July 13, 2026 Show with Oliver Allmand-Smith on “Gathered for Glory: Why We Worship”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us, iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have an imbuing conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnson.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth. We're listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Monday on this 13th day of July, 2026, and I'm delighted to have a first-time guest today.

His name is Oliver Almond Smith, and he is an elder at Trinity Grace Church in Manchester, England. He is an author and trustee of the International Reform Baptist Seminary, also known as IRBS, in Mansfield, Texas, and Trinity Pastors College in Nairobi, Kenya.

And today he's going to be addressing the theme of one of his books, Gathered for Glory, Why We Worship. It's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor Oliver Almond Smith.

Good to be with you, Chris. Thanks for your welcome. Well, first of all, let our listeners know something about Trinity Grace Church in Manchester in the United Kingdom.

Yeah, just one correction on your intro, Chris. I used to be with Trinity Pastors College, Nairobi, but it's African Pastors Conferences that I'm actually a director of, so it feels a bit more correct.

Trinity Grace Church, Ramsbottom, Manchester. Yes. Well, I've been ministering here now for just over 28 years, and maybe even 29. I lose count a little. And the Lord's been good to us in our time here.

He's blessed us. He's prospered the church in many ways. Obviously, we face our challenges and our trials, but the Lord is gracious and merciful and built his church, and I'm giving thanks for that.

And what would be the theological makeup of Trinity Grace Church?

We are a confessional Baptist church. We love the great doctrines of the faith, as summarized in the Second London Confession, and we work hard to teach those great doctrines because we believe it's the best summary of what the Bible teaches, and also because it's a good grounding for our people.

It's good for the souls of saints to be built up in the whole counsel of God.

That's our position, Chris. Well, if any of our listeners in the Manchester, England area would like to visit Trinity Grace Church, perhaps you're either living there or you have family, friends, and loved ones living in that area, or perhaps you're visiting Manchester, England on vacation or on business, well, their website is trinitygracechurch .net, trinitygracechurch .net.

And before we go into your personal salvation testimony, which is something that we always do with first-time guests, and before we introduce the topic of the day to our listeners or begin discussing it, that is, which is Gathered for Glory, Why We Worship, I understand that you have a new book in the works, Connected with Children, and what is that title and what is that all about, because I'd like to have you back in the future to discuss that when that book is available.

Yes, thanks, Chris. So titles are always up to editors and publishers, so I can't tell you what title they'll choose, but my subject is the theology of a child. So what I'm trying to do in the book is not so much to lay out a theology of family or a theology of parenting—I think there are many good books on that—but to begin from the perspective of the child.

What is a child according to the Scripture? How do we understand the anatomy of a child? Not the physical anatomy, the spiritual anatomy. And then how is a child—bearing that in mind—how is a child to be helped in terms of understanding themselves, understanding their relationship to God, understanding their need of salvation?

What is the role of discipline? Why do we discipline? What is the purpose? How do we shepherd a child? How do we reach their hearts? These kinds of questions, coming at it from the point of view of what is a child, because I think that today in our culture, and I'm sure in yours as well, the assumption is that children are fundamentally good, and as long as we surround them with good things and give them a good education and help them with a good environment, then of course they'll grow up to be good people.

We know that is not the case, and they're born with a sinful nature, and they need to be saved. So that's what I'm working on at the moment, Chris, laboring with it, sweating over it.

And I'm assuming that being a Reformed Baptist, you're going to be taking a different approach as to the spiritual nature of children. I know that there's a lot of similarities that we have with our Paedo-Baptist friends and brothers.

Our confessions are nearly identical, etc. But there are a considerable number, not all, but a considerable number of Paedo-Baptists who do not view their own children as a mission field. And I'm assuming you have a very different view as a Reformed Baptist.

Indeed, brother, your assumption is quite correct. So yes, our primary objective, as I hope to lay out in the book, with our children is to bring them into covenant with God, because we know they are not in covenant with God.

So by nature, as sinners, they are under the condemnation of God, and we want to see them redeemed. Now, many Baptistic evangelicals who are not Presbyterian would see that purely in terms of getting saved, and they might have some sort of very simplistic Arminian view of what that looks like—praying, prayer, and so on.

So with regard to that, we'd be much closer to our Presbyterian brethren as to what true spirituality is. But in terms of what the child needs, the child needs to be converted. The child needs to be regenerated.

The child needs to have a new heart. And without that, to speak of them as partaking of the covenant in any direct way is misleading at best and seriously damaging at worst. So we want to bring them into covenant, but then at the same time, we share with our Presbyterian brethren that understanding of the means of grace.

How do we do that? We bring our children under the means of grace. We want them to worship. We want them to hear preaching. We want them to receive discipline and so on. So as you say, we share a lot in common, but when it comes to our children's relationship to God in covenant, we're clear.

Being our children does not bring them into the covenant of grace at all. They need to be converted. They need to be regenerated. And it's regeneration, which is the sign of which is not baptism. You know, regeneration is the new covenant fulfillment of old covenant circumcision.

But it's through regeneration that they enter into covenant with God. And that's what we're seeking to bring to pass.

If any of you listening want to check up on the availability of that book, it is not yet in print, but you can go to the publishers, which is brokenwharf .com. Brokenwharf, W-H-A-R-F as in Frank, E .com.

They are also the publishers of the book we are addressing today, Gathered for Glory, Why We Worship. And I'm sure you will be quite impressed with their catalog, quite a number of books by Reformed authors, both of the past and present.

So I'll be repeating that, God willing, later on in the program. Before we have you begin your discussion on Gathered for Glory, Why We Worship, as I said moments ago, we have a tradition here where our first-time guests give a summary of their salvation testimony, which would include the kind of religious atmosphere in which they were raised, if any, and the kind of providential circumstances our sovereign Lord raised up in your life that drew you to himself and saved you.

So let's hear your story.

Thanks, Chris. Yeah, well, I was the youngest of six children, and both my parents were professing believers. And my father was very influenced by Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones. He'd been at Westminster Chapel as a student in the 50s, when Lord Jones was really in his zenith, really, at this peak.

And he was very, very influenced by Lord Jones. So I was brought up under a very Calvinistic doctrine of God, of salvation, and of Christ. And I understood from an early age what it meant to be saved, what it meant to be a redeemed person.

But my heart was not transformed. And I knew the law of God. I knew what was right. I knew what was good. I knew the gospel. I knew that I needed to repent. I knew that I needed to believe. But I had no heart for that.

So throughout my childhood and my teenage years, I did a very good job of putting on an outward show with family and, you know, in religious contexts of spiritual life. But I was not a believer. I was an inveterate thief.

I was a liar. I was really not a righteous person at all, even though I put on an outward show of that. But the thing is, I knew all of that about myself. I deceived others, but I didn't deceive myself.

I was never self-deceived. I always knew I was unsaved. I knew I was unconverted. And there were times when I genuinely feared the consequences of that and, to some measure, desired to be a Christian.

But again, without any repentance. Later in life, when I came to understand our confession of faith, I realized that repentance is a gift of God. It's not something we do to put ourselves in a position where we can receive faith.

Yeah, that's how I used to think of it.

Matthew 15 Even though you were raised Calvinist, you used to think of it that way.

Well, yeah, exactly. But I wasn't raised under the confession. I wasn't raised with a clear understanding. I knew that God was sovereign, but I didn't really understand properly the relationship between repentance and faith.

So yeah, it's an interesting point, Chris. But it's only when you embrace a full of confessionalism, the whole counsel of God, that you understand the system and you understand much, much more accurately how everything fits together.

So anyway, that was my situation as a young person, as a child. But then when I was 17, as we often do, I had a bit of a rebellion. I had a bit of a crisis. It was actually when I was in the United States in Chicago.

I was on a school exchange performing a Shakespeare play at a school in Chicago. I can't even remember which one it was. But I got myself in a bad place. And to cut a long story short, I ended up on some park bench at 2 a .m. in the morning in a pretty poor condition.

And—. Been there, done that. And this is when you were how old? How old were you? Seventy. Okay. Seventy, yeah. And it was in that condition, really, that I understood what my real problem was. My real problem was pride.

That was my real problem. I believed that I needed to do something to earn the right to be given faith. And I kind of structured what I'd heard to fit with that scheme. And when God humbled me to that level and I saw myself for what I was, I realized, I'm absolutely hopeless here.

I'm absolutely lost. And God regenerated me. He gave me a new heart. He changed me completely. And yeah, all my old desires went away. I didn't lie anymore. I didn't steal anymore. I didn't want to deceive anymore.

And I just wanted to serve Christ and love him and follow him. And although there have been many challenges along the way in my Christian life, that's never changed. From that moment on, I've always loved the Lord and wanted to serve him.

But in my Christian journey from that point onwards, I quickly came to realize that a Calvinistic doctrine of salvation and even understanding of some aspects of purity and piety in preaching is insufficient for us.

What we need is the whole counsel of God. We need to know, for example, what the church is. We need to get our covenant theology sorted out. We were chatting about that in relation to children a moment ago.

We need to understand what our relationship to the civil authorities ought to be, etc., etc. And it's only then, much later down the line, when I came to realize the value of being compassionate and embracing the whole counsel of God in that system of doctrine, which is laid out there.

So that's been my experience.

Praise God. And what led you to believe that the Lord had placed a call upon your life to enter into pastoral ministry?

Well, I think the moment of my conversion, I had a tremendous zeal and desire to tell others, to share the gospel with others. And I threw myself as a young person into that work. So I got very involved in youth ministry.

I got very involved in running camps for young people. I spent all my summers with vast numbers of young people, playing games with them and looking after their dormitories and preaching the gospel to them.

So that's where it all began, Chris, and it developed from there. And I never really looked back. And I suppose from that age, I felt very much called to the work of the ministry. And it was just a matter of time, really, in God's promise.

And how were you specifically led to Trinity Grace Church in Manchester, Med Kingdom?

Yeah, well, I grew up in a county just south of Manchester called Cheshire. And I became a member of a church there, a small Baptist church there, and I ministered there and served there. But it became clear after I was married in 1995 that that church wasn't the right environment in which to develop any kind of long-term ministry for all kinds of reasons.

So they commended me to the work of the ministry elsewhere, and I just made it known through a couple of channels that I was available. And I received a number of invitations to preach in different churches.

And one of them was this church just north of Manchester. And they called me in 1997. They called me, and I began here in 98.

Well, praise God. Well, I'm going to give our listeners our email address if they would like to join the conversation with questions of their own. It is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-S-E-N at gmail .com.

As always, give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA. And please only remain anonymous if your question is about a personal and private matter.

You might be in a church where you're becoming more and more uncomfortable with how they worship in this church. And you don't want to publicly identify yourself at this point, which I wouldn't want you to because I wouldn't want to be critical of a specific church without knowing more about them firsthand.

So I don't want to be guilty of bearing false witness or anything like that. But if you're asking a general question, please give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence. And as far as this book, Gathered for Glory, Why We Worship, as you know, there are scores of books on worship, many written by the forefathers of our faith from centuries ago, and many by contemporary authors whose ministries you and I both honor and which have blessed us.

Why did you believe that there was another book needed that perhaps was filling a void, that these other works were quite as wonderful as they may be? They weren't quite hitting the mark as far as certain areas of worship, or perhaps they weren't approaching it specifically in the manner that you desired to see this subject approach?

What was the story that compelled you to write this?

Well, a few reasons, Chris, and I'll take them number two first and number one second. The second reason why I wrote this book and why I published it is because there is a definite preponderance of books on worship by Presbyterians and Anglicans, and a paucity of books on worship by Baptists, particularly Reformed Baptists.

So yeah, I think that's true. Actually, while I was writing the book and publishing it, our dear friend and brother, Sam Waldron, was bringing out a slightly more academic work on worship, but that wasn't available at the time that I was writing.

But apart from that, I'm not really aware of much, if anything, from a Reformed Baptist perspective in this regard. I've been blessed greatly by many books by our Presbyterian brothers on worship. But of course, when it comes to aspects of worship that relate to our covenant theology, our ecclesiology, particularly our pure baptism, we find ourselves departed quite significantly.

So that's kind of the second reason why I thought there was a tremendous gap there. But the primary reason and the most important reason is a pastoral one. This book came out of ministry in the church here that I gave to our people because I perceived that it was absolutely vital for them, for us all really as a church.

And again, the two reasons, the first and the most pressing and immediate reason was because of the COVID -19 crisis. Now, during that crisis, churches were in certainly our country and I think in parts of the United States for periods of time forbidden to gather for worship.

And many evangelicals, even Calvinistic evangelicals, came to the conclusion that it was right and necessary to obey the civil authorities completely and even without question. And some even used the terminology, this is a great opportunity to, quote, do church in a different way.

And it exposed our lack, particularly, I think, as Baptists, it exposed our lack of theology of worship, theology of gathered worship. Why do we need to gather? Why is it that if we don't gather, whatever we're doing is not biblical worship in that narrow, particular meaning of the word in relation to what we do when we gather together?

So that was the immediate context. This book came out of a series of studies that we engaged in as a church to emphasize the vital necessity of gathering, hence the title Gathered for Glory. But the second reason was that although as a church we are generally, I think this is true of a lot of Reformed evangelical churches that are not in the Presbyterian church, going back to what I said earlier, the Presbyterians are much better than us at this.

But in Reformed, Baptist, and evangelical circles more generally, although we may be conservative with a small C, although we may eschew charismatic ways, quite rightly, although we may know, if we could put it this way, what we're not going to do when we gather.

Well, we're not going to do that. We're not going to bark like dogs. We're not going to scream like cats. We're not going to roll in the aisles. We're not going to dance around. We're not going to sing all this happened nonsense and so on.

All well and good. But what is our positive theology of worship? What actively are we supposed to be doing? We can't have a theology of worship that's geared around, don't do any of those things. And so as long as you do some preaching, we're covered.

Everything else is secondary. That was how I grew up, really, with that view. All that matters is the preaching. Everything else is sort of padding. And I felt we needed a theology of worship, a theology that covered why do we do what we do when we gather?

So two things there. One, why it's absolutely vital that we gather to worship. And two, why we need a theology from a Reformed Baptist perspective of worship, which then directs what we do when we gather.

Great reasons to write the book. By the way, since you said that there was such a lack of Reformed Baptist works on worship of which you were aware, I just wanted to draw your attention to a book that you may or may not have heard of or read.

And I know I'm going to be getting into some controversial waters here, but John Price is a Reformed Baptist pastor, Grace Baptist Church in Rochester, New York. I haven't spoken to him a couple of years, so I'm assuming he's still there, but I don't know that.

He wrote, I thought, an extraordinary book called Old Light on New Worship, Musical Instruments and the Worship of God, a Theological, Historical, and Psychological Study. And he advocates a position of strict a cappella worship.

He is not an exclusive psalmist, but he believes in exclusively a cappella worship, as did Charles Haddon Spurgeon and quite a number of well-known Reformed Christians from history. And I just thought that I'd point it out in case you ever want to look at his work.

He is not a ultra-sectarian individual over this. He doesn't break fellowship with other churches that have musical instruments, so he's not taking a radical position, accusing people of committing a sin like Nadab and Abihu, offering false worship or something.

But it's just a well-written book, and I, in fact, interviewed him three times on this book. If anybody wants to look that up on the Iron Trip and Zion Radio website, irontripandzionradio .com. And if you type in Old Light, all of those interviews will come up.

And let's see what time it is, because I want to make sure. I think that would probably be the wisest thing to do, is go into our first commercial break right now, and then when we come back, we are going to have you delve deeper into your book and about the subject at hand.

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Welcome back.

If you just tuned us in, our guest today is Pastor Oliver Almond Smith, who is an elder at Trinity Grace Church in Manchester, England, and we today are going to be addressing his book, Gathered for Glory, Why We Worship.

And if you do have questions, submit them to chrisarnson at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence. And before you start digging into the primary contents of your book, I just wanted to quickly read a few statements.

These are not questions from listeners, but statements. We have Gary Morrison, pastor of Trinity Baptist Church of Allentown, Pennsylvania, who is originally from the UK. He wanted me to send his greetings to you.

I don't know if that means he knows you personally, or he just knew that you were a fellow Brit, but do you know Gary?

Yeah, I know Gary. Gary's actually, I think, originally from South Africa, but he ministered in the UK for a number of years, just down the road from us here, so I know Gary well.

Please forgive me, Pastor Gary, for forgetting the accent where the origins are. And also, we have, let's see here, a comment from Eric in Venus, Texas. I really like to listen to this Dear Brothers preaching.

And then finally, we have Pastor Morungi Egweta, who is in Kenya, Africa. I love Pastor Oliver Almond Smith. His ministry has been so impactful to me and my own ministry at Trinity Baptist Church in Nairobi.

So those are some nice greetings that you have there.

Thank you. Yeah, I've known Morungi well for many, many years, so I appreciate that very much.

And by the way, we plan to have Pastor Egweta on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio again. He has been a guest on the show in the past, and we're going to have him back to address the subject of his new book on TULIP, the Five Points of Calvinism.

So I'm looking forward to that. Well, let's dive in now to your own book, which is the subject at hand for us today, on a very important issue because of the fact especially that there are so many divisions in the body of Christ, even amongst churches that share the same theology and at times the same confession of faith.

There are very strong differences of opinion on worship. You might even have a very strong difference of opinion from the person sitting next to you most Sundays in the pew at church. But this has actually caused church splits and so on.

So this is a very important issue. Tell us where we should begin now in this very important subject.

Well, I think I would begin where you just left us there, brother, which is sitting next to someone else in church. So at least if you're sitting next to someone else at church, then you have begun to understand one of the most foundational and essential aspects of worship, which is that we must gather as Christ's people.

We must gather. As I say again, hence the title of the book, Gathered for Glory. If we do not gather together, what kind of spirituality do we have? Now, it's true in the New Testament that we are told that the emphasis in true worship is not on a particular place.

And that's true. And we rejoice in that. You don't have to go to Jerusalem. You don't have to go to London. You don't have to go to New York or Los Angeles or whatever. You don't have to go to Mecca. You don't have to go to a particular place.

You don't even have to go to a particular building in order to worship God. That is true. But does that mean then that you worship God in all of life and that there is no special blessing or special calling given to God's people, which requires us to gather together?

And I think when you look at the unfolding narrative of Scripture, every book of the Bible screams out at us and says, no, we absolutely must gather together. Obviously, in the Old Testament, that cannot be controverted.

It's inescapable. Gather together. We must gather together as God's people. That is why the tabernacle was built. That is why the temple was built. And the people were called to gather. The trumpet was blown and the people gathered together at the tabernacle.

The feasts were announced and the people came together in Jerusalem to worship at the temple. So yeah, the gathering in the Old Testament, nobody really can argue with that. But then there's this argument, ah, once we get to the New Testament, the gathering is not required.

We have this individual relationship with Christ. All our spirituality is private. It's personal. It's me and Jesus, me and Jesus, me and Jesus. And that's the sum total of everything. But again, that simply will not fly when you read the New Testament.

That won't, you can't sustain that view. Look at the way in which the New Testament is structured. It's all gatherings of people. Obviously, in that transition period when Christ came and we have the gospel accounts, they're still gathering together at the temple because the Pentecost hasn't yet come.

But if you go post-Pentecost, what do we have? Well, we have Paul writing to churches, Paul calling churches to gather together to hear the reading of his letters. There is that clear anticipation and understanding that when his letters are read, they are read to churches, churches that comprise all kinds of people.

Just read Ephesians. Just read Colossians. Men are addressed. Women are addressed. The elderly are addressed. The young are addressed. Parents are addressed. Children are addressed. Masters are addressed.

Servants are addressed. All kinds of Christians in all kinds of stages of life are expected to be present as the word of God, the apostolic testimony is made known. Again, you look at the Acts of the Apostles and what do you find?

Gatherings. People gather. The day of Pentecost, they gathered. Following the day of Pentecost, they continued steadfastly together, gathering together to fellowship, gathering together to break bread, gathering together to pray, gathering together to hear preaching.

And so the testimony of the New Testament continues and continues until you reach Hebrews. And when you get to Hebrews, what do you get? Do not forsake the gathering of yourselves together. Let us draw near.