147: The Confessional Baptist

to the Ruled Church Podcast. This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased.

He is honored, and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better, because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas?

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

The church is not a democracy, it's a monarchy. Christ is king. You can't be

Christian without a local church. You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the

Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible -believing church, and spend your life serving

Jesus in a local, visible country. Welcome to the Ruled Church Podcast. We have a first ever today, to my knowledge.

I don't think that we've ever in our existence, goodness, how long have we been going?

This has been, well, we're going on like four years. So we had the podcast, and this is really, and me and another brother, and now this is the

Ruled Church Podcast 2 .0, because we stopped for a while, then we came back on. And so now we've been going on for about four years.

He had to drop off last year to focus on his local church. But I think this is the first time ever that we've interviewed a deacon.

So yeah, so play the ominous music in the background.

Welcome to the Ruled Church Podcast. My name is Alan Nelson. I'm your host. I'm an elder at Providence Baptist Church in Perryville, Arkansas.

We are a 1689 confessional church, Second London Baptist Confession. And we are located almost the center part of the state.

And I'm thankful to have our guest today, Benjamin Allen. Do you go by Benjamin or Ben?

Which would you prefer? It is fine. I mean, whatever works. People call me a variety of things.

My last name is like a first name. A lot of people call me Alan too. So I just roll with it. Yeah, I like that you spell

Allen correctly. Yes, we do have that in common. That's right. Well, people joke with me.

They say that my first name is spelled like a last name. So anyway, whatever. But we're grateful to have you on.

You serve as a deacon of, remind me of the church name. It's Redeeming Grace Church in Cartersville.

Redeeming Grace Church in Cartersville, Georgia. I wanna get into why

I asked you on originally in just a minute. But before we get to that, why don't we just start out telling us about who you are, your family.

Let's all start with that. Yeah, sure. Yeah, so I live in Atlanta, Georgia.

I've been here for about 10 years. I live in a suburb called Dallas, ironically, not

Texas, it's called Dallas, Georgia. I've been married to my wife, Hannah, for almost 10 years.

I'm married to the pastor's daughter, so I have to behave. I have three kids.

Heather is seven. Ethan is five, almost six. And my son Peter's almost three. The Lord's blessed me with those.

And yeah, I'm very thankful. I've been kind of a nomad growing up. I'm not, my wife and I kind of opposite backgrounds.

She's lived in Georgia her whole life. My family moved a lot. So I was born in Florida, but I've lived in, we lived in New Jersey, Iowa, Alabama.

I lived in New York for a while. And then I finally ended up in Georgia. So I've kind of been all over.

I'm more of like, I guess when people ask which state I associate with, I'm like, I guess I'm an American, but I do love

Georgia. I mean, of all the states the Lord's placed me in, Georgia's my favorite. So I told my wife, I said, look, you've started off in the best state.

But yeah, I'm a deacon, as you mentioned. I enjoy serving the church. Really enjoy reading the

Bible. And I love studying theology in my spare time. And that's one of the things where, my page kind of grew out.

It was just, I wanted to share some of the things that I've learned and stuff I was discovering online. So that kind of just started from there about two years ago and took off.

Yeah, so just a couple, a few weeks ago, which actually I don't know when this is gonna come out.

After we get done recording, I have to look and see when it's coming out. But not long ago this year,

I had a brother from, well, you were at the G3 conference, right? The Unity in Christ, yes, the last one.

Did you get to meet Jeff Johnson or listen to? I did, yeah. Well, actually, hang on.

I didn't talk to, I'm sorry. I didn't talk to Jeff this time around. I've talked with him. So Jeff's part of FIRE. Our church is part of two organizations,

FIRE, the Fellowship of Independent Reforming Angelicals and RBNET. I've met Jeff at FIRE events before and the bigger

G3 events. I neglected to get to talk to him this time around. I always enjoy talking to him, but I just got busy and missed him.

So he's also, I mean, he's a lot busier than me, so. Well, one of his elders, one of his fellow elders,

Danny Thursby, I don't know if you've met him or not, but. Yeah, I've talked with Danny a couple of times, yep. Danny was on the show recently and we talked about deacons.

And that was a good episode. I thought it was really helpful. But, so I'm not, I mean, this episode is not about you being a deacon, but since you are a deacon,

I just thought I'd give you the floor for a few minutes and just say, okay, tell us what you see the role.

I'm gonna say a reformed Baptist church, but I mean in any church really, but you are a part of a reformed Baptist church. But what is a deacon's role in the church and how do you personally fulfill that role?

Yeah, deacon's role in the Greek is diakonos or diakono. A deacon's role is to be a servant.

That's kind of the main, and it's funny when the Lord ordained this position through Paul, he just called it a servant.

And the main role of the deacon is to serve the church in any area. Well, what's interesting about the role of a deacon is the scripture,

I could be wrong on this, but never explicitly lays down any specific duties for deacons other than serving, right?

So it's very open -ended. Practically in bigger churches, like I've seen, they'll have 10 or 20 deacons and they'll have very specific areas of responsibility.

Usually in smaller churches like ours, we have two deacons, I do pretty much everything. So I assist with that financial reports,

I teach Sunday school, I teach the kids Sunday school, I purchase security cameras for the church, file our incorporation forms, work with our accountant on taxes.

So whatever the church needs, I'm there to serve and do. At our church, we have a man who's a very godly man who just became a deacon.

He's very skilled as a contractor. I'm kind of more on like, I work in IT. So the way we kind of divide stuff is like, we had a tree fall on one of our church fellowship halls.

So he's handling all that. He's preparing the stuff and like, we go help him, but he plans that. And then I sort of lead like the digital side because since I work in IT, our

Facebook, our Google Maps listing, the various things that I do online are more by me because since I'm more familiar with that.

So the Lord has gifted us, it's kind of like we've sort of settled into our natural sphere of serving. Part of it also though is more important than that is like looking out for the congregation, trying to see if someone falls into like, has financial problems, giving them, trying to support them.

If people come to our church and ask for money, like generally we don't always like to give money, but maybe like evaluate their need and maybe buy them some food.

So there's a variety of things, but I mean, first and foremost, serving the flock and freeing up our pastor. And in the case of a small church, it's more important because he's very busy.

So freeing him up to just spend his time studying. He works, like our pastor works like 60 hours a week on his normal job.

And so he's, you know, and I do preach from time to time too. You know, I've preached a couple of different,

I think maybe about 20 -ish sermons. I've done one on holy violence and I preach through Naaman and I'm working through a series on Balaam now from Numbers.

So it's kind of a, you're kind of a jack -of -all -trades when you're a deacon of a small church. You're gonna do a little bit of everything most of the time.

Yeah, I love what you said about, you know, making sure that you're freeing up the pastor.

We were talking about a book. Let's see,

I thought I maybe had a quote, but we were talking about the book earlier that Nine Marks puts out, which,

I mean, I don't know, I'm not trying to run anything down. There's some issues I've had with Nine Marks.

That's all, so I'm not like giving a blanket, a blanket endorsement of everything they've put out. But here's what, here's a quote from that book on deacons from Matthew Smethurst I thought was great.

He said, a church without biblically functioning deacons will be perpetually distracted from its central mission of making disciples.

So the whole, that's, you know, the whole point of the deacon ministry is to keep the pastors able to focus on the ministry of the word and prayer.

So I thought that's great, brother. Yeah, and Alexander Strouk has a good version too on deacons, the

New Testament deacon, that's an older version. You know, Smethurst's version's a little more modern, which it's got some good stuff.

Alexander Strouk is good. I also have, it's funny, I have it here at my desk. This is the, I'm sure as a

Reformed Baptist, you're familiar with Albert Martin. This is the

Diaconal Manual from his church. And actually I have a brother, I don't know if you know

Luke Peterson. He was part of RBNet. He recently became a missionary to Costa Rica. But he got his hands on this back in the day when he heard

I was becoming a deacon, he sent it over to me. So I've read through it. I don't think, I don't think Albert Martin put it together.

I think some of his elders or deacons did, but it's an excellent like 60 page, like just laying out everything biblically, like the roles, what they can do, what they shouldn't do, even some practical tips and finances.

So that's a resource too I've shared on my page before. And like, it's not, you know, they don't, you know, I've, you know,

I know I've talked with Pastor Dave Chansky, he's one of the pastors up there. You know, they're fine with it being published and stuff.

And it's very, very helpful. I mean, of all the resources on deacons, I think that's probably the best in my opinion, even over the two books that I've previously mentioned.

Yeah. Yeah. Al Martin's always, when I can, I try to give it a plug. His pastoral theology three volume.

It's kind of underrated. I don't see a lot of people talking about it, but there is a niche group that like, they know it, you know, and it's, it's, yeah,

I mean, it's, it's heavy. I've got the second volume on my desk right here. I just have it. You know how like you, you see kids take a bunch of bites of apples and they leave them unfinished.

That's me with all my people. I think that's a problem with all Reformed Baptist brothers.

Well, no, that's great. Like I said, I didn't want to take up too much time on deacons, but I thought it was cool that we'd had that conversation not long ago.

And then here we are, a real life deacon in the flesh. So our church doesn't have deacons presently.

We had a situation, we had deacons several years ago.

We had a situation where, well, I mean, long story short, they basically said, hey, you're out.

And by God's mercy, it didn't happen that way. And they ended up leaving. And so, so we don't have deacons at this point, but we are,

I'm preaching through Acts right now. And so I've been walking through that.

And so, you know, Lord willing, maybe in a, end of this year, maybe first part of next year or so, we'll be able to select a few deacons or whoever, you know, we'll see, we'll see how it goes.

So, unless you want to move to Arkansas, I saw you moved around. So, you know. My wife and I do want to move back to rural areas.

Yeah, well. Yeah, and that's something too, that is a problem. Even in some conservative churches, as you see kind of this tyrannical deacon, where the deacons kind of run the church.

I've talked to a lot of pastors who, just in my, in Fire and RBNet, about like churches they've moved into, where the deacons kind of run the church.

And because the deacons have been there for so many years, they had this reputational capital that can't be overcome very easily. And a lot of them had to sit down and say, you know, this is, you know, you have more power than you should, right?

And that, and biblically, if you look at the model, like, you know, biblically, you know, deacons, they're servants, they're not overseers or bishops.

And so like, if you become like, if a deacon starts making spiritual decisions all the time, then it's like, well, you either, if people think you're an elder, make you an elder, but a deacon's not that.

Yeah. What is an interesting thing, I think, about deacons in general though, is some of them, you know, as we were talking about them, some of them were very noted preachers, obviously.

Stephen was one. I think there's some discussion on whether Philip, the Philip of the evangelist was also the deacon or it was a different Philip.

I've seen different things from like commentators on that, but obviously you do see like a strongly evangelistic role.

And that's not to say that like that's their primary task, but it is interesting. Like, you know, you see them, you know, Philip being, and I do tend to think that the

Philip that was a deacon was also the evangelist. So, but you do see like evangelism and you see

Stephen being a powerful preacher as well. So deacons, they can do a variety of things, but it shouldn't take away from their serving. I mean, if they're doing those things and they're not serving enough, then, you know, there's issues.

Yeah, yeah. Well, the whole reason that I reached out to you, and I don't really remember how we got connected.

I know that I had messaged you, because I do work for Free Grace Press. Yeah. I had messaged you,

I think, back when we were doing the sale on the, I think you were gonna like buy, oh,

Sam Waldron's, the optimistic amillennialism. And I'd mentioned something like, hey, wait, if you'll wait like a week, it's gonna be on sale or something like that.

But - Yeah, I appreciate that too. Yeah, I didn't end up, I think I didn't get that book yet.

I have a couple of his. I mean, his books have really helped me. You know, my histology was a seller for a while.

His books kind of helped me. I'm all mill, that's kind of the view, I think. There are things, I explained to my wife, I said, there are things that I think

I can't explain with the all mill view. There's always that with every view, but I think the all mill view fits best than any other view, in my opinion, right?

I don't see the, to me, the millennial reign of Christ on earth, I've always, when Jesus says, my kingdom's not of this world, you know, and I'm just like, that seems sort of reversal.

So, you know, we had disagreed, like our church, our pastor is historic pre -mill. Yeah. So, I mean, we just agreed to disagree there, but I mean, we're, for the most part, most of them are fairly aligned, except for dispensationalism, that tends to be the one that's kind of far off the corner.

So, your church, do you guys, what is y 'all's official confession?

It's a 1689 confession, that's our official one. Yeah, we're more, you know, we realized that a lot of people come into the church from different backgrounds, we're more strict about elders and deacons holding to it, like people can take exceptions.

I mean, even our church at the leadership level, we do have a few exceptions. I don't think the Pope's the antichrist, for one.

I think he's an antichrist, and I've heard Rendahin's explanation of that, but like,

I don't think that necessarily the Pope is the antichrist, I guess, and that probably is a little deviation from the nominal view, but we think it's very, to us, the 1689 is very, very important for leadership because it sort of gates the leadership in from going down weird rabbit holes, right?

I mean, for the people of the church, we teach the Bible, we do teach the 1689 in the Sunday school class, but for the leadership, it's important because it's like, we're saying the congregation, we're not gonna go outside the bounds of this.

Yeah, so we, you know, so. That's good, we're very similar, so we don't say like, now, yeah, we don't, we're not like, hey, we'll just believe whatever, but we are like, look, this is our confession, this is what's gonna be taught, this is what our church believes.

If you disagree, that's okay, as long as, you know, we're not gonna, to an extent, obviously, if you're like, well, you know,

I don't think Jesus is the son of God, okay, whoa, whoa, whoa, but if there's something that, you know, that you disagree on, we're gonna take that into consideration, but like, okay, and something else,

I think it's like, do you want like, so I think the 1689 is a robust, mature confession.

Do you think that only people can join your church if they're robust, mature believers, or do you have room in your church for immaturity so that they can grow, you know, and learn?

Yeah, exactly, and you may have people, I know people come from backgrounds, it's not on the reform side much, but some people come from backgrounds that are kind of wary of creeds and confessions, and they say, oh, they're man -made, and they don't understand it, like, you have to come around and realize, you know, that like, you know, these are formulated,

I forget who said this, and he said, well, creeds and confessions don't have more authority than the Bible, but they do have more authority than you, right?

I mean, we shouldn't lightly, you know, with, you know, our church also, of course, you know, the

Nicene Creed, the Athanasian Creed, the Christology part of it, of course, Calisthenics and Christology, all that's important to affirm because you do have stuff like process theology and annihilationism and just random stuff that tries to sneak back in the church, and if you hold to the creeds and confessions, it says, no, we're not gonna go that route, but like you said, it's a process.

I mean, we're first trying to raise up people that are, you know, mature Christians, and then once they're mature, they can kind of see, like, they can understand that, like, we've told people, like, we teach through this, this is our doctrinal statement.

Rather than making a whole doctrinal statement ourself, which is tough, it's just easy to say the 69th Confession is our statement. Take a look at it, right?

And I mean, I can't improve on that. I mean, I'd be prideful to say I could. No, that's good.

Well, the whole reason I asked you on, and just talk a little bit about it, so you have, which you're also on X and Instagram, but where I see you the most and interact the most is the

Facebook page, the Confessional Baptist. So it's just the Confessional Baptist, pretty easy to find.

You have, I'm looking right now, 8 .6 thousand followers. That's pretty good.

You have, thus says the Lord, walking the old path, Jeremiah 6. I have a story about that from my church.

I preached on that in 2022 about some directions that we needed to take.

And anyway, that's kind of led to the whole situation I referenced earlier.

So I like that. And then your most recent, like your most recent post,

I shared it, it's a John Gill quote. Christ's church is a kingdom and he is king in it.

Pastors of churches are subordinate governors who rule well when they rule not in an arbitrary way, according to their own wills, but according to the laws of Christ with all faithfulness, prudence and diligence.

That's John Gill. And then that's the kind of stuff you share. And other things, multiple sort of streams of things that you share.

So why don't you tell us a little bit about how did this come about that you started this little page?

You've got quite the following. Obviously not the biggest ever, but I mean, it's a notable following, you know?

So how did the page come about and what are you trying to do with it? Yeah, so I started,

I think it'll be around two or three years in April. I started a couple of years ago. Like I shared a lot of theological content on my personal

Facebook page and I still do from time to time. But what I kind of realized is like, you know, I have a variety of interests.

Like a lot of people, you know, don't want to hear about immediate versus immediate revelation on my personal Facebook page.

I wanted something where I could share kind of like more like theological things that are more in depth and then like have a select group.

So like on my personal page, I'll share Bible verses and quotes sometimes, but it kind of grew out the desire to do that.

And then, you know, I read a lot. Reading is my favorite hobby. I just,

I read all the time. And I come across a lot of things when I read. I'm thinking, hey, that's a good quote. I want to share that.

You know, I love church history, especially. I've almost finished Philip Schaaf's eight or nine volume on church history.

And so it just kind of, it kind of, I've started the page, you know, three or four years ago. It kind of became an outlet just for me to share various things.

I also try to do stuff like I feature different churches every week, Reform Baptist churches. I also feature, you know, sermons from past.

I think I've featured one of your sermons before. And I think hopefully in maybe the next couple of weeks, I'm going to feature your church as well.

But trying to like, you know, most Reform Baptist churches are smaller. I mean, there's not, most of them are not, you know, two, 300 people.

They're mostly a hundred or less. And so trying to like, you know, direct people to Reform Baptist churches in their area where they can find good, solid preaching and not have to worry about like, you know, fluffy preaching, you know, man -centered evangelism, all that stuff.

So that's kind of my thing. And like I have, you know, you know, just kind of like a, sort of like a central hub.

I've recently, I think about last, maybe last eight months, I've been writing tracts.

Cause I'm very, I love evangelism. That's one of my, you know, one of my favorite things to do. Our church evangelize quite frequently.

And I get a lot of tracts from the chapel library. They're good tracts, don't get me wrong. But there are certain things like that are more niche that I'm like,

I want to address. And so I decided to write a few tracts to them. So I wrote a tract on, if you remember the

Titan sub going down and blowing up, going to see the Titanic. I wrote a tract about that called the Titan's Descent into Eternity, right?

Because that's something that's more of a recent event. I want to use it in the same way that the Lord, our Lord and Savior used the,

I think the Tower of Siloam fell, right? And he said it wasn't those people. So he used that to steer people to the gospel. I want to use that to steer people to the gospel.

And then I've written a few more. I written one called Cosmic Treason and Eternal Love. I wrote one, since Pokemon's all the rage,

I wrote one on, I wrote like a Pokemon theme track so I can leave it on Pokemon machines. And, you know, so I'm trying to like, just write various tracts that fill certain niches.

I did one recently called Eyes of Faith as well on what's the most important thing. So that's one of my things.

I'm also, I love Thomas Watson. He's by far my favorite Bible teacher. I'm writing a study.

My favorite verse in the Bible is Matthew 11, 12. The king of heaven suffers violent and violent taken by force. So I'm currently,

I'm trying to write a study guide to go with his book. I'm about, so far

I have 8 ,000 words in, about another 2 ,000 to go. So I'm working on that. That's one of my other projects I peck at here and there.

So, you know, kind of a variety of things I do on the page, like some, you know, writing some tracts, you know, writing a book and, you know, hopefully making some good resources available to people for free.

You know, that's my plan, so. No, amen. Yeah, that's great. I was just scrolling through here and looking at some of the churches featuring and just the idea of getting the, not just rural churches, but, so rural doesn't have to mean small.

And by the way, the rural church podcast, I say this a lot, but like, we're not just for rural churches. I just feel like the smaller sort of rural area church is underrepresented on a -

Yeah, it is. So I just kind of like to give from that perspective. Yeah, go ahead. Well, and I tell people this too, because sometimes people get on my page and get mad at me.

I say, I am a confessional Baptist. That doesn't mean I only share quotes from confessional Baptists. Sometimes they're from Baptists.

Sometimes they're from people that are like Presbyterian. So it's like the confessional Baptist is who I am, but I had people say, well, that guy's a

Presbyterian or Tozer wasn't necessarily fully Calvinist. I'm like, well, I share good quotes from a variety of sources.

You know, I do. Go ahead. Just tell them, brother, if they've gone to be with the

Lord, they're confessional Baptists now. That's right. Yep. I've told people, I think, hey,

R .C. Sproul's a Reformed Baptist now. You know, I think, and, you know, every

Reformed Baptist surely has benefited from, you know, Owen, Sproul, Edwards.

Yeah. I mean, covenant theology comes, I've told multiple Presbyterians this, like Reformed Baptist covenant theology comes a lot from Owen, but like his work is very, his work on the discontinuity between the covenants and the very major differences.

When you start following that line of covenantal thinking, that's what makes you a Baptist, not a Presbyterian.

And like, I am convinced that if Owen was alive in our days, he probably would be Reformed Baptist just because of his thinking.

Like when you start, because I agree biblically with what he's saying. I think there are, there is, you know, Presbyterians talk about the continuity between the covenants.

They try to want to flatten them out, but there is a strong discontinuity as well. And when you talk about that, that's when you see the sign change and the focus is on adult membership and the regenerate and not on just the, you know, totally nations or families.

And so, you know, I've told people, I said, look, Reformed Baptist covenant theology, John Owen, he's one of the main people that started, like that's where we get a lot of our stuff from.

So we do have a strong base in the Puritans. Like we're not, because I remember when I was growing up, I asked my dad once,

I said, are we from, are we descended from the Anabaptists? And he corrected me and said, no. He said, we're not.

We do have the same sign as Anabaptists, but our heritage comes from the Reformers and the Puritans. It's just, we held onto that theology, but we just went back to the biblical practice of believer's baptism.

So that's what I was going to ask you that. So now that brings it. So one thing I was going to say, and then

I'll ask you this question, but I was going to say that, you know, as especially as Reformed Baptist, oh brother,

I don't know how you feel about it, but sometimes we can get really, really niche and really, really narrow and, you know, and there's even, you know, even right now, people who are listening to this, they'll know,

I don't have to say everything, but like there's even conflicts between, you know, Reformed Baptist, you know, it's like we're a small group of people.

We're too Reformed for the Baptist and we're too Baptist for the Reform. So we're a small group of people.

And then we decide to point the guns at each other as it were and have some infighting. So I get, not that discussions over theology are unimportant.

I don't mean to say that at all. I'm just trying to say that sometimes we can try to gatekeep one another.

We can, and I think it's, you know, I just came back from the G3 conference on union

Christ and Joel Beakey was talking there about having an ironic spirit. And I think that's so important because so many people today are so quick to have a polemic spirit or even an apologetic spirit, which is not bad.

But I thought about going through or maybe having Chad GPT going through and categorizing Jesus' statements.

Like he was a very peaceful person. I mean, he did push back against the Pharisees and he did defend the truth, but I do see the same thing.

Sometimes I see a lot of fractiousness in Reformed Baptist circles. And it kind of grieves me because we're already like 4%.

And then it's like a split down to 8%. And I, you know, I tell people like there are things godly men are going to differ on, you know,

I mean, I'll give you a classic example. Impassibility, qualified versus classical. That's split some

Reformed Baptist denominations in the past tend to be the classical side myself. But I understand, you know, there are godly men that will be qualified.

I'm not going to make it like a huge fight and start fighting like a war over that, you know? I mean, to me, it's like, I do think,

God is, you know, the concept of God and, you know, it's a mystery. So some, you know, on one side,

I think I would hold to Malachi 3 .6, I'm the Lord, I change not, therefore you're not consumed. Some men might say, well, trying to say, well, we are made in God's image.

So therefore there's something about him that's analogous to us. Like those types of debates have really driven

Reformed Baptist circles. And like, to me, it's like, I, you know, I like to, it's nice to disagree about them, but understand like we can still be brothers in Christ and not tear each other down over it, you know?

And we can even have, say, look, you know, this brother, you know, he may not, because of our church's position, he may not be able to be an elder at our church, but we still, you know, like, for example,

Joe, I'll just give you an example, Joe Beeky, and this is an extreme example, but Joe Beeky, he couldn't be an elder at our church, obviously, because of our differences on baptism, but he certainly could preach, you know?

And we can respect him and love him and have, you know, benefit from him.

Obviously, that's a credo pedo situation, but even within the credo

Baptist, Reformed Baptist world, I wish there was some more unity. And I've tried to try to kind of,

I feel like I've befriended brothers on multiple sides of various debates, you know, like impassibility and such.

So I hope I can be a force of unity and encourage that, even without, you know, like you say, it's like, these things are not unimportant.

We want, absolutely, they're important, but are we, should we divide over some of these things?

You know? And I'll even point out too, like even Calvinistic or Dispensational Baptist, like, you know, we wouldn't, we've had them in the past preach at our church.

We would tell them like, you know, there's no, please don't preach anything that related to Dispensationalism. But I mean, one of my favorite pastors is

John MacArthur. I mean, he's a faithful and sponsored preacher. And like, there are times he says stuff on Israel. I'm kind of like, eh,

I kind of wince a little bit. I'm like, I don't, that's not how the Bible says it. And I strongly disagree with him on Sunday because of course he believes

Sunday's abolished, which I don't think that's a creation ordinance. But as long as he's not preaching on those two topics, if he's just preaching through the

Gospels, I'm going to agree with him 99 % of the time, you know? So they're faithful brothers. I mean, there's, I think it's good to recognize too, sometimes

Reform folk throw all the Dispensational people into the same camp. And there are more of your sober Dispensational types like a

MacArthur or an Abner Chow. Like, we don't want to put him in the same group as like, they're just not even close to the same orbit.

Like, there's your extreme Dispensational. So it's like, I do think, yeah, like you said, it's important to understand that we can have fellowship with Presbyterians, Dispensational Baptists, and, you know, no, we're going to have our differences.

We're not going to, obviously we're probably not going to have a Dispensational Baptist ever preach on the Old Testament covenants.

But, you know, you come in and preach something general on, you know, unity in the church or loving Christ or Christ for your sacrifice.

Yeah, we're going to agree with him nine times out of 10 on that, you know? So I was going to ask you, because you mentioned earlier about asking your dad.

So it sounds, did you grow up in a, like a Reform Baptist? Yes. How did you become a

Reform Baptist? Yeah, so I'm very blessed. I often compare myself to the, in the

Parable of Talents, I got 10 talents. Both of my parents are solid Christians. And as far as I know, like at my church,

I'm the only person that has that. Everyone else, well, my wife does too, but everyone else other than me and my wife has either no

Christian parents or only one, or maybe none, right? So, no, my dad was, my dad, the

Lord saved my dad in his thirties. He actually, it's funny, he met my mom at Grace Community Church out in California.

So the Lord saved him, he met at MacArthur's church. And his introduction to being a Reform Baptist was MacArthur used to bring in various pastors at night.

And this kind of shows you, like, MacArthur's ironic spirit, because he brought Al Martin in one night when my dad was at Grace.

And he said, you guys listen to my tapes, I listen to Al Martin's tapes, right? That's how he explained it to the congregation.

So that was my dad's introduction on Martin. So they moved to Florida. We attended a Reform Baptist church down there for a while.

That's grown quite big. It's now, it's Coconut Creek, Emmanuel Baptist, that's where they had the last

RVNet assembly. And then after that, we moved to Mississippi, went to a small Reform Baptist church there in Yazzie City, that's gone.

When we moved to New Jersey, we did attend Al Martin's church for a couple of years. And so we've, I've been in Reform Baptist or Reformist churches my entire life.

So I've been very blessed. The one exception, it's funny, since this is the Rural Church Podcast, when we moved to Iowa, Iowa's very rural.

In Iowa, you're either Baptist or you're Reformed. You're not both. So we spent most of our time out there going to, like,

OPC. We went to a CRC church for a while. I think maybe an RPCUS or something, USA.

So we stayed at Reform churches, not Reform Baptist, because your Baptists out there were

Armenian Baptists, usually pretty strongly anti -Calvinists, usually. So, you know, it's funny.

My friends would always say, you're either Reformed or you're Baptist, you're not both. And I'm like, what about John Bunyan? You guys ever heard of, or Charles Spurgeon?

So, but no, my parents brought me up and like, we've, you know, we've been in a lot of Reform Baptist churches over the years.

And so I've been very blessed because the theology, you know, sometimes I, and I try to do this, is I take for granted the foundation my parents gave me, the churches

I've been in. Like, I do see some of my friends drifting off into annihilationism, or maybe process theology, or open theism, or something like that.

And I'm very thankful the Lord gave my parents, you know, my mom would do the devotions in the morning, my dad did devotions at night.

We were at church twice a week. It's a very solid foundation for me, and I'm very grateful for it. You know,

I don't, I didn't deserve the Lord's mercy in that area, for sure. That's amazing. I hope it's an encouragement to brothers out there who are raising children right now, and just an encouragement that like, yeah, this is great.

It's great to hear that, because you hear a lot of, it's, you know, like you just said, you being the only one in your church with that kind of background, that's a blessing that you grew up.

But it's also an encouragement, I hope, to other brothers, and even sisters listening to this podcast to say, hey, raise your children up in the nurture and admonition of the

Lord. I'm not saying it's a guarantee. Obviously, the Lord is sovereign. But man, it is an absolute encouragement to hear that.

Yep, that's right. So we were - Yeah, go ahead. So many people consider kids ministry kind of a throwaway ministry.

And like, I, you know, I help teach our kids when they're in school, and it's one of the favorite things I do.

And, you know, when I was, I was at a weekend or a few years ago in DC at Capitol Baptist Church.

And I remember Mark Devers, you know, he had everyone sit down and he, you know, he had everyone, he always does this, he had everyone stand up.

And then he said, sit down at the Lord's stage at the various ages. And then when he got to age like 17 or 18, I think, I want to say 90 % of the room was sitting down.

And he said, you know, so often at churches, people make the kids ministry kind of a throwaway ministry, or you start with the kids and you move up to the adults.

But he said, how many of you are pastors and leaders and deacons? And the Lord saved you through the kids ministry, right? Because that was probably like you, you know, the

Sunday school and the things that you learned then, and obviously church too, obviously, I'm not saying people weren't in church, but it's like, it is important, like teaching little souls is one of the most important things you can do.

It's not like a, and it's not like a disappointed ministry. And that kind of opened my eyes to like, it's very, very important training of the next generation.

I mean, those little souls, a lot of times the ground is most tender in those years and they're willing, they have tender consciences, they hunger for God.

Like when you get to older people without the Lord, it's hard ground. Now the Lord can break any ground up, but no,

I mean, ministering to kids is very important. It's not one of those things, because I see a lot in evangelical churches, people kind of start off as youth pastors and they move their way up.

That's kind of like their entry level position, you know? And he pointed out that like, if you look back at the Puritans and Reformers, they took childhood education and catechizing kids very, very seriously, right?

One of the first things Luther did was write a, like one of his first things after he translated the Bible, I think the second thing was to write a catechism.

And he was very, I was reading about what he did with his kids. They'd recite the apostle's creed. They'd say the Lord's prayer.

They'd sing Psalms and he would exposit a section of scripture. I mean, he would give his kids a mini sermon every day, right?

A mini sermon. And that's kind of like, that's so important because it's just lacking today in Christian families, you know?

Yeah, you know, I think the Votie Bauckham position, which I do agree with, and he was right.

He got me, you know, that he pulled me out of the evangelical sort of, you know, youth ministry, children's ministry mindset that is unhealthy and unbiblical.

But the problem is, if you're not careful, it always happens. I think Luther said, you know, sometimes we're like a drunk and we get up on the horse from one side and then we fall off on the other side.

And the point he's making, you know, it's like, so, you know, generally speaking, we are family integrated as far as like our main service, you know,

Sunday morning, Sunday night. But we do also have like children's Sunday school, some children's

Wednesday night classes. And then of course the encouragement, we do catechize as a church, but then also the encouragement of, and I'm even teaching on this tonight, actually, it's

Wednesday that we're recording this, on family worship, you know?

So you're right, like give children the gospel and let's -

And we're very much the same as you. I mean, we practice family integrated worship. I think one of the reasons, one of the big problems that modern evangelical church, they split the adult worship and the kids worship up.

Like, I guess what I should have clarified is Sunday school is where we, in Sunday school, we're going through Joel Beek. He's got some great books for kids on like, you know, going through the

Old Testament. So, but like we are, because, you know, when you train your kids, my wife talks about this every week, you know, when you train your kids to eat, you wanna train them to eat adult foods.

You don't want them to eat kids' foods forever, right? And when you bring them into the worship service, we're preparing them to be little adults.

So why don't we give them their own worship experience? Right, they are training. It's important to learn to sit still. It's important to listen to sermons.

And so we're the same way. We split Sunday school up to get a little more age appropriate training, but then we're very much a firm believer in like, everyone from two to 98 is in the general auditorium.

That's something like, to your point, like up until about maybe 80 years ago, or maybe 60, 70 years ago, like that's the way it's always been throughout the history of the church.

It's always been everyone together. So it's only recently been this whole like, kids' church and adults' church.

That's not, that's a new thing. Yeah, that's right. Well, let's say, just kind of shifting gears and maybe kind of start laying in plain here, but like, what is your goal now, you know, from here on out?

Like, what do you see the Confessional Baptist page going? And how can folks like, you know, just to you go ahead and give them your ex and Instagram and how they can find you on these places and connect.

So like, what's your goal? And then how can people find you? Yeah, I mean, I'm just, I think my handle is just at, just the

Confessional Baptist on Facebook. I think it's, I think it handles the same place. I think on Instagram and also on Twitter, or Twitter, it might just be

Confessional Baptist, but no, my goal is to eventually, like, I don't have a website yet. I've built a

Squarespace website for our church. When I get time one of these days, I'm gonna try to build one for here as well. But my goal is to kind of like, just collect different resources.

You know, I have some tracks I've written. There's another Reformed Baptist pastor in our area, Bob Self. He's a very faithful, he was a coordinator for our committee years.

He's given me his whole library of tracks and he's written a lot. I think he's written over maybe 80 or 100 and I've gotten his permission to share them.

Kind of like just make a general resource hub for people to share kind of stuff for free, especially, you know, stuff like tracks or like resources that, you know, other, like, you know, maybe the, like I mentioned the diaconal manual from Montville.

Yeah, Al Martin Church. Al Martin Church. I'm sorry, I'm losing the name here, but anyway, it's been a while since I was there.

No, that's kind of my plan is do that and keep, I'd like to get a blog up eventually and get like some guest bloggers to write various articles on topics.

Like I do blog at our church website. I have my own blog as well, but you know, I like to get various people to write different blog posts on areas of, you know, their own expertise.

One thing I've noticed here at Christian conferences, even Reformed circles, and someone pointed this out to me a few years ago, my former pastor, in fact, is you tend to see the same people over and over preaching on different topics.

And really the body of Christ is so diverse that like, you know, someone like, let's take, well, for the sake of argument,

I'm just gonna use Steve Lawson, right? Since he's CFL, I think. Like when you see Steve Lawson multiple times over the topics, it's like, well, like I said, it'd be better if you said, you know, he's good in these areas.

There's someone else that's got more strengths in another area. Let's get him to speak on the atonement, right? And so it's less celebrity driven and more like, you know, different pastors have different niches.

Like some people are good on like, you know, talking about serving, some are more devotional. Some can give in and give you a really good lecture on classical theology.

Like finding different niches and you bring people in rather than the same famous people year over year, which I think sometimes that does kind of build up a cult of personality.

Like when we saw with Lawson and it leads to a fall, right? And so that's what I'm trying to do is like, I'd like to find, and I'm, like you said,

I'm very, one of the things I do on my page purposely is I try to feature smaller churches. I'm not saying

I haven't done some big ones, like, you know, Emanuel Baptist Coconut Creek. I feature Pastor Jeff Johnson's church over there in Conway.

I know they're a bigger church too, but I tend to focus more on smaller ones because they're the ones that need the publicity, right? And they're the ones that like,

I know as a part of being a small church, it's a struggle sometimes, like the finances are tight. You know, a church of 200, 300, a family or two leaving is not a big deal, but for a small church, it's like, that can be an existential crisis, right?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, trust the Lord. I'm not saying we don't trust the Lord, but you know, I'm trying to feature smaller churches, smaller pastors, and just show people that, you know,

I don't want to get into like an Elijah syndrome where we think that we're the only ones left. The Lord has, you know, the more

I've, you know, kind of gone to conferences and met people, the Lord's got faithful Reformed Baptist churches all over the country. And I want to kind of direct people to those churches and say like, what

I do online is not a church. I want you to get to a local church because that's how we grow and, you know, build up the body as part of the local assembly.

So. Amen, brother. Yeah, that's great. Well, is there, yeah.

So check out the Confessional Baptist. Is there anything you feel like we haven't said that you were hoping to get to say?

I'll give you the floor for that. No, I mean, you know, I've enjoyed being on the podcast and, you know,

I, yeah, I appreciate talking to you. I've actually, I've listened to some of your sermons and followed your work.

There's a lot of Reformed Baptist pastors I meet and I'm like, oh, I followed your work from afar. And that's kind of the way I feel with you. I've listened to your sermons and I haven't, you wrote the book, what,

The Gospel According to Christmas, I think? Yes, sir. Okay, I haven't got my hands on that. The Gospel According to Jesus is one of my favorite books.

So I'm assuming it's like in the same vein, it's gonna be great. So yeah, I just, I enjoy, you know, meeting different Reformed Baptist pastors and, you know, hopefully like I've had multiple, one thing that's really been cool about my page is

I've had people message me and say, you know, do you have a church in this area? And I'd be able to connect them. Or I've shared a post in a group and someone said, hey,

I didn't know that church was 10 minutes away from me. And I'm like, go check it out, go visit. So I'm hoping the Lord uses it for His glory to evangelize and to bring people to solid churches.

I mean, you know, you, I've told people too, when you go to a small church, like a small church doesn't, like people always look at a church as like, what can

I get out of it, right? It's always like, what can I get, get, get? But with a small church, it's like, you know, they need your time, they need your service, they need your skills.

Like we're not, it's like for us, it's like, you know, when the Lord finally sent us one or two more men that could help teach and preach, that was a tremendous burden lifted off our pastor and my shoulder as well, you know?

And it's like, you know, I've told people like, my final thing is consider going to a smaller faithful church, you know? And not, don't be like, well, this church doesn't have what

I need, I want to go somewhere else. If you find a church that's biblically solid, that has good fellowship where they evangelize and they, you know, they practice, you know, they do the ordinances correctly and they'll do discipline if someone falls into, you know, serious sin, then consider going to that church and helping building it up into the type of church you want to attend.

You know, no church is perfect. And R .C. Sproul, you say all the time, he said, if you find a perfect church, don't join it because you'll ruin it.

Yeah. No, that's, yeah. That's a great, that's a great exhortation, brother.

You say you're like the kid with the bite, taking a bite out of all the apples and leaving around, but is there a one book recently that you've picked up that you would say, hey, you guys, check this out, it'll be beneficial.

Yeah, that's, I mean, my, you know, I, there's, there's, there's, there's so many. I mean, I love, there's a short book by Watson called,

Heaven Taken by a Storm, Only Violence. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That, that's one of my favorite books of all time. I love

William Gernell's Christian Incomplete Armor, but other things like, I mean, those, those two to me are like some of my favorite books

I've ever read. First, the Bible, and then those two. But I'd say some of the books that I've read recently have been very helpful as I love the

Valley of Vision. I got some, I got another book on prayers, the church fathers and prayers, the puritans. Those have been really helpful for me too, just going through them and seeing like, you don't, on one hand, you don't want to go to the

Roman Catholic extreme where they just sort of repeat the same nonsense. Hail Mary, and, you know, our father is just not really, but on the other hand, you don't look at it, the evangelical extreme from that is just say, well, who cares what the prayers of the church fathers and reformers are like, do your own thing, right?

And it's like, no, there is value to praying the Lord's prayer and looking at the church fathers prayer and how they prayed and learning to model your prayers the way these godly men did.

I mean, I'm, I'm not more, you know, smarter than Augustine and I'm not, you know, I'm not as godly as Ambrose, right?

Or even, you know, Luther or Zwingli. So that's been really helpful to me to read those types of books.

I mean, I even have, I picked this one up, Grace from Heaven, Prayers of the Reformation. I'm gonna see it too.

There's also Fount of Heaven, Prayers of the Church Father. Those type of books have been helpful for me because, you know, to help me see how these men pray, you know, because sometimes

I feel like I pray the same things over and over and God is a great God. There's many ways to talk about his majesty.

And I don't want to just be, you know, if I came up to you and we always talked about the same thing the same way, you start getting a little like, hey, what's going on here?

We have variety with people. So why should we not have variety when we thank God? Lord, thank you that you chose me.

Thank you for your salvation. Thank you for your consideration. Thank you for my health. You know, praising him for his various attributes.

Like that's helped me immensely spiritually just reading those books. And so I do post Valley of Vision quotes later on.

I'm gonna start posting some Church Father quotes, Church Father prayer quotes. But yeah, those books have been really helpful. And I would say

Joel Beeky's and Paul Smalley's Systematic Theology too is very helpful. Yeah, I've read the first volume of that in a second.

So those are kind of the top books I've been reading. Well, one more thing too, I'll say, I was reading Warren Wiersbe has a collection of sermons.

It's like 120 famous sermons. And that has been very immensely helpful for me. Reading through, I try to read a new sermon every day.

And like, I was reading a sermon by Augustine a couple of weeks ago. And you know what's funny about Augustine when you read his sermon, he's so thoroughly evangelical.

You could bring him back and put him in a pulpit today at a reformed Baptist church. And it wouldn't be that different. When you look at someone like Basel or maybe an

Ambrose, they're a little bit higher, a little bit different. And Ambrose could be good too. But Augustine is so thoroughly evangelical.

It's like this guy, you could put him in a pulpit today and that would just be just as good as it was then.

He's just timeless. I love Augustine's sermons and his prayers. And I've really loved everything

I've read by him. I don't agree with him on everything. I don't think, no, he does, he would say there's no salvation outside the church.

I would say there's no salvation outside Christ. I would echo, I think Martin Buker said that, but I love his,

I mean, because that's the thing too. I think sometimes, and I'll just say this before we leave, some, I'm sure you've heard of the

Trail of Blood and some of the general Baptist. Well, sometimes Baptists, they try to go back and trace the sign versus tracing the lineage, right?

We're not, we're first reformed and then we're Baptists. We're not Baptist reformed. So our lineage is not through like the

Anabaptist and then the Waldensians and whatever. There are various sects or maybe almost cults or kind of splinter groups that practice baptism.

Our heritage comes from down to the apostles, the church fathers, the reformed, and then eventually particular Baptists. So that's where our heritage comes from.

So it's interesting reading their writing and seeing like, when you read some of their writing, you'll see that even though these guys were in a system, they were very thoroughly evangelical as well, right?

The same, God is a God, he's always kept his church. And when the Roman Catholic Church got to a point where it's so corrupt, the

Lord sent to Lutheran to reform it and they broke away from it. So, I think that's one thing too, is not neglecting where we came from, because I think a lot of heresies and errors pop up when people say, forget the history of the past, let's just go on to the future.

Yeah, no, so basically for like $800, you can get the Benjamin Allen suggested reading package.

No, that's great, but I'm the same way. No, that's good, lots of good resources there.

Man, I really, really appreciate you taking the time to come on here, man. And I appreciate your love for the church, your love for the

Lord, love for robust reformed Baptist theology. And you guys check out the

Confessional Baptist, give him a follow, you'll be blessed. It'll be something that will benefit you.

Thank you, thanks for being on. Yeah, no problem, thank you, I appreciate it. Look forward to talking more in the future.

Amen, thank you guys for joining us on this episode of the Rural Church Podcast. We'll catch you next week.

If you really believe the church is the building, the church is the house, the church is what

God's doing. This is his work. If we really believe what Ephesians says, we are the poemas, the masterpiece of God.