Episode 1: On Gospel Growth Beyond Your Church

(upbeat music) Da-da-da, it's the Nine Marks intro for a Nine Marks conversation. - This is Jonathan Lehman. - And Mark Dever. - And I'm gonna ask Mark questions about, I actually haven't told him yet. Coney guesses, I don't want to guess. - I don't, I don't, there's so many things going on. - I'm gonna ask him about seeing the gospel grow in your city, not just your church. - Okay. - So gospel growth, local-- - Oh, I've just been the last hour. - Doing what? - Conversely with two other pastors. - In this area? Any highlights? - Oh, one brother just trying to figure out kind of next steps for him in his church in some challenging situations. And some paratroopers agencies have been less than helpful to him. He's expressing some frustration. Appreciation for the fruitfulness he's seen here and in churches that have been born out of here, wondering how he can kind of get more in sync with that. - Because Mark, this is characteristic of you, trying to help other pastors locally and churches locally. I thought it'd be worth our time. You have a couple of chapters about it, expressly on it and your new little booklet, Understanding the Great Commission. Let me start here though. A few years ago, one of our fellow elders, Andy Johnson, one of the staff pastors here, began an article like this. What if you spent years faithfully and earnestly praying for a viable to come to your community? And then one day, seemingly out of the blue, God dramatically answered your prayers. All across your city, every day, people begin crowding into the churches to hear the gospel from God's word. On the streets and their workplaces and classrooms and homes all over your town, previously timid church members are faithfully declaring the gospel and fruit is coming fast. Lives are transformed, marriages are saved, and most of all, one after another of God's and he's laying down the weapons of their rebellion and taking refuge in his glorious and merciful son. What if all this happened in your own town right in front of your own eyes in that other guy's church? Just a few blocks down the street from yours. I suspect we all know what we ought to say in response, but the words of praise and joy are likely to get caught in the back of our throat, Mark, what do you think motivates this turfiness among pastors and churches? - Well, let me confess that I know from what people tell me that sometimes I sound pretty unturvy. And I honestly, in just examining my own heart, I wonder if that's a case just 'cause our church is visibly doing well right now while you and I are talking. I wonder if our church were declining in numbers, having a hard time, you know, in some obvious ways. I wonder if I would be as, you know, Catholic, small sea as universal as I hope I would be, but I'm always aware, it's like the rich person saying, you don't need to worry about money, you know, it's just like, well, it's still true, but it doesn't have quite the punch that it does when, you know, somebody who didn't know really, literally where their next meal is gonna come from, says it. - Yeah. - So with that kind of proviso or qualification. - Is it always calm desire? - No. - Is that something more innocuous in your heart and all of our hearts? - No, no, no. If you're truly regenerate and you've gone into the ministry because the Lord has called you to it, you wanna see people come to Christ and it's natural that you, yourself, would like to be an instrument of that. What, you know, how beautiful are those feet of the person who tells good news? And, you know, if you're telling good news, you love to see the fruit of that and feel it being converted. But it's like with our parenting, you know, we wanna see our kids converted. We parent in no small part to see them blessed and ultimately eternally blessed. But, you know, what if you, like me and my wife right now, have not seen all of your children converted? Well, then does that mean that you wasted your parenting? I don't think so. I mean, you know, we parented to the glory of God. That was our, our desire was to honor and how we love our kids and that's its own worship, its own testament, its own beauty, its own glory and trophy to God, apart from any outcome he may work through it. And we still don't know what the outcome of that will be ultimately. It's not been as quickly as we would like to see it. But then pastors know what that's like. So, I think the desire for fruit is natural and it's good, of the desire for fruit soon. Because that's fruit assured, is natural and good. But I think we can also understand why in God's sovereignty or rather that in God's sovereignty, his timetable is different than ours sometimes. And we need to trust him in that. - Yeah, what are some of the signs of a wrongful turphingness that pastors should watch out for in their own hearts and ministries? - Yeah, if there's not genuine excitement over somebody coming to Christ other than through you, or if there's considerably more excitement because it was through you than through someone else. We recently had another pastor of another church just come in and share about a wonderful conversion or a Muslim woman in his neighborhood that he saw and the four Muslims came for the baptism and heard her testimony with. I want to cultivate that kind of encouragement and the puse here that the Lord is moving. The Holy Spirit is converting people. And I want us to rejoice with our sister congregation and they rejoice and share those joys and pray together. And yeah, so I think if we have a sense of our own neediness for the gospel, God's rightness and damning us is graciousness and saving us through Christ, then we're gonna have a sense for the sweetness of that whoever's story we're hearing. - So bottom line, pastors should care about gospel growth in their city and not just in their own church. - That's right, that's, in fact, I would almost say your own church is kind of incidental. It's just the means and once in God will use the gospel. The means in another sense is a particular church. Well, that second kind of means, which church, it really doesn't matter. It's, you know, this world is passing quickly. Now, I would like the churches to be healthier rather than healthy. I'd like to be faithful in everything rather than unfaithful. But, you know, praise God, the gospel gets out there and I'm just rejoicing when someone comes to Christ. - You pray for other churches by name and you're mourning an evening's services. Can you explain what you do and doesn't that strike people as strange? - I'm sure it varies when it strikes people as strange. I do get comments on that sometimes. I often get positive comments that they appreciate it. I do it in my pastoral prayer in the morning. So this last Sunday, I prayed for Annacostia River Church. I prayed for fourth best vegetarian church. I prayed for false church physical. I prayed for Anglican, I prayed for McLean Bible Church. There may have been actually-- - So now it's just Baptist churches. - No, no. Deliverately. - All of evangelical churches. - Well, occasionally I even pray for liberal churches. I pray slightly differently when I pray for liberal church. I try to distinguish my prayers and I'm not, this is not a subtle encouragement. You go to this liberal church and believe what you were taught. I just pray for the Bible that they read and their services to come alive for the Holy Spirit to convict them and I pray to them. - We do that with Catholic churches. - I do that with Roman Catholic churches too. And that's right. But no, usually I'm praying for other local evangelical churches and I pray for them very obviously with a kind of sisterly affection and trusting God's work and rejoicing God's work. - Then an evening service is our prayer service. You'll have other pastors show up sometimes. - And honestly, those are usually Baptist churches, not always, but almost always. Baptist churches and often Baptist churches that we work with pretty closely through our Columbia Baptist Ministers Association. - Well, where did you learn this? Do you see other people do this? - I think it's just kind of innate. It's, if you look at, among Baptist churches, any way how associations grew up early on, it's like pastors know they need each other so they naturally get together and share in pray. So I think, you know, it's kind of like learning to breathe. It seems innate. - Yeah, along some other lines, if you walk into our church and you look at the little brochures on the door, when you come in, you'll find one brochure that gives information about our church, but also lists other area churches. Or if you go to our church website, hey, here are some other churches. - We want to try to help identify for visitors, other churches that if they like our church, that our church has had a hand in planting, that the pastors have come from our staff, but they may be closer to where they live in Virginia, Maryland or the district. - Explain how you structure your staff and your internship program to help other churches. - Well, the internship burden is pretty clear. It's not really for our church. It's for others, occasionally members of our church do it occasionally. People who finish the internship, we hire on our staff, but the overwhelming majority of folks who do our internships will go from us to serve and other churches elsewhere. Sometimes we even have pastors of churches leave their church for five months, do our internship, and they go back to continue passing the church. - Like Johnny just came from there. - Johnny just did that, it's right in a church in Sweden and pretty much every semester we'll have somebody like that. - What about your staff? You structure your staff too with a mindfulness of-- - Well, yeah, the staff's a little different. - I don't encourage us to use our staff budget to have the best people in each position we possibly could and then pay them really well and keep them for a long time. We do have some senior staff like that, but most of our staff, including admin staff that we call pastoral assistants, are guys who wanna be pastors, but we're giving them time serving us on our staff so they get more experience here. We get a few years with them so that we can watch them, get to know them in our church, disciple them, disciple them. with them once you're evangelized, watch them care for their family, so that we then are able to help them more than we can merely in the internship, which is more like school, being a pastoral assistant in our congregation, gets them involved with all kinds of aspects of ministry in administration, administration becomes the platform for them to build relationships and do ministry through. Talk to me about implications for your budget, or our budget, for local gospel growth, both in terms of budget planning and in terms of budgetary impact. - Well, local gospel growth presumably means establishing other churches, or helping out a dying church with a new pastor. - Yeah. - Helping other churches. - So, there'll be certain lines in the budget item, internship is a line, nine marks, our support for nine marks. It's a line, but I think we're less than 10% of nine marks budget, so I think. - No, that's right. - So I think we're helpful, but we're not, we're not, most of it by any means, we're, we're, we're cooperating with a bunch of churches in order to help nine marks exist. And then we also have money set aside for a local church plant, or church we're trying to help, so right now it's anti-casi-river church. - Subsidizing them. - Very often what's happened, we've subsidized a church for a year or two or three, but then they stop needing it. And they let us know, actually, no, you just keep seeding the newer stuff, we're doing okay, we've got enough people, we're self-supporting. - And we use that subsidy, of course, to help control what goes on in that church. - Church. - Wow, I mean, we wouldn't be subsidizing a church, we didn't agree with their philosophy of ministry. - Right. - But when we give them money to the other church, they're a sovereign church. We don't have churches that we try to run. - Right. - We manage our own affairs, and we trust our brothers and sisters and other churches to manage theirs, giving account to the Lord. - Jamie also does a lot, one of the pastors here does a lot of planning about knowing the impact we're gonna take. - Yeah, Jamie, Jamie Dunlund does a lot of guessing to figure out, you know, how will this particular move, this pastor going here and taking these 30 people with him, how will that affect our budget coming up? - It's all guess work, but he seems to guess pretty well. - Yeah. How do you use ministerial fellowships to promote gospel growth locally? You talked at the beginning about, you just met last year, you just met with two guys. What do you do in terms of ministerial fellowships? - Well, for example, last week, we had about 30, 35 pastors there on the Tuesday at the CBMA. - CBMA. - Columbia, that's our area of the country, Baptist, our examination ministers, that's who's there, association, that's what we do. We come together and we talk, we have lunch. - Of course, Tuesday of each month here. If they're-- - You started that? - Mm-hmm. - How many years ago? - I don't know, 15 maybe. If they're a Southern Baptist pastor, so the church needs to be Southern Baptist, so we can talk denominational matters as well. And they agree with nine marks, then they are the senior pastor, not other members of staff, but just the senior pastor, main preaching pastor, is welcome to come. If they bring five or 10 dollars, we will provide a subway sandwich for them of their preference. So we can literally see they're over our lunch time, so we'll take two hours, 1130 to 130. And we just talk about all kinds of different stuff. We talk about evangelism, but one of the things, we're talking about gospel growth. One of the things we said this last time, one brother was kind of feeling discouraged at the amount of conversions he hadn't seen in his church. And so I just had everybody go around and say in this last year, "What have you seen?" What, how many people you baptized, who weren't being baptized just 'cause they'd never been in a Baptist church before as a member, but actually it just recently come to Christ. And as we went around, it was a, we got into a number of good conversations about what this brother's doing, you know, some ministries that this one brother out in Bui is using. Yeah, we just had some really good gospel conversations. I think it was encouraging to everybody in the room. - You said there were 30 guys there. You started with how many? - Right, three or four. - And it's just grown gradually over the last 15 years. - Yeah, slowly but surely. - You talk about church budgets. You read books together. - Mm-hmm. When somebody walks in the room, I just ask in their name and church, which I know, where the hell was the joy of my memory and say anything you wanna talk about. And then I'll write that down. And I may have some things I wanna talk about. And then we just work through various parts of that agenda, getting updates from them, how their church is going, if there's some continuing issues. And, you know, over the years, the brothers have gotten to know each other. So it's a delightful fellowship. - Are multi-site and multi-service churches just a baptized form of the Turfiness we talked about at the beginning? - Oh no, I think, I understand how you could rhetorically, if you're arguing, argue that. I think that would be an uncharitable way to put it. I think that, I mean, we pick on Matt Chandler, because Matt is a good friend, and Matt has multiple campuses at Village Church in Texas. You know, Matt wrote for us years ago, when you did that first issue, probably I can own nine or something about multi-site, that he doesn't really like multi-site. It's not his preference. He felt kind of served him, essentially, that he didn't have a theological objection to it, which you and I would have, into the way he felt free to do it. No one is preference. He felt like he was the best stewardship. I don't see that as Turfiness on his part at all. I respect and appreciate him. I feel logically think you can't really do that, but of course, he doesn't see that in the same way. So I would just assume that the brother has a different understanding of what a clasian means. And he is, you know, from friends I have, who people would leave here and go to Dallas and join one of the nine marks, out one of the Village Church, I would call them Village Churches, that are there. They have many of the same values that we promote through nine marks, so. - You would encourage a guy going to multi-service multi-site, hey, make sure this isn't. - Well, if you want to get to Turfiness, you're talking about the preacher's heart in a church when it's growing, and it's one service right now, one site one service is growing. And you can tell that sometime in the next six months, that thing's gonna fill up. And so you got one or two or three far-sighted businessmen, Deacons, who are trying to figure out what to do. And they're just saying, listen, we gotta do something, we gotta plan, we gotta have a second service, or another site, we gotta build, we gotta do something. And the planting takes a lot of thought, you gotta have the right guy there, and there's no guarantee that certain people will go, and then they'll go to make the difference you need to, to not have your building full. The building, making the building larger is both unpopular these days, and it's just a lot of hassle, and it's expensive. So almost everybody thinks good stewardship is just having multiple services, and what if those services meet in different places, so be it. I don't think they back into it, Turfiness, assuming like I have to be the one preaching to these Christians. I think they're trying to be good stewards of the fruit that they see coming their direction, the Holy Spirit's bringing them. And that's why I would just say, you just need to have some confidence to let some fruit fall out of your basket, and just trust if it's fruit it's gonna fall on other people's baskets. So you just let the building get full, let people not find a seat, it's okay. Now if you want to build a bigger building, that's fine. You want to plan on other trips, that's fine. I'd probably encourage you to do both. But just assume that if there are any other churches in your area, if you're not in Saudi Arabia, then there probably gonna be other places people can go to hear the gospel. And if you know other churches, you know what's going on in your area, and you can even suggest churches they could go to. You hate to do that. So basically what I want are people to go to church closer to where they live. - Right. - So I had a brother who I personally like, he's a friend of mine here in our church who mentioned to me this last Sunday, he'd gone to Cherrydale Baptist Church, which is close to where he lives. He's moved over to Arlington, Virginia. - Which is 15, 20 minutes drive from here probably? - Yeah. - Yeah. And I said, well, Steve King, the current pastor, there's a great brother and the preaching's gonna be fine. And yeah, there'll be a few differences in our culture, but basically it's great, man, if you live near there, I think I would encourage you to go there. And if you move back here, then brother come join here again. But you're gonna be far more able to be involved there at the services, you're gonna be able to know your neighbors and commend them to go to church there. Bring on Christians with you, get involved in small groups more easily. If you go to church closer to where you live, normally. There are lots of exceptions to that, but normally. So that's the way we fight turfiness, ultimately, is by having enough good churches around that wherever somebody is, they can find a good church pretty close to where they live and/or work. - Another way you work on that is through planning or revitalizing. And I was trying to count up in my heads of the brothers, we've sent out the plan to revitalize from this church. And I came up with that McKinley Law. Connor, Kel, Roar, Sleggle, Anjubuille. - Well, that's local. - Well, just locally. Yeah, just locally. - Yeah. - And we've kind of adopted Nathan Knight. - Yeah, yeah. - And a few others. - Yeah. - How do you prepare church for your own church and the people in it for a planting and revitalizing sendoff? - Well, I think the transitoriness of a lot of people's jobs in natural and areas in the US, these days does a lot of that preparation for us. People used to coming and going. People are used to saying goodbye, making new friends, the pain of relationships ended. So I think a lot of that happens. You can more deliberately once you have a guy who you think is the one who is qualified and able to lead it. The plan that people will follow, you can encourage him to develop a harder concern for a particular region. You can have him work with the small groups in that area from your church, where maybe further still, away from your church in this particular area, I haven't been aware of this. those people especially and then maybe even at some point have some open public prayer about that and some meetings where they begin meeting separately to try to see could we be the nucleus of a new church or our church is there in the area that's not doing very well and would like some help and we could you know send in a pastor some money and some members and give them to them and hope that that church's witness the community is able to be turned around. You give preaching opportunities to the guy you're going to send? Certainly yeah the congregation needs to be able to hear how they handle God's word become attached to them own them as their own. Are you willing to give your best guys? Should you give your best guys? Your starters? You're bent? Who do you send? Well when you say best guys I mean as far as members I can't decide who goes and who stays. So you don't have people on the shoulder and say a little bit but we more just pray and encourage people who want to try it and try to not be self protective when some really good people want to go. Make a church announcement for me what do you sound like when you're making the announcement? Turn to what stage we are in the thing. So you know if we're middle way through we could say a couple months out. Well by then it's going to be very developed so you know Garrett is going to be passing this church over here so if you live across the river we would encourage you to meet with Garrett next Thursday night and he's going to be meeting with those who want to go with him. They're going to be talking praying with us together. Let me just encourage you if you have any thought about this just check that out. Do you, I also will call you telling people to talk to an elder? Sure because there's the other half the equation is not just that church and it's them and their lives. Are they in a period of stagnation? Are they in a period of great growth spiritually or are they just kind of in between and how connected are they? Are they how? Unconnected. So there's just a lot of, it's kind of like you want to check up from your spiritual doctor to know is this kind of activity you should be involved in right now. And who's who's best to go? The stagnators, the big growers, the in-betweeners? I think stagnators, if there's not like open, open underpinned sin, the stagnators are great ones to go. I think certainly some who are growing well and are willing to give leadership in a way that they haven't been giving or willing to just do it again in a smaller, harder setting they should go. If you got a pretty young Christian who's really just started to grow in the last year or two and usual time of growth, probably not the best time them knowing it. Probably just let that kind of keep going. You do not want to handle our hand, rather difficult pastoral cases off to new congregations or something. Somebody's deep in a counseling relationship with this or that addiction. Even if they live across the street from that other church or just helping, you probably want to keep them for a while to that other church maturers and has the leadership that they can take that kind of tax on the pastor's time and the congregation before you encourage that to happen? How crucial is it to have control of the pulpit and a church revitalization project? It's central. Explain. If God shapes his church by his word, which your book reverberation I think shows so well that he does, then to try to lead a church, especially into change, without doing the kind of pastoral apostles' patient teaching from scripture, which is supposed to win over even those who oppose you, it's just pointless, it's spinning in the wind. So you really want to lead by teaching. So that means you've got to have the teaching in order to lead. And we don't need into the details. We learned one church. We learned one case, we learned the hard way on that one. We said it so cheap. Well, that was so weird. I don't know that we learned anything. Because- What would it hurt you to have control of the pulpit? Well, yeah. But even there, that was just a mega weird situation that basically all of our members went in there and labored for a year or two and then got excommunicated. And so they planted a new church and they later merged with another church. They're great. But it was just a horrible thing to watch this older man who I want to be clear has since asked for my forgiveness for his part in it, but he really betrayed a lot of Godly Christians in order to coddle some leaders in his church who were an underpentant son. And it was a really grotesque thing to see. It's been a grotesque thing to see how the resources of that church were wasted with the help of other denominational officials. I mean, it was a- it was a deeply grotesque thing to watch. Any last lessons you want to encourage pastors, maybe say a little more, close on optimistic note here. Any last lessons you want to give to pastors on promoting gospel growth locally? Yeah. I've been here over 20 years, which I know to a young people sounds like a long time to me. It seems like you're out here like week before last in my experience. And to see all of the ridiculous fruitfulness, it's just so encouraging. I mean, it's just- I could not have planned all of this. There's been growth, you know, coming out of both ears, you know, by God's grace, fun things that I wouldn't have thought of ahead of time. So it's just a tender garden, pray for God to be honored and glorified, and enjoy watching what God will do. Yeah. Well, and you hate statistics, but if I could just give a couple, I look through the church directory, but before I began, former staff members of yours are now in 28 different churches around the world. There's been over 84- 84 of your former interns have the word pastor in their job title, and that's locally and around the world again. So you have over 100 different churches affected by having guys having come through here, and impacted, built-up, strengthened, equipped, sent. And so then you think about how many Christians are being impacted in those 100 plus churches, and that's a great, praise God for that. Thanks for your time brother. Thanks man.