Bonus Episode: Sustained by the Gospel

Welcome to the Whole Council podcast. I'm John Snyder, and with me again is our special guest Jordan Thomas, who is one of the pastors of a sister church in Memphis, Grace Baptist Church. And really, what we wanted to do in this episode is just to let Jordan talk to us about how God established that work there.

Yeah, thank you, brother. We do consider ourselves a sister church. I'll say some about that in just a moment. Grace Church began with a series of Bible studies through the fall of 2006. The church officially constituted, welcomed her first covenant members in February of 2007, so we consider that our birthday.

So we're recording here for those who listen in August of 21, so from 2007 to 21. We're almost 15 years old. A quick backstory. The Lord ordered my steps in a way that was, you know, everybody's story is unique, but mine has some layers to it that I can now in hindsight see the Lord was preparing me for this work.

So I mentioned in the previous episode about my conversion. One thing I didn't say was that was during my college experience. A few months after I was converted, at the college I attended in southwest Arkansas, a small Christian school, there were about 1 ,500 on-campus students.

Every Thursday night, I spoke to a third of them, about 500 peers, and I was basically regurgitating what Clyde said. All right, but my major through most of those years was science. So I'm preaching every Thursday night to about 500 college students.

I'm one of the students, and I'm going to the science building. All right, so fast forward. I'm also, for the last two and a half years of college, preaching almost every weekend in churches all around Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, whatever, at all sorts of environments.

So youth weekend, college weekend, pulpit supply for a church, special series of meetings, Sunday to Wednesday kind of thing at churches, and no exaggeration, three out of four weekends for two and a half years.

Over the course of that time, I'm asking people like Clyde and peers, do you think the Lord may be leading me toward it? I'm a slow learner. So long story short, before my senior year, I began to be convinced that I thought the Lord was setting me apart for gospel ministry.

I'll skip some details and say I did go to seminary after college. Those years became more and more confirming of that sense of calling, but during those years, this, you know, maybe to many people's surprise today, I was hearing virtually nothing about what is so common now, namely, church planting.

So let me date this. This would be like early 2000, 2000 -2001 -2002. Daily, I'm having this desire to think and pray about the prospect of eventually being part of the work of establishing a new church.

My wife and I, Tracy, prayed about this consistently. To our knowledge, this may be exposing our ignorance, we didn't know about books or networks or conferences or anything on the theme. We were just reading the book of Acts and seeing how God was causing His kingdom purposes to make advance in the world through the spread of the gospel and the establishment of New Testament churches.

I'm reading the epistles and realizing those are written to churches, and all of them were established. We see the start of most of them in the book of Acts, and Jesus, in Revelation, is speaking to seven churches and so forth.

We're starting to see, okay, the establishment of new churches as the gospel advances God's plan in these last days, from the resurrection to the return of Christ. Well, I'll stop boring you with backstory by saying something coalesced, and the something was, I would say, based on my understanding of the New Testament, God's doing three main things until Jesus comes back.

He is glorifying His name, He's always been doing that. He's doing good for all of His people. The Bible calls it edifying and equipping, building us up in the faith, making us useful in His service. He's doing that for every Christian, and He's also getting the gospel to the ends of the earth.

So glory to His name, good for His people, gospel to the nations. The thing that coalesced for me is, in the New Testament, He's doing that in and through local churches. So I knew for sure I want to give my life to that, and I was convinced.

Well, fast forward to the beginnings of Grace Church. For three years, a few families met and prayed together frequently about the prospect of establishing a new church together. The reason we didn't move forward is not because we weren't convinced that the Lord was putting that burden on our heart, but we were waiting for like-minded mother church to say, you know, we bless this work, or to put it another way, we didn't want to show up someplace and say, we're the pastors, and they say, who said so?

And we say, we did. So we wanted a mother church, and it seemed Acts 13, Antioch, and other examples, Paul talking about Jerusalem to Illyricum, you know, going on to Spain, that churches plant churches, and anyway, we didn't want to just do it ourself.

So in God's providence, He arranged an opportunity post-seminary for me to go up north and do what's called a church-planting residency at a local church, and to be trained in basically biblical pastoring.

So I spent a lot of time in the book of Acts that year, and by God's grace, they did investigate us theologically, pastorally, the qualifications and calling of a pastor, they assessed our life, and also those brothers who had been praying with us for years, and by God's grace, at the end of that year, the congregation affirmed, laid hands on us, and sent us out.

And we came to Memphis, like I mentioned, summer of 2006, began a series of Bible studies that fall that materialized into 18 people covenanting together in February of 2007 for the establishment of Grace Church.

What are, you know, if you were to explain to someone who said, so, you know, what are the things that you feel are... While there are many sweet things the Lord gives us as churches, you know, we think a lot about community as a big emphasis right now, and that's a sweet gift, but if someone were to say to you, what are the essentials that you would not be willing to be, you know, a pastor of a church without these, what do you think those would be?

I love that question. I'm gonna do it with... I wasn't... I didn't prepare to do it this way, but I'm gonna do it with consonants, okay? With words that sound. True conversion. So the true gospel, making true Christians.

So true conversion. I would say, to me, this is paramount. Christocentricity. It's one thing to be Baptistic or not to be, like you said, heavy emphasis on community or something else, but you can have a lot of those things.

Even doctrines that I would myself embrace and have an egregious absence of Christ. And so I would say if all of our theology is not leading to a admiration of the Lord himself, the Lord Jesus, then there's something defective in our theology.

Theology should lead to the doxology. So Christocentricity. And then finally, I would say ecclesiology. Those things coming together. So true converts rallied around Christ, covenanted together in this congregation, and, you know, if you have those three basics, I would say I'm happy.

I hope that we can grow in some other ways, but to your question, those are things I would not want to be willing to let go of.

You know, in the last, let's say in the last 20 years, there has been a resurgence of Reformed thinking among evangelicals in the states. So suddenly, you know, Banner of Truth, Reformation Heritage Books, whoever, you know, influence of Martin Lloyd-Jones, so, you know, and then of course then there's our homegrown ones, Sproul and Piper and MacArthur and others, and those are the old guard.

There's a whole new guard come up. What I've seen as a trend is this, that we started with soteriology. So we need to rethink actually how God does save a soul, which I think needed to be rethought. Agreed.

But we have seen it work itself out into the next, which I think is a healthy progression. Okay, so that's a Christian, and that's how, that's the gospel, and that's a Christian, but what about ecclesiology?

So most of my life, I'm 52, so most of my life, I would have been the kind of guy that would have read Spurgeon or Whitefield at some point, you in college, but as for understanding what a healthy application of that looked like in a church setting, I was clueless.

So one question I have for you is this, and I'm just gonna spring this on you. All right. Be brave. As you see the Reformed trend from soteriology to rethinking ecclesiology, biblically, what, I have two questions, what is one of the more encouraging things you're seeing?

Because you are connected with a lot of men who are doing this, who are earnest about reforming, and what, is there a warning? Do you see some.

Red flags that concern you? Yeah. I mean, because I can't repeat all that I would like to say that you and I have talked about before, and that I've talked about with some of those other friends, I would say last Sunday in God's Providence I preached a sermon titled, What is a Church?

And that's August 15, GraceChurchMemphis .com website, you can find it. What is a Church? From Ephesians 4, 1 to 16. So I won't repeat all of that either. But in terms of encouraging and concerning, I would say that Jesus meant what he said, he will build his church, the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.

And so not only in our land, where there are some freedoms to seek to expand Christ's kingdom, but also in places where it appears those freedoms don't exist, Jesus is advancing his cause. The church is not in jeopardy of vanishing.

That will not happen. The king of the kingdom is seated squarely on the throne. He's not going to abdicate his responsibility. But one encouraging thing I see is there, I do meet a lot of, as you referred to them, as earnest young brothers wanting to honor Christ and faithfully represent him in a church.

They don't want to lie to people about God. They want to help people grow in the faith, and I'm encouraged by that. You know, I don't know if I ever told you this, but I was actually interviewed in the infamous Young, Restless, and Reformed article that became the book, or whatever it became.

Were you one of the Young, Restless, and Reformed in their minds? I guess, I have no idea. But I did ask them, just take me out of the whole thing, and here's why. Maybe there's self-righteousness in this.

I'm willing to concede that. I do know for sure a lot of people have put up with a lot of self-righteousness in me. So there may have been some in this as well. But I was, though encouraged by some of the resurgence of a God-centered soteriology, I would say I was equal parts concerned.

Because it seemed as much full of self as a lot of the anti-Reform stuff I had been exposed to personally in my limited experiences. So it's like trading terminology and keeping self. And that's an unfair assessment to just blanket over everybody all the time in all places, but I just back up to what I was saying earlier.

If our theology, and particularly soteriology, doctrine of salvation, you said it this way, how does God save a soul? If we can't agree on that, I'm not quite sure what we can agree on. You know, it's so core to everything that Christianity is.

But if that doesn't lead to a humble appreciation of, and dependence upon, Christ that manifests in dying to self, then I am concerned about it. I don't want my Christianity to look like that. So I can de-spiritualize some of what I'm saying.

I saw a lot of what sounded just like basic, braggadocious, brash, me-centered, rah-rah-rah in the name of Jesus, that was using terminology that I actually appreciate myself when it comes to doctrine of salvation.

I just didn't appreciate the smell of the brash, braggadociousness of it all. So yeah, I don't know if I told you about my interview and me requesting, and now in hindsight, oh man, I'm so glad my name is not attached to some of the things, because.

Grenades are getting launched everywhere. Yeah, I think what you pointed out, really at the heart of what we want to see moving forward, for ourselves first, you know, for us, not for our church work, us.

The soul to be held captive to the point of self-forgetfulness as we view Him. And then, like you mentioned, the aroma, the sweet, the humility of Christ, so that we could be the kind of men that He could trust with messages.

Yeah, well said. But then, as we think of, you know, you mentioned that it's easy to have a shift in your vocabulary. What Edward Payson said about his people, Edward Payson, early 1800s pastor in Maine, Portland, Maine.

He went to a church that was fairly self-righteous and kind of not very Reformed-ish, not very evangelical, and he began to preach. And after about a year, his people quit coming and telling him what good people they were and how many good things they did.

He said, they shifted in what they said to me after that. They started talking about, oh, how sinful we are, and oh, it's all of grace. But what Payson said was, in his memoirs, I am afraid they have gotten an evangelical tongue without an evangelical heart.

They weren't brokenhearted over sin. They didn't really believe what they're saying. They just learned a new set of words. And as you mentioned, it's easy to do that. One illustration I've thought of, because it bothers me, you know, I'm concerned, I don't want to see myself...I want to guard against this.

I want the churches we serve in to guard against this. We want to see our brothers across the nation guard against this. As we move from one set of words to another, from a me-centered gospel to a God-centered, from, you know, if you want to use the historical terms, so I was Armenian now, I'm Calvinist, whatever, Reformed.

It is easy to think of the church as being kind of in love with self, okay? So you walk into a room, there's the church, she's in bed with self. She's in love with self. She lives for herself. It's all about her.

And she's, there they are under a blanket in bed, and you're horrified. So you rip the blanket off, and the blanket in this case is bad doctrine. Then you throw a new blanket on, good doctrine, and you say, okay, now that's better.

But self has not been removed, you know? And you can hear it when we talk. You can see it in the mirror when we're not careful. But yeah, you know, I think that one good guide for us all is what Christ said, you know, about himself in John 10.

If I do not do the works of my Father, don't listen to me. And that goes for every messenger. If a man does not carry about that sweet aroma of Christlikeness, humility, boldness, yeah, but tenderness, brokenheartedness, if he's not like his Lord, then you are not required to listen to him, and it doesn't matter what.

Puritan he quotes, you know? Yeah. So yeah, I'll tell you an experience that helped put it in my face in a way that I was feeling but couldn't say yet, was the Lord took our family to India for the fall of 2012, and learned a lot of things there, saw a lot of concerns there.

It was, you know, a mixed bag of experiences, both encouraging and concerning. One of the encouraging was, among the faithful brothers we got to spend substantial time with, there was an altogether obliviousness to self-promotion in their pastoring.

Because there wasn't, in those circles where we were, I was even asking these questions. Who does everybody listen to? Who's everybody read here? Who's got the kind of ear of all the Indian guys who live in your tribe?

Nobody. You know, they're all trying to be faithful to Scripture, they're leaning on good resources that have been made available to them, but there wasn't a celebrity-ism or a popularity, and nobody was trying to aspire to become that person.

But I think inherently, in our culture, there is a American Dream-ish, you know, rise to the top, become the most successful, and to do that you have to be known, and appreciated, and a lot of following.

And it seemed like, even in the emergence of, I think, genuine works of grace, an emergence of God-centered soteriology. I mean, becoming clear on how does God save a soul is a good thing. Let me be clear about that.

I believe that's a wonderful thing. But when it's packaged in an aspiration to also make oneself known, that was the smell of the danger that concerned me about me, and, you know, just more broadly, you know, is this a truly God-centered movement, or is it God-centered terminology in a very me-centered.

Movement? Lord help us. Yeah, certainly. Well, thank you for talking about the Lord's faithfulness, and the things you said at the beginning, you know, that He is establishing, carrying out this great, you think of Ephesians 3, the great tapestry of His multifaceted wisdom is being seen throughout the ages from, in our eyes and the angelic eyes, watching God manifest Himself through these very flawed lives, being brought together and made part of a living temple.

And we get to be a part of that, some small part. So, great privilege for every believer, whether you're serving in, you know, the kitchen, chasing kids in the nursery, you know, or getting up and being allowed to speak on His behalf in front of people.

So, well, thanks for being with us, Jordan.