July 11, 2024 Show with Paul R. Karstens on “The Training of Pastors in the Doctrines of Sovereign Grace in South Africa”

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 in view in 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 Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this 11th day of July, 2024.

Before I introduce my guest and our topic of the day, I was just informed this morning that another dear senior saint has gone home to eternity with our Lord, Savior, God, and King Jesus Christ. His name is Gary D. Long, and he has long served his King Jesus and the body of Christ as a faithful ambassador for the gospel of sovereign grace.

And over the years, I have given away dozens of copies of his book, Definite Atonement. In fact, I strongly urge everyone who listens to this program to go to Amazon. It's still available at Amazon. Definite Atonement by Gary D. Long.

And that booklet, it was a truly helpful aid, and even in my own life, in getting to understand, appreciate, and love even more the precious doctrine of Definite Atonement, which has also been nicknamed Limited Atonement, Particular Redemption, and Substitutionary Atonement.

And I strongly urge you to get that. But Gary D. Long was in his mid -80s when he went home to his master, and we ask of you to please pray for the Long family and for everyone mourning the loss of this great elder statesman of the sovereign grace movement amongst Baptists in the United States.

And I want to thank again Pastor Bill Sasser for giving me the news today. Well, it's quite providential that the first and only time that I ever met the aforementioned Gary D. Long was also the first and only time I've ever met face-to-face my guest today.

And I had no idea, obviously, and neither did he, that our brother Gary D. Long would be going home to glory today on the same day that we are having an interview. My guest today is Paul R. Karstens, who has served the Body of Christ in Cape Town, South Africa as an elder and a teacher at the Bible Institute of South Africa, Cape Town Biblical College, and the School for Biblical Church Leadership.

I met them both on the same day in Franklin, Tennessee, at the church where the aforementioned Bill Sasser is the pastor, Grace Church at Franklin. You hear commercials every single day for Grace Church at Franklin.

They are a faithful supporter financially of this program. But I met my guest today, Paul R. Karstens, and the late Gary D. Long on the same day at the John Bunyan Conference several years ago there in Franklin, Tennessee.

So it is quite a remarkable act of God's providence that we have him on today. And today we are going to be addressing the training of pastors in the doctrines of sovereign grace in South Africa. It's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Trepans, Iron Radio, Paul R. Karstens.

Greetings, brother.

Hi, Chris. Hi, Chris. Thank you for having me on your show.

Oh, it's great to have you on the program, brother. Well, why don't you first and foremost tell our listeners about Cape Town Biblical College?

Chris, Cape Town Biblical College is a very small school in the northern suburbs of Cape Town. Cape Town is quite a big city, probably in the region of about 4 .5 million people. And the school was started a number of years ago by a Korean lady who had a vision to train pastors.

But she never had a faculty. She never had teaching staff. And so she asked a number of us who are in ministry, either teaching or in pastoral ministry, to come and assist in the training of pastors in one of the regions of Cape Town.

And so it's a fairly young school, probably been around for about 15 years. And that's as long as I've been teaching there. So at one stage, I taught at two schools, the Bible Institute of South Africa for 22 years, and then alongside of that, also teaching at Cape Town Biblical College.

I hope that helps you a little bit. Sure.

And tell us now about the School for Biblical Church Leadership.

Chris, we started the training or the idea of the School for Biblical Church Leadership probably about five years ago, just before COVID struck. And the burden was to reach out to pastors in the more rural areas who will never get the opportunity of coming to Bible colleges in the cities.

And my burden was to get theological education, basic Bible training out to pastors. And so instead of pastors coming to us, we decided to go to them in the rural areas. And that idea started about five years ago.

And so the idea really was for pastors who are in full-time ministry with no training, pastors who are bivocational to stay in their jobs, and pastors to stay with their families. And we would make the effort then with a theological background to go and train them in basic Bible knowledge, which they would never have received had we not had the burden to go to them and so forth.

And that's where we came up with the School for Biblical Church Leadership.

Great. Well, if anybody wants more information, the website to go to is ctbiblical .co .za. C-T, which stands for Cape Town, biblical .co .za. And God willing, we'll repeat that later on in the program.

Also, before I forget, and to make sure you are aware of this before we run out of time at the end of the program, my guest today, Paul Carstens, is preaching at two churches. He's already been preaching here in the United States, but he's preaching at two more churches before he returns to Cape Town, South Africa.

And the first is Beaver Baptist Church of Beaver, Pennsylvania. And when are you preaching there, Paul?

This coming Sunday. This coming Sunday? Yeah, this coming Sunday, yes.

And if you want more information about that, go to beaverbaptist .org, beaverbaptist .org. And then following that, he is preaching at Gospel Fellowship Church of Sussex, located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

And I'm assuming that will be the following Sunday?

It will be the following Sunday, yes, on the 21st, yes.

And if anybody wants more details on the Gospel Fellowship of Sussex in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, go to gospelfellowshipsussex, and that's spelled S-U-S-S-E-X dot com, gospelfellowshipofsussex .com. Well, we have a tradition here, Paul, on Iron Sherpa and Zion Radio.

Whenever we have a first-time guest, such as yourself, we have that guest give a summary of their salvation testimony that would include any kind of religious atmosphere in which you may have been raised and what kind of providential circumstances our Sovereign Lord raised up in your life that drew you to himself and saved you.

So I would love to hear your story.

Oh, I'll be glad to share that. I grew up in a Roman Catholic home, and my mom and dad, you know, got converted in 1973 in an evangelical Reformed Anglican church in Cape Town. And very shortly after that, in 1975, or even in the years before that, they would take us to church, whereas before they would never go to church.

And so all of us children tagged along, you know, with them to go to church. We were not exactly happy about that as young children.

Hey, sometimes even as an adult I'm not happy about it.

We very reluctantly did go, and we would go to the morning and the evening service, and that made things worse because in the day evening services were very, very well attended. In fact, they were converted in an evening service, and there was a radical change in their lives.

They showed a difference that we saw. They were never churchgoers before. They always sent us to church when we were in the Catholic church. And then they got saved. The whole household changed, and they took us to church.

And one Sunday evening in November 1975, I heard the gospel being preached by a very well-known preacher in Cape Town at St. James Church, where incidentally, a number of years later, the St. James Church massacre took place.

But in 1975, I sat and heard the gospel being preached from John 3, and I surrendered my life to Christ. And almost immediately, I understood what that gospel meant. I think there was a lot of preparation that took place in my life.

A few years previously, one of the priests that was involved in our school introduced the gospel in little ways because he got saved. And so that prepared the way for the Lord, giving us, myself and my sister, a few months later, salvation.

When you said the priest gave you the gospel, was he a Roman Catholic priest or a Reformed Anglican priest?

He was a Roman Catholic priest who got converted.

And he was still in the Roman Catholic church?

He was still in the Roman Catholic church, and eventually he got booted out.

Well, thank God for that.

Yeah. And he would introduce us to the early choruses and things like, you know, reach out and touch the Lord as He passes by. And all those made an impression, early impressions on our lives. And I think one of the things that made an indelible impression upon my life is that he would let us do these parables.

And the parable that we did that made an impression, I now realize, or many years later, I realized that God was using it to prepare. It was the rich man and Lazarus. And we would do the play as, you know, primary school children on the rich man and Lazarus.

And I was Lazarus. And as we went through that play, something struck me that the Lord was basically speaking to me. And the foundations were being laid in preparation for a few years later, in 1975, where God would use all of that background in my own salvation.

So, you know, that's wonderful. We must never forget that, you know, God often prepares our hearts in amazing ways to eventually bring the truth, you know, to our hearts.

By the way, do you keep in touch with this former Roman Catholic priest?

No, you know, we lost contact with him. My mother said that, you know, he died very, very shortly after that.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, I mean, it's many, many years ago. We're talking about, I mean, that's a long time ago, 1970, you know, 1973, 74, 75, of course, was quite some time ago.

Well, that is just another reminder to our listeners and to me, myself, that we should never view someone like a Roman Catholic priest as beyond any hope of redemption and avoid evangelizing them. One of my dearest friends who is now in heaven, Richard Bennett, who edited a book published by Banner of Truth, Far From Rome, Near to God, the testimony of 50 converted Roman Catholic priests.

Richard was a dear friend of mine. He actually, even though he was a man of meager means himself, he financially supported Iron Trup and Zion Radio, loved to be interviewed on Iron Sharp and Zion Radio.

And he is an example of someone who was a Roman Catholic priest. And after nearly dying in an automobile accident in Trinidad, he came to Christ and eventually became a Reformed Baptist evangelist and founded BereanBeacon .org, and that still exists.

BereanBeacon .org, so if you want to look that up, folks, that will have a wealth of information on how to evangelize your Catholic family, friends, and loved ones. And that's being run today by some friends of mine who were also very close friends of Richard Bennett.

Now, I remember during your description of your salvation testimony, you said that you were for a time a member of a Reformed Anglican church in South Africa. And was that where you discovered the doctrines of sovereign grace?

Not really. We never knew those words at all. I mean, I was very young when I got converted, but it was a solid Reformed church. Preaching was expository, biblical, and I was young. I got immediately involved in the Sunday school and in youth work and started to really have a love for growing.

I think what was important in those days was really laying strong foundations, getting good discipleship when you're young and having a love for scripture, laying strong foundations in one's life. And I certainly grew.

My parents eventually left the Anglican church because for some reason they thought it was too close to the Catholic church in terms of a belief system. In particular, they differed on the understanding of baptism.

They differed. My father said he believed that the scripture was talking about believers' baptism. And so he took the entire family out of that tradition. Although it was a very, very strong Reformed Anglican church, he wanted to get to a church that practiced believers' baptism.

And that's why at a very young age all of us eventually left and joined the Baptist church in our local area.

And was that Baptist church a sovereign grace-believing church?

No, there were very few sovereign grace-believing churches in those days. I mean, I only came to know the doctrines of grace when I went to seminary.

Which one was that?

Nobody spoke that language. Cape Town Baptist Theological Seminary, that's where I did my undergraduate and my honors degrees.

By the way, there is a wonderful Reformed Anglican brother in South Africa that I've interviewed. His name is Jake Griesel, and he is on the Faculty of Theology at George Whitefield College and Northwest University in South Africa.

I'm familiar with those colleges, yes.

And perhaps one of these days, by God's providence, you two can meet because he's a wonderful brother. Well, I'm going to give our listeners our e-mail address, chrisarnsen at gmail .com, c-h-r-i-s-a-r-n-z-e-n at gmail .com.

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We're going to be going to our first commercial break right now, and when we return, we are going to be hearing more about the specific theme of our day today, and that is Training of Pastors in the Doctrines of Sovereign Grace.

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So go to royaldiadem .com today and mention Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. We are now back with Paul Carstens who is training pastors in the doctrines of sovereign grace in South Africa. And if you have any questions, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

Give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence. Well, Paul, I think it would be wise to start with when you are meeting with men who are either in the very beginning stages of entering into pastoral ministry, whether it's their seminary training or Bible school training or if it's just something they believe they are receiving from God as far as the call to the pastoral ministry, what are the things, the major things that are to be looked for not only the person themselves when they are examining their own hearts and minds but even someone such as yourself who is instructing them as to whether or not you believe the call is truly from God for them to enter the pastoral ministry and or whether it's just something that they may be infatuated with an idea of what being a pastor is all about.

They may like public speaking. They may like being the center of attention. They may just love the Bible and they love Christians but they're not necessarily suited for a pastoral position. So why don't you tell us about those things that you believe are primarily of concern when somebody is believing that they have been called by God to be a pastor.

That's a difficult one but I think I've always been of the opinion that you've got to build relationships with people before you make those decisions as to whether somebody's called. I like the word you use, call to ministry, because that's the key, isn't it?

It's the key to know that God has called you to ministry. A lot of people could care less about a call to ministry but I'm very keen to look for that and the way we do it is build relationships with them.

It's not something that you can necessarily figure out immediately or in the short term but get them into the classroom and together we can figure that out with them. Most of the people that we train have been in ministry for a longer time.

I would rather say that anybody who's going to stick it out in ministry for a long period of time, there's a stronger chance of them being called to ministry. The people that we train in the School for Biblical Church Leadership are older students and they've been around for a long time and for most of them I have a sense that there's a strong call to ministry because they keep on coming back for more and as we build relationships with them, they start to realize that it's not about the money, it's not about the position but it's really about God's call to ministry.

So that's a tough one. I mean we can get it wrong sometimes but I would rather them come, build relationships with them and then we can figure that out over time.

Well, so are these men who are there predominantly or perhaps exclusively because as you've already said they have been in ministry a long time, is it because they are clearly aware that you specifically are a believer in the doctrines of Sovereign Grace, also known as Calvinism, also known as Reformed Theology and so on.

Are they aware of that and they want to know more about it? Are they already seasoned Calvinists themselves and they just want to learn more about the art of preaching, homiletics and perhaps hermeneutics and so on and shepherding and all that comes with it.

What's the typical thing, if there is such a thing, that you find amongst those men coming to you for training?

Chris, there's no typical person. They come from a variety of backgrounds and the vast majority of them haven't got a clue what the doctrines of grace are all about.

And.

We want them to come. That's the important thing. We want them to feel confident with us. We want them to trust us and so forth, that we are not fly-by-nighters, that we are here to build them up in the true faith.

You know, you use the words Reformed and Calvinism. We would prefer not to use those words in South Africa. We have a bad history with those words.

Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa?

Correct. Yeah. I mean, I grew up in the apartheid system for most of my life and those are not good words. So we don't use Reformed. We don't use Calvinism. But that's what we mean. So when we train, I like the word the doctrines of grace.

It's not a term known by them but it's really what we teach. And eventually they start to understand where we are coming from and so forth. It's small beginnings. Most of these people that we are training are they've got absolutely no Bible training background.

And sometimes they're in ministry for 20, 30 years. Look, you need to understand that the apartheid left a lot of people untrained. And that's why we feel the burden to go to them. The majority of our people that we are training are charismatic and Pentecostal from that background.

They love the Lord. They desire us for more training. We don't train reformed people because it's like preaching to the converted. And we prefer training pastors who have little or no theological background and get them to understand what God's grace is all about.

Yes. It's interesting that you said over there they don't use or don't like the terms reformed and Calvinist in a similar fashion. I am acquainted with a brother. I'm not sure if he's still pastoring there, but there was a really powerful, powerful preacher, Amrash Simirath, and I may be mispronouncing his name, but he was and perhaps still is the pastor of the Reformed Evangelical Church in Trinidad.

The exact city is Tunapuna, Trinidad, and he and the believers of the Doctrines of Sovereign Grace, a .k .a. Reformed Theology in Trinidad, do not typically use the word Baptist, even if they are Baptist, because in Trinidad, many of the churches calling themselves Baptist are involved in all kinds of false religious practices, are involved in animism and really bizarre beliefs that are not even within the pale of Christianity.

So, obviously they want to separate themselves. Even though they are Baptist and perhaps even Reformed Baptists, they don't use the word Baptist. So I understand why. So, when you're training up these men in the pastoral office, which obviously involves more than just soteriology and theology and so on, are there any men who, since you say that most of them don't even have any clue what those doctrines are, are there any of them that say at some point in the training, wait a minute now!

You sound like you're trying to pull some willow over our eyes. This sounds like that Calvinist heresy. Have any of them gotten up and left?

No. Maybe a handful, but over the many, many years that we've trained them, there's always been an acceptance and a desire to learn more. Chris, in many, many ways and I've been talking to the American churches about this, Africans are very accepting of the word.

Now, that could be positive and negative, it could be a good thing or a bad thing. The good thing is that they embrace us and they're willing to grow. The bad thing is, sometimes they get desperate and then they embrace false teaching and so forth, and so the sooner we get to them, the better.

But there's more of an acceptance rather than a rejection.

Of.

The truth of God's word and so forth. Very, very few people in our training have started with us and have left. Most of the people, the lights go on at certain stages and they realize they've been on some wrong trajectory and so forth, and they need to correct what they have wronged and so forth.

And we are here to facilitate and grow them and patiently do it. You can't force people to change decades of sometimes false teaching. But you've got to, it's all about building relationships with these men and getting them to trust you that this is actually, this is the truth, this is the right way to go.

This is what the Bible says. And you have to do this with proper biblical exegesis. You can't do that sucking things out of your thumb or coming with some book that you've read or coming with some creed that you have.

Those things have a place. But what is that verse actually saying? Or if you say that, where do you get that from? Show me where you're getting that from. And they will amen, oh, and say, but it's not there.

So we'll say to them, that's the issue, that's the problem. It's a lack of an understanding of the truth of the Bible. It's the authority of Scripture you're pushing them back to. Where do you find this in the text?

Or if you're looking at the text, does the text say that? Or does the text say what you're saying? So they will have to look back into the text, put their eyes on the verse, and then realize, oh no, what have I done?

I've misread that verse in Scripture. So that's it. It's the Bible engaging them. God commuting with them and wanting to change their hearts through His word and so forth. And we facilitate that because I think that's the right way to go, rather than giving people what you want them to hear.

You want them to engage from the text of Scripture and so forth. And that's really what we are doing, both at Cape Town Biblical College, and specifically through the two schools that we have, the School of Biblical Church Leadership in Queenstown, on the east coast of South Africa, and in Kimberley, in the northern Cape province of our country.

We can talk more about those two schools, specifically what they are and what we do there, and who we are training and so forth.

Why don't you do that?

Well, let me just say to you that I taught at a residential school. I was a professor of theology for 22 years, and it was wonderful teaching in that environment, but I started to think we're not getting the senior pastors and engaging them and training them in the teachings of God's Word.

So my burden was, instead of waiting for them to come, Chris, the thing about it is this, you know, we've got 32 unemployment in our country, and it's not economies and shambles. And a lot of pastors that we train are bivocational.

So they are working to put bread on the table, and they're pastoring a church. The churches do not often pay them what they deserve, you know, because they're just because of poverty and so forth. So we want them to stay in their jobs, and then we also want them to stay in their families.

A lot of schools will say, we will support the man to come, but you'll have to leave your wife and your children at home. Now that's not healthy, that. I don't believe that. You must be correct. So we want them to stay in their families, we want them to stay in their jobs, and also, we want them to stay in their ministries, because sometimes the problem is you'll have dozens of churches with no pastors.

And it is a problem, and so the ones that are pastoring churches, we want them to stay. Sometimes they're pastoring more than one church. So here's the vision, here's the burden. A group of us decided to sit down and work on a training program and a vision.

Instead of the church leaders coming to us in the colleges, the residential schools, in the cities, those of us that have been trained and have the experience, why don't we go to them? Let them stay in their positions, and then all we ask them to do is to take a week off work and put in leave, and then join us for some training, maybe three or four or five days, depending on what we're doing and how we set the program up.

So we go as a team and we go and train them. I also want to talk to you about a partnership that we have with the TLI Training Leaders International out of Minneapolis. I believe in partnerships, I believe in working together, sharing of resources and so forth, and TLI in Minneapolis has been a wonderful partnership for us from the time that we started.

Is that affiliated with the Gospel Fellowship Church of Sussex?

No. They're totally independent.

Yeah. Oh, okay. And, yeah, well, feel free to continue giving us more details about that as well.

Sure. So let me just carry on. Okay. Let me talk to you about... So we decided to work with this organization in Minneapolis, you know, Training Leaders International, and their burden is to go to a third world or majority world environment, much like what we're doing, and they have a program or curriculum or training program that's geared for this exact pastor who's not able to get to a seminary or to a Bible college and train them in biblical truth.

So they come across, at their own expense, these lecturers, these professors of theology come and they partner with us and we team teach in the various schools, and they have schools in many, many parts of the world and so forth.

And we have a very, very healthy partnership. So at the moment we have two schools, one amongst, you know, the Xhosa people in the Eastern Cape in a place called Queenstown. The Xhosa people are the second biggest tribe in our country, and very, very culturally, you know, driven and so forth, but tremendous needs, a desire to be trained.