Austin Duncan Interview

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the

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Apostle Paul said, �But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.�

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In short, if you like smooth, watered down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn�t for you.

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By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we�re called by the

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Divine Trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King. Here�s our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth, glad to be your host. We�re almost into our sixth year now, and if you listen regularly, you know the format.

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Monday, it�s a sermon that I preach on a Sunday here at Bethlehem Bible Church. I�m in Malachi now.

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It�s been really fascinating as we go through the oracle or burden of Malachi. Tuesdays, I usually talk to Pastor Steve about issues in the church, what�s church membership, how should you find a church, how could you leave a church.

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Thursdays, I usually teach something positive. I call it kind of K -Love Thursday. What is imputation?

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What is the act of obedience of Christ? Something like that. Fridays, I usually take people to the theological woodshed.

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Sadly, there�s lots of folks that need to be taken to the woodshed. But on Wednesdays, I like to interview folks and learn what the

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Lord has done in and through them. It�s fascinating to me that God uses sinful, fallible, finite people just like me, and He�s building

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His kingdom, He�s building His church. And so today, speaking of sinful and fallible, we have Austin Duncan here on No Compromise for a

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Day. Amen. Austin. Mike, thanks for that. Thanks for that bumper intro.

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That�s really helpful. Wasn�t that really nice? Yeah, two things. I�ve never been so happy that it�s not

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Friday, at least on your show, because I�m not ready for the woodshed. Somebody actually sent me a t -shirt.

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Is it a theological woodshed Friday t -shirt? Yeah, no, no. I�m really glad that we�re pretending it�s

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Wednesday and this is an interview for that day and not for Friday. I�m just not ready for Friday. And yeah, if you�re looking for fallible, you�ve come to the right place.

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Austin Duncan is a pastor at Grace Community Church. Most people know who John MacArthur is.

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He�s the college pastor there. He�s been the junior high pastor, I believe, high school pastor. And was it a graduation to be the college pastor?

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Are you kind of working up through the ranks? Will it be young adults next? No, they�ve tried me in four or five different jobs here. They�re just looking for one that I could actually do.

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So they�re still trying me in different things. I�m hoping that eventually they�ll figure it out.

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Well, Austin, in all seriousness, I thank you for your ministry at Grace Community Church. Not just for college students in general, but my son

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Luke attends the college ministry there, and so thank you very much for teaching him the

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Word of God in a Christ -centered way. I really appreciate it. I got to spend some time with Luke last weekend at a graduation party for one of the kids at the college.

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He�s a fine young man. He was looking forward to spending some time with his family this summer. I think you guys are going to surf or something.

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He�s sort of like the young and handsome version of you. That�s right. Let�s talk a little bit about college ministry, because I know your philosophy, but maybe some of our listeners don�t know.

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There seems to be a desire for attendance and interaction with some of our young college students, and so too often churches turn to everything but the

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Word of God. Tell us why the proclamation of the Word of God is so central to college ministry and how you go about it at Grace Community Church.

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Yeah, we have a ministry opportunity at Grace, being in Los Angeles, and not just an opportunity, but a responsibility to reach students for Christ on campus, and there are other ministries that happen on campuses in the greater

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Los Angeles area, parachurch organizations, Campus Crusade for Christ, InterVarsity, stuff like that.

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We really have a heart here at this church that certainly predates my involvement in college ministry here, to be a resource to students on campus who love the

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Lord, to help them get plugged into a solid local church, to use their gifts in ministry, and then to partner with those students to reach their campuses for the gospel's sake.

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I mean, you know, I've been in student ministry for a long time, as you said, junior high, high school, college students, and there's just no environment like a college campus that's such a ripe field for harvest, you know, it's an environment that's highly social.

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People are talking about pressing topics, sometimes even eternal topics or issues of philosophy or history that need to be informed by a

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Christian biblical worldview, and our students have such an incredible opportunity and responsibility to be light to that campus and to bring a biblical worldview into that world.

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So, you know, and that's not just a Los Angeles thing, but it is a pressing issue here, because 14 minutes from our church, there's a huge campus,

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Cal State Northridge, with 40 ,000 undergrads, and I mean, almost every country in the world is represented there.

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And so, I just see...I love what I'm doing, because I see a connection to God's global goal in bringing glory to himself and reaching every tribe and tongue of the nation.

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And, you know, 30 minutes away is UCLA, and, you know, that's obviously famous for her historic basketball program, but we have a group of 300 students there every

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Friday night who are passionate about reaching their campus for Christ and just to build into those leaders and to equip those students and to try to teach them what you're asking about, the centrality of the proclaimed

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Word, you know, that that's their responsibility to be built up in the Word, and that's why they're driving up here on Sunday mornings and being a part of a healthy church and taking that Word to campus with them.

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So, we've got ministry at USC and UCLA, which reminds us of the unity we have in Christ, two schools that hate each other.

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But we have students from both schools that have the same desire to proclaim the excellency of Jesus there.

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So, I love it, and what we do when they come together, all these campuses, and, you know, we've got college students, we've got young adults, college students that aren't what they used to be.

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Some of them are 26 years old now and gaining sort of a college age group, and we, you know, we don't want to be a church service for them.

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We want them to go to church. Pastor John does, I would say, an admirable job teaching the

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Bible. And so, what we do, I want to complement that corporate worship service.

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So, we have a huge Sunday school class with about 800 college kids in it, and we preach the

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Word of God in an expository way. We sing together. We spend some time being practical, talking about, you know, issues that are pressing in their world and how the

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Bible applies to those things. We try to break them up into smaller Bible study groups so they can have some of those questions answered, build some discipleship, mentorship kind of relationships.

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So, that's what I do, and the Word of God is at the center of all those things.

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So, I believe in preaching, I believe in evangelism, and I can't do any of those things apart from the perfect way.

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Pete Austin, so many people might come into college ministry and say, well, but I do teach the

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Word, and when I tried to teach the Word of God, it didn't really work, and so I've gone to other philosophies or approaches.

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What would be your response to someone who would say that? Pete Yeah, you know, that, to use the parlance of our time, that bums me out, because, you know,

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I think there's so many student ministries, and this is true of college, high school, and even junior high kids that are trying to make a really stupid version of church that is the lowest common denominator approach to both the human intellect and to, you know, the means that God's given us to evangelize and put people into His Word, and I think the cheap substitute approach is not just harmful,

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I think it's detrimental, I think it makes a long -term negative impact on the way students think about what the

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Church is or what the Church is for. You know, I think because of our really just widespread approach to doing youth ministry in a way that doesn't hold the

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Word of God in high regard, it's made a whole generation of Christians who think that what they're looking for when they look for a church, now that they're adults, is some glorified version of a go -to game show host pastor who can entertain them and thrill them and keep it light and goofy.

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And I'm a light and goofy guy, you know, by nature, that's kind of how God's wired me, I think, but I understand sobriety as well, and I understand the

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Word of God being taken seriously, and I would never say youth groups shouldn't have fun.

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I'm, you know, I'll accommodate and play volleyball, and I don't think that's outside of God's created realm, but I think there's a difference between replacing the

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Word of God with cheap substitutes, with trying to be so culturally relevant that that becomes the driving force to try to appeal to the flesh, to try to entertain, rather than to shepherd and lead and preach in the way that God has intended.

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So I talk to youth pastors all the time about how do we keep the Word of God central in what we're doing, and when

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I think about high school ministry, college ministry, I want to help these students build a robust ecclesiology.

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What were you talking about when you opened the show? I don't remember what day of the week it is. It's Ecclesiology Day, but that's every

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Sunday for us in college ministry. I just want to remind these students that God has an indestructible purpose, and the manifestation of that indestructible purpose that the gates of hell can't prevail against is seen in local churches, and they need to link their life to a local church in what they think is the busiest time of their life, you know, college years.

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Little do they know what it's like just a few years off of that, right? But, you know,

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I want them to understand that that's when they need to start to give and sacrifice and live for others and take

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God at His Word in connecting their life to His eternal purposes as manifested in the local church.

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So that's big boy stuff. It's not fun and games. And when student ministry is done with cheap substitutes or when it's just, you know, some kind of cultural dog and pony show, they're missing out on building and investing into young people who are the church now and who are going to make choices about what their churches will look like in the future if they leave churches, and if they've only received fluff and ablum and goofball stuff, they're not going to understand, you know, what

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God's purposes for the church really are. Talking to Austin Duncan today. He's in youth ministry at Grace Community Church as a college pastor there.

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Austin, I think of S. Lewis Johnson, and he would say, ministry is to be sober, but you don't have to be somber.

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And I think there's a real joy, especially we as men who rejoice and exalt in the sovereign, distinguishing grace of God.

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If you want to call it Calvinism, that's fine by me. The joy that we can have in light of that, knowing who we are, who we were, and then now who we are in Christ Jesus, I'm all for excitement and fun and to have joy and enthusiasm, but certainly not at the expense of the

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Word of God. So, I'm just echoing that. Tell me a little bit about the Foundry Conference, because I'm sure you'll address some of these matters.

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June 5th, 6th, and 7th, just outside of Washington, D .C. What's going to be happening there?

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You know, my friend, Jesse Johnson, he was… Who's that? Jesse who? …college years.

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Jesse Johnson, the Reverend Jesse Johnson, is a pastor at Emmanuel Bible Church there in the

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D .C. area, northern Virginia, Emmanuel Bible Church. He asked me to come out and to help him put on a conference for the college students in that area and say, if there's any listening to this show,

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I hope that they'll join us for that weekend. It's the first weekend in June for the Foundry Conference, and I'm sure it's on Emmanuel Bible Church's website.

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And you could Google it and find it, and yeah, we're going to have a great weekend together. Again, it's just the same thing we've been talking about.

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It's a biblical worldview. It's about connecting your life as a college person, as a young adult, to those great global purposes that God has in bringing glory to himself.

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It's about rejoicing in the sovereignty of God. We're going to have a fun weekend together, and I'm not sure what's in store.

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I, you know, I hope I get taken to a number of coffee shops, because that's kind of my thing.

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And, you know, that's how I keep up with college students at my current age, and I just take in a lot of coffee.

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And that seems to help, because I've noticed that college students don't sleep very much. So, I'm going to minister to college students that weekend with Jesse and another one of the pastors at the church, and I think we'll have a good weekend together in the

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Lord. Well, our listeners can go to emmanuelbible .net to find out more about that, the Foundry Conference, June 5th, 6th, and 7th.

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Austin, as I look at youth ministry, college ministry, I think of that juvenilization of American Christianity that Thomas Burglar wrote, and, you know, you've got a lot of put peanut butter on kids' faces and throw cheese balls to see if they stick, or jam grapes up people's noses and shoot them into a basket for snot put, or all these kind of things.

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Then it gets into, see, notice how I know these things? I'm trying to, like, identify with my audience.

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And then it's worked its way into the Corporate Worship Service on Sunday morning, but now

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I think it's almost working its way back into college and youth ministry.

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And I see Luke's friends at Masters College, and when I was just there during the Shepherds Conference, the

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Inerrancy Conference, these young men that he was with, hey, what about this issue?

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I've learned such and such a topic when I was growing up, but now I want to earn it for myself, or, excuse me, own it for myself.

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What does Burkoff have to say? Studying, deeply engaged in, of course, college life and fun and coffee, but they wanted to know what the

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Word of God said. And so I'm encouraged by these young people who are post -post -modern.

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They know there's truth, they know there's true truth, to use Francis Schaefer, and somebody please tell me the truth, because I know you're a phony if you don't.

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Well, Mike, I think as we see an obvious cultural decline all around us, and we hear the world's offering as to what the priorities are around us in a culture that's unbelieving, you know, from what marriage is to what tolerance is to, you know, what a good citizen of our society is, it doesn't take even much of a

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Christian worldview to understand how ludicrous and how unacceptable the world's standards are becoming.

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And so I think you have Christian young people who are recognizing that they are equipped, and they can be even more equipped to answer the folly of this age, and to say that we believe in things like a relationship between sexuality and gender.

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I mean, this is so basic, and it's so biblical, and it's so outside of what the world is selling right now, that our young people need to have confidence that they have the

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Word of God, and they know what the Bible says, and they can engage on the highest levels on these topics, because they know the

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Word of God. They're more wise than their teachers. So that's what's exciting about working with young people, is having the lights go on, like you're saying.

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Young men who are serious about the Word, and serious about engaging this culture with the truth, and about tearing down strongholds, and about, you know, knowing the reason

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God made them male and female, and knowing that marriage isn't just a cultural concept invented by, or identified by sociologists, but it's good and holy and created by God for men's happiness and holiness, and for His glory.

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And you know, when they gain this stuff, they're going counter to everything that the media is trying to sell them.

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And we have an obligation to train young people, to help them think biblically, to give them that robust worldview so that they can engage in all this stuff.

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And I just think it's becoming easier, not harder. As the world gets weirder, and more perverse, and more out there,

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I think it becomes even more simple to show them what the hope of the Gospel is, and how basically a biblical worldview answers all the questions that you have in this universe, because we're the ones who created it, right?

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Amen. We're talking to Austin Duncan today. Austin, let's go maybe with a little quicker answers, because I've got a short time left, and it'll be like a

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Todd Friel, I ask you a question, when you ask MacArthur a question, and answer it like in a minute. Do we call it a lightning round? Yeah, that's right.

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We call it lightning round. Hey, this is my show. So let me ask you just a couple questions, maybe five or so, and if you answer within a minute or less, that would be great.

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What's your favorite MacArthur book, and why? Our Sufficiency in Christ.

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It's not a new one, it's an old one, but you've got to get a copy. And because not only does it demolish the old integrationist, psychobabble approach to life and things, but because that's the book that set my heart with a deep connection to Psalm 19, to the sufficiency of Scripture for all of life, it's my favorite

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MacArthur book, and I bought myself a first edition copy that's funky, and old, and cool. All right.

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That's my favorite one. Great. Question two, why are you preaching through Judges verse by verse?

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Oh, boy, the dark days of the Judges. It's been an adventure, and we just last week finished the book of Judges.

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I preached through the book of Deuteronomy with college students just to show how hardcore I am, that I really do believe in the sufficiency of Scripture, and I learned so much preaching through Deuteronomy, the

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Romans, or the Old Testament, as some people have called it. And I try to keep going in the

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Old Testament. I go old, new, old, new with our Sunday school class, and I just decided to go

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Judges, because I love the historical books of the Old Testament, I just have a major connection to those in my heart, and I know they're just so unknown.

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And Judges in particular—I know I'm getting too long for lightning, but I've got to talk about the book of Judges—Judges in particular has such relevancy to an audience today in the

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Church, and it's not just, you know, don't be naughty like Samson.

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There are moral lessons in the book of Judges, but that's not central. What's central in the book of Judges, in my reading of it, in my study of it, is you have

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Israel being completely Canaanite, becoming more and more like these pagan cultures around them, so much so that they'll take

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Samson, their deliverer, their savior, their judge, and hand him over to the Philistines, because they're so comfortable not colliding with the world.

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And I see that in Christian young people today. It's so much easier to be worldly.

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It's so much easier to be Canaanite, to adopt their—you know, I think when we think about the

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Old Testament, we think about Israelites, you know, accommodating and becoming idolaters and worshiping these, you know, goofy images, and I don't think we realize just how cosmopolitan that was for them.

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I mean, they were doing what was cool, what was avant -garde, what was, you know,

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I mean, the sexual lores of that culture, the societal ideas, even their concepts of agriculture.

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I mean, this was the stuff that was in, and to buy into it was to be accepted in the world around them.

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And I just think that there's such an obvious parallel there. So the Book of Judges is really helpful in talking about pandering to the flesh and the dangers of compromise.

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Okay, I'll quit there. Well, that's excellent, because you're fired up about preaching the Word, and so I love that, and anytime someone uses the word avant -garde,

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I'm happy. All right, just a couple minutes— We started Ruth on Sunday. We started Ruth just because Judges has such a dark and depressing end.

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It's a chopped -up concubine, and things don't go really well in Israel, and then you have this bright sunrise of providence as the

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Book of Ruth opens. So that's what we're doing. Amen. What's your short response to the

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Southern Baptist opening their ranks to missionaries who now speak in tongues or have private prayer language? You know,

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I don't know anything about it. I mean, I know about private prayer languages because when I was a kid, I grew up in a in a

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Calvary Chapel world, and we were not only encouraged to go try to learn how to speak in tongues in our dorm rooms at summer camp, but made to feel left if we could not.

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And unfortunately, you know, I could not. I didn't realize that was because tongues are real languages and a gift given, you know, in the apostolic age.

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So as a young person raised with Pentecostal background, I just think it's so sad to see the modern conception of what were true and biblical gifts with very distinct purposes in building the early church just completely turned into something they were not.

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So I'm bubbed at private prayer languages, but I don't know anything about the FTC mission. All right.

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About one minute to go. In retrospect, it's been two years. Any thoughts of the

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Driscoll's books confiscated issue two years after the fact? I was there that day, and what an adventure.

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It's sad to see, you know, people sucked into a version of church that's man -centered and that's personality driven and that's crooked and debased by leadership that's not qualified.

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So it's really sad. I was in Seattle a few months ago. We've got about 20 seconds.

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Yeah, and I saw some of the wreckage of that whole thing. And I pray for those people that they find a good, solid church that teaches the

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Word of God, that has plural godly eldership, and connect their lives in that way. Amen.

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We're talking to Austin Duncan today, college pastor at Grace Community Church. Austin, thank you for your ministry, testimony of the

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Lord Jesus Christ, and for Gospel Preaching TV. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life -transforming power of God's Word through verse -by -verse exposition of the sacred text.

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Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston.

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You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

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The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff or management.