Brad Isbell interview (2020)

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said, "'But we did not yield in subjection to them "'for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel "'would remain with you.'".

In short, if you like smooth, watered down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.

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

And as many of you know, the format of the show is pretty simple. 25 minutes a day, Sunday sermon plays on Monday's show. Tuesdays, I talk with my associate pastor about church issues. Thursdays, I usually talk about the book of Hebrews and the Lord Jesus, the high priest.

And then Friday, I usually go after somebody, kind of woodshed Friday. But on Wednesdays, I like because I get to talk to fellow pastors, fellow elders, theologians, authors, superstars, and even today, we have a mega church elder.

Church Size, Ministry Success, and the Prosperity Gospel

So Brad Isbell, thanks for being on No Compromise Radio today.

Oh, well, I'm glad to be here. And I'm not a mega church elder, of course. We're thoroughly small to medium, I guess you'd say. Well, I heard that the average church in the country is still 65 members.

So we're, or maybe that's in the PCA, maybe it's nationwide, but my church is a little more than two and a half, about two and a half times that size.

Well, Brad, you joke around a lot and so do I, but with joking aside, whenever I get to travel and I'm speaking someplace and the dear pastors out in the middle of India in a village or maybe someplace in rural America, when they hear that I don't pastor a large church, they get encouraged because I think there's this vibe that goes around in Christianity, of course, with assets, buildings, and cash, and you don't have anything to say unless you've got a lot of followers.

Why do you think that's so prevalent in America today?

Well, I guess it's, you know, we hear about the prosperity gospel, the most brazen forms of it, but we're all wired to think that if you're doing things right, you're gonna be heavily blessed numerically and financially.

And we only have to look at the Bible to see that that's not so. So again, there are soft prosperity gospels and hard prosperity gospels, and I would even hold it, some of the, you know, we're gonna transform the city and we're gonna love the city to life, and we're gonna redeem the city for Jesus, you know, those even smack of prosperity gospel to me sometimes.

And they set people up for disappointment and we should avoid that.

Well, I think there was an old writer that said, old English writer that said something about thinking that he was the object rather than the subject of Christianity, and once we take our eyes off of the author and finisher, the Lord Jesus, then it's inevitable, I think, that it becomes about us, the city, size, growth, et cetera, et cetera.

And so, but I don't think Isaiah or Jeremiah got the memo about having a large following.

No, there were many people who didn't, who were not non-successful in earthly terms. Of course, if you do look at the early church, they experienced incredible growth, but we know that was supernaturally, that came about supernaturally, and we know that they did it in far less than ideal circumstances, but there's no formula.

You know, many of us grew up in evangelicalism where there was a new formula or technique or program every few years that was gonna, you know, win the city, the state, or the country to Christ, and we know that there's no such automatic formula.

There are things that we're supposed to do according to the Great Commission, but we're not guaranteed a mathematical type of, and you know, faith, faith is, it's not by sight, and what we see as success is often, it's probably not real success.

Well, today we're talking to Brad, and he's known also on Twitter as Chortles Weekly. That's not with two E's weekly, but W-E-A-K, and I think we first met on Twitter, Brad. I've since had you on two times on the show, and I've been on your radio show once, Presbycast.

I encourage all our listeners, probably many of you already listen to Presbycast, regular shows that come out. I'm kind of at a loss today, Brad, because I'm listening to you at regular speed and not 1 .5.

Oh, well, that's, you'll just have to deal with that. I know.

Well, one of the things that you say here on your Twitter account, as you describe yourself, a PCARE, that is a Presbyterian Church of America, ruling elder, and then you have something called a term coiner, and I thought, well, you know what?

With my henno language and other things, I thought, well, I'm competing with Brad for a term coiner, but you did coin something that's very near and dear to my heart. One time, you called not just people Baptist, or Reformed Baptists, but there's a no-co-Baptist, so what's the difference between a Reformed Baptist and a no-co-Baptist?

Well, that's a really good question.

Bad taste, maybe? I'm not sure. That's right. Tolerance for inappropriate memes? I'm not sure what that would be, really.

Well, once in a while, you do send me things that I don't know if you're too afraid to post or you just want to duck and let me take the hit, so then I just usually post them.

I've been doing that my entire life. You know, there's always the kid that gets other kids in trouble, and I was probably always that kid.

Well, all joking aside, I'd encourage our listeners to go to Presbycast and listen. You can listen on your typical podcast downloader, iTunes, et cetera, or go to the website, and I think it's important for a lot of Baptist listeners, which I think we probably have many, but for them to get some insight into the Presbyterian life while many Baptists love reading Presbyterians and understanding soteriological theology, proper hermeneutical issues that pretty much all come from the Presbyterians.

I know there are some exceptions, but I think what some Baptists don't understand, things like general assembly and how sessions work and what goes on between ruling and teaching elders. Brad, if you could give our listeners kind of a summary, what would you like, without blasting Baptists, what would you like the Baptists to know about Presbyterian life in general that you think maybe most Baptists are ignorant about?

Presbyterian Accountability and Church Government

Well, I think a lot of Baptists are congregationalists and by default, they kind of grew up congregationalists and they value independency. They see virtues in the reformed system of doctrine, of soteriology, maybe even worship doctrine, but they, for one reason or another, will not buy into the accountable system that is Presbyterianism.

And I think that's, yeah, I think there are very few examples anywhere in the world of Baptist-type churches that aren't accountable to other churches. You have associations, but you don't have presbyteries and you don't have one Baptist, you know, you don't have all the Baptist elders in one area checking out the meeting records and reviewing the practices of other Baptist churches in the area.

I think it would be, I think there were a few reformed Baptists who would like to be a little more accountable and a little more presbyterial in the government, but I believe it'd be encouraging if there was some move in that direction.

And I think that's one of the reasons I'm often critical of the Gospel Coalition because I think they're very light on ecclesiology, on church order. High concepts are nice, but there's some real practical benefits of being accountable.

And of course, let me say on the front end, this doesn't ensure orthodoxy or fidelity. We could talk about all kinds of problems in reformed and Presbyterian churches. The presence of those problems doesn't invalidate the system of accountability, which we actually find in the Scriptures.

It's not something we've made up as far as we're concerned, and I'm sure the Baptists and the congregationalists don't think that they've made their system up either.

Well, here in New England, where Jonathan Edwards used to be, Solomon Stoddard, I don't know if it's his grandfather, what was his relationship to Stoddard, but Stoddard was known as the Pope of New England.

So these days, if I just consider myself, I don't know whether it's the line of the Roman Popes, the Avignon Popes, or the Conciliar Popes, what if I am the Pope of New England now, self-designated, and then I don't have to worry about these other issues?

Well, I think you would be a benevolent ecclesial dictator, sort of a philosopher king.

So I'd say go for it. I'd say try that. Try it. Yeah, what would they say? The cure to hedonism is to try it. It's fascinating, the other day I was looking at Hebrews, and I'm preaching in Hebrews 12, and he's basically saying, look out for other Christians and help them, and this is not a race that you run by yourself.

And he uses the word episkopos, to look out for, to oversee, and he calls even the congregation, and this is not my argument for congregational rule at all, but just thinking about church government. Everybody should be an Episcopalian was kind of the subtitle to my sermon.

It didn't go over very well.

Oh, really? Well, that happens sometimes.

I know. Brad, regularly, I've heard on Presbycast, you have taught Sunday school classes at the church you're at there, the PCA church, and the ones that have played on Presbycast have been on worship, the doctrine of worship.

How do we go about worship? Give our listeners a little bit of kind of fly-over philosophy on how do we approach worship and kind of what you came out of, the liturgy you came out of, and the liturgy you're in now, and why it's important.

And the reason why I ask this question is because I've liked your classes, and I also just got done teaching the end of Hebrews chapter 12, and he was talking about Zion and Sinai and if you're gonna go apostate, the only place you can run back to is Sinai, and you're not going to be able to survive, so don't do that.

But for us, we've come to Mount Zion, this great gospel, grace, Jesus Christ. We have this relationship with him, and we worship him, and we're in his family, et cetera. And then he says something very interesting.

He talks about shaking the world. Jesus is gonna come back. And then he said, therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, everything else is shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship with reverence and awe.

And you'd think this would be for maybe unbelievers, but he says, for our God is a consuming fire. So in light of that, give me your update on worship or your overview on worship and why it's so important and how you go about it.

The Priority of Lord's Day Worship and the Ordinary Means of Grace

Well, I can't remember the three or four Ps that I used in that class. Interbaptist is coming out. Yeah, yeah. Well, I just saw the opportunity and took it. It was sort of a, I guess it was sort of a joke for my own pastor who at one time was a Baptist and actually was, I think he worked at A .J. Rogers Church, and he was actually a serial alliterator, if you will.

He always used. But I think one of them was the priority of worship. I think that's especially, it's become apparent how important that is in these days of coronavirus, which what we're missing is the corporate gathering of the saints together to worship.

And what we've had to do is to strip away all the extra stuff. We're not gonna have Sunday school again anytime soon. Men's group activities, but we work very hard to maintain Lord's Day worship, which we always tell new or inquiring and that sort of thing, that the most important thing we do every week, worship on the Lord's Day.

And everything beyond that is to be helpful, but it's not the most important. The priority of worship, I remember when I was a Southern Baptist, the Sunday school material would say that our number one method for not just discipleship, but for making new converts is Sunday school.

And they pushed all these man-made things and it would devalue worship by having a contemporary service and a young person service and a service for the old people who were about to die at eight o 'clock, where they sing a couple of hymns and that tends to devalue worship.

So worship together on the Lord's Day, all ages and types of people together, the biblical elements of worship and nothing more, nothing less. I think these days when we can't, when we have to choose carefully what we can do in church and we can only do so much and some of it has to be, we're in smaller groups, that's what we're doing.

We've got three identical worship services on Sundays so we can get everyone there safely. But I think it points to the importance of worship, but it also calls into question worship that's too complicated or too technology driven or that's too tied to a building.

We're learning some things, I hope.

Brad, as you were walking through that, it made me think of a quote I heard probably 25 years ago and it was someone expressing their thoughts about the priority of worship and Lord's Day worship where our Savior, the Lord Jesus, calls us to worship Him with other Christians that He has redeemed.

And this particular author, I wish I remember who it was, said, you know, what would a church do if they canceled everything except Sunday morning worship services corporately and maybe some prayer meetings?

What if everything else was gone and then would anyone show up, right? Because what about the VBS and what about the kids program and what about this, that, or the other? And some of those obviously are fine, but I don't think the New Testament church knew anything about these other things.

It was, the issue even wasn't private Bible reading, although I endorse that and I do that, but it was corporate Lord's Day worship, right?

Yeah, we always say, we call ourselves an ordinary means of grace church, which means we rely primarily on preaching and sacraments. That's just mostly where it's at. We don't think that every other, that other things are prohibited, but we do try to prioritize that.

It's easy to have, you know, what they call mission creep or to become bloated where you've got this staff and most of it has nothing to do with Lord's Day worship. As big churches, you can have a church that has their own school and all of a sudden the school becomes more important than the church.

Any number of things can draw our attention away.

Well, I'd encourage our listeners to go to Presbycast, maybe the archives, to listen to some of Brad's worship material. I thought that was excellent. Brad, I think that mission creep, isn't that a song?

Doesn't Radiohead sing that? I think so, yeah. All right, I'm gonna change things up a little bit here and I'm gonna read something and the game is I read something and you tell me from whence, where it comes.

What am I reading from? All right, it's just gonna be fun little thing. If you don't know, that's fine. Nobody listens to the show anyway. It wasn't so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin.

You let the world, which doesn't know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief and then exhaled disobedience. We all did it. All of us doing that which we felt like doing when we felt like doing it.

All of us in the same boat. It's a wonder God didn't lose his temper and do away with a whole lot of us. What was I reading from? Oh, I don't know. Oh, it sounds British, but I don't know who the individual.

Well, that would be Eugene Peterson, Ephesians chapter two, one to three.

Okay, oh, so that was his paraphrase. Okay, that was his paraphrase. There you go. I got it. Okay, well, I'm sure there are some people that profited from some Peterson things, but I'm not a big, it sounds like the living Bible to me with and don't miss.

We are about the same age probably. How old are you, Brad?

I think I'm 55. Okay, I'm 60. You should have more respect, by the way. I'm 60, and I grew up going to church and we had living Bibles. And you know, the one thing about the living Bible that we used to have, it had really kind of, it was hardback, but it had that kind of plushy covered.

I wonder, that was kind of a new thing, that squeezy, plushy cover. Did you have one of those?

No, I'm so young that I had a living children's Bible. Oh, yeah, you did. I do remember that. I think my dad had one. It was green, and I do remember that padded cover now that you mention it.

Well, of course, it's right to be critical on certain things, and we want precision. The Lord wants precision. But I just think about some of the things I was taught as a Lutheran in a very liberal church.

I still learned that the Bible's God's word. God was triune, some other things. So I'm glad that God took even that system and taught me a few things. Let's see, what else do I have here in front of me?

Revoice, Side B Christianity, and the PCA

Tell us about, what's your take on the whole Revoice thing? I think you got a show coming up soon, but by the time this plays, your show will have already hit. So what's gonna happen with the PCA and Revoice?

If you had to fast forward five years, what do you think the state of all this is gonna be?

Well, I'm not terribly optimistic, but also I'm not sure what's gonna happen. I'm optimistic in as much as I'm sure God's in control and he'll preserve his church and glorify himself. But as to whether we can trust men to do the right thing in every case, I don't have a lot of trust in that, of course.

I've been looking into it again because we are gonna have a show. For this show, it's gonna be with someone, a doctoral thesis on who attended the first Revoice conference. So it should be very, I looked into some issues just today.

I was looking up some things. What struck me is how entrenched this Side B Christian movement really is. There are a bunch of organizations, and of course Side B, it sort of means, you know, it's okay to be a, quote, gay Christian.

You just don't need to do the worst gay stuff. That's my crude way of saying it without being crude. And most, a lot of people in the PCA don't think that's a viable way to go forward. That bringing, sort of chewing the, and spitting out the bones of whatever gay stuff is, that the idea that there's something good about that, that we can glorify, accommodate, that's more than most of us can, in the PCA, ourselves missional, that they would claim to believe the Bible.

And I believe they do. They would be evangelical in many ways. But they have a particular bent towards the culture and concern for certain groups that they think are underserved, or certain demographics, or people who live in cities, or things like that.

That all seems to go together with, I'm not sure the two sides can hang together. Learned as much this year about the prospects for that because our General Assembly was canceled. Assembly may be pivotal report that's gonna come out.

I'm told, this is my guess. And it'll probably have something for everyone. Possibly destructive thing is, we'll have a year to talk about it before anyone can vote on it. We're gonna cast it aside. So, it's gonna be an interesting year.

We'll know exactly what it will hold. Brad, if we look at the landscape of evangelicalism and see what's happening, I'm sure these kind of things have always happened with people and there have been downgrades in England, and of course in America and Europe.

What do you think we would call a group of Southern Baptists that left what seems to be a liberalizing of the Southern Baptists? So, let's say the evangelical conservatives, they leave the Southern Baptist, and then the PCA conservatives, the confessionalists, they leave and they join with the Southern Baptist conservatives.

Could we form a new denomination? And if so, what would we call it?

We'd call that a mess, I think. That would be a quagmire, that's what you would call it. Well, you know, the other day,.

I learned something on your show. I didn't know about New Light Presbyterians. And so, maybe this could be Old Darkness or something like that.

Yeah, I don't know. I'm a term coiner, but I'm open to your suggestions.

What about these churches that will say, you know what, we don't care, we'll accept baptisms. No, no, it'll strike that because I know Presbyterians will accept certain baptisms. How about we will either perform believer's baptisms or infant baptisms, either one, and we'll just go for whatever you want.

Do you like that idea? No.

Yeah, no. It's, I call them dual mode. I mean, that's sort of like telling your wife you could take her a lever, you know? I mean, have some conviction. So, and I think it actually debases baptism, but I mean, whichever way you come down on it, is that you don't have a good grasp of covenant theology.

And we know that there's Baptist covenant theology a few or three times. There's reformed covenant theology. There are distortions of reformed covenant theology, which leads to things like the federal vision.

And so, it's not easy. But I think, I like to say that as Protestants, we only have two sacraments or ordinances, if you will. And I think it's kind of important that we're precise and where we come down on them.

You know, Rome had seven, I think. And I guess when you had seven, maybe there was a room for, there was room for some diversity, but we only have two and we should get those right.

Well, remember this is, I'm a no-co-Baptist, so you're allowed to say sacrament on the show.

Well, I just, you know, we, they're sometimes referred to as ordinances, things ordained. And we sometimes use the word ordinance for other things like preaching. Just ordinance in a more general descriptive vein, but yeah, sacraments.

No, that's good. All right, well, Brad,.

We got to wrap this up pretty soon here. Time is up. You probably have to go back to work and so do I. Has Scott Clark, our mutual friend, said anything to you behind the scenes in regard to how long he thinks it's going to take me to become a paedo-Baptist?

No, believe it or not, you're not the only thing we ever talked about. But... Believe it or not.

Oh, that's funny. Well, you know, here's a good... It could have come up, it could have come up. Well, you know, I normally sit in this office and record the shows by myself and laugh, and there's nobody here.

At least I have someone, you know, I have someone to laugh with or you prompt me to laugh. So I'm glad for that. Brad, I hope one day we could sit down and have some... I don't really eat Taco Bell. Last time I ate Taco Bell, I threw up,.

Got sick from it. Well, that's a sign of a weak constitution.

It only... And I'm only getting weaker. My associate pastor used to say that I would go to India because I have a pretty strong stomach. I used to go to India just to kill the bugs there, but now we just Zoom people.

Brad, the website, do you have a website where you have some of the links and stuff so they can search easier than iTunes?

Yeah, you can go to presbycast .com. I think it is. We don't really do much with it, but if you get to our podcast page at presbycast .libson .com, that's searchable for sure. Yeah, it's not that hard.

Find us on Twitter and you can find the rest.

Okay, good. And, you know, for probably 10 years now, over 2 ,500 shows, I've used the same intro, same music to introduce a show. And one of the things that I'm always convicted by, and that's basically now because I'm lazy, but I'm convicted by your show because you always have great bumper music, both to begin and to end.

And it brings back a lot of memories when I hear some of the music that you put on there. And I think sometimes I want to contribute to that, but I think it might be more rock and roll than Southern drawl.

Well, it's a method in our madness. We choose kind of some of the worst and most inappropriate Christian music from across the ages. It's meant to make the point that all music was once contemporary, and that as silly as some of this stuff sounds, that we play, we now think is the greatest, may also embarrass us in 10 or 20 years.

And of course, as Christians, we know that we believe in sanctification, and we should hope in 10 or 20 years that we look back and think, well, why in the world did we do that? And that may even apply to these podcasts.

Yeah.

Well, it's interesting you think about hairstyles or clothes, fashion, and even contemporary music. I'm not saying we shouldn't write anything, but I think you've really identified a problem. Can these things stand the test of time?

And even podcast, although on the preaching side, I know when I go prepare a sermon to preach any place in the world, it's the same message, right? I don't have to do any kind of cultural appropriation.

Oh, I might say cricket instead of baseball if I'm in India. But what makes Calvin's sermons on 1 Timothy so timeless? And that is because it's the trans-chronological, I'm making up words now, omni-relevant word of God.

So at least that will endure, right?

Yes, yeah. I mean, we talked about worship just briefly, but we should try to deculturize our worship as much as possible, or maybe to transculturize it. In other words, if we sing, if we sing psalms and historic hymns, we're actually reaching across time in a way.

I don't think we wanna do anything in worship that some of the apostles and great men of the past would not approve of.

Well, Brad, your background might be similar to mine, but I know when I first was a Christian and I was really, I hope I'm enthusiastic now, but I was brand new, very enthusiastic, wanted to invite all my friends to the church I was attending.

And then crazy things would happen, right? They didn't happen eight times out of 10, but a couple of times out of those 10, they'd be speaking in tongues or some kind of gibberish or some kind of weird things.

And I was always afraid, you know, shall I invite my friends? And then they're gonna think I'm a total whack job for these things that are done up on the stage slash platform. But now the good news is we can just tell our people, and I regularly do.

You know, we're gonna have songs that praise the Lord Jesus and his work for us. We're gonna preach about the Lord Jesus, baptism, communion. It's very similar. And if you transplanted a bunch of us into Africa, the service would be pretty familiar.

And I like that and I know you do too. Yeah, yeah, that's important. All right, Brad, thanks for being on No Compromise Radio. I'm glad for your ministry. And I always like to see what you post on Twitter.

I went for two weeks trying to be nice Mike Ebendroth and didn't do any kind of scuds. And so I think I'm done with that.

Ratings are low. Well, let me shout out to my partner, Rosby. And we don't actually call our podcast a ministry. There may be podcasts that are, but we're basically friends who get together and talk about stuff and talk with people.

But one of the great things is we get to meet people all over the country and the world like you. So we appreciate that. Well, I'm thankful for that compliment, even though it's my show and you told me that's not a ministry.

Well, I said, we didn't consider ours to be. That means we don't consider yours. You have Bible teaching and sermons and I'll call that a ministry. Okay, good. Small M. Brad, thanks a lot.

Thank you. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Ebendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life transforming power of God's word through verse by verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at six. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.