Count the Cost of Pastoral Ministry: An Interview with Chris Bolt

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 congregation.

So Eddie, our listeners can't see it, but you notice anything different about my face today?

I noticed you're not wearing any glasses.

I know I'm suffering right now through contact. I really like the contacts. It's actually, our trip to the Buffalo was like, I gotta get some contacts, because you lose your glasses too easy. But I have an astigmatism in both eyes, and I just, I'm really struggling to read this computer screen right now.

My wife and my son both have astigmatism, and they don't do well with contacts. I wear contacts every day, and have for close to 30 years now, and so I can't imagine wearing glasses and not wearing contacts.

Just a side note, I used to think it was, you have a, as in the article, astigmatism. But the word is astigmatism.

Astigmatism.

Yeah.

So, all right, that's enough banter. Welcome to the Rural Church Podcast. I'm your co-host, Alan Nelson, one of the pastors at Providence Baptist Church in Perryville, and with me, one of the men with me is your co-host, Eddie Ragsdale.

Say hello, Eddie.

Hello, everyone, and we're coming to you from a Tuesday, which it won't matter when.

No one cares.

But we normally do this on Wednesday mornings, and it's a Tuesday just afternoon, and so you may get a little different version of the rule.

I'm sure you can tell that you're listening on a Tuesday. No, we had to bend the rules for the famous, or is it infamous, Chris Bolt. How's it going, brother?

It's going all right. I think the famous versus infamous just depends on the day,.

Or the hour, even.

And the listener.

That's true.

That's true.

Although sometimes I'm a little bit worried when some listeners like me. Sometimes you say something and you think, oh, why are those people liking what I'm saying?

I was trying to think this before we came on. I can't remember actually what year you and I met, but I know we've known each other a few years. We've been on a few FBI watch lists.

I hope our names are touching.

Hey, I tell you, I'm really glad

Is that FBI or SBC?

Are they different? So I'm really glad Chris hasn't taken his Twitter down because that happens every now and then. Chris has Twitter and then he doesn't have Twitter. But I pulled this up. I was able to pull up your tweet from, I was looking at the date, May 15th.

We're recording this on May 28th. So just almost two weeks ago, a tweet that had, or as of right now, 600 and almost 13 ,000 views. I reached out to you after the tweet because I actually really liked it.

Even though on one hand, you may feel, and Ada, you haven't heard it yet, right? I'm going to read the tweet. On one hand, you may feel it's kind of pessimistic. I kind of see it more as realistic. And then I know from, there's an optimistic aspect of it as well.

But I'm going to read it. And I'm going to ask Eddie's first impression. And then we're going to let Chris have an opportunity to chat about it. And we'll just see where the conversation goes. So here it is, the tweet I'm now reading.

Chris writes, you are not Billy Graham. You are not John Piper. You are not Al Mohler. You will struggle to find a church. The church will have 75 people. It will be away from your family. Legacy families will control the church.

You can listen in on the committees. Their traditions cannot be broken. You will spend half your week on sermon prep. People will forget everything by next week. They will remember the joke you told. Your children will be taught heresy.

They will be the only kids there. They will be strictly judged. You cannot complain about your finances. Nobody cares about your degrees. You cannot afford a place to live. Your wife will envy your time with church members.

You will feel guilty about neglecting your family. You will think you're neglecting your flock. You will fall in love with some people. Your closest friends will die. The others will leave. Count the costs before you answer the call to ministry.

If you think I'm overstating my case, I'm not. If you think you're the exception, you're not. All the above is just the bare minimum. If you can, find something else to do. If you can't, you're still not called.

But if you are, count the costs. Then enjoy. Smiley face emoji. All right, Eddie. What's your live reaction here? Oh, you're muted or something, bro.

My live reaction is that there is too much in that that hits too close to home.

Yeah.

And you guys, before this podcast, maybe y 'all knew of each other that you're not recollecting, but basically don't know each other, right? It's not like Chris was like, I'm going to write about Eddie in this tweet.

Oh, man.

Yeah.

I mean, so many things. I'm like, man, that's exactly what it's like. You know, just thinking about things that have happened. You know, you said this tweet's about two weeks old, and I'm thinking about just the things that have happened in the last two weeks.

Well, Chris, tell us a little bit about the reaction you've had and also talk to us about your heart in this tweet.

Yeah.

So, I mean, there were some negative responses and people typically focus in on the negative. That's essentially what X exists to do, I think. And I know that because when there are controversial tweets out there, things that are kind of fighting, right, people just gravitate toward it versus when there's some sort of post of reconciliation or something to that effect.

Nobody pays attention to it. It doesn't go anywhere. There are no views or anything like that. So, yeah, there were negative responses. There were people who thought that I was complaining, you know, about me or my place of ministry or about my church, that sort of thing.

But I'll point out this is not just, I mean, I can certainly resonate with some of the things in this, but this is not just about me. And it's not a complaint at all, actually. The other thing is that this is interesting, and it's actually in contradiction to the complaint complaint.

Some people acted as though I was just lying, like I was making it up, which was fairly disparaging, to be honest, especially when it was coming from people who should, I would think, know better. But that really just drives home the point that I'm trying to make here, which is that there are a lot of people out there who don't know better.

And I do think that for one thing, obviously, there is a little bit of hyperbole here, right? So I'm not prophesying that these things are going to happen to every single person who ever goes into pastoral ministry.

But if these things don't happen, something else will that's similar. When I say that it's the bare minimum, I just mean there were people who were afraid I was deconstructing my faith when they read this.

There were people who were afraid for my mental health when they read this. And I just looked at it and I thought, this is fairly basic stuff, at least in some of the settings that I've been in. And I've been in, I guess, six different Southern Baptist churches now throughout the course of my life.

And there are similarities in all of those that can line up with a lot of what I say here. So no, this was meant for young men who are entering into pastoral ministry or have the desire to, which is a good thing.

And they have too high or too unrealistic of an expectation, both of themselves and also of the place to which they'll be called. And I don't mean that to cast some sort of cloud over the local church.

The way that I mean that is young men training for pastoral ministry often have an unrealistic idea of what it looks like to actually do pastoral ministry. And so they think they're going to be the guy who goes into a place and is beloved and ascends to the heights of these celebrity pastors, that sort of thing, which I wouldn't count those heights, by the way.

But also, they often think, I believe, that they'll walk into a church that's not one to be reformed, but one that is preformed. So they go in thinking that they'll have a plurality of elders and they'll have church discipline that's there already.

Everything will just kind of be in place. And frankly, that's just not the case. I would wager with most churches. I know that there are some distinctions that you could draw here along denominational lines, also along maybe the size of the church.

I still think there are things in general here that almost every pastor should be able to relate to in some form or fashion. Of course, this is a rural church podcast, and I do know that this is the case for most churches, I would say, in rural settings, especially in the South, especially in traditional—my circles are traditional Southern Baptist churches.

So that's just kind of my initial framing of this for the sake of the listener.

Yeah, thank you, brother. I'll share a small anecdote. When I was 24, I became—I was my first, I guess for lack of a better term, just for the sake of understanding, I became a senior pastor and I was at a church and I knew there were some issues.

I was actually a youth pastor and became pastor, and it was during that time I was just consuming all this non-Mark stuff. And I was just like, look, I know some of this will be—there'll be some hesitancy with some of this stuff.

But if I just teach them, if I just open up the Bible and I say, hey, look, but look, it's right here in the Bible, everybody's going to be like, wow, thank you for showing us this stuff. Praise God. And we're going to go forward together.

And that could be for another episode, but needless to say, it didn't work out. So the question I want to ask, and Eddie, you can weigh in too, like, what is the Chris Bolt assessment on why—I'm agreeing with you, everything that you said.

A lot of churches are like, this is not disparaging the church. Actually, in my opinion, this is holding a high view of the church because you're trying to have men ready to come in and truly bring about reformation, which is only by God's grace and the Spirit of God.

But the question I have is why are churches, particularly SBC churches, but it's not exclusive to them, why are churches in this condition?

Yeah, that's, man, I mean, that's a good question. I mean, ultimately, the answer is because we're sinners.

Yeah.

Another answer is probably because of, you know, a type of cultural Christianity that did take root in the South. You've got, I think that we have, I mean, I could speculate on this all day. I don't know how helpful it will be.

Maybe you or Eddie want to kind of throw in what you want to say on that. But, you know, I do think that culturally, even outside of the cultural Christianity aspect, there are things that are, I don't want to say unique, but in some instances they are.

I think you're in a similar setting, you know, small town, community, Southern style of thinking, a Southern way of life where there's tribalism, where the people who are there have been there for, you know, since the 1700s, they've established themselves there such that, you know, they have the church that they're in, they have the positions they're in in the community, and those two kind of overlap.

And by the way, and I mean, we'll get to this, I hope, but that's not all necessarily a bad But it can very easily give way to a type of thinking, a type of emotion even, a type of tribalism, a type of culture that is very difficult to penetrate with a strong biblical ecclesiology.

Almost so much that you can see strong communities at times, and I think that their ecclesiology actually suffers for it. So the community becomes the central point of the relationships that people have and whatnot, and then the church plays a subservient role to that rather than the other way around.

Now, I think with you, Alan, I mean, you grew up in that type of setting, I believe. I did not, but I fell in love with it in the 10 years that I, you know, that I served in Alabama and in Tennessee. So I'm kind of providing what I felt as an outsider, just kind of looking in on that and the challenge that is there.

Eddie, you have anything you want to weigh in there?

Well, I have a question that may take us in a little bit of a different direction. So if you guys want to...

Sure.

So one thing I want to say is, and I think we're seeing this in the SBC, like the women pastor fighting in the SBC right now, it's really, in my opinion, it's just a fruit issue.

Yes.

And it's the fruit issue of a poor ecclesiology. And a lot of that is, I think today we have a low view of the pastorate. And so you say, well, how do churches get in this situation? I'm not blaming pastors only, and I'm not blaming churches only.

I think Chris made a great point that we're sinners. But as you have, you know, used to a pastor was more of a staple in a community, and now no one cares what he thinks, you know, maybe because there's so many in one sense and another sense, because maybe so many have really burned bridges or shown themselves unfaithful or unqualified.

And so today, or I feel like today compared to for sure a hundred years ago, the pastor is just another guy in the community and no one really, he's not really set apart in the community, whereas used to, he would be, you know.

And so there's a lowering, a lowered view of the pastor. And a lot of that is because we have guys pastoring that shouldn't be pastoring, or guys are using the church to just, you know, especially with the rural church, I think it happens really significantly with the rural church.

And that is, you start with some little church and then you just keep working your way up. I'm not going to say this name, and I'm not trying to disparage the name. I'm just giving you something I saw.

And that is a few years ago, I preached for my sister's church in, just outside of San Saba, Texas, a little community called Cherokee, Texas, San Saba County. And I was looking at the previous pastor names.

One of the pastors there was a man by the name of Ronnie Floyd. Have you ever, you ever heard that name? So it's just interesting that these many rural churches have, guys have come in, they've stayed, and then they've catapulted somewhere else.

And so I think that that has played into the point. So in one sense, you can't blame the committees and the deacons. Like, they've taken over what pastors should have oversight of. They've just taken it over, but they've done it in an unhealthy and sinful way.

Anyway, so what question do you have, Eddie? Take a second.

Well, can I add something to that? I mean, I was trying to be nice at first with the pastors, but you're absolutely right,.

Right?

I mean, there is a sense in which you can look back and you can say, what have these men who came before as pastors done in these situations or not done in these situations to leave things kind of the way that they are right now?

That's one question you could ask, right? But there's also, there were two different groups of people who would reply to this tweet. One, I'm just going to call the reformed crowd. And they would come along and they read this and they said, well, that's just an unhealthy.

Church.

That's an unbiblical ecclesiology. And I'm thinking, yes, so what are you going to do about it, right? It's like, so there are those who would kind of turn their nose up at this sort of situation and move on.

And I think that's bad.

I do.

I think that's bad. And then there are those who would come along and they read this and they thought, well, this is why I'm going to go plant a church. Well, most church plants fail and they fail quickly.

And it may be the case that one of the reasons that church plants fail and fail quickly is because you have men going into ministry who don't want to deal with any of the things on this list, which frankly, most of these are fairly light.

Again, this is what I would consider bare minimum. I'm not even talking about the types of challenges that we know are acute and face our churches every three to five years, right? I know that's not a law of the universe, but generally that holds to be true with regard.

To these churches.

So, yeah, no, I think you're right. And I think too, it's interesting you mentioned that the office of pastor is not held in the type of esteem that it once was. And I think you're right about that. There are a lot of churches who want someone like them.

They want, you know, they want to go have the beer with Bill Clinton. Is that kind of, you know, which is there's a truth in that, right? I mean, I'm not any better than any of these folks, but on the other hand, like, yeah, I'm not just your friend.

I'm your pastor.

That's good. That's good, brother. Well, let the record show, Chris says he's not any better than Bill Clinton.

Hey, well, you know what you were saying there, Quatro, is really true. I know a lot of small rural churches that have self-consciously taken on the role of they know that no pastor's ever going to stay.

They know they're a stepping stone. My grandfather's church, just outside of Quitman, Arkansas, I would say it's a wonderful little church, but not ecclesiologically. It's a wonderful little church in the sense that you've got some real believers there who really do love the Lord, but they're a little small church outside of a small town in Arkansas.

They're a missionary Baptist church. Well, there's a missionary Baptist college in Conway. So over the years, they have just rotated through the young guys pastoring, you know, out of that little college, and they don't even ever believe they're going to have a pastor stay more than three to five years.

They don't even think that way. They self-consciously think of themselves as we're a starter church, like a young couple might buy a starter home, and they think of themselves like, we're here to train this guy so that he can go on to another church.

And so that's dangerous, both for the pastor and for the church, that they actually think they're here to pastor the pastor till he's ready to go pastor a bigger church. And so I think there's a lot of danger in that.

But the question that I said was going to take us in a different direction, actually, Chris, you've already kind of hit on it, because what I was going to ask, when we think about church planting, I look at the last 20 or 30 years, there are a couple of different motivations.

One, there's the pragmatist motivation, right? Church plants, they grow faster than traditional churches or established churches. So we need to go into the cities. We need to go into the urban areas. We need to plant churches because they're going to grow real fast.

That's how you have a saddleback. That's how you have, you know, those churches we've seen in the 80s and the 90s that blew up into a lot of the really big mega churches. However, I would say in the last 10 or 15 years, we've also seen, maybe among the more Reformed crowd, the church planters who, they don't want to deal with all these things in this tweet.

And so they really do think, well, I'll just plant a church and we'll do the Lord's Supper every week from the beginning. And we'll have plurality of elders from the beginning. And we'll be a 1689 church from the start.

And we'll, whatever your set of things that you think are really important, we'll just do that from the beginning. And guys, I'll just admit, and I did not know about this. Plutro had texted me about us talking to you, but I didn't know anything about what was in this.

But this very morning, I was thinking, as a pastor, I plan on staying here at Marshall a long time, Lord willing. But I was having the thought this morning, I cannot imagine stepping into another, if for some reason I wasn't the pastor here, I wouldn't want to go pastor and establish church again.

Yeah.

Like, I don't feel like I have the fight in me.

And start all over again.

Yeah. Yeah.

Because you're probably not going to find that church that's already doing everything the way you think biblically those things ought to be done.

And that's the key. What you just said right there is the main point of what I'm trying to put across. And again, I'm not, I take joy in these. I know that there are obvious, I think every pastor would say there are difficult seasons, there are dark seasons, that sort of thing.

But I love being a pastor, right? I love the local church.

I love doing it.

And I accept it as a challenge. But I think it's because at the end of the day, and you guys know this, when you're going through a church difficulty, the one thing that sets you apart at the end of the day, you just look at yourself and you're thinking, I'm just as bad as whatever's going on in the church or these folks.

And I don't, you know, your calling is the one thing that sets you apart to keep on going. Right. And so that's my point in this, because there are a lot of guys who get in there and they run into these sorts of things and they think, wait a minute, this is not what I learned in seminary.

You know, I mean, the first fight that was in the church that I went to when I was called out of seminary, it was literally over the color of the paint on the walls. Now there was a little bit more depth to it.

But really at the end of the day, that was the issue, the color of the paint on the walls. You know, what do you do with that?

Right.

And so there is a biblical response to it. But I think that it's unbiblical and ungodly, frankly, for a pastor going into a situation like that to just throw up his hands and be like, oh, well, forget about that.

I mean, Jesus looked upon the people, right, as sheep having no shepherd.

Yeah.

And that's the distinction.

That goes right into something that's just on my mind. And I've changed over the years in this because used to, you know, it frustrated me, made me mad. And let's be clear, there are unregenerate people in these churches, and there are wicked people in these churches, and there are people I'm sure doing things that we don't even know about as wicked, sinful things.

And we need to call them out and we need to deal with sin and we need to do those things. But what softened in me over the last, you know, few years is there's also actual legitimate, regenerate believers in these churches, and they've just been taught wrong and they really do love the Lord.

They may not be sure about everything that you're saying and you're trying to teach healthy ecclesiology, but they really do love the Lord. And so that's the thing, too. So here's one thing. If you go out and you just plant the church and say, everything's going to be the way I want it from the beginning.

Well, in a rule setting, you know, I don't know. I say, good luck, I guess. I mean, it's really hard. Like, who's going to come to that? But if you go into a place and you're able to teach that genuine saints there and say, look, this is where we're at.

This is what we're doing. And look, I'm showing you the scriptures, and it's not going to be overnight. It's not going to be in two weeks. You're right. You're not going to preach a sermon and they're going to be like, wow, you changed my entire view in that one amazing sermon.

That's just not going to happen. But if you'll stay, you know, and if you'll work, and sometimes, and we've both been on both sides of this, or all three of us have been on both sides of this, where you've been successful, but also you've had to leave.

And one thing I know for the most recent situation happened here, it wasn't anything super noble within me. It was just what I had within me was, I can't leave this place. And I just, and so I couldn't, and I'm not saying that there's anything more noble than anyone else in that.

It was just, I was at the point in my ministry, I was like, this is what we're doing, and I can't leave. So help me God. If they get rid of me, so help me, but I just can't leave. And so I think that we need to be very careful of looking at the rural church, looking at like this tweet that you put out and disparaging people and say, well, everybody's there.

That's just a church full of goats. Now there are probably goats there for sure, but that doesn't mean everybody there is not a believer.

That's absolutely right. And you learn to love people through these things, just like the Lord has loved you through all of your stuff, right?

Through all of your sin.

And you're right. I mean, you look at these churches and here's the thing, they're not church plants. They're not 10 years old. Like a good church plant say is 10 years old. Just throw that out. There's a number of them.

Okay.

These churches were around back in the mid to late 1800s, right? Where they were planted in the 1920s during the revivals that took place or whatever,.

Right?

So they've been there a long time. I don't know about you guys. I had people in my churches who could not read, like literally did not know how to read. And yet there is a gospel witness there. There are people there who are gospel believing people and who demonstrate it through their love for one another and for their pastor and everything else.

That's a testimony to the working of the Holy Spirit. I don't believe that the Spirit works apart from His word. He always works with His word, but still it leaves you standing in awe of the power of God when you see the Lord's work among His people.

So yeah, writing this off, I just think it's a pride issue. I think it's a pride issue on the part of a lot of would-be pastors. And here again, like there's a way in pastoral ministry and training where you can train a guy to just restate these pious platitudes.

And look, I need those. Like I need the word of God. I need the pious platitudes. I'm not going to lie, right? Like, oh, there's going to be fruitful ministry. Those sorts of words of encouragement, we all need that.

But there's also a place where the rubber meets the road, where you have to have some practical, realistic understanding of the place you're going into. I'm not trying to necessarily discourage people from the ministry with this tweet.

Although if this tweet discourages you from the ministry, you probably should not be in it. But I'm also not trying to make it so that like, I'm not slamming the church. I'm not saying these churches need to just not exist.

Read Corinthians, right? Read Paul's letter to the Corinthians. I mean, that church had problems that go way beyond any church I've ever been a member of, frankly. And yet Paul is like expressing his gratitude for them.

So, which I think goes to the point that you just made. But yeah, what I'm trying to say in this is don't come out of seminary and then be talking to these other guys five years later and you're like, I didn't think it was going to be this way.

This is what it's like. This is what it's like. And frankly, it makes me nervous when, again, guys who should know better, who have pastored for, say, 30 years in some context, when they say, well, I can't relate to that at all.

Really?

Yeah, bro. Yeah.

That worries me.

If you've pastored for 30 years or five years or two weeks and there's nothing, you know, maybe two weeks is a little hyperbolic, but you understand. If you've pastored that long and you can't relate to any of that at all, that's an issue.

I want to be careful with the analogy, but I liken it to, you know, you explaining to someone who is going to enter into the military and you're like, this is a noble thing. Thank you for doing this, serving our country.

I commend you. But it'd be rather silly if they were like, yeah, and the fighting, that part will be easy. And you're like, now, listen, it won't. It'll be hard. It could cost you your life. But what you're doing is a noble thing, you know?

So I want to be careful because obviously, yes, that is a little more dangerous, but maybe just slightly than being a pastor. But the idea is that it is a noble work and Christ is worthy of faithful shepherds pulling up their sleeves and getting in the trenches and doing the hard work.

Christ is worthy of that. But it's important that you understand when you're getting into it, it's hard work. And not only that, I don't know. Now, John MacArthur, he may be an exception, you know, because he's kind of impervious to all, but I don't know of anybody that's been a pastor for a long time that even decades into it feels adequate or feels like, you know, they've conquered or feels like, you know, they're still not fighting, fighting sin and their own sin and maybe sin in the church and still seeking reformation.

It never ends, but it's worth it, you know, for the glory of Christ, the good of the church. I'm rambling. Eddie, you got anything you want to add in there?

You know, I was in a meeting with some other pastors just this morning and I was listening to a pastor that's been in his current church for 21 years. And we were talking about things exactly like what's in this tweet.

One of the pastors had probably been in his church at least 10 or 12 years. And we're talking about staff issues and different things like that. And it's stuff exactly like what's being talked about in this tweet.

You know, one thing that I might ask your opinion on, Chris, what do you think about the ministry retention rate, we might say? There's kind of a reality check when we look at how many guys leave the pulpit.

They leave the preaching and teaching ministry in the church, and they're not necessarily guys who deconstructed their faith or that left Christ or that aren't believers, but they just get out of it because they enter.

Do you think they're entering the ministry with too much of a rose-colored glasses kind of view of what it's going to be?

I do. I mean, that's precisely what I'm after right here, is that it's very easy to go in with I don't want to use the word high, but too unrealistic an expectation of oneself and of the church to which you will be called.

And again, that's not to put the church down. And here's the other part of this, okay? One of my mentors told me, hey, you want to make all these changes and everything. Why do you want to make them? Well, the quickest response, of course, is, well, because they're biblical.

I want to be this reformer, and I want it to be a healthy church, and I'm working for their sake, and they should care about these things that I'm preaching and teaching on and that sort of thing. But there's a lot of wisdom in what he said there, right?

Because I distinctly remember being at this church event, and there was a man in the church that I was like, I'm not too sure about that guy or whatever, right? And I see some of the young adults in the church who had been invited to that event as well, and I saw the way he interacted with them and how they interacted with him.

And I mean, he had been teaching them Sunday school and everything else since they were.

Kids.

And I realized in that moment, I'm the new guy. I've been here like a year, maybe not even a year at that point. I don't remember. And I'm thinking that I'm going to come in and make big sweeping changes.