What I Wish They'd Told Me

Ryan Denton - Dead Orthodoxy

In our ninth episode, Stephen Baker and Aaron Prelock sit down with Ryan Denton, an evangelist in Vanguard Presbytery who wrote Dead Orthodoxy and Its Cure, which is what this conversation is about. You can have the confession and catechism down cold and nothing in the soul. You can trade the musty building for smoke machines and a slick twenty-five minutes and be just as dead. Ryan talks about why so much Reformed preaching has become lecturing, what the redemptive historical method loses when it drops the imperative, and why the Puritans were called painful preachers, men who aimed the word at the backslider, the formalist, the worn-out mother. Halfway through, Stephen reads the post Ryan took heat for. It ends with a prayer: Lord, help us to preach a felt Christ. 00:00 — Welcome; Ryan Denton joins from Lubbock 01:00 — Family, and church plants in Lubbock, Clovis, and Roswell 02:18 — A year of filling pulpits; twenty sermons in twenty-four days 06:55 — Vanguard Presbytery and the office of evangelist 09:31 — Out of the PCA: Vanguard's origins and distinctives 16:37 — Dead Orthodoxy and Its Cure: why Ryan wrote it 19:42 — Where apathy and formalism come from 22:24 — One ditch into another: Ian Murray and Luther 24:57 — Head and heart fused: experimental Christianity 26:44 — Books: Alexander, Guthrie, Scougal, Edwards 32:00 — Stephen reads the Facebook post 33:53 — Redemptive historical preaching and the missing imperative 38:31 — Painful preachers 40:55 — Apply early and often 43:30 — Law and gospel, antinomianism, and the New Testament's imperatives 47:42 — Preaching to different hearers: real truth to real people 53:31 — Preaching to the conscience: Thomas Boston, Nathan and David 59:16 — Emotions, stepped-on toes, and the preacher's own conscience Learn more about the Frontier Shepherds conference at newgenevaacademy.com

Brian Croft - Pastoring the Pastors

In our eighth episode, Aaron Prelock sits down with Brian Croft of Practical Shepherding to talk about what no seminary can hand a man: staying. Staying when the church wants you gone. Staying when no one will mentor you. Staying long enough that your body breaks before the church turns. Brian and Aaron talk about why wolves in sheep's clothing and wounded sheep look alike until you stay long enough to tell them apart, the lonely nature of pastoral work, having no category for shepherding as its own work, and how the celebrity preaching conference circuit can overlook faithful, ordinary work. 00:00 — Brian Croft, Practical Shepherding, and thirty years in ministry 02:03 — From the Christian music world to a call to pastor 04:38 — Why eighty percent of pastors don't last ten years 06:13 — Four pastors who refused to mentor him 09:35 — Taking a dying church at twenty-nine 14:17 — Three firing attempts, threats, and a body that shut down at thirty-four 15:10 — Year six: the church turns 18:37 — Haunted by Hebrews 13:17 19:41 — Wolves in sheep's clothing and wounded sheep act alike 22:24 — Every pastor needs an older pastor and a younger one 24:47 — The isolation of the pastorate 26:50 — Lament versus complaining 31:20 — How Practical Shepherding began 37:54 — The lost art of pastoral theology 43:43 — Content to be an ordinary, faithful shepherd 49:43 — "Show me the army" 53:14 — Stop measuring ministry by numbers and money Learn more about the Frontier Shepherds conference at newgenevaacademy.com

Michael Clary - On Christian Courage

In our seventh episode, Stephen Baker and Aaron Prelock sit down with Michael Clary to talk about the lesson eighteen years of ministry kept pressing on him: courage. The courage to preach Genesis 19 as it stands. The courage to father a congregation and preach the sharp truths of God's word rather than simply befriend it. The courage to keep a clean conscience while half his church walked out. They talk about the winsomeness he built a ministry on and later repented of, the liberalism that signs every formal confession but fights for the heartbeat of none of it, and why conscientious men bury their gifts for fear of a God they take to be a harsh taskmaster." Pastor Clary will be speaking at the Frontier Shepherds conference. Learn more at newgenevaacademy.com 00:08 — Introductions: Michael Clary, Cincinnati, and the Frontier Shepherds Conference 00:58 — Planting in 2010: inner-city Cincinnati to a building in Northern Kentucky 03:30 — Seminary at Southern, and a love for the Old Testament 05:37 — Crew, parachurch ministry, and learning the church is plan A 09:00 — Why Cincinnati, and meeting Michael Foster 12:42 — Three eras of ministry, and the turn from a neutral world to a negative one 16:16 — Preaching Genesis 19, and the backlash that followed 17:41 — Sitting with Tim Bayly: be the father of this congregation 19:20 — The 2022 split that cut the church in half 22:06 — Holding the church together with a clean conscience 24:58 — Courage as the one indispensable lesson 27:09 — The new liberalism: ethical, not doctrinal 28:57 — What Young, Restless, Reformed got right, and where it went off the rails 31:22 — Intellectual respectability, and Iain Murray's Evangelicalism Divided 36:56 — The September conference, and the problem of fragmentation 41:23 — Loser Theology: piety shrunk to inner-heart religion 47:00 — The parable of the talents and the buried gold 53:34 — The fear of a slave versus the fear of a son

Andy Constable - Ministry In The Schemes

In our sixth episode, Stephen Baker and Aaron Prelock sit down with Andy Constable, pastor of Niddrie Community Church in Edinburgh and a Frontier Shepherds speaker, to talk about the schemes, Scotland's poorest communities. Scotland has healthy churches in its richer areas, but in the schemes the churches are dead or dying, and Christians are too comfortable to move. Andy tells how a London student ended up under Mez McConnell at a church with, from a student's perspective, nothing to offer, and how Niddrie holds word and deed together without sliding into pietism or the social gospel. Fruit comes slowly there: a woman thrown out of the kids' club came back twenty years later and was saved. A line from Andy's new book on addiction surfaces near the end: behind every single smile is a story of wicked rebellion. Learn more about the Frontier Shepherds conference at newgenevaacademy.com 00:00 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V50uexSwHng] - Introducing Andy Constable 00:46 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V50uexSwHng&t=46s] - Ministry this time of year: the church weekend away 02:05 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V50uexSwHng&t=125s] - Niddrie Community Church: a century of gospel presence in a scheme 03:11 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V50uexSwHng&t=191s] - The UK class system and working-class ministry 06:43 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V50uexSwHng&t=403s] - From London to Edinburgh 07:16 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V50uexSwHng&t=436s] - Meeting Mez McConnell and a church with nothing to offer 12:21 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V50uexSwHng&t=741s] - Word and deed: avoiding pietism and the social gospel 17:28 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V50uexSwHng&t=1048s] - The long game: a conversion twenty years in the making 19:55 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V50uexSwHng&t=1195s] - From intern to pastor: Mez's training model 22:45 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V50uexSwHng&t=1365s] - A training church: indigenous converts, three plants 26:50 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V50uexSwHng&t=1610s] - Christians too comfortable to move 27:46 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V50uexSwHng&t=1666s] - 20 Schemes: 18 churches in 13 years 31:30 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V50uexSwHng&t=1890s] - Whole-life discipleship at Niddrie 36:29 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V50uexSwHng&t=2189s] - Loving people, not just books 39:24 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V50uexSwHng&t=2364s] - Addiction and the Local Church 43:57 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V50uexSwHng&t=2637s] - "Behind every single smile": respectable and unrespectable sins 48:14 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V50uexSwHng&t=2894s] - The Ragged School of Theology 52:09 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V50uexSwHng&t=3129s] - Frontier Shepherds this September

Jake Mentzel - Church Planting & Godly Ambition

In our fifth episode, Stephen Baker and Aaron Prelock sit down with Jake Menzel of Church of the King in Evansville to talk about the word Reformed men are afraid of: ambition.  Ambition they've been trained to distrust. Ambition that draws on the Father's pleasure instead of earning it. Ambition for a man's sons and grandsons, and the church he's been given. Jake, Stephen, and Aaron talk through why a man who won't believe his sanctification has not believed his justification, why Reformed devotion becomes a contest over who feels worst about himself, and why feeling bad is not the same as repenting. Or, as Jake puts it: before you die, let the world see the best you that you knew how to become. 00:00 — Meet Jake Menzel and the Frontier Shepherds conference 01:46 — Why Evansville is a hard place to plant a church 07:10 — Why plant here at all: "God was calling me home to my people" 09:24 — Coming back to the Lord at 17, then off to IU 12:04 — Trial by fire at a secular university; charisma that outruns character 14:55 — Three years at NGA and seven years of campus ministry 16:51 — Godly ambition and how young men have changed in twenty years 22:24 — Bloomington vs. Evansville; when a church never grows past campus ministry 28:46 — A hard demographic shift and the cost of defining who you are 32:46 — How do you fuel ambition without burning out? 34:32 — The baptism of Jesus: the Father pleased before the Son has done a thing 36:22 — Haddon and the center-field fence 39:39 — If you don't believe in sanctification, you don't believe in justification 42:03 — The feedback loop of self-loathing — and why it isn't the gospel 45:39 — Godly ambition rooted in the fatherhood of God 49:43 — The little-league coach who can't let his son fail 53:47 — Better or bitter 56:41 — The smallest, most fearless kid on the team 1:00:36 — Ambition for growth, not greatness