Episode 116: A Conversation with Dr. Tom Ascol

To the Ruled Church Podcast.

Christ Is King and the Church Is Not a Democracy

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.

You know, Dr. Askew, one thing I wanted to say to you is you've been many places, spoken at many venues, I don't know, traveled the world, but I'm sure that you never thought to yourself, one day I'll be on the Rural Church Podcast.

I know it.

This is, I can mark this off my bucket list.

We're thankful today. Welcome to the Rural Church Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Nelson, one of the pastors at Providence Baptist Church in Perryville, Arkansas. And as you already heard, our guest today is the one and only, I don't know of another Tom Askew, the one and only Dr. Tom Askew.

Good afternoon, brother.

Hey, Allen, good to see you, man. Let's hope there's only one, okay?

Yeah, the world cannot handle more than one Tom Askew. I know you wear many hats, brother. I know probably some of the ones that you're proudest of are husband and father and grandfather. And so I'm grateful for all those things, but I can tell you personally that my life has been impacted by you.

Some of it up close, but also some of it just from, you don't even know about, just from a distance, just from your investment in Founders Ministries. And I think that I was first probably aware of Founders Ministries probably around 2008, 2009.

And then in 2010, I was kind of in a tough church situation over Calvinism. And so it was really great back then to learn, I'm not crazy, or maybe I'm crazy, but at least in this aspect, I'm not crazy.

And I know I wouldn't be the pastor I am today and our church, and you know some of this from firsthand, but our church, I don't think would be where we are today if not for the far reach that Founders Ministry has.

So just wanna personally thank you for that, brother.

Well, that's kind of you to say, I'm grateful for it. A lot of people have invested in this ministry and been faithful in doing things over many, many years. And I'm glad to just kind of have a opportunity to be along for the ride.

Well, I know there's gotta be more churches like ours that you don't ever hear about, you don't know about, but that your ministry and like all the people contributing that they're making a difference and maybe they don't even know about it, but eternity will tell, I believe.

Well, yeah, we hope that's true. And it's kind of the way we should live our lives, isn't it? You never know. I mean, God's always doing far more than you know. And I'm sure you have been a pastor long enough to have had these experiences where somebody comes up and tells you about something you said or something you did years ago, and you may have no recollection of it, or you may remember it as being something so incidental that it didn't register with you.

And yet God used that in that individual's life. And the Lord does that. And we're instruments. I had a friend describe it to me one time. It's like back before the days of word processors. He said, you know, if I write you a letter with a pen, said you don't praise the pen because of the letter, said you're grateful for the one who wrote the letter using the pen.

And that's the way God does with us. We're instruments in his hands, and we wanna do what we can and just trust that he will bring forth the results in his time and his way, and all the praise will go to him.

Amen.

Yeah, God is a God of means. And that's an excellent, excellent analogy. So why don't you just, I was at Founders Conference this year, highly recommend it. We had a great time. It was a great time with our family.

We're really encouraged and, you know, not the speakers were part of it, but then, you know, the folks that you meet and get to talk to. And so, and at that conference, you guys announced some things that you've got going on, but I just give you opportunity, brother, to just share, you know, what's new at Founders, what's going on, what's the future look like, and just, you know, take a few minutes and let us know.

Founders Seminary and the Institute of Public Theology

Yeah, well, it's amazing, Alan. God has directed our steps along the way. In these last five, six years or so, we found ourselves engaged in things that I never dreamed of and I wouldn't have chosen to do, but it's what the Lord has done.

So we are now embarking on launching a new seminary. God willing, this fall, Founders Seminary will open its doors. We have about 10, 11 students. I think we accepted 10 students and we've got a couple more I just heard today that are in the application process.

Amen.

Our goal was to have 10 students when we started, and we're gonna have more than that, it looks like, by the fall. So that's amazing to me. It's gonna be a four-year program. We want it to be, it's going to be rigorous.

We don't necessarily want it to be rigorous. We want it to be excellent. And so that's gonna require some rigor. And we're not ashamed of that, not backing away from that. But that's an outgrowth of something that happened four years ago, actually more than four years ago now, the development of the Institute of Public Theology.

That was in the height of the COVID craziness that was going on. I was out walking one day because everything was shut down, you know?

So what do you do?

Well, we just started walking. And through a series of events and some text exchanges with my wife and one of the men in our church, ideas began to foment that evolved into, by the end of the summer of 2020, the idea of, hey, man, we need to start some kind of training institute for men going into pastoral ministry to help them think about the way theology impacts all of life.

Because what became so apparent to me is that even really good guys were not prepared for what happened to us during the summer of Floyd and nonsense coming up with CRT and intersectionality and then the COVID craziness.

And again, friends of mine, people that I love and admire and respect that have helped me tremendously in talking to them about these things as it was going on, I just found myself diverging from them.

I was on different roads with them and it was strange to find myself in that situation. And over the previous couple of years, I'd had to really start working through, beginning in 2017, I guess, the whole social justice nonsense because I had friends on the other side of it and I just wasn't seeing it.

And contacted some guys that I thought should be the ones that would be leading the charge against it if what I was seeing was right and they weren't gonna do it. So I just began to educate myself. One of the key leaders on the other side of that movement, he and I got into some exchanges.

He's a friend, old friend. And we're writing back and forth to each other. And I kept telling him, I don't see it, I don't see it. We need to do the reading. So I said, send me the books. So he sent me a list of 10 or 12 books and I bought them and read them.

And so I still don't get it. I still not seeing it. In fact, I'm more convinced it's dangerous. So from all that, it just, it dawned on me, man, men need to be equipped to think about the life of the Christian in the public arena.

And we have a, what seemed to me at that time to be a closing window in the United States of opportunity to do these things publicly without the kind of opposition, persecution that our brothers and sisters have known in many places around the world throughout history.

So we started the Institute of Public Theology and it had no desire to be accredited, no desire to offer any degrees. We just wanted to provide the best theological training in the world for the day in which we live.

And we graduated our first three students last year. But from that, things happened that I never envisioned, never intended to where we started. We came up with a, basically dropped in our lap a way to offer bachelor's degrees and then an MDiv out of that.

And now we have the whole Founder Seminary on top of it. And so God willing, this fall, we will have a four-year college, the Institute of Public Theology that offers bachelor's in business, in classical Christian education and in public theology.

Those will be the three majors. And then the seminary, which will offer the MDiv and also a Master of Arts in Missiology that will be carried out in conjunction with the Association of Baptist World Evangelization, ABWE.

So these are amazing developments. God has done it. We're trying to steward it. And it just seems like things are happening fast. We're grateful to the Lord. And it looks like we've had, I think we have about 20, 25 students total now that are in IOPT, graduated three last fall.

One's a church planner, two are pursuing MDivs. And we'll be graduating more, not this year, but next year, God willing. And these are solid, solid brothers. I'm so encouraged with what the Lord is doing.

So I'm grateful to be a part of it.

Amen.

You know, I was thinking about Ephesians 3 .20. Now to him, he was able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think. And I'm not putting you in this. I'm gonna say this to myself. I know that sometimes I get so frustrated with the misuse of that verse, maybe from like the charismatic world or whatever, that I have the problem of not believing that, like I should.

And this is an amazing thing that the Lord has done. And I praise God. And I told you at the conference, and again, this is just something I would like to see more in the 1689 world, if you will, but like your success and founder's success, that's a win.

Like, you know, I graduated from GBTS and I work in admissions at GBTS, and I'm very grateful for that institution and what they're doing. But when I heard all this announcement, like I didn't feel a tinge of bitterness or jealous, anything, I was like, amen.

And I hope that others who are theologically like-minded would see founder's success as a win. And may God raise up a thousand more, you know.

Well, brother, that's my spirit as well. And I appreciate that about you. I mean, from as long as I've known you, that's been your spirit. I mean, Jeff Johnson, president of your seminary, spoke at our conference.

And Jeff's an old friend. They have been incredibly helpful to us. I mean, we didn't know what we were doing when we started the Institute of Public Theology. And Jeff and his team were very, very helpful, still being very helpful to us in trying to get the seminary launched.

And that's been true of Covenant Baptist Theological Seminary, the Institute of IRBS as well. And even, you know, Joel Beakey's an old friend. So Puritan Reform Seminary has been very helpful to us. We just, we've been blessed with a lot of friends that have exuded the same spirit you said.

And man, that's where I am as well. There's distinctives and there's some differences in how things are articulated theologically. And we might have different emphases. But I don't think those things should divide us.

I think we have many, many reasons, more reasons to be united and to work together. It's a big, big war and we need every available gun pointing the right direction. And that's the way my spirit is. God's given me that.

I'm grateful for it. And that's what we want founders to be. And that's certainly the kind of friendship we felt from nearly every other 1689 ministry.

You know, Baptists, as you know, are fighters. And I'm actually, I'm grateful. That's in our blood. I'm grateful, you know, because we're just gonna fight. But the problem is sometimes we fight about silly things, you know, the color of the carpet, you know, maybe the worst case scenario, but sometimes, you know, the hymn singing controversy and we've had some bad fights.

So yeah, I hope that we can continue even not to diminish important differences, but to focus on that we're on the same side. I do appreciate that about founders and what you guys are doing. And just real quick, I know we're kind of the middle of the episode here, but if somebody is like, I've never heard of this, where should they go and look?

Yeah, well, if you go to founders .org, everything that we have is available there, founders .org. Foundersseminary .org is where you get information on the seminary and then iopt .org if you wanna look at the four-year college.

But if you go to founders .org and just kind of tool around there a little bit, you'll get connected to everything that we do, the books that we publish and conferences and everything else.

That's great. Well, I wanted to, I told you before, I wanted to talk about this and really, so all the founder stuff is great and I want everybody to check that out and look into that. But really the topic of the episode that I wanted to get into is maybe you shared this on X or maybe I just heard, I don't remember, but somebody shared a Tom Askew quote, I thought, that said that when we invest in pastors, we invest in churches.

Now I can speak personally that that has happened with me, with founders and not just founders, of course, so many men and women and ministries over the years, I owe all glory to God, but I owe God's work too.

But founders is certainly part of that. And so would you maybe flesh that out? First of all, just what do you mean by that? What do you mean investing in pastors is investing in churches? Why should we even care about investing in churches?

So maybe you'll just work through that for a minute.

Investing in Pastors Is Investing in Churches

Yeah, well, I mean, certainly church is central to God's mission in the world. Christ died for the church. Church is the bride of Christ. And so you can't love Christ and not love the church. People try to do that, you know, and I love Jesus, but I don't have any use for the church.

Well, the Jesus you love isn't the Jesus you think you love then because the church is his body, he is our head. So man, we've got to be churchmen. We've got to be churchmen. If you're going to be a faithful Christian, you're going to be a churchman to the best of your ability with your circumstances.

And then what do churches need? Churches need faithful men to lead them. Paul tells Timothy that what he heard from Paul in the presence of faithful witnesses entrust those to faithful men who will be able to train others also.

So there's men who lead churches that need to be trained. And that's just God's way of doing it. That's the way Jesus set it up. It's the way the apostles carried it out. It's what our responsibility is as well.

That'll look different and has looked different and from age to age and situation to situation. But early on in Founders Ministries, as we began to think about what we could do, the focal point was on local pastors because the philosophy is, as you articulated it, and I've said it multiple times, if you help a man, you help a pastor, you've helped at least one church because most pastors are going to serve more than one church over the course of their lifetime.

So if you help a young pastor and he gets benefit from what you can assist him with and provide to him, then that's going to benefit his church that he serves. If he goes to another church, it's going to benefit that church as well.

And it's going to benefit other men that he might be able to help equip to go out and serve other churches. So we've always had kind of as our center point of our aim, who are we aiming for? We're aiming for local church pastors.

Now, what we've discovered is in doing that, aiming at pastors, providing resources for pastors, we've served other people as well because there's other people that have benefited from what would benefit a local church pastor.

And we're grateful for that. You know, we've done some academic stuff and we're glad to be able to do some of that along the way. But, and we've done things that have probably, most pastors would say, you know, I got that, I don't really need that.

But our bread and butter has always been let's shoot for pastors because we want to equip pastors and help pastors to do the job God's called them to do to the best of their ability. We're not a church.

We never pretended to have any kind of authority like that. We're a parachurch organization. I'm a churchman. You know, through the years, I've had different encouragements to quit pastoring and do something like this or this full time.

I'm just a pastor. You know, I mean, God made me that way. I want to be that. And so Founders has always been kind of an extension of my own pastoral ministry. And I would hope, you know, not suggesting that every church ought to have something like Founders Ministry, but I would hope that every church would recognize in their pastor to the ability that God's given him and the opportunity with the circumstances of the church that they would see his investment in other men, however that takes place, as being a very vital part of the church's ministry as well.

We send missionaries around the world and we ought to do that. We ought to also send missionaries into the future. And by investing in men, especially men younger than myself, that's the way I look at it.

I hope there will be a lot of fruit long after I'm dead from men who have benefited from some things that maybe I've been able to do or at least provide access for them to gain some further training and information.

Young men can be hard. I mean, I'm 38. I'd like to consider myself still a young man, but young men can be hard because they can have a lot of things right, and then they can have a lot of things wrong.

And I have noticed, you know, sometimes that causes older men to just abandon them altogether. And what I've seen about you, and I appreciate that in others, is willing to say, okay, look, you're wrong about this, and you're gonna have to correct it, but let me help you.

Let me encourage you. I like that. We didn't even talk about the publishing arm of Founders Ministry, because just off the top of my head, I was just thinking about things y 'all have coming out with the particular focus of helping pastors like, which I think this one's already out, "'Dear Titus' by Nate Pickwick.

It's already out, right?

It's out, yep.

I read that, and I mean, it's so encouraging. Like, it's geared towards church planting, but I read it, and I was like, makes me wanna be a better pastor. Made me love the church more. And, you know, just doing those kind of things to invest in pastors, which is investing in churches, which is, as you said, the mission, you know?

So, well, go ahead, go ahead.

No, that's right. And with the younger guys, I mean, I just look back on my life, and there were so many people so patient with me. I would have probably killed me, you know? If I'd have been an older guy, put up with the nonsense that I brought to the table.

You know, I was a self-righteous prig early, early, early in my life and going into ministry, even. And God just brought some patient older men who loved me and recognized, you know, that by God's grace, I could grow out of some of that stuff.

And so I wanna be that as well. And, you know, man, sins of youth is a category for a reason. They're just some things you don't get until you live long enough. And because of, God motivated me pretty strongly with the different men that he put in my life who still today are patient with me and love me and help me.

Yeah, amen. And I think some of this, I mean, would you say like around, for example, a church like our church and other rural churches, I think some of this is providential. And what I mean is you can't necessarily say, well, okay, now I'm gonna start investing in pastors.

I mean, I guess maybe, but you also just have to think about the pastors that God has put around you and maybe not being so isolated and instead seeing, you know, even if you have theological differences, maybe finding a way to invest in them.

And would you say anything, would you agree with that?

Well, absolutely.

And it's one of the conversations I've had. It used to have it more before the internet and, you know, made things so accessible to us like this, being able to have a conversation across state lines that can be recorded and played for others.

But with Reformed Baptist, I said this to a lot of my Reformed Baptist friends early on, look, man, the evangelical world needs what you have. You guys, you know, you've studied, you've come to terms with some things that the broader evangelical world just hadn't thought about or has forgotten or doesn't like.

And if you isolate yourself, then you're cutting yourself off from opportunity to be influential in others. And so, yeah, go to the pastors conferences. You know, I've been in a lot of those pastors meetings and you have to hold your nose and, you know, I mean, I get it.

Sometimes it's really bad, but there are some faithful men that are involved in that. And I've got stories in my own life and I've seen it in other places where men have been really helped by brothers who maybe have thought deeper or further along the road than others, just coming alongside some men and, you know, not condemning them, not looking down on them, but linking arms with them where they can and being encouraged by them and encouraging them to think about things.

There's one guy that's turned out to be a really dear friend of mine. He had never preached expository in his life. He was older than me. And when he was in our church facilities one time for a pastor's conference that we were hosting, the pastor's lunch, he began to look at books and began to talk to me.

He was just starting to think about preaching through Romans and saw some books on Romans. And so, you know, I was able to help him to think about getting some good books. He began to preach expository.

It transformed him. It transformed the church. He wound up being a very faithful, he probably was faithful before that, but he was a faithful pastor, faithful shepherd, faithful preacher, and became a good friend.

And he influenced countless others of pastors as well. That would never have happened, you know, if there hadn't been just the initial friendly relationship as brothers. And so, man, I think we owe that to the broader evangelical world.

Especially, I would want to say to my fellow Reformed brothers, don't miss those opportunities where you can perhaps be useful in someone's life. Maybe you've thought about some things that they hadn't thought about.

You've had opportunities they haven't had. And why would you not steward those to the welfare of a man that could be beneficial to a church and perhaps other churches as well?

Amen.

That could be as simple as, you know, we've had big conferences here, but also I know churches, brother, that like they'll just have a Saturday and they'll have a couple of brothers, local faithful brothers preach and they'll invite other pastors and they'll just be intentional about that time.

And it also makes me think, and I don't know if you want to give any exhortation to this, but it makes me think about churches. I know we have some people that listen to the podcast. They're not pastors.

So my word to them would be, you know, encourage your pastor in this. If your pastor says, hey, we're going to do this Saturday conference, it's going to be a low key thing, but, you know, support him, encourage, be part of that.

And know when your church's resources are used to invest in pastors, that you are furthering the mission of Christ. Would you say anything to that?

Absolutely.

I mean, we have done, we've done lunches here where we bought pizza or box lunches, or sometimes our ladies will cook some things and invited pastors in and just to bless them. You know, we might buy them a book as well to give to them.

And if a church has a vision of, hey man, this is a $200 investment we can make that could benefit maybe six or seven pastors, that's an awesome thing to do. I mean, if you can get 10 pastors in a room or five pastors in a room to share a meal together, they don't have to pay for the meal and maybe put a book in their hand, that can be a valuable investment with a good return for a local church.

But you have to see that as ministry because sometimes we think in terms, okay, we just spent $200, what'd we get out of it? You know, is this gonna bring more people to our building? Well, probably not.

But you know, for the kingdom, it could be a big return for the kingdom.

That's a great point, brother. We've been kind of conditioned, we've been kind of conditioned that whatever we do, and we have to show how it brought more baptisms or whatever, you know, and like I said at the start, you know, there's some things that we do, there's things Founders Ministry has done that you don't even know the impact.

But when we invest in pastors, I think sometimes it's even exponential, the investment, and you may not actually ever get to see it, but it comes down to this, and I know you agree with this, but it's like, we're gonna believe what the book says or not.

And the book says that investing in churches is where it's at. We see that in Acts. We see that in the epistles. And so that's where our priority and focus ought to be. Amen, that's good.

Yeah, and it's that same principle that Paul mentions to the Corinthians, you know, some plants, some water, but the Lord gives the increase, and however, wherever he wants to do that, that's his business.

We are called to be faithful with what we have, where we are, and do that to the best of our ability. And just, you know, he's going to use all of us to play a role. It may not be the role that we would have chosen, but it will be a role that will be useful and necessary for the outcome that he's determined to bring to pass.

And if we can buy into that, man, we can die happy.

That's good, brother. I know that you know him. He was a friend, but the late David Miller, what a wonderful, they had a church, or he was part of a church there in Hebrew Springs, Arkansas, just an hour and a half from me, and little bitty church.

But for years and years, he and Dr. Herschel York held the expository preaching conference. Did you ever, I don't know if you ever went to that, but that little bitty church, they paid for the preacher and the wife to come, and then they would give like, I don't know, a couple hundred dollars in books, have a free conference, and it was just amazing thing that they did.

And they're just a little bitty church in Hebrew Springs, Arkansas.

Yeah, that's amazing. And that's, I think churches can do far more than they tend to think they can do. Yeah, most of the time we think, well, we're not big, we don't have a lot of people. Okay, what can you do?

What can you do? I mean, can you feed half a dozen preachers a lunch? Yeah, I mean, I don't know a Baptist church that doesn't have women that are happy to, you know, prepare some wonderful meals. And so something like that, that just can be an encouragement and a blessing and can foster relationships that God might use in ways that none of us could imagine.

That's valuable.

Amen, amen. Well, I don't know, I was kind of closing here, and I didn't tell you about asking you this. You may not have anything you want to say. This will come out late April. And I know right around the corner will be, of course, the June SPC meeting in Dallas this year.

And so, I mean, you know, we've kind of, our church has gone through a little bit of turbulence and we just, you only have so much bandwidth as a pastor in a church. And so we've just stepped back and we're not opposed to you or the brothers who are fighting this great battle.

It's just for us, we've had to take a back seat and focus here. And we've been blessed and encouraged by that. But we'll be praying for you. And is there anything about that meeting that you hold out hope for or encouraged or?

You know, the Southern Baptist Convention, it's got a lot of potential for great good and it's done great good. And I'm grateful for that. But what you just articulated is so important, man. Where our focus needs to be is on the local church.

So yeah, the convention's coming up in Dallas. Clint Presley will be reelected as president and he's done a better job than what we've had in recent years. And so I'm grateful for that. The law amendment will be reintroduced to try to make it very clear that the Bible doesn't allow for women pastors.

I think that will pass. It should pass, but it's got to pass now for two years again. There has to be a suspension of the rules in order for that to come back up. And I think that will go as well. I believe there will be a motion for the ERLC to be done away with.

And I think that probably will happen. It takes two years though. So, you know, just a majority vote for two years. Those are the significant things. There's gonna be efforts for calling for transparency.

I hope that'll happen too. I really think, I think we're on the precipice of just kind of a populist uprising of the fact that the people, the messengers have been ignored or churches have been ignored.

Some will say, oh no, we've only done what the messengers have said, but the messengers have been misled for so long. Some of them have awakened to that and aren't going back there again.

So I don't know.

I hope it's all done in a high decorum with proper reminders of who we are in Christ and treating each other that way. But I also hope that the lights will be turned on.

Well, I've said this for a long time and I still 100 stand by it. And that is, if you're giving to SBC entities, you've got to go. You just can't. I mean, we're just way past the days of all these churches that are just giving and saying, well, we just trust the system.

If you're giving to any SBC entity, you need to go, you need to make your voice heard and you need to be involved. So, and it's encouraging that there are still faithful brothers that are carrying this mantle and fighting the good fight.

And so we hope, I mean, it would be, if God sent revival and repentance to the Southern Baptist Convention, there should not be a soul in America that should be upset about that.

Amen, amen. I agree with you.

I agree with you 100%.

Well, I appreciate you, Dr. Askle. I know you're a busy man. Thank you for your time. Thank you for coming on the Rural Church Podcast. Anything else you feel like you wanted to say before we close our time?

No, it's just, if we can help you in any way, Founders exists to try to help pastors and churches. And so don't hesitate to reach out to us. We can't always help, but we will try. And maybe we can connect you with people who can help.

But founders .org has everything available there. Pray for us as God brings it to mind. We've got lots of challenges, lots of opportunities, and we want to steward them well. So thanks so much for having me on.

I should mention too, if you want to listen to a better podcast, you can go to The Sword and the Trowel because I've benefited from that, you and Graham, and it's really good. It's helpful. That's another way that you guys are investing.

And so yeah, check out The Sword and the Trowel. I'm sure you can find that wherever you find your podcasts. So, well, thank you, Dr. Askle for joining us today and we'll catch you guys next week.

Yeah, thank you.

The Church as God's Work and the Call to Respond

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 going to respond?