighbor is. If they're murdered in the womb, there ought to be swift and serious consequences, just like we would, whether the child is one years old or one minute old or whatever, you understand?

So just to clarify those that might be listening, wondering, but anyway, that brings us, brother, because you actually did reference specifically in the introduction. Let me talk about your book for a second.

Let me introduce that. So we invited you on, brother, because we wanna support what you're doing. Is this your first book?

It is.

God’s Good Design and the Biblical Case for Human Sexuality

So Michael Clary, God's Good Design, A Biblical, Theological, and Practical Guide to Human Sexuality. So God's Good Design, A Biblical, Theological, and Practical Guide to Human Sexuality. I would guess, this is a big book.

I would guess, my guess, rough estimate, is this maybe around like 60 ,000 words or something? Is that?

90.

90 ,000? Okay, good. That's good, brother. It's a good size book. It's like 300 pages. But one thing you talk about in your introduction and the connection I wanna make here too is you talk about Obergefell in 2015.

You talk about, I have that pulled up actually, where the gradually of our culture change became a suddenly. Talk about that a little bit. Talk about how your book ties in also with the abortion. Connect all this together and just tell us why Michael Clary took the time, because it's a lot of time, and especially a 90 ,000 word book, it's a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of energy, a lot of focus.

Why'd you write this book?

Yeah, it's a readable book. You hear 300 pages, 90 ,000 words. So it's very thoroughly researched. I'm making a case, and that's really the, if you could use some of the case for Christ, the case for, I mean, it could be, you could call it the case for biblical sexuality.

And that's what I'm trying to do in this book, because I wanted to, so I'm a pastor. First and foremost, I'm a pastor, and there are people in my congregation that I love, and I want them to understand, understand something, but also not be deceived about sexuality, and there's so much deception in the air, it's in our culture, it's everywhere, and it's pervasive, it's constant, and it is very powerful, just the deception and the lies, and I'm like, there has to be, we have to be able to oppose it.

What I found was, whenever you try to oppose, or oppose a negative view, or promote a positive view, without some of the foundation, some of the presuppositions, then it's not gonna gain a lot of traction.

A lot of times, there's a, so let's say with abortion, if you think abortion is, if you think it's, well, it's not really human until the baby's born, then if that's your presupposition, then abortion, it's gonna be, abortion is gonna be an easy case for you to make and to believe that.

But if you believe this is a human life, then now you're dealing with a more full picture of why this is an evil thing. So I think with sexuality, it's the same thing, because a lot of people that I talk to as a pastor, they might see, they'll see a verse in the Bible that says homosexuality is a sin, but they, all of the presuppositions and assumptions of their life make that implausible or difficult to believe, because they think, well, they just love each other.

And marriage is, marriage and love is just about our affection for one another, and why would God create somebody homosexual? And things like this, they believe that God made a person this way because they've bought in, they've bought into all of the lies that the culture tells them.

So I wanted to have a single volume that would make the case that here is a, it starts with God, here is who God is, and here is God's purpose in creation, and here's how sexuality fulfills that purpose in creation which glorifies God, and then here's how that, how God created us, he created us as male and female, and there's a purpose in maleness, and there's a purpose in femaleness, and then these things are worked out because God has some grand design that is glorifying and good that he created the universe to express and to fulfill.

You need all of those things as the under, as the foundation for some of the specific teachings that you might get to in like, why is the husband the head of his wife? Why, you know, why wouldn't we just say singleness is just as good as marriage?

Why do men get to be the elders in the church? Why, you know, why do they get to be in charge? Why is homosexuality a sin? Why would we oppose transgenderism? All of those things need some prior foundation that is supplying the mental framework for how we even understand scripture and engage these topics.

So that's the book. It is a case. God is a father who is the father over a cosmic household that he rules supreme over as an eternal father. And then he created an earth where he would dwell with his people.

And this earth, the vision of the book of Genesis, chapter one and two, where he created man and woman, and he said, be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. So the, it's kind of good. The wheels were set in motion at Genesis 1, 27 with the creation mandate, dominion mandate, that this planet would ultimately be filled with human beings created in God's image who are worshiping him for his glory.

That's still God's goal. That is God's goal right now is one day, this will be a renewed heavens and a renewed earth. And we will have human men and human women, eternally male, eternally female in glorified physical bodies, filling this earth for the glory of God.

That was God's plan from the beginning. That's God's end game. And the three of us as men, we have a particular calling and a vocation in that. And our wives as women, there is a particular vocation and a calling for them to fulfill.

If we miss that foundational piece, then some of the particulars we get into, the questions that we probably run into all the time as pastors, things like working mothers, or why should a wife submit to her husband?

Things like this. It's like these are real world practical things that we run into all the time in ministry. And I have found that a lot of people don't have the basic vocabulary to understand even, it's like they don't have the prior knowledge to even begin the conversation.

So that's why I wrote the book to be able to put it in, it's something anybody in your church should be able to read if they have just basically, basic amount of biblical literacy. Sunday school, it's written at Sunday school level, so it's very accessible and it's very practical.

A lot of pastoral care. It's not the kind of thing that you would read as a pastor and think, I agree with this, but I could never give it to my church because everybody would freak out and think I'm crazy.

It's something that I think any pastor can hand to a member of their church and say, if you wanna know why God's designed for sexuality, here it is, even if you don't agree with all of it, it's something that it could at least not freak your people out when they read it.

Yeah, I think one of the things that we've lost in our arguments here are we've allowed kind of the culture to make this into, you're just trying to take us backward type thing, like you're trying to take us to either a time period where women really were harmed or abused or whatever the case may be, or this is about taking us back to the 1950s.

We don't wanna be in the 1950s, we wanna be in the 21st century and you even find that kind of rhetoric and language, again, not to just, this show today isn't about bashing the SBC, but you find that kind of rhetoric and language in some of the arguments when it comes to the Southern Baptist Convention, and we've just got to meet the times and those sorts of things.

And so what I hear you saying and what I know your objective here is, and Eddie, you weigh in here on this too, is this isn't about a time period. This is about an attack on human sexuality is it's not just preferential, it's actually assaulting the God who designed the sexes.

This is God's good design. And so when we distort and twist and get this wrong, when we just say, well, anything goes in the home, anything goes in the church, it doesn't matter about God's design, then of course people don't say it that way because they don't think like you said, brother, they're not thinking in those categories.

But ultimately what I'm trying to say is when we allow men in roles or doing things they shouldn't be doing or women in roles or doing things they shouldn't be doing, this isn't ultimately about men and women.

It goes past that to the God who made us. And so this is a lot bigger issue than some make. Anyway, I'm rambling. Eddie, you got anything you wanna jump in there?

Well, yeah. Michael, thinking about God's good design, it seems like the tip of the spear in the attack against God's good design in the day and age in which we live is the distinction that the world wants to make between biological sex and gender, as maybe they would call it a construct.

So I just wanna ask, kind of how would you, if maybe an opponent, a person that's not holding to a biblical worldview, ask you that question or wanted to challenge you on that, how would you define a biblical view of biological sex and gender?

Biological Sex, Gender, and the Return of Gnosticism

Yeah, well, if I were in a debate with somebody, here's how I would respond to that, knowing that they would not be persuaded by this, but we'd have to begin with, we come to this debate with different presuppositions.

My presupposition is that the word of God is true and eternal and infallible and inerrant. And so that is the foundation that I'm building on. However, we can also look to nature. And so I address this in the book, we have truth with a capital T, and that is the word of God.

And we have truth with a lowercase T, which is things that we observe in nature that correspond with God's word. So what I would say is, one, we are embodied souls. We see that in the book of Genesis, where God created Adam and he became a living creature is what our Bibles will translate.

The word there is soul. Nefesh is the Hebrew word for soul, which at the very least, it gives some indicator that it's not just here is some thing that happens to be alive. I mean, trees are living things, but there's something unique about man in that his embodiment, he is a soul that is embodied.

So we might, that is the biblical worldview. What the world is doing now is a renaissance of Gnosticism. And the Gnostic idea is that you have an inner core of who you are, and then you have this outer shell that doesn't always correspond to who you are on the inside.

We didn't invent that in the 21st century, that that was a Gnostic idea that the early church had to deal with, and the early church condemned it. But the Gnostic idea is something that we hear all the time.

So Gnostics thought material world is evil, it's corrupt, it's bad, it's fallen. So all material things are bad. What's really important and what's really good is the spiritual thing, and that's all the inside, the inner person.

So a Gnostic, the way that they would play this out in their views, it's like you had some Gnostics that would abase the body, they would kind of do self, that would kind of mutilate the body as a way of kind of punishing and purging this physical thing.

Other Gnostics would indulge the body. And they say, well, and Christians would do this. So Christians like, well, you know, the body's gonna do what the body's gonna do. So it's not me having sex with this prostitute, it's my body having sex with a prostitute.

The real me is this sanctified man because I'm a spiritual being. The same idea is now happening in the modern world where you could say, well, I'm Eddie. Now, I'm a man on the outside, but who I am on the inside is totally different.

People can say, I'm a man trapped in a woman's body or vice versa. Those are pagan ideas that are, I mean, even the ancient pagan religions, there are the goddess Ishtar was, in modern language, she would be considered transgender because Ishtar was sexually, she would change.

She could manifest as a male, manifest as a female. And it's represented in some of the pagan mythology around Ishtar, which is, in the Old Testament, I believe it's a fair connection of Ashtoreth. You see Ashtoreth as one of the idols that the Israelites were tempted by.

But it's this sexual idea that who you are on the inside doesn't match who you are on the outside. So whenever somebody says gender and sex are different things, they'll say gender is a social construct and sex is a biological thing.

And I would say, well, you are rebelling against reality. Your body tells you, your body is the determinative factor. But people say, well, sex is assigned at birth or we're not gonna assign sex at birth.

And I mean, I knew some parents, I mean, this is the most insane thing. You know, I hear of these really crazy liberal parents that will say, well, I'm not going to assign a gender to my child. Whenever they're, as they grow up, they'll figure it out for themselves.

I mean, that is insane. Good, godly parents train their children from the very earliest ages to, there are certain ways that it's good for boys to behave and there are certain ways for girls to behave.

And then we train them virtuous life, holy life that is somewhat determined by their sex. And that's a good thing because we learn to live as adults, as men and women that have, you know, these distinctions being a good thing.

But the world is just, it's rebelling against all those things. I'll stop, I'll stop right now, but no.

Well, that's great, brother, it's great. And, you know, one of the things that I try to communicate here is when the serpent, when Satan made his attack in the garden, he doesn't go to Eve because he's just like, oh, well, she's dumb, you know?

I mean, like she is a worthy image bear created in the image of God to fulfill her roles. But he goes to Eve for a specific purpose. In the garden, he is reversing the very created roles that God has made, man first, then woman, Adam headship over the wall.

I mean, Satan is turning all that. And that's, some people may, maybe you've not thought about it that way before, but that's exactly, like there is a purpose to Satan's attack here. And so all I'm trying to say is from the beginning, God has had this good design in the created roles of male and female.

And from the beginning, Satan has sought to thwart that and to invert that. And all we're doing today is seeing that, you know, played out.

That's what feminism is.

Sexual Roles in the Church and the Local Church as God’s House

One more, yeah, absolutely. One of the things I did wanna get to, chapter 10, and you talk about sexual dynamics in the church. By the way, I did wanna mention this too. Brother, you've got some great endorsements here.

Michael Foster, C .R. Wiley, Megan Basham. That's wonderful, brother. You've got some great folks that are kind of on the front lines of these things that have read your book and said, hey, this is something you need to read.

So again, I commend the book, but you have this quote, it's on 243 from William and Barbara Mauser. Men who are led in the church by women are less than men. Women who lead men in the church are less than women.

And that's gonna do it for part one. You'll have to tune in next time to part two to get my answer, Michael's answer, Eddie's answer on this quote as we continue the conversation about God's good design of gender roles and specifically next episode, what that looks like in the local church.

Thanks for joining us on this week of the Ruled Church Podcast.

Catch you guys next week.

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 hoemas, the masterpiece of God.

How are you gonna respond?