146: 5 Types of Pastors Who Cannot Lead a Church to Biblical Health

To the Ruled Church Podcast.

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

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

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

You can't be Christian without a local church.

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

The Ruled Church Podcast. 2026 is rolling right along. It's not officially spring yet in the great state of Arkansas, but man, since that snowstorm at the end of January, actually, I should say ice, snow and ice, we have really received some beautiful weather, an early spring.

Of course, you did not tune in to this episode to hear any kind of small talk, so we'll jump in. Welcome to the Ruled Church Podcast. I am your host, Alan Nelson. I'm one of the pastors at Providence Baptist Church.

We are a confessionally-reformed Baptist church in Perryville, Arkansas, pretty close to the geographic center of the state. And today, we are talking about five kinds of pastors that cannot lead Reformation or cannot lead their church into biblical health.

I need to start this episode by saying, no need to mention names or anything, but I've received a pretty serious rebuke for posting this on social media, so I hope to give a little bit of a defense of what I wrote, and that's what I wanna talk about in the episode, but also like the spirit in which it is given.

So maybe we'll start like the spirit in which it is given. I, as you know, if you listen to this podcast, you know, I'm a big fan of the local church, and we say a lot of times at our church, this saying, Christ is worthy of a healthy church, and he is.

And so the overarching spirit, if you will, the overarching motivation goal of this episode is the glory of Christ in the church. We are after and aspire toward healthy churches. It's also given in a spirit of humility because I'll try to mention this as we go through, like not all these people I can identify with, but there are a couple of them that I can identify with, especially in my former youth ministry days, and even some of them in my pastoral ministry days.

And so it's given in a spirit of humility within the sense that, look, brothers, if one of these types of pastors describes you, then you're not alone in the sense that we've all failed, right? There's only one perfect pastor.

It is the Lord Jesus Christ. I am reminded, even as I say that, of what Peter tells us in 1 Peter 5, when he says, I exhort the elders among you as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed, shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you, not for shameful gain, but eagerly, not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock.

And when the chief shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crown of glory. So let me just start with a reminder that there's only one chief shepherd, and that is our Lord Jesus Christ, the shepherd of our souls, who is the only perfect pastor who has ever and will ever live.

All our hope is in the perfect pastoring of Jesus Christ, who lived a perfect life for his people, procuring a righteousness, obedient to the law, active and passive obedience, and then dying in their place, suffering under God's wrath on the cross, rising again the third day.

Man, all our hope is in Jesus, and this is true not just for the masses and not just for church members, but it's true for pastors too. So hopefully you understand the spirit which this has given, the overarching goal of the glory of God in the church, and Christ is worthy, a healthy church, and then a spirit of humility.

And then I might just mention that like, there is an aspect of like, I'm just done playing games, and I hope that you are too. You look around the state of our nation, you look around the state of Christianity, you look around at churches, like, can we just stop playing games?

Can we get serious about the health of the church? Maybe I should give a few qualifiers of what constitutes a healthy church, that we want a church with serious membership, biblical, regenerate church membership, serious about church discipline.

Man, there's so many Baptist churches out there today that just, they don't care about membership, they have tons of people in their role that they don't care about, they're not active in church discipline.

This is what we're talking about. Churches that are serious about these things. Churches that are serious about worship, that examine the scriptures and seek to align their services and their worship with what God's word says.

Now, this isn't me trying to come across and be harsher. All of us, hopefully all of us, there's no perfect church, so hopefully people listen to this like you're on a journey towards health. You're not there yet, you're not checking off every box that you want to, but you're moving from where you were to where you wanna be, and that's good, and amen, and I commend you, so don't take this as rebuke.

I'm just saying we have this idea of what a healthy church is. Faithful preaching, faithful evangelism, regular evangelism, practiced or modeled or encouraged by the pastors for sure. Commitment to prayer, devoted to prayer.

We're preaching through Acts right now, that comes up a lot in Acts, or at least several times in the first chapters about a church and pastors being devoted to prayer, so we wanna see all of these things.

The church is the bride of Christ, and local churches are the visible manifestations of the church universal on the earth today. The church is the kingdom. It's not some institution meant to pad the pastor's pockets or meant to bring you as a pastor fame and fortune.

Or whatever.

It is what God is doing in the world today. It is the most glorious place on earth, and we must not treat her, that is the church, like a harlot, or something less than what she is. And so that is the motivation.

That is the overarching idea of what I'm trying to get at in this episode. And when I was getting out of the Facebook post, I posted this on Valentine's Day actually. And like I said, I received a pretty stinging rebuke, a private message.

Somebody just said I'm being arrogant. That's not my desire to be arrogant. I'm judging motivations. I'm not trying to judge motivations. These are just the kind of men that I've seen in churches, some of them very close, some of them from a distance.

And the point is we do not want to be these type of men. If you are one of these type of men, then the call of Christ is to repent of being this type of man and go to the gospel, go to Christ, go to his mercy, receive forgiveness, publicly repent as needed.

It could very well be someone needs to step down if you're guilty of one of these. But the goal is not harshness or arrogance. As I've said, I've struggled. I'll get to that here in just a minute. And I've had to publicly repent.

Yeah, so there's a time in our church in the summer of 2022, I had to stand up and say, look, I've not been pastoring like I need to. I've been timid, I've been reserved, and I'm guilty of that, but here's the way we're gonna go.

And so God has really blessed our church over the last few years, and I just wanna help you. I wanna encourage you. And so if you're one of these guys, you've got to repent. And know that one day you'll stand before Christ.

Who cares what everyone else says so long as you please the Lord Jesus Christ, because he's worthy of that. So all right, let's walk through this. Five types of men that will not be able to lead reformation in the church, will not be able to take their church to biblical church health.

So maybe this is a bit anecdotal. I've just seen this, known this. You can laugh at the alliteration, but please take seriously the point of each one of these. So otherwise, some of these guys are good guys.

I've known them, I've been friends with them, and it's like, this is, from our perspective, a good guy. It's not like these are evil. Maybe some of them certainly could be. They could have ulterior motivations, wicked.

But a lot of the guys I've known personally, I would say, at least outwardly, from my perspective, hey, this is a good guy. He just, man, he just doesn't get it about the church. And isn't that what we want to do?

Like, we want to get it about the church, because this is what God is doing in the world today. So here they are. Number one is denominational Dave. Denominational Dave. This guy is worried about his reputation with denominational leaders.

So, man, this guy, whether it's SBC or BMA or whatever, maybe PCA, whatever it is about this, whatever denominational tie-in or convention tie-in or whatever, this guy wants to be in with the big crowd.

He wants to rub shoulders with the higher-ups. He wants to climb the ladder. He wants to be somebody. I've seen many of these guys just start out in little bitty churches and just use them as a stepping stone.

I'm here for two, three, four years so I can get on to the bigger thing, or I can get on and get the seat at the table, get the place at the convention. And so this person is not going to risk anything.

What I mean is he's going to do everything he can to never have any kind of conflict, to just see the church, to be able to perhaps even pad the numbers so that he could say, look, I took this church from this number to this number in order to stay in with the denominational leaders.

He has the aspiration not for the glory of Christ in the church, but to step the ladder, climb the denominational ladder, denominational Dave. I don't know that I ever have really been that guy. I'll tell you a story.

Early on and just in my youthfulness, but when I first came a pastor at First Baptist to Wit in 2011, one of my sermons, early sermons, was how we had a bad reputation with the state convention because we did.

And a person at the state convention had told a former pastor of mine, like, hey, that's a tough church. Well, I was just foolish enough to repeat that in a pulpit. I didn't say any names, I just said, this is a tough church.

Our convention thinks this is a tough church. And instead of us owning that and repenting of that, we had people just calling the convention and complaining. And so early on in my pastoral ministry, I kinda got blacklisted, so I was like, well, I was never gonna be a denominational guy.

But I would say, like, maybe in my youth ministry days, and who wants to be an outcast, right? So I can say there are certainly, I can certainly say that I'm sure that there's a decision somewhere along the way in my past that I made like a denominational Dave, and I shouldn't have.

And I repent of that, I own that, and I wanna move forward. If you're a denominational Dave, repent. Move forward, publicly repent, tell your church. This is kinda, I've been thinking about the convention, I've been thinking about the next move up, and I haven't been thinking about the glory of Christ in the church.

So denominational Dave will not lead a church to biblical health. Secondly, we'll call him Guidestone Greg. Now Guidestone is the retirement service, the financial, I don't know, suffice to say the retirement service of the Southern Baptist Convention.

So Guidestone Greg, usually like an older guy, and like his thing about the church, like man, just give me a few more years in the church so I can keep putting money to retire. The fight has been taken out of him.

He's, in his mind, he's too old to make real change, that's gonna have to be somebody else. Man, I just wanna show up as I can and preach and keep preaching and keep receiving a salary, keep putting the money back so I can finally retire.

And again, some of these guys, otherwise good guys, but they are not going to rock the boat. In their mind, they only have so much time left, and so it's like, we're not gonna mess with this. We're just gonna go on and we're gonna leave it to somebody else, maybe the next generation.

It's going to be their problem. We're not gonna seek to make real change. Typically, this is an older guy. I guess it could be a younger guy. But if this is you, so like, I don't know that there would even be a guy like this listening, but if this is you, like question is like, why are you still pastoring?

If you are still pastoring just so you can make it to retirement age, man, you gotta get out. Say, yeah, yeah, but no, figure something else out. You have to understand because you're gonna stand before the Lord, and you're gonna treat his church as just a way for you to make money so that you can retire.

Like, this is not the way. Personally, again, like the last one, I don't know that this one has been a big factor in my life, but if I have, I'm sure that there is a decision I've made somewhere in my past that was motivated by money instead of the glory of Christ, and to that, I repent.

If you are a Godstone Greg, repent, and if necessary, publicly repent, and lead the church rightly. If necessary, step down. Okay, Godstone Greg, denominational day, Godstone Greg thirdly. Now, this one is, these next two are probably more that I've identified with probably more than the first two.

So the next one is Timid Tom. Now, like I said, I probably identify with this one the most, and I feel for this brother because Timid Tom knows where the church should be. He has got along with God. He's gotten the scriptures.

He's done his reading. He's done his studying. He knows where the church ought to be. He knows what a healthy church should be like, but he's afraid to make the decisions that need to be made. Now, let me issue a caution here.

I'm not talking about guys that are being patient. All right, I've been that too. Yeah, we should be patient, and we should have wisdom, biblical wisdom, full of the Holy Spirit, and I think that more pastors should look long-term, big picture, what's things gonna look like 10 years, 20 years, and sometimes you just slowly, slowly, lovingly, patiently seeking the turn to ship.

So I'm not talking about those guys, but I'm talking about the guys that like, okay, I know we've got to make this decision. I know we've got to go in this direction. I know I've gotta push us here, but I'm afraid.

I'm afraid of the deacons. I'm afraid of the lady Sunday school teacher or of this committee or whatever, whatever person or group may be opposed to biblical health. He's not going to do what he needs to do because he is afraid.

Now, this really is more of the guy that I had to repent of publicly because I've been guilty of that before. There's a fine line, isn't there, sometimes, or I've found it, a blurry line sometimes between biblical prudence and cowardice, and it's just like, okay, am I being wise here or am I being timid, am I being afraid because I know that this is going to cause a stir and a blowup, and you're gonna have to navigate that, but I will say this.

There are some guys that they're so timid that they're never gonna make any decision that makes anybody angry because they just can't bring themselves to face the conflict, but I would say there's no way, particularly, if you're in a church plant, that might be different, but if you're in a situation where you're in a traditional kind of church, whatever denomination that may be in, but they're kinda stuck in some man-made traditions, unhealthy traditions, and you are seeking to bring them from point A to point B, like there's going to be a crisis point.

You can kick that crisis point down the road a year, two years, 10 years, 20 years, but if you never reach the crisis point, then you'll never reach the point of reformation and revitalization. There's no such thing as being able to revitalize or reform a church without pain.

Now, hopefully, that pain is more minimal, but it's going to happen, and you can't be timid, Tom. If there's something before the Lord that needs to be done, you have got to do it. You've got to be wise about it, but you've got to stand up and you've got to say, hey, this is wrong, and this is the direction that we need to go.

Again, if this is you, brother, repent, take it to the Lord, trust the mercy of the gospel, press on, own it before the congregation, and press on in the Lord. All right, Denominational Dave, Guidestone Greg, Timid Tom.

Thirdly, Pragmatic Pete. Now, I said I identified it with him, but Pragmatic Pete was probably not so much in pastoral ministry, but in my youth ministry days. This guy's always ready for the next gimmick, the next program, the next discipleship course, the next event, whatever else that he can do to see more people sitting in the pews.

Some of these guys, they don't really care whether or not the people in the pews are born again. It's just about numbers. What's the next program coming down the line? What's the next cool thing that LifeWay is pushing?

That was me in some of my youth ministry days. What is it that we can come up with next in order to bolster our numbers? And really, it's the Pragmatic Pete's of the world. Actually, it's a mixture of all these guys.

The point is, well, all five of them. You haven't heard the fifth one yet, but it's a mixture of all five of these guys that is a great, not the only reason, but a great reason that so many churches are in the state that they're in today.

That some churches don't even know the gospel, don't even understand membership, don't understand worship. They just see the church as something that just feed them, feed them, feed them, feed them, entertain them, entertain them.

It's like that Spurgeon quote that said, he nailed it almost 150 years ago, whenever he said it. Basically, one day the church is gonna be full of clowns seeking to entertain goats. Well, do we not see that here in America and in churches?

And so Pragmatic Pete feeds into this. It's just always about the next gimmick, the next program, the next thing. And he's not really serious about giving his life to his people. He's similar maybe to Denominational Dave.

All these guys maybe have some overlap at times. Okay, let's talk about the fifth one. So you have Denominational Dave, God's Son Greg, Timid Tom, Pragmatic Pete. The last one's just, we'll call him Lost Larry.

This man may be any of the other guys, but this guy's just, he's not born again. There are people, do not fool yourself, there are people in conservative denominations who fill the pulpit who are not born again.

They're not even a Christian. No wonder they don't love the church. No wonder they don't have a right ecclesiology. They have still a heart of stone and they're a pretender. And I tell you, dear sir, if this is you, and so I just couldn't bear, I can't bear the shame and the ridicule and even the economic impact of having to stand up and say I'm lost and I have to step down.

I remind you that you'll stand before the Lord one day. And you'll be far greater, happier, joyful, if you bear the shame today and look to Christ and give that shame to him, repenting of sin and believing the gospel.

Then you will to continue to pretend until your dying day. You will be judged all the more harshly because you have mistreated Christ's church. The point is, these five guys, Denominational Dave, Godstone Greg, Timid Tom, Pragmatic Pete, Lost Larry, most of us in the ministry, as I've said, could identify with at least one of these guys, maybe more, at least at some point, maybe at some decision, not really describing you overall, but maybe a decision here or there, and maybe some of you, how you are right now.

The reality, though, I'm trying to say is none of these men are fit to pastor Christ's church. So if one of these is you, Denominational Dave, Godstone Greg, Timid Tom, Pragmatic Pete, Lost Larry, if this is you, go to the God of grace.

Go in repentance, humble repentance, and know that he is merciful. Know that he has the power by his Holy Spirit to empower you, equip you to be the pastor that God's word says you should be. Hey guys, why are we taking this office so lightly?

Is this me being arrogant? Is me saying these five false pastors, these five pastors that cannot take a church to biblical health and revival, is this me being arrogant? Is it really? I don't think so, because I think that what I'm trying to communicate, or at least what I'm working to communicate, is that Christ is worthy of a healthy church, and that requires faithful pastors.

On the day of judgment, we're going to answer to one king, the Lord Jesus Christ. And here's a sobering reality. All these people, you know, you're worried about pleasing, you're worried about offending, rubbing shoulders with the big wigs in the denomination, the deacons that you're worried about offending, the lady Sunday school teacher.

Okay, when you stand before Christ, not a single one of those people is going to come to your aid. Not a single one. So what do you do? Stop caring about them in the sense of their accolades, their applause, their encouragement.

I don't mean to stop caring about their soul, but I mean care above and beyond what our Lord Jesus Christ thinks. Seek his glory above all else. Trust him. And if you're seeking the glory of Christ, then whatever happens after that, you're okay with him.

You're right with him. And nothing is more important than that. Nothing. Nothing is more important than for you being right with the Lord Jesus and leading his church as he would have you.

Okay?

You're going to make it. And I know pastoring's hard. When I say that you're going to make it, I don't mean that, you know, you're guaranteed to have a successful church or revitalization happening in your church.

But I do mean that if you're right with the Lord, then no matter what happens in this life, then eternity is set. So seek to please him. I think as old Charles Spurgeon quote, fear God and nothing else.

Be that kind of pastor. And I know there's so many other like, we've gone, we could go on more tangents. Worldly Wes or something. Or Worldly William. I actually know a Wes, Wes Brown. And he's not worldly, he's a faithful brother.

So I try to take these names of people I don't actually know. So Worldly William or Political Pete or whatever. You know, we have a lot of that going on today. Distraction maybe at times of away from Christ's church.

The point is, we want to be pastors who are faithful stewards of the gift that God has given us and the calling that God has called us to. And we want to be the people, we want to be the men, the qualified men, overseeing Christ's local churches as he would have us oversee them.

And so let us, this is not me being arrogant, brothers. Let us repent of minimizing the office of pastor and then let's do our due diligence to take the calling seriously, examine our lives and seek to uphold these standards and be serious about the church.

I guess one exhortation I have is that some pastors that I know don't even have a right understanding of the church. So that is one encouragement, to read the scriptures, to study them out, to read the old dead guys, to read the Puritans, but particularly I would obviously argue, read our Baptist forefathers, consider what they saw the church as, seek to have a better ecclesiology, do an assessment, we'll do all sorts of audits, weird sorts of things we'll do, but do an assessment, take the scriptures, look at your service, or what we doing in our service, is it in accordance with what the word of God says?

Do we sing Psalms? For example, I think there's two errors that I see in churches. One is, I do think it's an error that churches only sing Psalms. I don't think we should only sing Psalms. And then there's a lot of churches, kind of typical that I grew up in, like never sing a song, ever.

Psalm, never. And when the scriptures say we should sing Psalms, hymns, spiritual songs. That's just an example, that's not the be all, end all, but it's just an audit. You know, I just take the scriptures, I'm looking at the scriptures, looking at the service, what are we doing?

Are we paying attention to the public reading of scripture? Is our service filled with prayers? You know, I've been in many services, probably you have too, when it's like, there was like maybe one prayer in the whole service.

So these are just some thoughts. I'm not, there's some freedom, there's some liberty. It's not X number of prayers, X number of Psalms, or maybe even necessarily a Psalm every week or whatever. I'm just saying these are some intangible examples to look at the scriptures.

And then to look at the church and like, are we doing what the Bible says? Are we serious about membership and discipline.

And all these things?

I'm just rambling. And if you listen to this podcast, these are themes that always come up. But the point is, we do not wanna be one of these types of pastors, because God will not use these types of pastors to reform the church.

And if you don't care about reforming the church and the health of the church, then you ought not to be a pastor at all. Brothers, let us be a people who humbly sit under the instruction of the word and seek to be the pastors that God would have us to be.

Christ is worthy of a healthy church. Thank you for tuning in to this week's episode of the Rural Church Podcast. Hope it's been a help. Hope it's been a blessing. As always, you can reach out to me if you want, QuatroNelson at gmail .com.

That's C-U-A-T-R-O-N-E-L-S-O-N at gmail .com. And we'll catch you guys next week on the Rural Church Podcast.

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 poemas, the masterpiece of God.

How are you gonna respond?