How to Evangelize to College Students | David Russell

We are back with another episode of the Room for Nuance podcast, not live, but we are coming to you from an undisclosed location.

The studio is still not in working order, but I'm sitting here with Dave Russell from Oakhurst Baptist Church in Charlotte, North Carolina.

And you flew here. I flew here. You guys flew me here. Thank you. Your arms must be tired. I indeed.

Okay. We've set the tone for the interview, brother. Will you open us in prayer? Then we'll jump right in. Let's do it. Okay.

Father in heaven, we thank you for this time to pause and to connect and to consider your word and the call to make disciples to the ends of the earth and to consider what that would look like for churches, to make disciples of college students, to engage college campuses for the sake of spreading the gospel.

Lord, we pray that this conversation would be a help to those who are listening, to those who are college students, to those who work in churches who are seeking to reach those campuses.

Lord, we pray that this would be helpful in edifying that you'd be glorified in our conversation in Jesus name.

Amen. Amen. We have brought you here today, Dave Russell, to talk about campus ministry and you've written a book on it.

I have not written a book, a couple articles, a couple articles. Where can those be found? You can find one on TGC.

Okay. That's going to be about should college students join a church close to their college campus? And then

Nine Marks has one mobilizing the church to evangelize on the college campus.

So if you've written two articles and no books, why are we interviewing you on this subject?

That's a good question. Yeah. So I think I'm a pastor now, but for 15 years worked in campus ministry.

15 years? 15 years. So how long have you been a pastor? I've been a pastor now at Oakhurst Baptist Church for going on nine years this fall.

Okay. And then I served previously on staff at Capitol Hill Baptist Church, served as an elder there for four years.

Wow. Well, can you just start with your testimony? Give us the three to five minute version of it, and then we'll move into college ministry stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. I was saved, I believe, at a young age. I say I believe because I had the benefit of growing up at home with two

Christian parents. And so as long as I can remember going to a gospel preaching church, learning the gospel at home, learning the gospel at church, my parents were meaningfully involved in local churches.

So it was a great blessing. And I did grow up in a time probably where revivalistic methods were more common.

So I'm not sure if it was when I was at five years of age or 12 years of age.

At some point when I was younger, I believe I was converted. A pretty pivotal place for me though was my freshman year of college.

And so at that point, I've moved out of my house. I've gone on to a college campus. Which college?

UNC Charlotte. So the University of North Carolina. Tar Heels? No. The Tar Heels are at Chapel Hill.

Okay. So it's kind of like the Alabama system. We're in Charlotte. Large campus though. Right now it's about 25 ,000 students.

Home of the? 49ers. Oh. We play in the American Athletic Conference. Weren't they just in the

Super Bowl? No. Okay. Anyways, continue on. San Francisco. Yeah. Okay.

We're the other 49ers. We had a gold rush in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1849. We did.

So that's why they say Charlotte is the San Francisco of the East Coast. They do say that.

Okay. Yes. Yes. So back to your story. Back to the Charlotte 49ers. So yeah, went off to college and was at a place really where I was going to have to decide what was

I going to pursue? Was I going to pursue the typical college life, partying, whatnot? Or was

I going to pursue Christ? And the decision got made pretty quickly. Like the first night I moved in,

I was going to pursue the party life. And so sadly, that's kind of where I was going the first couple months of school.

And really looking around in my dorm, on my campus, hardly any

Christians. I mean, I think on my floor, 50 guys. I think there were maybe two guys that were showing evidence of a relationship with Christ, a real walk with Christ.

And so it almost just didn't seem possible on mine. Like, what am I going to do to have fun? What's my life going to be? Who am I going to hang out with?

And as a college freshman, you're starting over. You're wanting to make friends. You're wanting to develop your social life and whatnot.

So yeah, sadly, I kind of had this idea of, hey, maybe I'll just like, get more serious about the

Lord after college. And by God's grace, he had different plans, probably two months into classes.

I came home one night from partying and I was feeling guilty about the way that I was living, but really didn't know what to do with that guilt.

And I looked up on my desk and there was a book my mom had given me to take off to school. And it was something about taking your faith off to college.

I don't remember the name of the book. And she had written a handwritten note about how she was praying for me. And I felt miserable.

I felt about an inch high because I'm thinking about the state of my life at that time, how I was living versus how

I was raised, what I knew to be true from God's word. And I remember praying at that moment at my desk and just asking the

Lord for help. Just some sort of general prayer. I don't recall exactly what I prayed. However, like a week later, there was a guy on my dorm floor who worked with the campus ministry.

He was meeting some other guys, starting a Bible study. They invited me to that Bible study. I jumped in.

Some of those guys in that Bible study were believers. Some weren't. We were studying through the

Sermon on the Mount, Matthew. And we got to Matthew 6, 24. I remember studying Matthew 6, 24.

No one can serve two masters. You will hate the one and love the other, hold to one, despise the other.

And the Lord convicted me of that, that I was living as if I could serve two masters. And there was just a place of repentance.

Lord, I don't want to live like this. I want to pursue you. And by God's grace, really through that Bible study, from that point forward, the rest of my college years, which thankfully that was only two months in.

So the rest of my college years were spent growing as a Christian. It's where I learned how to evangelize, learned how to disciple.

And I can look back, have lots of great memories. The Lord's blessing on that time. So it's not a surprise that you got into college ministry.

I mean, one of the most formative seasons of your life was on the college campus. Were you self -conscious of that?

Did you think like, man, look what the Lord's done in my life on the campus. I need to turn back around and sort of work in this field.

I did. I was really close though to going on the foreign mission field. Okay. So at one point, I'd actually made the decision,

I'm going to go serve in East Asia. And before I made that final commitment, like signing on the dotted line, in my mind,

I'd said, I'm doing this. I told others I'm doing this. I had gotten an offer from a campus ministry to come and serve.

And it was kind of like at the last minute, I just felt the desire to come back. Like you said, to come back to campus and to try to be that impact on others and serve in the way that I was served as a student.

Did you finish your four -year degree? I did. What was it in? It was in communications, public relations.

And what does that even mean? Yeah. I mean, you're a pastor, I guess. It helps out. It probably helps.

Okay. Yeah. So you finished your four -year degree. Was it right after that you jumped right back in?

I mean, it was like two weeks after I graduated, I started. Yeah. And who did you work for? I worked for Campus Outreach at that time down in Charlotte.

So can you just sort of, I want you to tell us about who Campus Outreach is, but for the sake of clarity, if you could also contrast

Campus Outreach with the other major college ministries that people might know of, like Crewe and so on and so forth.

That's right. Most people are going to know Crewe, InterVarsity. Campus Outreach was started in 1978 in the great state of Alabama.

Wow. Which campus? Samford University in Birmingham. Look at that. Okay. Started by Frank Barker, some men out of his church.

Is that the Presbyterian guy? Briarwood Presbyterian. Yeah, there you go. He's with the Lord now. Yeah, he did. He passed on the same day as Tim Keller, I think, or the same weekend.

Everything to Harry Reader. Harry Reader went and replaced Frank Barker, but Harry Reader was very involved, instrumental in getting

Campus Outreach going in North Carolina when he served as a pastor in that state. Wow. Yeah.

So both those men committed to evangelism and committed to campus evangelism. So it's a younger ministry and it's different.

Like Crewe, InterVarsity are going to be international true parachurch organizations.

Campus Outreach is a little bit different. It's going to be church -based and more franchise, for lack of a better way to describe it.

So effectively, a local church would take in a Campus Outreach ministry for that particular region and the authority for that Campus Outreach would be the church there in that region.

Okay. So you said true parachurch versus church -based. Yeah. Can you elaborate on the distinction there?

Yeah. So, you know, when we were in DC, you were at Capital Baptist when I was there. So the same relationship that like a

Nine Marks ministry had with Capital Hobabist Church where they had - Desiring God with Piper Church or whatever.

Yeah. They're under the authority on the umbrella of that particular church. So in terms of just who's being hired, all the sort of oversight spiritually provided by that local church.

Okay. But for the other ones, Crewe, InterVarsity -

Yeah. I'm not an expert on them. As far as I know, they're going to be parachurch ministry. So they're going to have boards and how their governance is going to be is going to be set up outside of a local church, outside of a denomination, all that kind of thing.

Okay. Are you at all paying attention to like the

Crewe controversy surrounding gay and homosexual language and the training that they're giving their workers and stuff?

I've started to hear more about it. I don't know a lot about it. And I think that's part of the concern for me in campus ministry.

Campus ministry is always going to have these new winds of kind of like the edgy theology coming through.

It's going to hit campus ministry first. So when I was doing campus ministry in North Carolina, back in 06, everyone was passing out

Rob Bell's DVDs on campus, the NUMA. And -

More like old ma. Yeah. Blue Light Jazz was getting passed around. Donald Miller. Donald Miller, yeah.

So kind of like trendy, edgy, that kind of thing hits campus ministries pretty quickly.

And then you tend to have younger staff. Most of us, you know, at that point didn't have theological training.

I got my seminary degree while I was on staff with campus ministry. But - Where did you study? Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Yeah, okay. So, yeah. So I think the protection and the help that a local church provides a campus ministry is just that doctrinal anchor.

And you're not having to make all those decisions. What are we going to say about this? What are we going to do on this issue?

You're with a church. So when I was in DC, we were an extension of the local church ministering on college campuses.

Is there a place for parachurch ministries? I think so. I often say, let's not make parachurch a cuss word.

Okay. So I think if parachurches are functioning the way they should function, they're coming alongside local churches.

So we're pastors, we're generalists, right? We're ministering to all kinds of people, young and old, senior citizens, 80 -year -olds and 18 -year -old college students.

We're thinking through preschool, nursery, all those things, right? And parachurch ministries can zoom in and focus in on niche ministries.

They can focus on refugees. They can focus on college students. They can focus on sports ministry.

So those can be helpful things. Like they're focused, they can develop some sort of expertise on how to reach these particular groups.

But if they're not connecting to local churches, I think that's when they get outside of the proper design of what you'd want to see a parachurch ministry doing.

So connect, that's pretty loose, pretty vague, pretty ambiguous. I mean, campus outreach is sitting directly under the authority of the local church.

All the ministry flows out and flows back to it, which I think is good. What do you do for a different kind of...

And listen, maybe you didn't want to come here and talk about all this today, but I do think it's interesting. How connected does it need to be?

Yeah, so all the staff on a parachurch ministry should be members of evangelical churches, right?

And so I know someone in the town I'm from that works with Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

That's parachurch. That's not underneath the denomination or church, but he and his staff meaningfully connected to local churches and trying to get their students connected to local churches.

That's a good example of a parachurch that's reaching a specific kind of student, student athletes.

That's really specific. They have a different schedule even than regular students. Getting into those places sometimes can be challenging.

How do you get onto a particular team to share the gospel, to try to disciple? So think of parachurch, if it's functioning well, it's an arm that's gonna extend from a local church.

And in that sense, it's just, hey, it's a member of a local church. He works for an outside organization, but you should be unfolding your work back into a local church.

That's just normal Christian ministry where it should be. Okay, so going back to campus outreach, you're on staff, you're working for this organization under the umbrella of the church franchise.

Great image, by the way, I love that. How do you bring people back into the local church?

What does that look like? And maybe can you also give us some examples that you've seen of college ministries where there's no attempt to do that and maybe some of the damage done by that?

Yeah, so what we were trying to do was really go church to campus and campus to church.

So a lot of times you don't see that first move of a church making the move to a college campus for evangelism.

And here's why, it can be difficult. Campuses tend to be, if it's a normal college campus, it's like a city within a city, right?

So when most of us, I'm 45 now, when I'm going to bed, college students probably are just in the middle of their studies, maybe getting ready to order a late night pizza.

It's a different place to minister. For years when I was in campus ministry, our weekly meetings were at nine o 'clock at night.

We don't do anything in my local church on a regular schedule at nine o 'clock at night. If we did, not many people would likely show up.

I don't do anything in my house after nine o 'clock at night. Yeah, so it's a city within a city and a college campus is set up to be that, right?

So it's like, it's one of the few places where you live there, you work there, you eat there, your gym's there, your recreation, intramural sports, it's there.

You might have a job on campus, your library's there. You don't have to leave. That's why they're set up that way.

My daughter's getting ready to go off to school and she's asking about, you know, this particular school won't let freshmen drive.

And I just said, well, you don't need to drive. Everything's here. Like you can get a ride to go somewhere, but everything you need is here.

So yeah, it's set up to be a city within a city. And if you think about normal life, so I live in a suburban area of Charlotte, North Carolina, I live in the city limits, but a suburban area.

You're in the car going 25 minutes, pretty much anywhere. Drive here for work. Drive this direction for church.

Drive here for the grocery store. Drive here for your kids' sports. Drive here for the gym. You're just scattered all over the place.

So most people are like pulling into the garage and pulling out and taking off. That's normal life. On a campus, it's not like that.

So it's a great opportunity. Meaning here's like a focused place where there's thousands of people.

Some campuses, tens of thousands of people on these campuses tend to be people from all 50 states.

A number of campuses are gonna have about a hundred nationalities present. And if you go there, that's who's there.

And they're all at an age, 18 to 22 for the most part, where they're learning, at least should be.

Should be asking questions, who am I? Thinking about their future, engaging with new ideas.

So it's a great opportunity, but you have to go jump in the middle of it. And that can be challenging for churches to figure out how to do that.

And that's why I think in part, campus ministries have maybe, like para -church ministries have taken that over because they've become experts.

They have the resources. They can make things happen. So the first turn is churches mobilized to evangelize on campus.

The next turn is what you're doing on campus and folding that back into the local church.

So yeah, what that looked like in DC, we had a full -time staff team. So I was full -time with Campus Outreach DC.

That was a ministry of Capitol Hill Baptist Church. I was freed up to focus my full -time efforts only on campus ministry.

Now, when I started serving as an elder, obviously I had some other responsibilities in the church, but my job, like business hours was on the college campus.

We had a team of at that time, eight full -time staff. That's all they did. And so our goal was meet 18 year olds, share the gospel with them, get investigative

Bible studies going, for those Christian students that we met, try to encourage them, try to invest in their lives, try to get them plugged into our church, if not our church, to join some other church that's close by the campus and have them be discipled and meaningful members of a local church.

How do you do that? Is it just the messaging? Is it just, what do you say? Is it the literature you hand out?

Well, it's just gotta be your goal, right? So it's like our goal wasn't just to stop with the investigative

Bible study in the dorm lobby. That's a starting point. But we were bringing unbelievers to church.

So I can think of one example, we're meeting students on campus. The first conversion we had in DC was a guy who, he just smelled chocolate chip cookies being baked on his dorm floor.

And it was a young lady who was a Christian, who was a freshman at the school, who was a member of our church. She was baking cookies for this evangelistic meeting we were gonna have.

And we brought Mark Devereux on campus and we had a one hour meeting in the lounge of this big freshman dorm.

And it was called Ask Me Anything. And he wanted a chocolate chip cookie. And she said, well, you gotta come to this meeting.

This is what they're for. And you're welcome to have these cookies. So he came and he asked a lot of questions that night. And after the meeting's over,

I went up and talked to him. And I just asked him, hey man, do you think you understand the message of Christianity?

And he looked at me and he said, I don't think I know what the message of Christianity is. I know some things about Jesus, some things about Christianity.

So I shared with him the gospel, the message of Christianity. He shared it very briefly. It was like 60 seconds, kind of like we were trained to do in our local church there.

And I said, what are your questions? And he had like half a dozen questions and he was pre -med. I don't have a science background.

I just said, man, I don't think I can answer all your questions satisfactorily, but you know what? One of our associate pastors was a scientific advisor to the

U .S. Senate before he was a pastor. And if you come to our church on Sunday, I'd love to introduce you to him. So he came, he came to church.

He's listening to an expositional sermon, opening up the Pew Bible, taking notes there. Afterwards, I'd take him over to this associate pastor, introduce them, and they have a conversation right then.

And then I think they followed up at lunch. So that's what it looks like to bring an 18 -year -old, unbelieving student, meet him on campus, meet him in a dorm, share the gospel on campus, but enfold him into the local church.

I think it was like six months later, by God's grace, he got baptized in our local church, joined the church.

Praise God. Amen. Yeah. You didn't really address the...

I'm not trying to get you to bad talk or trash crew or IVP. I think there are more organizations than them out there, surely on college campuses.

Sure, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think we've both seen situations where any kind of person is targeted and the end goal is to get them to raise their hand, to make a profession.

And that's kind of where it ends. And that can be really dangerous. It can be really harmful. And you've seen that,

I'm sure. Yeah. And I think even beyond that, maybe just growing your organization on campus.

So it's very short -sighted. It's like, how is our particular campus ministry doing?

But we always have the mindset of like, hey, we're not only concerned. Obviously we're concerned with the state of their soul eternally.

We don't wanna think long -term eternally, but we don't wanna just think 18 to 22. We just ask the question, what are their lives gonna look like at 40?

Like, how can we set them up now? So that's where the normal Christian life comes into play. Like college students at 18, they need to, if they haven't baptized, they need to be baptized and join a local church and begin to live the normal Christian life.

That's gonna set them up to be walking with the Lord at 40. So that's, I think, where a lot of campus ministries miss the mark.

It's what's going on campus, who's coming to our Bible studies, who's coming to our weekly meeting, no real connection to any

Christians outside of their age group. And maybe the staff person who is probably just like five years older than them anyways.

I mean, I was with a guy last week that I discipled years ago and I was sitting down with him at dinner and I said, how old are you now?

And he said, 42, and I'm 45. He's just three years younger than me. And I told my wife that, I said, isn't it hard to think, like crazy to think, he's only three years younger than me.

At the time when I was 24 and he was 21, I just seemed like light years ahead of him, right?

In his mind and in mine. So I think you can have a lot of passion, zeal, good intentions in campus ministry with kind of this passionate young group of people.

But if it's disconnected from a local church, a lot of it's gonna fizzle out when they hit 23 and they go to work somewhere else and they leave that campus ministry and don't have that structure they got used to that really only exists there in a campus ministry.

But Dave, don't you understand that college students are kind of this unique demographic? They're their own people group.

They speak their own language. They're in their own socioeconomic bracket. They have their own cultural, linguistic, blah, blah, blah.

And we can't really expect to get them into the church. Yeah, I think that's ridiculous. I think it's, so it's not helpful when pastors or when churches think like that, like, hey, we're just gonna let them be a special case.

It's not helpful when parachurch ministries think of themselves that way. Hey, this is just four years, unique time, almost like you're just like floating in between like being in your parents' home and the real world.

And I've seen it, anecdotally, just in our ministry, I've seen it actually be a time where it's like, four years is a long period of time, right?

Very formative period of time. Your prefrontal cortex is solidifying. I mean, it's a big deal.

It's a long period of time. It's a long enough period of time to be a member of a local church where your college campus is.

If you think about four years, like I'm in a pretty transient city right now. There's plenty of people who are in our city working for less than four years before they get transferred somewhere else.

So you don't do college students any favors by treating them as if there's some special case.

Okay. So give me the campus outreach spiel.

You probably had to do it a bunch when you were support raising, when you were interacting with naysayers who didn't really understand the mission.

What's the sell that you would give them? I don't, I mean that in the least carnal way possible. Like what's the sell that you would give them?

Yeah, like the people that I was raising financial support from. You know, there's 2 million college students in America today and this is why we need to target them.

You know, whatever that version is. I was never that big on just making college students out to be special.

My older brother did not go to college. He learned to trade. He's an electrician. I was -

Probably makes more money than you. He may, yeah. He's got more steady work than most people do.

So he's never been out of work. I'll tell you that. But, and I was like, of all the grandkids on my side of the family, there was like maybe two of us that went to college.

So I've kind of not liked the idea of treating college students like they're special. So, you know, people will say a lot of things.

It's a strategic place. I think it is strategic, but you can make a lot of areas out to be strategic.

It's strategic to reach refugees who've just moved into America. So there is a strategy. If anything,

I would look at it. I more or less pitched it as, this is one of the most open evangelistic opportunities

I think in our country is college campuses. And for the very reason I mentioned to you, here's thousands of students, life concentrated in this place from all over the place.

You know, even now in Charlotte, North Carolina, we've baptized students from all over the state of North Carolina, students who've come from the

Northeast. We had a student from the UK who got baptized in our church, who brought, he was a soccer player at the school and brought the whole soccer team.

All the coaches came to watch him get baptized. So it's just a great opportunity evangelistically.

So, you know, doing ministry in my neighborhood now, it's slow, man.

I mean, there'll be days of time where I don't see my neighbors. They pull into their garage, put the garage door down and go inside.

Like you may see them when they're coming out to get their mail. If they have a dog, you're likely to see them more often because they're out walking their dog.

But it's challenging oftentimes to do ministry in suburban America. But you go on a college campus, here's thousands of people.

It's not hard to get into a conversation. And so I just think it's strategic in the sense of it's one of the most open evangelistic targets

I can think of. Is that changing? Is it becoming increasingly difficult with our, you know, almost post -Christian

America to get onto college campuses, especially if you're an evangelical? It is.

And there's a difference between private schools and public schools. So like state schools, you have a right to be on those. Where private schools, you don't.

They can decide as private property. They can decide who they want to come on there. So - But even in state schools, there's been pushback and certain campus ministries have been pushed out and they've had to fight those battles.

Yeah, you're right. Yeah. You're right. And I think it's kind of a testing ground to see what do you push for?

I'm of the opinion like we should push to be there and that we shouldn't kind of give in to those areas.

But so, I mean, you know, we're on a state campus. So my church, we have a campus ministry with a -

CO? Campus Outreach? No, no, we started our own. Okay. Oakhurst Campus Ministry. And we are a chartered student organization on a state campus.

As long as there's a small group of students. So for us, we started small, had a few students who were members of our church that wanted to start an organization.

We got an official charter, which what that means is that we can reserve room space in the student union.

And that's where we have our weekly meetings. And that kind of serves as one of our outreach tools.

So trying to build relationships during the week and whatever relationships we have, bringing those to those meetings to be able to try to influence them.

And then at those meetings, we've got church members that are serving who come in and they'll be the ones that bring the pizza or bring

Chick -fil -A and Krispy Kreme and are there to interact with students, try to follow up with a number of our members will come and try to build relationships that will like disciple these students and form personal discipling relationships.

So it's kind of our way to kind of reach on the campus and use that arm to unfold them into our local church.

A couple of questions. Number one, why did you do your own instead of buying into the franchise that you came from?

Well, cause they already existed in Charlotte. So they were already at a local church there. So you just can't do two.

It's like Chick -fil -A. You can't have two franchises too close to each other. I think you can, but that's not my call.

Okay, roger that. So you started your own. Can you talk us through what like a tip,

I'm guessing you did most of the training to get your church rocking and rolling with this ministry.

Myself and then Jonathan Morgan. Oh, that's right. So Jonathan was on our staff team in DC for seven years.

So between he and I, 22 years of campus ministry. So together, he's done a lot. Yeah, okay.

So what does a typical meeting look like? Hosted by Oakhurst. What did you call it again? Oakhurst Campus Ministry, OCM.

OCM. What does a typical OCM meeting look like? You come in, they turn the lights off. They start playing, open the eyes of my heart,

Lord. Right, or it's a big, big house. Lots and lots of room. And then you'd play chubby bunny. That's the nineties, man.

Oh, okay. You're taking us back to the nineties. Big, big house. Yeah. All right, walk us through a typical meeting. Yeah, so we actually do have a ministry resident right now.

So Calvin Davis. What does that mean? So basically what it means is we realized, for Jonathan Morgan and I, we have the experience and the understanding for campus ministry.

We used to work in campus ministry. So there's a lot of things that we understand. Here's how this operates and can be done.

But we're pastors. So we're giving our attention to a congregation broadly.

We're about 25 minutes from the campus. We're not out at 10 o 'clock, 11 o 'clock at night on the campus doing these types of things.

That's not our lifestyle. So we really needed somebody. And this is where Prairie Church Ministries have lots of resources.

They have young 22, 23 -year -olds who raise support and go give their full -time attention.

I would just want to say, churches should think about doing the same thing. If you can't fund a position, how could you do a residency?

So we developed a one -year campus ministry residency. We hired one of our graduates. So Calvin Davis, his father is actually

Andy Davis, First Baptist Durham. The cyborg who has memorized the entire Bible. There you go.

Which means we have a direct route to get him to come speak on the campus, which he did recently. So Calvin raised his full -time support.

We've helped contribute to that as a church. Members of our church have helped contribute. And then he's raised other places to be able to give himself full -time on campus.

So he's kind of the feet on campus running around. We help him develop his plan. He goes out there and just shares the gospel and his disciples and students.

He runs the weekly meeting while also he'll coordinate a team of members who are not college students and members who are college students who run these meetings.

So it's not lights down. A lot of it's we're in the student union. You come in, there's food. That's the way you get students there.

It's just this. So it's like if you're invited to say, hey, we're gonna have a message tonight. Like I'm coming Lord willing in a few weeks to do

Sunday before Easter. Just a question. Does it really matter that Jesus rose from the dead?

Question mark. Oakhurst Campus Ministry, Tuesday night, 7 p .m. Hey, come out to this.

We're gonna deal with this question. We'll have some free Chick -fil -A out there. We'll feed you. It's gonna be a 25 minute talk answering this question.

At the end, there's gonna be a chance for open Q &A. You can ask whatever question that you have.

So that's how most of our meetings that are more evangelistically focused are going to go. At the end, we'll have food.

We'll have some ways to try to follow them up. Most of who came, they're connected relationally.

You really don't get people to come by just passing a flyer out on campus. It's kind of like coming to church. People aren't gonna come to church just because they see an advertisement on the internet.

They're gonna come likely because a member of your church invited them, right? The same thing on campus.

And so we do have some that are more focused towards Christians that are training oriented and teaching. But everything we do is connected back to, hey, come on Sunday morning with us.

Sunday morning, 10 .30 a .m., that's our worship service. 9 .15 a .m. is our equipping hour. It's the cool name for Sunday school.

So yeah, so come be a part of this. And then membership and baptism. So a lot of people ask like, how do you have so many college students getting baptized?

We had two last Sunday. We've got two this Sunday and two more in two weeks.

Well, I think if you practice biblical church membership and you're doing campus ministry, hopefully those two things are intersecting.

Students are coming to the Lord. Maybe some of them already are Christians, but they've not yet been baptized and joined a local church.

So we're kind of moving them towards this in the local church, so. A year -long residency doesn't seem,

I mean, you were, how long did you stay at each individual college campus? How many campuses did you work at?

Well, so I was in North Carolina for 10 years. Okay. And then I was in D .C. for five years. Okay, so I mean, you had a good amount of time on these college campuses.

Is it planned to like re -up if it goes well after a year? Well, it's the whole idea, Sean. Start small and think big.

Ooh -wee, okay. So of course our desire was longer than one year. Yeah. It's like, hey, give us a year.

He was looking at doing some other things. He graduated with an engineering degree. He was interested in foreign missions. Hey, come give a year to this.

Let's see how it goes. Now he's already re -upped for another year. Nice. And that's the hope. You get in, meaningful ministry happens.

The Lord blesses that. That's our desire. But a lot of times it's easier starting off with a one -year commitment or a two -year commitment.

And then that way, if it doesn't go well, maybe it's not a great fit for that individual. Well, then there's just an off ramp and you kind of help serve in that way.

So it's our desire that he's there for a while and we're wanting to hire more campus ministry residents.

When you go back onto the campus, does it feel like you're putting on an old pair of shoes? It just feels right.

It just fits. Yeah, I love being there. So, and I'm a lot older now and you just kind of own it.

Did it ever hit you one day that you were no longer young and cool? It did.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I still like to think of myself as young and cool. My high school kids,

I've got three kids in high school, one in fifth grade. They remind me often I'm not that cool, so. I remember when

I first got saved, I have like a really dramatic testimony and I went on like the youth group circuit.

All the youth pastors wanted me to come and scare all their kids into behaving, you know?

And I mean, I was like a God to these people, right? I mean, I was just in which, yeah, carnal pride, a lot of pride.

I was 18, you know, it wasn't good for all these people to be putting me up on stage. But I remember I came back and I spoke at a youth group when

I was like 25 and the kids were utterly disinterested in me. And then

I went back and I spoke to a bunch of high school kids when I was 35 and they were like, who is this old man?

And I was like, oh man, I'm not young and cool anymore, you know? Anyways, I'm sure

Dave's like, yeah, we know. We know, we've been known. Well, I think they value, you just have to come to be yourself.

I value connecting with someone from a different generation and different age. Yeah, different strengths and different weaknesses.

Yeah, and now my oldest daughter is 18. She graduates high school this year and is planning to go off to college next fall.

So like I'm their parent's age now. Yeah. And I think you just kind of own it. When they come to our church and they kind of realize

I'm one of the pastors there, I think to see me on campus, they appreciate that often. Even ones that are not believers, they appreciate the interaction.

You know, most unbelievers, they've never had anyone have a conversation with them about Christianity.

They've heard some things about Christianity, but to come to like one of our weekly meetings to hear a message that is proclaiming the gospel and working through a question they may have, like are all religions basically the same?

They've not heard these questions really dealt with. And then to have the opportunity to talk more about it.

I've just found far more students, they're intrigued than they are offended initially.

If a pastor or someone in a local church is listening to this going, yeah, that's good.

We need to do this. What would you recommend? What should they do? What's the first step? Yeah, I think the first step,

I think they need to think big, but start small. So the question is just like I was talking with a pastor last week when

I was out of town and he was telling me, man, we used to meet right across the street from a university in a major city.

And now we've moved 20 minutes away and we don't know what to do. And I just told him what we did with a campus ministry resident.

And I asked him, is there anyone in your church you feel like could do this? Maybe a recent graduate, maybe a college senior who's getting ready to graduate.

And he thought for 30 seconds and he said, yeah, there actually is somebody. I said, well, you all should just look at hiring them for a one -year residency.

We'd be happy to talk with you more about what's going on. You could reach out to a ministry like Campus Outreach, talk with them.

There's definitely churches out there that are doing campus ministry well. So Capitol Baptist Church, they've got something great that's going on.

Bethlehem Baptist up in Minneapolis doing some great things. So talk to a church that seems to have some fruit from it.

But if you wanna see something that's ongoing, you're gonna have to focus some sort of staff time there.

Because as a pastor, if I'm just giving one afternoon there every two weeks, you're just not gonna expect to see a whole lot.

So that's where I think para -church ministry tends to rule the land there because they've got all the resources.

And so why we've got a ministry resident who raises support is we're funding pastors, we're paying for a building, or we're sending about 10 % of our budget to foreign missions, we're supporting church planting.

So we are giving money to campus ministry, but in order to fund someone, it's useful to kind of have that model where they're raising support as well.

So I would encourage them to look at who could give some full -time or very heavy part -time attention, like 30 hours a week to it.

What kind of person should a local church be looking for? Off the charts extrovert?

Can they be introverted? I mean, this guy that you're talking about from your church, he went to school for engineering, so he probably has no personality.

I mean, what are we looking for here? He's kind of a go -getter. He's kind of the best of what you'd want to find.

He's a go -getter. Because he's an engineer, maybe he's not aware if someone's not receiving him well, so he's still, he's just unfazed.

There's not like a fear of man aspect there for him where he's afraid of rejection or whatnot. So he is wonderful.

So I think - What are you looking for in someone? I think you need to find an evangelist. I think you need to find someone who is competent in evangelism, somebody who's willing to go out on the campus and meet people.

So I wouldn't say you have to be this kind of bleeding extrovert, but you've got to be somebody that's willing to go out there and work through people.

So for us, low -hanging fruit is a freshman that is a Christian. So we often meet freshmen who are

Christian and they need a church by the campus. Well, you go visit them. They sign you into their dorm.

You hang out with them. You eat pizza with them, play video games with them, start meeting the other people on their floor. And most of who you're going to meet are unbelievers.

That's just going to be statistically the way it is. And so that kind of gives you opportunities with that Christian freshman student to begin sharing your faith, pray with them for their dorm floor, share the gospel with them.

And in that way, you're discipling them. So that's most of what's going on. So it needs to be somebody who, they're going to be committed to evangelism, but they're also going to be about discipling because you don't just show up as a 25, 26 -year -old campus and just dive right in.

I think you've got to make those relationship connections and we always, wherever we were, if it was in DC, Charlotte, we're always looking for that low -hanging fruit.

When we came to DC, there was a dorm on the corner of 19th and F Street that had 1 ,200 freshmen in it.

And when we learned that, I told our staff team, hey, this is our evangelistic focus right here, but we got to figure out how we get in there because you can't get in there unless you're a resident.

And so we started praying just for the Lord to introduce us to five students, that we meet five students living there.

And within about a week, we had met five students. You'd probably know many of them because they ended up joining Capitol Baptist Church.

Many of them are still there. But how did you meet them? You're just standing outside? Well, some of it is standing outside, but some of it was things we were doing, like the back -to -school fairs and whatnot, because we were an organization, we'd meet them there.

We would do like a Thursday night, we'd do a little kind of kickoff party right outside the dorm where we had

Rita's Italian Ice, volleyball nets set up. So kind of food, some sort of recreation.

18 -year -olds are looking for something to do when they first go off to school. They don't know anybody. And so, hey, you get invited to something,

I'm going to show up. And if they were Christians and you're a campus ministry, they want to come likely and learn about who you are.

So that gave us a chance to meet them, get in the dorms and hang out with them. And then you're meeting pretty much everybody on their hall.

And that's how our campus ministry staff worked. But we're dealing with this right now. We've got one ministry resident, a guy, we'd like to hire a young lady to come on.

And so we've been trying to think through. So I don't think it just has to be someone who's an extrovert. We've got a number of counseling students at our church who are enrolled at a local seminary.

And so we've begun asking the question like, hey, how might this work? Because obviously there's a lot of discipling that needs to take place where in women's ministry on a college campus, that counseling training would be really useful.

So I think you're really just wanting someone who would have the commitment and give their available time to that.

On the mission field in Peru, half is too much.

I probably shouldn't try to quantify it. Some of my work was spent, some of my time was spent trying to combat work that other missionaries were doing that was dangerous and unhealthy.

Go into the county jail here to do ministry. There are a couple of other people who come into the county jail, unhelpful.

Teaching and doing all kinds of really bad things and trying to think about how to be wise and counteracting what they're teaching while also just saying laser focus on the gospel.

I'm assuming that's also the case on college campuses. You're there, you're trying to minister, you're trying to give them a particular healthy understanding of the gospel and how it applies to all of life.

And I'm sure you're coming into contact with other para -church or local churches, ministries that are doing things that are unhelpful.

Yes, no? Yeah, we are. I mean, one of the newest trends I think is planting churches on campus.

Yeah. So - Doing baptisms in the dorm room. Yes. Lord's supper with Jaeger bombs and stale pizza.

Your elders are 20 years old and they sleep until 11 o 'clock, play Xbox. Yeah. But yeah,

I mean, I understand why that's a movement of people thinking, well, hey, the church needs to own minister on campus.

And so there's a big trend of planting churches on campus. I mean, if you think about what you're gonna end up doing if you plan church on campus, you're gonna have a very homogenous church, which may be their intent, right?

Just to have a church made up only of 18 to 22 year olds.

That sounds like the worst idea. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a more effective evangelism plan, not a church planting plan.

Like I would just think there's plenty of places you could plant a church near a campus and reach all kinds of people.

Cause that's what I understand local churches to be reaching all kinds of people, all ages of people, men, women, young, old, ministering to all generations, children up to senior citizens.

So I just prefer the route of let's plant churches and let's think about how to get on campus for evangelism.

So I'm not real excited about the church planting ministries on a college campus.

And I don't know how you sustain a movement like that. It's a built -in turnover rate of their leaving after four years.

Yeah, you're starting to see a pretty large increase in affinity -based ministries like this.

I met some guys in California, good brothers, but they started like a military church, and it's just, they have a base there.

They're like, we'll plant a church just for these guys. And I'm like, but they need people who aren't in the military. It sounds more like para -church ministry, right?

That's more of a niche, a target focus, whereas church ministry

I think is necessarily broad and making disciples of all kinds of people.

I can't even imagine trying to pastor a church of nothing but 18 to 22 -year -olds. I mean, our church here, a revitalization effort in the early days grew with a lot of younger people.

Not like we're massive or anything, but a lot of the people that came were younger and the elders were just praying, Lord, send us some old people, send us 18 to 22.

I'm thinking nobody's ever gonna show up on time. Everyone's watching porn, right? They're all immersed in this therapeutic culture of college campus.

They're probably all pretty sheltered. None of them are giving, I mean -

Who's funding that, yeah. Yeah, who's, yeah, so it sounds really bad, which if you're a college student and you're watching this,

I'm not trying to beat up on you. If it was a church of nothing but geriatrics, it would just be a whole bunch of weaknesses in the other direction.

What makes the body of Christ so significant is we have all these different members that are not alike that come together and we use our various gifts to carry out the work of the gospel.

Well, how would you do Titus 2 ministry? Yeah. Older women to younger women. Amen. Older men to younger men if the age span is like three or four years apart.

Carl Truman says, yeah, elder doesn't necessarily have to be someone who's like 40 and above, but you should probably be above 30.

If you haven't lived a little bit of life, if you haven't gotten off the college campus, you're probably not in a position to teach people how to follow

Jesus faithfully in every area of their life because your life has been so limited. There are exceptions to that,

I'm sure, but there can't be many. Well, see, I think that gets to my desire for what I want to see churches do with campuses because over here, you've got campuses crawling with thousands and thousands of these kids, 18 to 22, and then you've got churches that largely have that generation absent.

Oh, good point. And think about what's missing in local churches to have the zeal.

And sometimes I think college students, they'll get a bad rap, they're idealistic, they're emotional.

Well, if you're 19 and you're not idealistic, something's wrong with you. You get cynical when you're my age, like 45.

So there's something about that that's refreshing. They're passionate, they're zealous. Think about all that the

Lord has done for world missions that started on college campuses. Gemma Elizabeth Elliott and all those folks from Wheaton.

I'm Southern Baptist, Lottie Moon. Lottie Moon's testimony is that she went to a campus revival meeting, in her words, to scoff and went back to her room that night and prayed all night.

Tim Keller, I mean, the most formative years of his life on college campus, Matt Schmucker got saved from a street preacher on a college campus.

And now he's doing some stuff for the sake of the gospel all over the world that we can't really talk about, but all from a campus ministry.

Yes, yeah. So I think you've got this amazing opportunity that largely is disconnected from the ministry of many local churches.

So you may have some wonderful 18 year olds in your church, but most of them, at least in my experience, they move away to go to college.

So they're going away somewhere and we're wanting to train our young people. Hey, get plugged into a local church wherever you go.

And now I'm getting to experience that on the side of being a parent of one who's getting ready to send our oldest off and what that looks like to visit a campus and ask the question, how would you do spiritually here?

Not just how would you do academically? Like how awesome is this campus with its facilities and sports teams?

But like, how would you do spiritually here? And one of the things that has been so encouraging to me just in a network of pastors we have is every campus we've visited, there's been a pastor there leading a church that either

I know personally or he's a friend of a friend everywhere we went. And that's how we're thinking about college for our daughter.

Hey, how would you do spiritually here? I was at a campus ministry here in Alabama recently where one of the titles for someone working on the campus with the students was campus pastor.

That did not refer to this person being a pastor of a church campus, like a multi -site church.

It referred to he is the pastor for all these people on this campus. Thoughts?

I think it's a bad idea. I think it's the same thing that we're facing in the Southern Baptist Convention that I'm a part of is just the question of what is a pastor?

And, you know, it's interesting to me. Like a lot of churches don't know what a pastor is. It's just become a cultural term.

So not connecting it to what we see in 1 Timothy 3, 1 through 7, that a pastor is an elder overseer.

So we got pastor, elder, overseer, bishop as interchangeable terms. So, you know, we have a campus ministry resident.

Let's say he went on to be more long term. I think we'd give him the title campus ministry director.

Just like we don't have a youth pastor in my church. We have a student ministry director. We don't have a children's pastor.

We have a children's ministry associate. And if that person was a pastor. Then you could call him pastor. You could call him pastor.

But can you be a pastor outside of the local church? No, because I think pastor is describing your relationship and your responsibility to a particular congregation.

So Hebrews chapter 13, that you're giving an account for a specific group of people.

And it's not just like a campus ministry. This is a church, right? So this is a group of people intending to be a church where the word is preached.

Covenant together. The ordinances are duly administered, right? So they're intending to be a church. Whereas campus ministries, for the most part, are not intending to be churches.

They're not calling themselves churches. They're not serving the Lord's Supper, baptizing, administering discipline when they need to.

They don't tend to have elders, deacons, those kinds of things. They're campus ministries. They're doing good work on campus, but it needs to be enfolded into a local church.

And I don't think the term campus pastor is helpful. Now that you have a church that's, you're pastoring a church that's connected to this university campus, you're getting a steady stream of students coming.

You're changing your church so that it's more amenable and attractive to college students.

Tell me about it. Go. Wow. Yeah. You know, it's funny as someone said to me recently, like our church is trending younger lately.

And I said, yeah, I can't think of anything we've really done to do that besides give attention to evangelism on campus.

So we need to change our carpet. It's 25 years old. It's purple. Yeah. We're getting to that.

There's just a lot of dominoes that have to fall. I actually like it. At our church before, maybe the Lord burned our church to get rid of the blue carpet.

That is the reason. But I loved it. Whenever some young, cool kid would come in and stick around,

I'd be like, he's sticking around despite the carpet. We're not appealing to the flesh.

Whatever keeps you here, it's not going to be the aesthetic of the building. That's for sure. That's right. That's right. What are we winning them with?

I mean, we're in a city with a lot of churches in Charlotte, North Carolina. And we're not the type of church you would think of, hey, this is going to attract the young people.

So when I talk with people often in the community, tell them the story of our church, Oakhurst Baptist Church, and tell them where we started and tell them how fast we've grown.

They've asked the question, what have you done to see so much growth? Like, have you reconfigured the church building?

Have you kind of done what this church has done with turning the lights down and having smoke machines and concert? And I say, no, we don't do anything like that.

We have an old building built in 1953. It's beautiful, but it's old. And there's a missing tile in the ceiling right now we just can't get repaired because you can't even find a lift that can fit in between our pews without removing all the pews.

So - That's the only thing I would be able to think about every Sunday morning. I would just be looking at that tile. Yeah, believe me.

It's like nails on the chalkboard for me. So - I'm guessing you preach long sermons from the word.

Longer than most. I don't know if I preach as long as you. I preach 45 to 50 minutes. Well, yours is probably tighter than mine.

I just ramble on until I see the eyes of our congregants sort of glaze over. And then I'm like, all right,

I'll call it. You pray longer than usual prayers, I'm sure. Prayers of confession, prayers of lament, prayers of praise, pastoral prayers.

That's right. Long scripture readings or, you know, relative again, you know. So you're not, if somebody were to, if a church planning expert were to ask you to write a book on how you took your church from where it was to where it is today, they would probably be pretty shocked.

It would be the exact opposite of what some people probably learn you need to do to grow a church, especially in the direction of younger.

That's right. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. I mean, even our service length, I mean, it's longer than most churches in Charlotte.

You know, it's an hour and a half to an hour and 50, depending on if we have the Lord's Supper or baptism afterwards. So why are 18 -year -old, 19 -year -old, 20 -year -olds coming?

Why do we have, you know, young people who graduated college and moved to Charlotte to work for a bank?

Why are they joining our church? I think my mind was just changed years ago when I was in Washington, D .C.

And I realized, hey, what's actually attractive to people is the word of God on display, pointed at what he's done in Christ.

And these long sermons for people who are spiritually hungry, it's useful because you're just opening up like expositional sermons.

You're opening up the Bible. You're looking at a passage. Here's where the pastor's getting this from.

He's preaching this message. He's pointing things out, answering questions, speaking to what

God has done in Christ and how this passage is fulfilled, and then applying it to the lives of the people that are sitting there.

And then preaching it to me in a way where it's clear. You know, I typically use an outline, the main idea, outline.

They can write some things down. We put down sermon notes, pages in our bulletin, like what the church before me did.

And so I've just found that feeds the spiritually hungry. That's what keeps people coming back.

Not like this worship experience that's meant to basically entertain or make us seem more appealing.

Practical is good. Pragmatic is bad. Practical is we just have to deal with the reality of life in a fallen world.

And there are just certain things you have to do. You have to pay the bills. You have to have insurance on the building, et cetera. Pragmatic is starting with the end in mind and then trying to reverse engineer ourselves into the results that we want.

It sounds like when you guys go onto college campus, you do some very practical things.

How do you walk that fine line without getting over into pragmatism, appealing to the flesh?

You probably have said this a thousand times. What you win them with is what you win them to. How do you make sure that you don't win them to something that is other than just loving the word, loving

Christ, loving the church? Yeah, it's a good distinction. Leadership requires being practical.

So there's plenty of things like practices that we have. So for instance, like the first six weeks on college campus for freshmen are some of the most important times for ministry.

Like practically, that's useful to know. First six weeks, 18 -year -olds come off to school. They don't know anyone.

They're looking to meet people. Seniors already have their friends. They're not as open to talking to new people.

Whereas like, it's really easy to go and meet this group of people who are looking to meet people. Useful, practical insight into campus ministry, right?

That's, I think, proper contextualizing and understanding a culture of people. Like culture just means what's normal for a particular group of people.

So it's normal to go meet people on a college campus first six weeks. Yeah, pragmatism is just asking the question, how can we manufacture desired outcome?

And that's where you have to be careful in your methods. And I think the way to maintain integrity in Christian ministry in any realm, but particularly on college campus, is that the greatest method is the message.

So it's sharing the gospel. So you'll have a lot of debates on relational evangelism.

Like, you know, do you have to become like best friends with someone and ride tandem bikes with them and just spend like months before -

You don't have to, you get to ride tandem bikes. I've just found this, you know, typically it's useful to go ahead and plant the flag early, like share the gospel early.

And you follow up in the relationship. So continue to hang out with them, continue to bring up these follow -up conversations.

And because, you know, you're not looking just to go and hang out with college students. You're trying to share the gospel with them.

And you're trying to provide opportunities to further minister to them. So yeah, it can be valuable to go and play basketball at the rec.

And then after basketball to say, hey, like we're going to grab a bite to eat. You wanna come with us and try to start a gospel conversation while you're eating.

That's a right use of investment of time that has a spiritual aim and focus.

So yeah, I think the other thing is just sometimes maybe people try to figure out how to avoid rejection.

And man - You just can't, you just gotta be comfortable with knowing you're gonna offend people.

Well, and you just think about, think about where debates on sexual ethics have taken us.

Before I left DC, the apologetics conversations really changed.

When I first got there 2010, really 2013, 2014, it was all your typical stuff.

Well, how do you know Jesus is the only way? How can the Bible be trusted? What about science? Are you saying my grandmother, who was a really good person, who wasn't

Christian, who died, she's not in heaven right now. All that kind of typical apologetic stuff.

And then things really changed to, well, what do you all think about the LGBTQ community?

Are you not affirming of them? And these weren't things we were bringing up and introducing into the conversation.

They were questions being asked of us. So it's not like we're starting conversations with students, we meet them about sexual ethics and our position on those as Christians, right?

They're asking us those questions and they're real barriers to them even being interested like in coming to a

Bible study, coming to a campus ministry meeting, accepting an invitation to church. I mean, I will occasionally get an email from guests at our church, not just students, just guests who they've moved in the neighborhood.

We're pretty close into the downtown area. They see a church here, they come, they like it.

And I've received an email like, hey, I looked at your statement of faith and in your statement of faith, it says, it defines marriage as only being between one man and one woman.

Are you not affirming of the LGBTQ community? And what I say is, well, anyone is welcome to come to our

Sunday morning worship service and everyone should be expected to be greeted warmly, be treated with kindness and with respect.

But yes, we understand this is what the Bible very clearly teaches, right?

We're Christians. And so for some, that's not gonna be enough. The idea that we would love the sinner and hate the sin, that's not acceptable.

If you think that's gonna bring acceptance in society, well, they'll see our love that we love them. Yeah, we're in a messy, difficult situation.

So I think campus ministries face that challenge head on. And I think you asked this earlier, like what is this looking like for campus ministries?

I think the ones that will survive will be the ones that have theological roots, particularly anchored in local churches.

I think Colin Hansen once said, people used to ask, is

Christianity true? Now they ask, is Christianity good, right? Their objections are moral.

They stand in judgment over the church and judgment over the Bible and judgment over Jesus. And that's just totally changes the tone and the nature of these conversations.

Russell Berger, one of our assistant pastors, we would go out and do some evangelism at our third

Friday thing. And he would put a question on the board, like a little chalkboard, is Jesus the only way to God?

And we would try to grab people and bring them over. And I think it took us about five minutes one night before we had somebody basically spit at us and cuss at us and render a moral judgment about the gospel.

So yeah, when you think about where things are now, does that change the way that you train people and equip people?

I mean, some of these apologetic conversations, yeah, what does that look like?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think there's probably more we could do specifically on these issues.

I think it's most important though, just to train people generally on what the gospel is.

Anyone who joins our church is signing a statement of faith. And in that statement of faith, our statement of faith is loosely based on the 1853

New Hampshire. You know, we've added to it a statement on marriage. It also has a statement in there on abortion and that clearly we understand that life in the image of God begins at conception in the womb.

And therefore we are for protecting all human life. So we would stand against abortion. That's in our statement of faith because these are issues that when these statements were in 1853, they weren't issues back then, right?

And the Bible is sufficient to address all these issues. So it wasn't like things were unaddressed. It's just these specific issues need to be spoken to.

And we added that to our statement of faith. So we're getting that. And I think at some level, the idea of we're here to preach the message and you're either going to reject it or you're going to receive it.

I think we have to prepare our people for both of those. If you're not facing rejection, well, then you have a ministry that has more acceptance than Jesus and the apostles, right?

It might be that you're not preaching the true gospel message. And if you're not seeing anybody receive

Christ, we'd have to ask the question too. I think Tim Keller is the one who said like, we might have to ask the question if we're brutes, if all we get is rejection.

And the other way, are we being cowards if all we're facing is just the applause of others?

So I think you have to prepare your people for both responses. So they're not surprised when they face rejection.

At the same time, they're anticipating, hey, if we preach the gospel, what normally happens is people come to faith.

It may not happen right away. It may not happen in droves, but I think we need to remember that. What normally happens when you preach the gospel, when you pray for the souls of men and women, what

God normally does is people get saved. Yeah, that's right. You can't control the fruit, but if there's no fruit, something's going on here.

Okay, the vast majority of training and preparation that a person should receive to do ministry on a college campus should be in the local church, good, basic, gospel, biblical foundations, right?

What is justification, all that stuff. But then like, let's say you're gonna send a missionary into a

Muslim context. You're gonna give them some additional training. You're gonna help them understand the Quran and Muslim culture and the way it differs from this country to that country.

Or let's say you're sending a missionary to Utah. You're gonna train them how to think about Mormon theology and so on and so forth.

What kind of specialized training do you think someone might need if they're gonna go into campus ministry?

Yeah, you know, Sean, I've never been huge on just so much of the cultural contextualization because I feel like you can, you know,

I remember when like post -modernity was the big thing and we would take post -modern classes when

I was on a campus ministry staff team. And the reality is a lot of times we're like five or 10 years behind on that stuff anyways.

So by the time we're learning it, the culture's already changed. So I think there are some useful things in that, but I just advocate more for, hey, we're asking our campus ministry staff to do a few basic things.

Share the gospel with someone, equip them how to follow up, equip them how to lead investigative

Bible study, equip them how to use an event, like where evangelism is not an event, but we can have some events that are useful in evangelism and in just following people up.

So when I moved to Washington, DC, you know, people are really candid there. I remember when

I moved coming from North Carolina, there were members of our church there who looked at me and they just said, you realize you're not in the

South anymore? And I just said, yeah, you know, we're aware of that. We're not in the South. They said that in North Carolina?

They said in DC when I moved from North Carolina. But it is South of the Mason -Dixon line, isn't it? Well, you know, if you're from the

South, that's the North. If you're from the North, you feel like it's the South. Okay, all right, all right. Yeah. Anyways, go on. I interrupted for no reason.

Well, I've heard it said it's the perfect mix of Northern hospitality and Southern efficiency in Washington, DC.

Okay. So anyways. That's actually pretty funny. I think RFK originally said that.

So anyways, it's kind of true. It's kind of true though. Yeah, I mean, and the joke is Southern efficiency, right?

That's right, and Northern hospitality. Yeah, because there isn't any. Okay, I'm tracking. Yeah, so their point to us was, do you really understand this place?

And the reality was, man, like I would not have gotten into those schools. Like these 18 year olds are way smarter than me.

Yeah. Intellectually, I'm not their equal in many sense. Like there were a lot of brilliant people there, right?

So, I mean, there were presidents who came out of Georgetown. So when we're thinking about this, the question was that you realize you're not in the

South anymore. And how are you gonna deal with this? How are you gonna deal with this? And all these different questions of the culture. You know, smart students, students here from New England, post -Christian students.

And I just said, you know what? We're gonna learn as we go to do a better job in these areas.

I think we'll learn. However, here's what we know. We know how to share the gospel. We know how to follow people up once we've shared the gospel.

And we know how to lead evangelistic Bible studies. We know how to use some of these events to be able to like bring the pastor on campus for an ask me anything night and invite students to be a part.

And then how to properly follow it up and get them to come to church. Those are the most important things to know.

And I think there's lots of the other cultural questions that get answered, but I don't know. A lot of those conversations

I would get in even with other campus ministries, I felt like sometimes the conversations were so much on the culture that we were losing sight of the very tip of the spear of what we're called to do is just proclaim the gospel clearly and faithfully.

Amen, brother. That's so good. Someone gets saved at a campus ministry intervarsity.

They're having a pool party. Somebody gets saved. Do we baptize them?

Right there in the pool. Right there in the pool. They profess faith. I mean, you know, the Ethiopian eunuch.

Just welcome, baby. Yeah, that dude, that eunuch, he always gets pulled out the regular cases. Someone's like, we're gonna baptize you on a camping trip.

Just us and our friends. Well, the eunuch in Ethiopia, he always gets pulled out. That's right.

So no, I think the Ethiopian eunuch is an irregular situation.

Descriptive of what was happening in that particular time and the age of the church. Going back to Ethiopia where there likely was no church.

I mean, even how his path was crossed with Philip was just, yeah. If there's a miraculous occurrence, like truly miraculous occurrence in your evangelism encounter, maybe, but -

That's right. Descriptive, not normative. So normally, again, like the keys of the kingdom,

Matthew 16, we would understand those are placed and deposited in the local church.

We see that, Matthew 18, the authority be given to the church. And then Matthew 28, the very call.

What does that have to do with baptism? Matthew 28, 18 to 20, to go make disciples of all nations baptized.

Keys, baptism, how are they connected? So the binding and the loosing, the authority of the church.

Okay. That authority from Matthew 16, we see it given in Matthew 18 to the local church.

Okay. That's a matter of a personal private dispute. And when someone's not repentant, take two or three more with you if they don't respond to you initially.

Okay. And if they still don't respond, the authority there of the church, not the elders, but the church. And then as the

Gospel of Matthew closes in 28, we see the exercising of that church authority.

It's to go and make disciples in the name of Jesus Christ to preach the gospel, to baptize, to teach them to obey all that I've commanded.

So baptism is something that is part of the authoritative teaching and ministry of the church.

Yeah, it can't be separated from the gospel proclamation and disciple -making role of the local church.

Okay. So what that means is that Oakhurst Baptist Church would not receive someone who is baptized in a backyard swimming pool.

Well, I mean, here's how we would parse that out as elders. So I think you have to ask the question, what's invalid?

So certainly an infant sprinkling is not a baptism. There was no faith there. That's not what Jesus commanded.

So that's not a valid baptism. If you were maybe at a church and you were an adult and that church believed that that baptism saved you,

I wouldn't understand that was a valid baptism because baptism does not save you. Jesus saves you by his grace through faith in him.

So if somebody, let's say we've treated that as an irregular baptism. So you're going true, false, regular, irregular.

Yeah. If it's a true baptism, if there's the true gospel and a true believer - In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

That's right. If it's a false baptism, if the person's either not a believer or they're being baptized under a false gospel ministry.

That's right. But there could be a regular or an irregular baptism would be outside of the local church, but the person who baptized you was a

Christian under a Christian gospel. You were a Christian. It's just weird. It shouldn't have happened outside of the church. That's right.

I don't think I can say with certainty that's not valid. That actually wasn't a baptism, but you shouldn't baptize that way.

I'll say that. Don't do it again. Okay. The Lord's Supper. Some people are in a

Bible study, the Spirit moving them. They're blown away. Maybe they're even studying the

Lord's Supper and they're like, what's keeping us from celebrating it right now? Grab the Pepsi, the

Wild Cherry Pepsi, right? And the Pop -Tart and let's have the Lord's Supper.

You say, yes, let's do it. That sounds like an awesome snack, but that's definitely not the

Lord's Supper and communion. So again - What if they had actual wine and bread? Then they still should not do that.

Because again, the idea that you're taking communion apart from the community of believers, right?

And that's - Did you just think of that? No, I doubt it was mine originally, but just connecting those two things together.

Like you do in 1 Corinthians 5, when someone is barred from the table, removed from the local church because of unrepentant sin, no longer affirmed as one following Jesus, walking in repentance before the

Lord, they're removed from the Lord's table. And that's an act of the whole church in 1 Corinthians chapter 5.

So then receiving people at the table, should be a participatory act of the whole church, not your small group.

So I can understand how people may think this is a spiritual thing, that this would be meaningful to do, but that's to take place.

People will do it at weddings, which I don't think, again, that's not a church service of the community. So normally that shouldn't happen.

So if baptism is how you come into the church family and the Lord's Supper is the family meal, the person who's overseeing those two things needs to be the church.

The organization, the entity, the person, whatever, it needs to be the church. It doesn't need to be the head of a family.

It doesn't need to be a parachurch ministry. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Did you ever baptize anybody in a swimming pool?

Never. Yeah. So you were, what was your, did you ever have any like theological wonkiness that you had to work out or were you pretty?

Well, I think it was the benefit of being involved in church -based campus ministry. So like the, you know, when

Rob Bell first came out, I didn't know what didn't feel right about him, but something didn't feel right.

And Velvet Elvis and all these students were like eating up that book, Velvet Elvis, and it just didn't feel right.

And then Love Wins comes out and he drops his video and it's like, oh, he doesn't believe hell is real.

He doesn't believe in judgment. So if he doesn't believe in judgment, what is Jesus saving him?

He doesn't believe in salvation. So he's a universalist, Unitarian effectively. So yeah,

I think because like those wins, those theological wins, they'll hit a college ministry on campus differently than they hit most churches.

So, you know, you're a pastor. I'm sure there's things sometimes that you'll have to talk to your members about if they've heard something online or read something on Twitter, there's some new voice or book, and you're the one giving them perspective.

You've got elders here. You've got a statement of faith. You've got a track record, right?

And I think that that's useful in enduring some of those theological tests. But those things can just take over campus ministries.

They can sound appealing and yeah. Yeah. You worked on primarily, I'm guessing, like state campuses, state -run schools.

In DC, they were all private. And then in North Carolina, it was a mix. I was on a large state campus while I was also on a smaller private school.

Did you work with any schools that had chapel services? Yes. Yes, I did.

Any thoughts about that? Those are always a little weird to me. Well, the campuses I was on, the chaplains would have been liberal

Protestants. So the chapel services didn't attract anybody, really.

They were very low attendance. So if anything, it created a friction where the campus ministries, we'd have like three, four, five times the amount of students than the paid liberal

Protestant chaplain would have in their chapel service. So they were very aware, hey, these conservative evangelicals have more influence amongst the students than they do.

And that was difficult in North Carolina because I think you'd get some chaplains, if they were theologically liberal, they would kind of view it as their mission to try to get rid of the

Bible belt mentality amongst students. When we moved to DC, conservative evangelicals are such a small blip on the radar.

We were insignificant and no one really cared. No one viewed us as a threat to what they were doing. Like the idea that we believe

Jesus is the only way to God, only way to have your sins forgiven. They didn't think we needed to be stopped because of that because we were such a small, insignificant number.

So I haven't been on a campus where the chapel services were conservative evangelical and maybe were seen as a substitute for churches.

Do you have any really cool stories from your time? Like, you know, everyone kind of has their bag of war stories.

Like, oh man, when I was there, this happened. It was crazy. Do you have any good stories for us? I mean,

I can think of a handful. One, I just, I had some great reminders last week, just in God's providence. I was in two different cities and connected with guys that I discipled.

One, it was like the first guy I discipled when I was an undergraduate. He was from Brooklyn, New York.

His dad was Jewish. His mom's Puerto Rican. So he said, I'm from Brooklyn. I'm a Puerto Rican Jew.

That's how he described himself. And the first night he heard the gospel, he believed it.

And I just haven't come across many. I mean, it's not like he, yeah, I grew up and I heard pieces here and there.

My grandmother had never heard the gospel and a girl brought him.

He came because he was interested in this girl. Obviously. And I don't even know if this girl was a Christian, but maybe she got invited to the meeting because she never got involved in ministry.

And he heard the gospel the first time and he believed it, put his faith in Jesus.

And I discipled him and he, it was a joy to disciple him. That was the first guy I ever discipled. I was,

I think a junior. He was a freshman. And here we are 24 years later.

He's still walking with the Lord. He's in full -time Christian ministry. And yeah,

I met with him last week and he's doing well and still walking and growing. So that was encouraging.

One of my first semesters on campus, actually my first semester at a school in North Carolina was the fall of 2001.

So 9 -11, came just a few weeks into school. So that was back before we had high -speed internet, all that stuff.

So watching that happen on a campus and seeing a campus of 20 ,000 students just come to a screeching halt.

And yeah, I walked through the door and every TV was on CNN because that was the way you got information back then. Again, they didn't have high -speed internet or wireless internet or any of that stuff.

And yeah, it was a special opportunity to minister. There were a lot of people who were open to hearing the gospel in that point.

It was interesting to see, this was a state university, to see how they responded. They held a kind of like a candlelight vigil and all these different interfaith, this interfaith council, all these different groups got up and really no substance to their message, right?

No gospel. Just vague hope talk. Yes, and I remember this song that this one group led the crowd in singing and the chorus was, we are the ones we are waiting for.

And I just remember thinking, how empty. And I'm looking around, I'm like, really, we're the ones we're waiting for?

There's no hope to be found looking around at one another. And just how overwhelming that event was.

It's hard to describe, even to my kids, what it felt like for America to be under attack that day.

And everything that you thought, I mean, they just experienced a little taste of COVID, right? Everything you thought was secure and stable could just get rocked in a moment.

So also in that moment thinking, man, we have got the opportunity to be light in darkness and point to true hope found in Christ.

He's the one we're waiting for, not us, one another. So man, that was just a privilege to be ministering.

I even remember, Sean, it was such a tough time. I was single then and I looked at my boss in campus ministry and I said, man, should

I join the military? I'm not married, we're under attack. We just had 3 ,000 people get killed, murdered in Midtown Manhattan in the middle of the day.

And there was this real sense of, like our Pearl Harbor, defending our country.

And I wondered, should I go join the military and fight? I'm not married, I don't have kids, like we're gonna need to defeat the enemy here.

And it could have been a fine thing for me. I had some friends who did that. But I remember my area director that I was meeting with, he just said, well, you're fighting a spiritual battle.

You're doing good work. Like the Lord has placed you here for this time. And I think it was a good word and it kind of focused my efforts there.

Do you have any horror stories? Any stories for those who might feel discouraged or they've done something stupid or they maybe even feel a little rebuked by some of the things that we've talked about here.

Like, oh man, we tried this and that was so stupid. It didn't work. Or in times of discouragement.

Well, I mean, I'll say this. Everyone I know in campus ministry has had this evangelistic

Bible study where no one showed. It's happened to me several times.

You know, you get the last minute text. Sorry, can't make it, can't be there. And when you're out doing that type of work where you're ministering to people who, yeah, they don't know the

Lord, you're giving your effort, you're into this. And there just seems to be a lack of interest.

There can always be these moments like, am I wasting my time? Like, really,

I think I'd realize in those moments that's selfish. I'm asking the question, like, is this worth it?

And there were some words, I don't know if you're familiar with the missionary, Helen Rosevere.

Helen Rosevere, Noel Piper has written a book about her and a wonderful missionary from Northern Ireland, went and served in the

Congo. I have heard of her. Yeah, okay. Oh man, I will tell you. So when I was a sophomore in college, she spoke at our campus ministry conference over New Year's.

My wife and I, you know, at that time, we weren't even dating, but we were both present for this conference. And Helen Rosevere got to speak.

And to my shame, as a 19 year old boy sitting there,

I saw an old senior citizen woman walking up and I thought, why is she speaking this conference?

And what she shared, her testimony of her missionary life blew me away.

And I'll never forget it. She was sharing, you know, she went off, she left a medical career to go serve in the

Congo, was there when civil war broke out because she was a foreigner. She was taken and thrown into prison because they just were suspicious of foreigners.

And in prison, she just suffered torture of an extreme nature. She was very detailed in what she shared with us about it.

And she said, in a dark night, sitting in that prison cell, she asked the question in her own mind, was this worth it?

I left all this behind. I'm sitting in prison. I'm being tortured. Is this worth it?

And she said that the Lord moved in her heart in that moment. And she felt rebuked that she was asking the wrong question.

The question isn't, is it worth it? But is he worthy? And the question, is he worthy? Is very easy to answer.

Of course he's worthy. Like, of course you're worthy, Lord. So yeah, so in those moments of discouragement, when

I'm at, is this worth it? Anyone paying attention? Obviously it doesn't, it pales in comparison to what she went through in prison.

You're in a situation where no one showed your evangelistic Bible study, but still that self -pity and that rejection, it can hurt and he's worthy.

Let's keep going. Let's just keep sharing God. We can't control the results, but we can control our efforts. You spent 15 years of your life being a full -time evangelist.

Now you're a pastor. You still get to do some evangelism, but things change. Has that transition been difficult for you?

It's been hard, Sean, it has. You know, I've had to buy into that.

Certainly there's a role for personal evangelism, but there's also the pulpit ministry is a big part of our evangelism, right?

So I want to be clear. I forget who said this years ago, like evaluate your sermons. Could someone have gotten saved from that sermon?

That doesn't mean that you're preaching an evangelistic message. It just means that the gospel's clear and that you've called those present who've not yet believed in Christ to repent and believe

Jesus. And you're doing that with urgency and with joy and being honest about the gospel.

So I believe that wholeheartedly. It is an honor, man, to preach every Sunday. I mean, I just think, man, my days are numbered.

I don't know how many more sermons I'll have. It's an honor and I want to preach the gospel. I think the personal evangelism part is harder.

A lot of my time is given to church members and we pray and take initiatives for evangelism.

I always try to keep that on the front burner. We just did two Sunday nights ago, we did a evangelistic prayer effort where we basically passed out cards to everyone on Sunday evening.

It had three lines and it was write down three names and their relationship to you. Yeah, and then hand them in.

And as elders, we're gonna pray for every single name that gets passed in. And here's what we want you to do over the next couple of weeks is just pray for them regularly, which means at least a couple of times a week.

Try to start a gospel conversation with them and invite them to church. We're going through the

Gospel Luke right now. Easter's coming up sometime. People who may not receive an invitation to a normal Sunday, maybe they'll come on Easter when they may not come another

Sunday. So we're doing that, trying to keep that in front of us. But I think it's been tough,

Sean, because I've just tried to think through how do I keep my connection with unbelievers?

And that shifted some of my personal life because my kids are at a Christian high school now. So a lot of the sports games

I'm at now are with, a lot of those parents are Christian. Some of them may not be, but a lot of them are. Whereas like when they were in Little League, that was a great way for me to connect, right?

So that's changed. So I've just tried to employ things like I can walk to a restaurant that's two blocks from our church.

I've tried to go in there regularly, build relationships with the wait staff, let them know who I am. I've invited them to church, started those conversations, doing the same with my neighbors.

So it doesn't move as quickly as with campus ministry, but I also am just trying to give more time.

Like I even thought preparing for this time with you, like, man, I should think more about how I can be physically on campus.

I'm doing a lot with our students when they come out of our building. And I will go over occasionally and speak, but I've got four kids.

We've got a lot going on at night, Monday through Thursday is a hustle in our house. But I've just thought more like this is a good evangelistic place.

I mean, every time I've gone to the campus, whether it's for a meeting or just to do, we've done like tabling on campus as a way to make contacts and do evangelism.

I've left so encouraged. So yeah. I struggle with it too, man. Evangelism has never been difficult for me.

I've not always been good at it, but the Lord seems to even bless my mistakes, you know, which are many.

And I love being a pastor. Wouldn't trade it any day of the week. I was a missionary full -time, didn't see any fruit, came back to be a pastor, saw immediate fruit.

The Lord pretty clearly distinguished where I should be. But even just on like a day -to -day basis, when

I'm not talking to someone, if I don't talk to someone who doesn't know Jesus, it's just, it feels like there's a part of me that begins to rust a little bit.

So I do the same thing. I try to go to the same places, get to know the wait staff, share the gospel with them. I do jujitsu.

That keeps me around unbelievers all the time. But even when you think about giftings, can

I make this interview about me? Thank you. Even when you think about giftings, like by God's grace, you know,

I'm able to counsel our church members on various and sundry things and private ministry of the word stuff.

Man, I don't think I'm as good at that as I am at evangelism. But the vast majority of my time is going to, you know, public ministry of the word preparation and delivery and private ministry of the word with counseling.

And so, yeah, it's weird. It's a strange thing to think through.

And the reason why I ask that is because I don't know many people who have made the same kind of transition.

Yeah, man, there's days I really miss that opportunity. And that's probably why I didn't want to be a pastor for the longest time as I -

So you resisted. You can't be a Southern Baptist pastor unless you resist the call. You gotta run for it.

I definitely don't phrase it like that. I think in terms of my desire, it grew over time.

And I think what I saw with Mark Dever, Capital Baptist Church, was, I mean, here's a guy who's serious about pastoral ministry.

Dude preaches for an hour, has a study where he's given serious time to studying the word of God. And he's one of the best evangelists

I know. And I think that helped me see, okay, like there's gotta be a commitment to the pulpit ministry.

There's gotta be a commitment to equipping members for evangelism, which

I think involves telling them why, showing them how, but I think also doing it with them.

So I think for me, I'm always trying to figure out how can I do this more with other members?

So we're getting ready to start another round of training our members in one -to -one Bible reading, David Helm.

Great. And - What's the name of that book? One -to -one Bible reading, David Helm. Yeah, the name is what you do.

The book is the method. So yeah, so that's gonna be encouraging our members.

And you can do that with disciple relationships to some of those one -to -one Bible readings, but there's some plans through the gospel of Mark to do that.

And that's just an easy way to equip members how to share the gospel, get a bunch of people going and then kind of go do it with them.

Yeah, yeah. I have like 15 questions and I'm just trying to sort through which ones

I wanna leave off. I don't wanna keep you here for hours on end. When did you realize, okay,

I probably need to make the transition? Is it when your knees started hurting when you got out of bed or like, when did you realize, okay,

I need to get away from the campus. I need to probably pursue something different. Yeah, when I moved to Washington DC, I was pretty sure

I eventually wanted to be a pastor. So that would have been 10 years in the campus ministry.

Okay, so how did you get there where you're thinking, okay, I think I wanna pursue that. Yeah, so I mean like we, I will say this as a college student,

I was not meaningfully connected to a local church. I was present on Sundays, but I saw,

I had a church membership and it was a membership back home. So I wasn't there.

I attended regularly every Sunday. Part of my testimony, even I don't know if I mentioned this earlier, my dad told me, if I'm gonna pay for you to go to school, you're still under my house and you'll need to attend church every

Sunday. And if you don't wanna do that, then you just need to pay for your own school. So I was like, okay, I mean, it sounds like a decent deal.

And so yeah, eventually I started going to church weekly like that.

And the Lord used that because at a time where simultaneously I was going through that Bible study and the

Sermon on the Mount, I'm going to church and I would go by myself sometimes and sit up in the balcony at this Baptist church near campus.

And I was for the first time in a long time paying attention to sermons, listening, leaving affected by what

I just heard, leaving desiring God. So I was there, but I mainly saw church as a place to hear sermons, like to be inspired, just like sing some songs.

I was at a good church, but I never took the steps to get connected there. My senior year, I finally decided to go another church closer to campus because I thought

I'm discipling guys and I'm about to leave and they're gonna be here in this massive church where we're not connected.

And there's a group of students that are connected to this church closer to the campus. Maybe I should just go there so that they get connected.

So I was starting to feel the need to be more connected, but I had fellowship on campus with students, encouraging relationships.

I just didn't feel the need for a regular church connection. So I wasn't the model student.

It wasn't until my wife and I got married and she joined me in the campus ministry.

I'd already been up in another part of the state for a year, she joined me. And we're there. And for the first time, we're disconnected from all of our campus friends, our college friends.

It's just us, we're married. We were doing fine as a married couple, but we felt that we need help.

Like we're just getting married. Like we need help and encouragement. And I remember us having that conversation. I think it was looking for meaningful membership before I even knew the phrase.

I hadn't read nine marks to a healthy church or any of that stuff. But the example of my parents, who just had always been faithful church members, meaningfully involved in local church.

I just thought I need to live more like them. So we talked and I told her, I said, you know, we're in campus ministry, but we shouldn't excuse ourselves from being regular church members.

Like what would it look like if I wasn't in campus, if I just worked for the bank? And so we basically moved towards meaningful membership personally as a couple.

That moved our students towards that. That got them, like we started encouraging them, join this church, get involved.

20 years later, some of the students are still members of that church. A couple of those guys are elders at that church now, which just shows you the power of churches reaching 18 year olds who could still be there 20 years later.

So yeah, as time went on, my maturity grew, my ecclesiology grew, and maybe the things that concerned me about being a pastor.

Like, man, I thought in an immature way, man, as a pastor, you're just responding to who shows up.

And some of that's true. But on the campus, I can choose. Like I can go over here, here's a fraternity.

I wanna go share the gospel with these guys. Here's the football team. I wanna go share the gospel with these guys. And you just gotta move around and just share the gospel.

And I thought, if you're a pastor, man, you deal with a lot of junk, man. You deal with a lot of riffraff.

There's politics in the local church. And again, some of that stuff's true, but I had a very immature view of it.

And by the time I moved to DC, I had gotten introduced to non -Marx. I'd read their books. It started to put meat on convictions

I had. And I knew I wanted to be a pastor when I moved up there. And I was finishing my seminary, my

MDiv work at Southeastern. I was doing most of that as a hybrid role. I'd go on the campus for week -long classes back then.

And then a year into my time at Capital Baptist, I started serving as an elder. So I got to serve there in that local church.

I'd been through the internship. In the spring, right before that. Did they ask you to do the internship so that you could come on and serve their

CO ministry? No. They offered it to me and they told me that I wasn't obligated to do it, but I wanted to do it.

How come? Yeah, I just thought, man, at that point I'd been in ministry for 10 years in campus ministry and so much leadership output and so much giving on myself and just thought, man, this would be a good time to be shaped and formed and to grow.

And they just made some accommodations for me. When you went through, we had the four hours of administrative work.

Yeah, that's right. They let me take that four hours to meet with my campus outreach staff. So I could still kind of like meet with them, lead a weekly staff meeting and do this internship where I wasn't leading or teaching at all.

I was reading and writing and being sharpened and challenged and encouraged doing that with five other guys.

And man, it was such a formative time. And I think that kind of sped up the desire to want to go pastor.

What would you say to someone watching this right now thinking about getting into campus ministry?

I think it's a fantastic opportunity. I think it's, again, one of the great places you can go and focus your time evangelistically.

It offered me a lot of experience that is useful as a pastor. As a pastor,

I'm teaching, I'm shepherding, I'm leading. And I see a lot of pastors who may be challenged, particularly in the leadership aspect.

And I think campus ministry gave me some experience in leading. So like leading a staff team, leading people.

I probably made a ton of mistakes leading staff, just in terms of like being too zealous like maybe working people too hard, things like that.

So I got to take some of my bumps and bruises of learning while I was in campus ministry.

Thankfully, our team was great. We were all learning together, growing together. But that was useful to have that leadership experience and just the evangelistic experience.

I think what the market left on me was the realization that there are many people who, if you take the initiative to share the gospel with them, they'll at least have a conversation with you.

And I think that's just helpful for me as a pastor because it helps me stay focused on that aspect of the mission of proclamation and equipping our members to do the same because it's very easy in church ministry for evangelism to get pushed to the side.

And I think it just helped me keep that in front of our church and do a better job leading. So I would say go do it.

I think I actually met with a seminary recruiter 22 years old when

I was a senior. And thankfully, what he said to me, he gave me really good advice. He said, yeah, don't come straight to seminary out of college.

He said, go get a few years of ministry experience under your belt. And then if you want to come to seminary, go. And you'll be able, what you learn in seminary, you'll have an experience to interpret some of that through.

So if I had gone into seminary at 22, I would have missed out on that. So I think it's a wonderful way to spend a few, or like me, 15 years.

Yeah, that's right. Speaking of leadership stuff, maybe the best leader

I have ever known told me that you are the most natural leader that he has ever met.

What do you think about that? He's told me that before, and it was surprising and humbling to hear.

Yeah, I think... Well, I guess I'm saying that because a lot of people who would maybe want to follow your path might not feel like they have the natural giftings, you know?

So, I mean, what do you know? You're a natural. Man, I would say this, I think in any leader, there's some natural gifting.

There's natural gifting in you, but you have to ask the question, how were you developed? Yeah. How were you developed? And there's all sorts of things the

Lord used. You know, I'm sure you could point to the military, right? You could point to times like the internship, just different ways the

Lord shaped you. Coming in as an 18 -year -old freshman, I wouldn't have said like I was the natural leader.

I mean... And maybe what he calls natural is only what he perceives in you after you had been formed for quite some time as a leader.

Yeah, well, I think thankfully I was developed, the campus ministry I was in had a leadership culture.

Yeah. So there were a lot of sharp young leaders. And if you want to grow as a leader, you need to be under seasoned leaders.

And you need to be around some peers that are growing. And you know, when I got to do the CHPC internship, here's five other guys with me who were all sharp brothers.

Who was in your class? Oh, man. I think that pastor you mentioned also said we had the best intern class.

Dude, Tripley. Tripley. Gary Kell. Philip Howell. Jamie Owens. And then

Mike. Yeah. And who? Mike, his last name slipped in me. Sorry, Mike. Sorry, I just talked to him.

Oh, Mike. He was the runt of the litter. My mind's faded, but we had a great class.

Man, yeah. I was coming in as a member as you guys were finished. I was there twice.

I was there in 2011 when I was stationed there with the military. And you guys, I think, had just finished your class and you had started full -time

CO work there. And I just remember thinking, these dudes are like superheroes. Our class was much less impressive, mainly because I was in it.

We developed a theory that there's always like a gamble student in every class.

Did you guys have that theory back when you were in the internship? We did, yeah. Okay. I was the gamble student.

I was the gamble student. Mark's like, all right, you don't meet any of the qualifications and this probably isn't going to go well, but we got an extra slot.

Well, but that time around other leaders, it's really important. So I think leaders get developed. The work community is such a buzzword, but I think it's like, there's got to be a culture of developing leaders.

And I mean, yeah, even just my short time with you, I can tell you're establishing that culture here.

And you've got younger guys that are being shaped by a leadership culture. So that's so important, who you're surrounding yourself with.

Yeah. So next on the list for you is what, like president of the SPC or something like that?

No, no, thank you for that. You're going to run against Al Mohler? I mean, I would love to see him be the president.

Yeah. Okay. I think I'm going to go into the rapid fire questions.

You're going to appreciate these, but before I do that, let me tell you a little, let me just tell you a little fact word

I learned the other day. I think you'll appreciate this. You like nature, right? I do, sure. Yeah, sure. Who doesn't like nature? I learned the other day that all ants are female.

Did you know that? Like the bugs? I'm questioning if that's true. All ants are female.

I can prove it to you. Ready? If they were males, they'd be called uncles. It's dad jokes.

Dad jokes are never bad jokes. Thank you, Sean. Never. All right, let's start off light and breezy.

Was the government involved in 9 -11? Not at all. All right.

I don't know why you're, why did you, I just had a conversation with someone about that recently. Really? Like, did you know something about my life? I asked

Ed Moore that question and he gave me like a, he was like, no, of course not. What do you mean?

Well, so somebody close to me just, we had that conversation. It's a massive conspiracy theory.

And, and I looked at, they said that, I looked at them, I said, are you kidding me? Yeah. Are you kidding me?

Yeah. And this is someone younger. So anyways. Yeah. Yeah. Very relevant question. Absolutely not. No. Okay.

How often have conspiracy theories proved to be true? Recently? I don't know the percentage of them is.

We'll keep moving. Okay. All right, keep going. Tea or coffee? Coffee. Uh, favorite sitcom?

Favorite sitcom? You might say I don't watch TV, but like Office, Friends, Parks and Rec. You know,

I will, I'll take you way back to when I was, when I was a kid, The Wonder Years. Oh, that's a classic.

That was one of my favorite sitcoms. Fred Savage. Loved it. Come on. So good. Um, Dever, Piper, Keller, Sproul, Johnny Mac.

Who do you think has influenced you more? Dever. Dever, yeah. Who would be second? If we kind of remove the obvious, since you were a disciple before.

Piper. Piper. And it's just the serious joy, Christian hedonism. Yeah. I mean,

I remember I was first handed his book, uh, in 1998. Yeah. And no one ever heard of him.

And I read Desiring God and it just, that read, I followed up with Future Grace. Yeah, it just gave me a completely different lens to understand the scriptures through.

Be honest. Did you read all of Desiring God? Not that one, but Future Grace I did. Okay. Future Grace is actually like one of my favorites.

A lot of people say it's better. Yeah. Uh, I think Desiring God is kind of like Das Kapital by Marx.

Like all these communists have it on their shelf. Nobody has actually read it. Desiring God, I think we all get it, but very few people have.

I, I couldn't read. I didn't read all that. Pledges of God, I read all the way through too. I think that's fantastic.

Have you read his, have you read any of his recent stuff? Uh, Come Lord Quickly. Yeah, Come Lord Jesus.

Yeah, yeah. Uh, I think, I think he's gotten better as a writer over the years. I think being freed from sermon prep, more wisdom, more skill after you've written however many books, but he just put out a new book on lifelong learning.

It's fantastic. It's fantastic. Yeah. So yeah, I would agree. Piper. I would like to,

I would like to have the pastoral sensibility and the clarity and charity of thinking that I see in Mark with the serious joy,

Christian hedonism that I see in Piper. Whatever that aroma is that they put off there. I think is incredible.

Favorite author. I really don't have a favorite. You know, just don't read. I read, but I don't feel like I have a favorite.

I mean, I'd probably have to say Piper because I read more of his books probably than anyone else's. Are you a fiction guy?

No, I should read more. Are you a history guy? Not as much. All theology.

Mainly. I mean, I just started Rosaria's book, The Five Lies of Our Anti -Christian Age. And Steve Wellum's Systematic Theology just came the mail the other day and started that.

Whoever designed that marketing scheme. No, I shouldn't say scheme. The marketing, the rollout for that book crushed it.

Oh yeah. That's all I see. Any, it's just Steve Wellum's Systematic Theology. So many people are sold out too. You can't find, there's demand for it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Brilliant marketing strategy. Let me know if it's good. Mountains or beach? Beach.

Champagne or wine? Wine. You sure? You don't want to say no alcohol? I mean, as a

Southern Baptist, I probably should. Android or iPhone? Android all the way.

Oh really? Why? Why? Well, yeah. I don't care. There's a lot of pressure. There's a lot of pressure.

I'm tired of iPhone forcing people in their system. So my kids are Apple. Yeah. And they're like, dad, you're like the green blob and you're messing us up and you gotta come over.

So it's just made me like more dug in, like I'm staying Android. Yeah, you're the grumpy old man. Not that old though.

Macaroni salad or potato salad? Potato salad, yeah. Night in or night out?

Ooh, I'll go night out. Night out, yeah. Take the wife. Kids are old enough now. You can leave them at home.

Yes. What's like the ideal date night? Yeah, we don't stay out very late.

So we'll go out for, it's a nice meal. Just me and her. Yeah. And we're back home at a decent hour, like nine o 'clock.

Do you talk about the kids on date night? I think it's hard to avoid, but we don't. We try not to talk about them too much.

Yeah, okay. Concert or sporting event? Sporting event. Okay, so you're a sports guy.

Absolutely. College or professional or all of the above? Yeah, all. Okay. Soccer, communist or like should we watch it?

I watched my daughter's youth soccer. High school soccer, but that's it. Okay, morning person or night owl?

Night owl. Has it always been that way? Yeah, man. I mean, I was college, then campus ministry.

So it kind of conditioned me. Burger King or McDonald's? I worked at both. That doesn't answer the question.

I know. Okay. I'm going to say McDonald's, but here's my argument. Okay. Burger King should be superior.

They have the superior product. I worked in both kitchens, Sean. I made lots of Whoppers. I made lots of Big Macs. You get it.

I get it. Flame broiled Whopper, it should be good. The management's terrible at most. Oh, that is so true.

So I go McDonald's, Big Mac. Favorite candy? Yeah. Or dessert of any kind.

I'm boring here. Oh, dessert. We can get on dessert. I'm just a cake guy. Okay, that is boring.

Cake's not boring. Cake is boring. Let them eat cake. Let them eat cake. Boring. I go for cake.

We look for excuses to get cakes on our church staff team. All right, yeah. Red velvet, German chocolate.

I mean, cheesecake, you name it. Okay. You're like the Forrest Gump of cakes. Red velvet cake, cheesecake.

Least favorite candy? I would say like licorice. Okay. Black or regular?

Oh, the black's terrible. It's the worst. Yeah. Thank you. Okay. Are we keeping a tab on this? Like how many people say black licorice?

Are many people saying that? Yeah. It's got to be the vast majority.

They still make it. Oh, yeah. If I smell it, I'll gag. Mexican food or Italian food? I'm going to go

Mexican. Okay. Burgers or barbecue? I like them both so much, but I'm a burger guy, man.

A good burger. You can't beat it. I tell my kid I can eat a burger every day. Yeah, same here.

I'm proud to be an American. Chinese takeout or sushi? I'm going to go sushi.

Okay. Cold or hot? Cold or hot sushi? No, just cold or hot. You interpret that question any way you want to.

Oh, I'd rather be hot. Okay. I was talking about your beverage. No, I'm just kidding. Rock or rap?

Rap. Classical or jazz? Jazz. Theonomy, yes or no?

Not at all. Not at all? Please no. Please no. Were you ever close to becoming a

Pato Baptist? Because RUF is a pretty big campus ministry, and they're racking up these bodies out here.

They're getting people on to the PCA game. I was close in that I was in a

Presbyterian church for a while. But you know how it is. They'll welcome you in without being convinced on that. But I was never close to being convinced of the position.

I studied it. Humbly studied it, admitting I might be wrong. But it's not there, man.

It's just not there in the Bible. I think that's all we have for today. Dave, thank you for coming all the way to Decatur, Alabama, home of Big Bob Gibson's barbecue.

The inventor of the Alabama white sauce. Come on. Scale of one to 10, Big Bob's barbecue, 10 being the best barbecue ever, one being trash.

What do you give it? I'm going to give Bob's an 8 .9. Wow. And with a decimal, not a rookie, not giving us round numbers, you're giving us decimal points.

Yeah, nine's hard to reach, but 8 .9 on the chicken. And the dude invented the white sauce.

Man. That stands out in my mind. Incredible. Yeah. Well, brother, let me pray for the Lord's blessing on your continued ministry, and then for his blessing on this episode, and we'll wrap it up.

Lord Jesus, thank you so much for allowing us to do this. We are just a couple of nobodies, as cliche as it is, trying to tell everybody about you, trying to tell everybody about somebody.

Lord Jesus, we pray that you will honor our conversation here today. We've tried to do it to the glory of your name, and we pray that you will get it to people who need to hear it, who need to be strengthened and encouraged, rebuked and exhorted.

We pray that through this conversation, some who are called to college campus ministry will, yeah, do what they need to do to pursue that ministry in the healthiest, most biblical,

God -honoring way possible. And we pray for local churches, pastors of local churches, various local church opportunities that may come from this episode.

Lord, help them to minister to college campuses with the gospel wisely, and in a way that is really in line with the

Bible. We pray that the gospel message that we share will be proclaimed faithfully this

Sunday, not only in our pulpit, but in every pulpit, and that many sons and daughters will call on the name of Jesus for salvation.