Panel Question Time (Basics 2025)

Matt Ross: Well, good morning, gentlemen. Good morning.

Alistair Begg: Good morning.

Matt: It’s great to see you all here this morning. Good to be together. And if you’ll go ahead and grab your seat, we’ll begin with our panel question-and-answer time.

As we begin, keep in mind that these questions that will be asked are questions that you all have submitted. Some of them are directly posed to Richard or Alistair or William, and then some of them are more broad, for all three of you. And you can jump in, as you feel led, to the question. Some of the questions are more theological in nature, some more pastoral, some more practical. But we want to work through as many of them as we can with the allotted time that we have.

And so, as we begin, I’d love to just pray for our time and ask for God’s grace and wisdom as we start. So let’s pray:

Our Father in heaven, we thank you for the ability to ask questions and glean wisdom from other men in ministry. We thank you for the truth that as “iron sharpens iron, [so] one man sharpens another.”[1] And we do pray that we would be sharpened in our ability to live well, to pastor well as a result of this time. Please help me as I guide and facilitate this conversation, and help these brothers to speak words of wisdom that derives from the Holy Spirit and your Word. We want to speak words that are good for building up as fits this occasion, that it would give grace to each one who hears.[2] And so help us to that end, we pray. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Well, our first question is for Willie. And we got several questions around this very idea. But this question asks: What is your story of being called from working as a medical doctor to being called into the ministry to serve as a pastor?

Willie Philip: Yeah. Well, I guess it was a kind of long story. I grew up in a manse. My father was a pastor, so the one thing I knew I was not going to be was a minister. I went to study medicine. A lot of medicine in my family; my mom was a doctor. But early on in my time in medical school, I think I began to feel I probably was going to end up in ministry. I was involved a lot in student Christian things—leading Bible studies, teaching, so on. And actually, at one point—I think it was perhaps in my second year of medical school—I talked to some folk and said, “Look, I think I should switch out of this and go and do theology.” Thankfully, wise heads said to me, “Don’t do that. You’re too young. Why would God get you into this training at this point to pull you out halfway through? Get on with it. Learn something about life. Learn about working and so on.” So I went back to it and carried on. And I’m glad I did, because, you know, medical training teaches you a lot about people. And ministry is about people. At least it ought to be about people.

So, I carried on in medicine, and I really enjoyed it. In my early years as a doctor, I kind of hoped that this sense of feeling I ought to get into ministry eventually would kind of go away. But it wouldn’t go away. So I lived with that tension for quite some time. And eventually I felt, “No, I need to go and test this. I need to go through the selection procedure”—which, at that time, was for the Church of Scotland. You had to go through quite a residential thing and so on.

And I went to that kind of hoping I wouldn’t get through. I said to the Lord, “I’m doing this once.” And I kind of hoped that they would say no and I could go back to my medicine with a clean conscience and get on with it. But I kind of knew that wouldn’t happen.

I for a long time… On my mom’s side of the family, we’ve got five generations of missionaries in Africa, going right back to the early 1800s. And so I for a long time felt I would go to Africa, and I’d be a medical missionary, and I would do medical work and ministry work. And the more I began to understand what that looked like… All the people I knew who went abroad to do medical missionary work ended up spending all their time doing medical work, running hospitals, administrating things, and this whole idea of preaching and teaching, it never really happened. And I began to realize that I can’t do both of these things; it’s going to have to be one or the other. And so in the end, medicine had to go. Others said to me, “Look. We think this is where your calling is.”

And so I was a little bit like C. S. Lewis. I was a kind of “reluctant convert”[3] to the ministry. But when I was accepted, I knew the die was cast.

So, I did find it hard. When I’d got past the worst of the early few years of medicine, I was really enjoying it. So it was a bereavement for me, my first year when I went to…We had to go to—they called it “training for ministry.” It wasn’t training at all. It was going to do a theological degree in a fairly mixed liberal divinity faculty. I hated it, and my first year was miserable. I was grieving for my job, and I was not enjoying what I was doing. So I did find it a hard transition. But after that first year, I got over it, and I carried on.

Matt: Well, it’s fascinating to hear the backstories of somebody’s aim and vocation. And for you it was in cardiology. Alistair spoke last night about law. Richard, was there something before ministry, or did you sense God’s call into that early on?

Richard Pratt: No, absolutely not.

Matt: What did that look like for you?

Richard: I preached my first sermon when I was five years old.

Matt: Make sure you have that mic up there.

Richard: I preached my first sermon—without a mic—when I was five years old. And it was youth week in my Southern Baptist church. If you have that tradition, well, I was the Marjoe. (Do you know that name? No? Look it up. Google it.) I was the Marjoe of our church. And so, five years old I preached my first sermon, and it was on the difference between agapē and erotic love. I promise. I promise you, that was the topic that was assigned to me. So my mother wrote the sermon, but she didn’t know the difference either.

Alistair: Which was good news for your father!

Richard: Yeah, that’s right. My dad told me that. That’s right. So, that was my first preaching experience. But I’m… Yeah, so…

Matt: In the feedback, they said you should do it again. Yeah.

Richard: I guess so, yeah.

Matt: And so here you are, all these years later.

Richard: So, you know, in my branch of the church, there are two things about calling. One is an internal call, and the other is the external call. And so, yeah, even before being a believer, I was pressed toward that vision for life for me. And then, at seventeen, then the church began to say, “Yes. Yes, yes, yes.” So that’s how it happened.

Matt: Yeah. That’s helpful. It actually ties into this next question for you, Richard. This pastor writes, “As you have led Third Millennium, what do you believe effective theological education and training ought to look like in an increasingly digital world?”

Richard: Well, thanks for that question. I’ll try not to turn this into a Thirdmill commercial.

I believe on the whole that we are in a new day. I mean, Thirdmill began the year that Al Gore invented the internet. Do you remember that? Some of you old enough to remember he went on television and said he invented it? Yeah. Okay, so we knew that the new thing was digital communication and on your watches—you know, looking at people on your watch and looking at people on your phone all around the world. So we thought that “it’s going to be a new day, but there’s no substitute for human contact”—except that human beings don’t need to be used as data transfer units, which is largely what, in traditional residential schools, professors are reduced to in the classroom. Did that just make sense?

And so I’m absolutely convinced that the Achilles’s heel of traditional theological education or pastoral training is a lack of focus on life and the immediate application of the subjects that you’re studying in that school. And a lot of that is—the reason it’s ignored, I think, by and large, is because a lot of the teachers themselves have been isolated from life, and they’re seen… They’re experts in their fields, not experts, shall we say, in life.

And so I do believe that digital communication can—if it’s done well, if it’s done well—it can communicate the content of theological education well and with just some touchup here and there by a human being, but the human being is needed, by work of Holy Spirit, to bring the implications of that to life for the students immediately, not in the practical theology department but in every class.

Okay, so, I do think that the digital age opens us up to having people in nonresidential theological education. How’s that? Which means that they are in local churches. They’re doing ministry. They’re suffering. They’re raising their families. They’re failing. They’re struggling. And I do believe that theological education ought to be a lot like boot camp in the military. Okay? (“Oorah.” I heard it.) Okay? Meaning: It should be a nightmare. Because ministry in many respects is just that. It’s hard! And if you go into it thinking that because you’ve read a few books and have heard a few astonishingly academic and sophisticated lectures that you’re ready to do ministry, I think that’s a big mistake. And so I think combining it in local church settings is extremely important.

Matt: Yeah. Willie, I know we spoke yesterday just a little bit about what that looks like at the Tron and how you’re training younger men to discern that subjective versus objective sense of calling.

Willie: Yeah, I mean, I would absolutely reiterate what Richard has just said there. In fact, Richard’s been a great help to us. When we were flung out of the Church of Scotland in 2011, and even before that, we’d been training younger men through the Cornhill Training Course, which gives a two-year training alongside church ministry, very much with the idea that, as Richard said, training for ministry and doing ministry have to be held together. The church and the academy can’t be separated. That’s been a disaster, in our country at least. That’s been one of the things which has led to the calamitous destruction of the mainline churches. And so we then had to provide something for guys who wanted more than that and who would have previously gone on to train in the church seminaries and so on.

So we had no choice. We had to do something. Richard helped us. And we put together a program where the guys do another three years of doing ministry under supervision but doing academic study, using online resources, using digital resources, but also getting together regularly once a fortnight for a full day of seminars and once every term for a residential. And I can see the guys that we are training now—the guys that have come on to our staff through that—have been trained so, so much better. They’re so much more ready for senior ministry than I ever was or anybody in my kind of generation was.

So, we have just found that putting the local church and the academy together as much as possible has been a huge benefit. And it’s quite difficult to do, because you have to have good trainers. You have to have church leaders who are willing to give the time and give the focus to doing that training. You have to create a training culture in churches.

But if you have a number of churches, you don’t need that many who can then get together and pool their resources for that classroom part of it, for the academy part of it. And it can be very successful. So, yeah, I can just testify to the whole model that Richard’s been talking about. And it’s been enormously helpful for us.

And one of the really important things it’s enabled us to do is have people training for ministry in quite remote places, in small churches. You see, often it’s only big churches that people have been able to do ministry training. And big churches are not normal—at least not in my country. Most people are going to minister in much smaller situations. But because you can combine the remote learning with the getting together periodically rather than all the time, we’ve been able to have people training for ministry with a good guy in a small church far away and yet still being able to come and be part of that cohort. So I think for geographical dispersion in particular, it’s really, really helpful, and it’s helped to democratize training in the churches rather than just in a few big centers that have the facility for that.

Matt: Yeah, that’s good. That’s helpful.

We got several questions about preaching. So if there’s anything pastors are thinking about on a regular basis, it’s how to handle the text, how to think about where to go in terms of leading your congregation into specific books of the Bible. And so somebody wrote this question for you, Alistair: Over your forty plus years in pastoral ministry, how have you thought about organizing a preaching schedule? And how have you known when the congregation is ready to hear certain books of the Bible preached?

Alistair: Well, I think I’ve been following my nose, as it were. I mean, I greatly admire people who tell me that they go off for a month in the summer and lay out their preaching program. I can’t do that. Or maybe I’m just lazy; I don’t know. But I’ve never been able to do that.

I’ve been thinking a lot about it at the moment, because I have six opportunities to preach before I’m finished in this pulpit. And that’s not six Sundays, but that’s six times in the pulpit. And so I just don’t know what I’m going to do in these six occasions. And so it’s uppermost in my mind: How do you make the decision? I never had to make this decision before. Because you never think about what’s the last thing you’re going to say.

But anyway, when I came, I started with Nehemiah, because I thought it’d be good to figure out how to do God’s work God’s way. And I figured that as I was going through that, I would find something else that I could try and do. And that’s really been the way I’ve gone. I think we’ve tried to go—you know, if we’re in a Gospel, then go, maybe, to an epistle; if we’re in the Old Testament, go to the New Testament. Shorter things: The book of Ruth is manageable. Philippians is shorter; it’s easier.

And just try… And I ask my colleagues all the time. For example, one of my colleagues said to me, you know, four years ago, “You know, you should do 1 Samuel.”

And I said, “Well, I can’t do 1 Samuel.”

He said, “Why not?”

I said, “Well, the chronology in 1 Samuel is a little bit daunting. You know, I’m not sure whether he was the king or when he was playing the harp or he wasn’t playing the harp, you know.”

And so he said, “Well, that’s no excuse.” He said, “So just do it.”

And we did it. And then we went into 2 Samuel as well. And as anyone who’s listened to me knows, John Woodhouse is a very, very good Old Testament teacher on 1 and 2 Samuel. And eventually I had to bring him here so that the people would see whose material I’d been using so they could hear it for themselves.

But yeah. I listen to the congregation. I listen to what’s going on in the world. Only very rarely have I done things like on the day that Magic Johnson declared that he’d been diagnosed with AIDS, I preached a sermon on the diagnosis of Magic Johnson. When Ellen DeGeneres came out, I preached on that, because I felt that it was such a moment. It’s like, you know, if there’s a distraction in the room, like if a pigeon comes in, for me, I’ve got to acknowledge the pigeon. Because everyone else has already gone to the pigeon. So things like that—the death of Lady Diana. But by and large, it’s always been systematic, consecutive exposition of the Scriptures. That way the church gets a balance, and I know what I’m doing from Sunday to Sunday.

I would say just one thing about theological education: In the time that I’ve had opportunities to go to different places, one of the things that I find fascinating—I’m not sure I like it—is the way the department of homiletics exists on its own. And that’s not… You don’t learn… I mean, somehow or another, if you’re doing Old Testament, the homiletical dimension of that needs to be taught in that context. Because you learn it over here, and then you go in the other room, and you go, “Well, how do you do this with Old Testament narrative? Or how do you do this with the book of Proverbs?” And I’m not sure many places have really figured that out.

Matt: Yeah. That segues into this next question. I think a number of guys here have probably picked up, Willie, your commentary on the book of Genesis that just came out.

Alistair: I’ll take the royalties on that, okay? Thank you.

Richard: It’s a really good commentary.

Willie: There aren’t any!

Matt: But this pastor, he writes, “I want to grow as a preacher of the Old Testament, but I don’t want to be overly redundant in saying the same things as I point my people to Jesus. What are some of the common patterns, types, and promises that you look for that help you to be honest to the biblical text and yet Christological in your focus?”

Willie: I guess I was trying to speak about some of those things in the breakout session. I mean, I would boil it down to being “Don’t be so obsessed with being Christological you forget to be biblical.” Because I think that if we believe the Lord Jesus, that all the Scriptures speak of him,[4] then it seems to me it’s not so complicated. If we really are getting the message of these Scriptures, we will be speaking of Christ.

Now, we’ll be doing that in a multitude of different ways. And I do think that one of the problems is that, particularly younger preachers, because they’re so keen to not be preaching a Jewish sermon and preaching Christ and so on that they become very formulaic—and so every sermon does become the same. And, you know, I’ve sat down in sermons, listening to people, and I’ve thought, “I know exactly where this is going right from the get-go.”

Alistair: It’s like Where’s Waldo?

Willie: Yeah, exactly. And I think… And then the problem with that is that because that is the case, you end up taking larger and larger and larger chunks of Scripture, because you can’t possibly preach all these chapters, ’cause you’re going to just be saying the same things over and over again.

We had a situation years back with one of my guys on staff where the first time I gave him a series of three sermons to do—we used to do a lunchtime service, and so he got three sermons in a row, and he picked this passage—and after the first one, I knew we were in trouble. ’Cause it was quite a good sermon, but I just thought, “You’ve said everything, now, there is to say.” And I waited and said nothing. The second week, it was a sort of minor car crash. He was beginning to realize. And by the third week, we really hit the wall. And I took him aside, and we talked about it, and he said, “Well, what do we do now?” And I said, “Well, what we don’t do is inflict you on the congregation again for quite a long time.” And he tells this story about himself now. He found it a very helpful thing. Because he learned that, you know, he was doing a formula, and he’d run out of text.

And so I think the message is: Work hard on the text. You’ve got to know your theology. You’ve got to know your biblical theology, your doctrine, your systematics, and so on. But that’s the basement of your house. You know, your house is going to fall down if you don’t have a really good basement. So don’t hear me saying you don’t need these things. You need the theological foundations. But you don’t live in the basement of your house. You know, you want to live in the house. So our preaching wants to live in the text. It needs to be held up by all of these things. But people have got to see that when we’re preaching, we’re showing them round the house. We’re not taking them down into the basement.

And so I think it comes down to just: There’s no formula. There’s no way around it other than just hard, hard work, and milking the text, and reading the text, and really seeing what is the meat of this portion of Scripture. And yes, I think about it in the context of the whole of the Bible—the unfolding story, the whole of God’s revelation, and so on. But when I’m dealing with this text and “What does this text really have to say?” And there’s just a danger you use the text as a trampoline, and you bounce out, and you start there, but really, most of the sermon is not about that text; it’s about Jesus—or something else. And then the text almost is redundant. So I just want to say: Have confidence in the text, do the hard work, and the reality of the message will come out. You will be speaking the gospel.

Matt: That’s good. Richard, anything you would add as an Old Testament guy?

Richard: Yes. You can blame Old Testament professors for not giving you better handles for how to preach the Old Testament as a Christian, you know.

And let me say this word of, I guess, warning, or of alarm: Preaching, homiletics, goals in preaching, that sort of thing—they come in waves. You know, you get one person that’s a successful preacher, and so everybody wants to be like him. You get another one like that: like him. And there have been waves that happened. We are now in a day still—probably at the end of it, frankly—where Christocentric preaching is something that’s expected of everyone. And so, basically, what you’re going to do is find a very hard way to handle that, because the Christian idea of who Messiah is is narrowed down by our church traditions and by our own prejudices and things. And so the connections from the text to Jesus is going to be often what I lovingly call “leprechaun Christology.” And you know about leprechauns, right? If you catch them, you get the pot of gold. Okay? But nobody ever sees them except you. Okay? There’s the problem. And so you find people preaching things like “Well, Joseph wore sandals.” (We texted about this just a week ago, didn’t we?) “Joseph wore sandals, and Jesus did too.” Okay?

Willie: “Joseph’s name began with J, and Jesus does too.”

Richard: That’s right. “And they both begin with J!” You see what I’m saying? So we’re pressed so hard to squeeze what the Old Testament says into our rather impoverished view of what Christology actually is and who Jesus actually was and is and how it unfolds—this Jesus, how he unfolds in our lives and in the history of the Bible—that the wealth of what’s there in the Old Testament, it’s hard to connect that to our Jesus.

Did that just make sense? I hope it did. I’m trying to be obtuse and not name names.

But at the same time, you know, if you’re young and you have to start, you have to start with something. You have to start with something. So don’t throw away the methods that you see in others and the books that you read about Christocentric preaching and things like that. Don’t throw them away. But at the same time: Get a life! Okay? Live a life. And perhaps if we could avoid the big word (and I don’t know how to do it; yes, maybe we do), I think we should always preach all of the Bible as Christians (that is, as followers of Jesus), and I think the critical piece of that is to understand that Jesus is the last Son of David, the eschatological son of David (Can I say it that way?), and that the wealth of who Jesus is—the richness of who he is—can be seen in how the last days unfold in the New Testament and beyond, in our day as well (’cause we’re in the last days also). If we can catch the richness of how that unfolds, you’ll find it connecting to Old Testament themes all the time, just like Willie did with Sodom and Gomorrah: judgment that comes, mercy that comes. Those kinds of themes, you see, connect to Jesus when he was here two thousand years ago; they connect to Jesus now, reigning in heaven, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, who’s in the church today; and they connect to the last day, the great judgment, as well. And that kind of eschatological richness allows us to go back into the Old Testament and find these kinds of thematic connections to Christ.

That okay?

Matt: Yeah. That’s great. Helpful.

Richard: I never preach from the New Testament except here. It’s kind of weird. Actually, I do.

Matt: The Old Testament scholar preaches in the…

Richard: But only occasionally—yeah—do I preach from the New Testament. I don’t know how to preach from an epistle.

Alistair: Well, you faked it pretty well.

Richard: Well, you know what I mean. I don’t feel comfortable with it. Because epistles are so situationally based. They’re so specific to the need that the apostle, we’ll say, is writing to. And so you have to get into this tiny little community in Ephesus, let’s say, and then enlarge that to the whole church forever. That seems to me a very difficult task compared to books of the Bible, Old Testament, that were written for the nation of Israel, the people of Israel, and all of the diversity and all their various situations. That seems to me to be an easier step. But I’m weird, I know.

Matt: Well, hey, you did a wonderful job in Romans 1 and Ephesians 4. I think we all benefited greatly from your expositions there.

This next question, to kind of run on the theme of what you had covered in a rapidly changing culture here in the West: This pastor writes, “We’ve heard a lot in this conference about the transformation happening within our wider culture. As pastors, how can we help our churches read the news through the Bible rather than read our Bibles through the news?”

Alistair: Was that… Was it me? Well, I did say that.

How do we do that? We do it. Begin the day with your Bible. Sue and I have a friend in California. She’s in her early nineties now. And she said to us one day, she said, “Make sure that it’s Word before world. Word before world.” And what she was really saying there was just that: Let the Word of Christ frame as you waken to a new day, with all that you don’t know about or you do know about, with everything that you’re about to encounter that comes at you now in our world of social media and everything. And something just as straightforward as that is very helpful to me. Because I fight the temptation, like yourself. ’Cause I have The Times of London. I’ve got the New York Times. I’ve got the Telegraph. I’ve got everything there. And it’s right there. And so that’s why, even early this morning, I physically read my Bible—my actual Bible Bible—to keep me away from all that other stuff.

But learning to think biblically is learning to think about everything from a biblical framework. I mean, the breakdown of family life is explained in Scripture. I mean, the great alienation of our world is the alienation between ourselves and the living God. Every other kind of alienation is a sub-alienation. But that’s the real issue. The battle, the war, is Genesis 3. I mean, that’s what’s going on. That’s what has been going on and will go on—so that instead of getting completely preoccupied with whether I am pro-Ukrainian or pro-Russia or whatever it might be, I step back from it, and I remind myself that God is sovereign. Instead of getting completely steamed up about immigration, I recognize that if I read my Bible properly, that God sovereignly was overseeing the movement of peoples throughout history to different places.

And if you take, for example, a very strident tone about immigration, then you’ve got to play that against, for example, the services that the Tron has in the afternoons on Sunday, or whenever it is, for all the Farsi people, many of whom have come there by devious routes or strange designs. But they’re there. And in the providence of God, they’re hearing the gospel.

And so—that kind of thing. Yeah.

Matt: Anything you would add to that, Willie?

Alistair: He might not. He’s a bit of a… You know, he’s a big immigration guy, you know, so… So am I. So am I.

Willie: I think you’re the immigrant here, aren’t you, Alistair?

Alistair: It’s true! It’s true!

Willie: It’s all right. I’ve got a ticket home.

I think… One thing I would add, I think… And this may not be true here, because I think maybe Americans are a bit more skeptical than we tend to be on our side of the pond of authority and government and media and so on. But I think a lot of—and this is something I think that people have perhaps observed more particularly just in the last few years—I think since the whole COVID era and so on, a lot of people, I think, have woken up to just the sheer level of deception and propaganda that there is in public life, the media, and so on.

And I think as Christians, that should not surprise us. You know, the devil is “the father of lies.”[5] He’s the deceiver. You know, in the vision in Revelation—is it 13?—of the beast and the false prophet and so on, there’s very clearly, aren’t there—there’s two sides of it. There’s God’s people being persecuted—persecution is a very clear thing—but then the other side of it is propaganda. And I’m not sure that we take that seriously enough. I think I would urge Christians to be very skeptical of all media and be very discerning before we just drink in what’s being given to us, because I think we’re much more propagandized than we realize. And I think there really is a lot of agendas behind what seems to be or what purports to be, you know, neutral news.

I mean, certainly in my country, an older generation—my parents’ generation, particularly—would take what the BBC says as gospel truth: “It was on the BBC—must be right.” And that’s still pervasive. But I want to say, “Well, this is the BBC that is telling you day after day after day after day that there are fifty-seven genders and that, you know, all of these things are true, and so on. And then the next thing it tells you you’ll assume is true.” So, you know, we’ve got to be careful, because you can go so far as to become absolutely cynical—that you believe nothing about anything, you know, except every single conspiracy theory there is under the sun. So we need to be careful.

But I do think healthy skepticism… I think the Bible urges us to realize that we live in a world of deception and lies. And the devil, I think, in our society… See, in some parts of the world, it is outright physical persecution, isn’t it? But I think for us, the propaganda is probably a bigger thing that we need to be realizing. And that is why—what Alistair says—we read the news through the lens of Scripture and not without that. That’s a protection to us. So that’s just a…

Alistair: I’ll just add one thing to that. I don’t think—to your point about, I think, maybe we’re more skeptical about things or whatever it might be—in my experience, in moving in the circles that I move in, the danger is not from the people that we disagree with. The absence of skepticism is towards the people we actually do agree with. And they are as guilty of the propaganda as are those with whom we disagree. And because we know we disagree with them, we can just simply turn that off. But we turn that off; we don’t give them an opportunity—we don’t even give ourselves the opportunity—to see if there’s one valid notion in it, but we allow ourselves to be completely overwhelmed by whatever else it might be.

And that is what breeds the forms of Christian nationalism. That’s what breeds all that stuff—the wrapping the cross of Christ with a big American flag: “As it goes in DC, it goes in the world.” That’s the biggest danger for, in my experience, for evangelical Christianity.

Willie: Yeah, we’ve got to be very careful. ’Cause you can easily live in an echo chamber now, can’t you, with social media and all the rest of it? Yeah. Yeah.

Matt: Yeah. That’s helpful.

We did get a number of questions, Alistair, in light of you mentioning Christian nationalism in that opening message—questions pertaining to “How can we encourage our people to be citizens of heaven, recognizing our place in the world but also not succumbing to its various temptations and being engulfed in the whole thing?”

Alistair: Well, I mean, we bear a huge responsibility in this regard, in terms of having both the freedom and the privilege of seeking to do what we’re saying should be done. I mean, the way that I can help is in conversation, in moving amongst people, thinking about things in the context of coffee and talking and that way. But the tone that is set from the pulpit is so crucial in that regard. And that’s easy stuff. That’s low-hanging fruit if you just, you know, take the temperature of the crowd and then feed—you know, throw the meat there. And so we have to guard against that, especially if we’re politically oriented.

And we do care. I mean, people—during the whole, you know, the last three cycles of presidential elections, I felt really gratified, because I got kicked in the butt from both sides because of things that I’d said. So I said, “Well, I must be doing something right.” Because people wrote in to say, “You know, you’re obviously…” Because I mentioned in passing that I thought it was a really bizarre thing that Trump would come in and out of his rallies to the song “YMCA.” Okay? And so people said, “Well, why would you say such an unkind thing?” I said, “Well, I didn’t think it was an unkind thing. I was just saying it’s bizarre to me.” And I said, “Because if I’ve missed it, as far as I know, I know the song wasn’t written this way, but that song is a bastion for the LGBTQ department, you know. So either he’s being cynical in using it, which he shouldn’t, or he’s clueless.” And so I got a lot of nice press about that. And then, you know, then I got it from the other side as well. But it’s a tough one here. I think it’s tough.

Matt: Richard, anything you would add? We got a question directed at you: How can the church speak prophetically without being unnecessarily combative or overly political? So…

Richard: My goodness! I mean, how would I know? “How can the church speak…” This is one of the problems: What do we mean by that? I guess we mean, “What should preachers say?”

Matt: Yeah, small-c church here. Yeah.

Richard: Okay. Okay. Okay. So, I think… I think… Now, brothers, someone said something to me after one of the messages yesterday: He said, “I was waiting to try to figure out who you voted for in the last presidential contest.”

Alistair: There you go. That’s what I’m talking about.

Richard: And he said, “I couldn’t”—even to this moment, after the message, he said (Where are you, brother?)—that “I still couldn’t tell who you voted for.”

I thought, “Wow, that’s really good. I succeeded.” Because the truth is that authentic, God-fearing Christian people have voted in different ways. Okay? They really have. I mean, I know you may not feel that way, but it’s true. You need to get out more often if you don’t know that’s true. You need to get out more often. And while that doesn’t mean that we soft-pedal everything, we have to be very careful to say the things that we say in ways that are edifying to the church. I mean, that’s what we’re trying to do, is to build up the body of Christ.

And so kindness, I think, from the pulpit on questionable things is a very important thing—humility about them, raising questions rather than always giving the answer. I mean, I have my views. I really am right of Attila the Hun on most issues. I really am. But… So who cares? Who cares what I think? Okay? That’s really not my… My job is not to make decisions about the subtleties of these complex—obviously complex—worldly matters. And my goal is to point people to Christ and to point them toward the kingdom of God and to encourage them to be thinking, “As important as it is for certain things to be in place in the civil magistrates—and we want that to be true—our loyalty belongs to Jesus. He is our King. He is our King. And this country will go up and down, and it will come and it will go like every other empire in this world. But there is one empire that will not fail, and that’s the one we want to be a part of.”

Alistair: That’s it. That’s it.

Richard: And we have a King. We have a King. As much as we go around (I do, anyway) saying “Sic semper tyrannis” to human kings down here on this earth—okay?—we have a King, and his power and authority is absolute. And that calls us to be distinguished from the world as well as helpful to the world and seeking to be salt and light in the world. And it’s just—those are complicated things, and we have to help our people think a little more complexly than they normally do, if that makes some sense, so that we can be welcoming to people that disagree with us on these things.

I mean, do you really want your church to be identified with a particular political party, so that no one from another political party could possibly be welcomed in your church? Is that really what you want? At Thirdmill, we have a rule—’cause we do have political diversity in our staff. Our rule is you can’t go on social media and say anything controversial during working hours. I said, “I’m going to restrict your freedom of speech from eight to five Eastern Standard Time. There it is. Okay? Now, after that, you can do whatever you want to do, but not during working hours ’cause we don’t pay for that.” If we didn’t have that kind of restriction, we would blow up. We would blow up at Thirdmill. Because these people sincerely believe that aligning with one side or the other is the better way to go as a Christian. They’re critical of both sides—their own as well—but they sincerely believe that these values are more important than those sets of values.

And who am I to tell them, “Well, you’ve got to align with me and my politics, or you can’t have a job at Thirdmill”? Who am I to do such a thing as that? The body of Christ is struggling to know directions to go, and it always has, and it always will. And we just need to recognize that.

Now, believe me, on issues like abortion and a few things like that—you know, you can name five or six of them—I would be all the way right, I hope, where everyone in this room is, honestly, I hope. But there are lots of things that get involved in politics beyond those. Lots! And so we just have to be careful, I think.

Matt: Yeah. Thanks for that insight.

Maybe a couple more questions, just looking at the clock. We got a number of questions about spiritual dryness, apathy, fatigue from various pastors. This question reads, “How have you set boundaries in ministry with so many demands that are placed upon you? I often struggle with the expectations people put on me to not only preach Sunday by Sunday but also to counsel, lead our staff, respond to emergencies, and develop new ministry initiatives. I can’t do everything, yet sometimes I feel the pressure to do so.” Any thoughts?

Willie: Yeah, well, you said it: You can’t do everything. And if you try to, you will die. So…

One of my mentors, William Still, used to have a word that he often used. And it was detachment. And he said, “You have to learn detachment,” which means that you have to realize you’re not God. You are not able to do everything. His little book The Work of the Pastor is a great book. And my favorite line in that book goes something like this—and I often quote it to ministers in training. It says something like this: “Some meddlesome pastors think that it’s their job to sort out every problem in everybody else’s life. God is not so optimistic.”[6] And that is a liberating word, because what it’s reminding you is you’re not God; you’re not Christ; you’re not the Holy Spirit. You cannot sort out everything. And if you take that burden upon yourself—which we naturally do, because we feel that weight, don’t we?—we will kill ourselves. And so that’s what he meant by learning detachment. You have to be able to say, “Well, this is beyond me. Leave it with the Lord. And me spending more hours on this is not going to help the situation. It’s just going to kill me.”

It’s very, very… One of the things I say to our new staff and apprentices at the beginning of our year, when there’s new people coming on our team, is—I do a little pep talk about various things—but one of the things I say is: The whole issue of boundaries is sometimes, I think, the most difficult thing that people find in ministry. And when you’re coming into church ministry, particularly for the first time, it’s very, very different from any other kind of thing, even from parachurch ministry. Because the boundaries of your life are completely blurred. You know, your church life, your social life, your friends, your relaxation, everything, it all blurs together. You know, you may not have a specific responsibility in any particular way on a Sunday, but if you’re on the staff team, you know, you’re at church on Sunday. Well, you’re at church; you’re not working. But you still feel like you’re working. When things happen, it’s very, very hard to get away from it. And if you’re the kind of person that wants to put working hours into your diary (“I work these hours only, and others…”), you will find that you become very angry, because things intrude into your time off and all the rest of it. So you’ve just got to find a way of working that.

And people do it in different ways. I think it’s very difficult to put boundaries on your work. I think it’s easier to put boundaries on your escape time. So I encourage our folk to say, “You have to put a boundary around this time when you’re not at work. And if that means you have to be physically away, or doing something else, or whatever it is, you do that.” People are different. They have to find it in different ways. But some people, in my experience, just cannot live like that. They can’t do it. And I think if that’s you, then I think you need to think seriously: Is church ministry something you can do? Or would you be better in something like a parachurch ministry, where when you have your working hours, you do your ministry, but you come to church, and it’s nothing to do with your ministry? So there are some people I’ve come across who just can’t manage those boundaries. But if you’re going to survive in church ministry, you have to find a way of living with those blurred boundaries.

And I can’t tell you what that is for you. For me, unless I’m out of the country, I do not feel I’ve escaped. I can drive to the other end of Scotland, but I feel that I’m not far enough away. I need to be on the other end of an airplane. And as soon as I get off at the other end, in another place, I don’t mind if somebody phones me up. If it’s a problem, whatever it is, I can deal with it, and I am detached, because I’m on the other end of a flight. I can’t get there. So for me, it has to be that. I mean, I’m just maybe a bit weird. But others can do it on the golf course or wherever it is. But you need to find some ways of escape where you realize, “The world is not going to stop if I don’t do this.”

Matt: Yeah. That’s a good word.

Last question here: This pastor writes, “What is one thing that concerns you about pastors in ministry today, and what is one thing that gives you hope as you think about pastors in local church ministry moving toward the future?” So, one concern, and one thing that gives you hope.

Alistair: I would say the concern is the concern that I would live with for myself, that I alluded to: that I take myself too seriously, and I don’t take the task that I’ve been entrusted with seriously enough. That would be the concern. The flip side of it would be the sense of marvel and wonder that God has chosen to put his treasure in old clay pots,[7] so that he uses the most unlikeliest of us in ways that we would never have conceived for ourselves.

And so, at this vantage point of my life, as I move around here and meet my own young guys and the guys that I’ve known over time, I’m jealous for them for the future. I’m not jealous of them; I’m jealous for them. Because in the goodness of God, they have more runway in front of them than they have behind them. You’re a case in point. And I’m excited about that, because I see that God has his hand upon these young lives. And as J. C. Ryle said at one point when people were saying to him, “All the old guys are dying, J. C., you know,” and he said, “Worry not. God has yet brighter stars in his universe.”[8] And so the best is always still to be.

Richard: I think—I believe (I don’t know whether it’s true for you or not, but I think it is true of lots) that the biggest challenge, I think, that many ministers have that discourages them greatly is that they create… Well, there’s a celebrity culture that our culture at large has, and we have it too. And by “celebrity” I mean: Obviously God has given ministry opportunities to some people that are larger, shall we say, or apparently more impactful? And we associate that with being more important. And so when you don’t get that, you feel utterly dismayed—you know: “I’m doing my best. I’m trying to be faithful. And somehow or another, my church isn’t growing. Somehow or another, I’m not on television, and I don’t understand why that’s not the case.” Okay? So that disappoints me. That discourages me, for anyone that wrestles with that.

And I think that especially if you’re younger—like that teenage grandson that was going to his granddaddy and thinks he was going to change the whole world—that’s often the way you start. Okay? You want to be the next Charles Spurgeon, don’t you? Don’t you? Okay? Okay, so let’s just say that’s a big problem.

But the flip side of it is: The solution to that is believing that what God has given you to do, even if you can’t perceive that it’s true—what God has given you to do, the opportunity he’s given you to do, to serve in a particular way—in his providence, can be the most astonishing thing in the world, the most significant thing that’s ever happened. Because you don’t know. You don’t get to see it. But you can know it can be true. And you can trust that the Lord is using you as part of this magnificently complex and wondrously arranged providence of his—that “I, in my little church of twenty-five, fifty people, and half of them don’t like me, and I can’t figure out what I can do, and it’s just weighing down on me, and… But the church across the street is just busting out, and he’s not even preaching the Bible”—those kinds of discouraging things—you’re going to touch a person in your life, and that person may be the next Charles Spurgeon.

And isn’t it interesting how some of Jesus’ apostles we know very well, and some of them we have absolutely no information whatsoever on—reliable information, anyway—on how the Lord used them? And these were apostles of Jesus! But they’re still the foundation of the church. And we assume and we trust that God put them in their places to do what they did, even though they didn’t write thirteen letters that we all read every day. Does that make sense? If you can begin to trust that, it will relieve you of a great many burdens. A great many burdens.

And to know that a ministry is not a straight line. One of my favorite lines from Thus Spoke Zarathustra (If you want to know, I’ll tell you where it’s from)—at one point he said the distance between one mountain peak and another is a straight line if you live above the clouds.[9] In other words, if you’re a god, life is just a straight line. You go from one mountain peak to the next to the next to the next. But that’s not the way ministry is. You’re not living above the clouds. You’re living down here on the earth. You’ve got to cross rivers, and you’ve got to go down into gulleys, and you’ve got to go over hills, and you’ve got to deal with this, and you’ve got to deal with that.

But all of this is in the hands of God. It’s all in the hands of God. And if you never make it to a mountain peak, and everyone says, “Oh my goodness! Look! Look how wonderful that person is!”—that’s okay. There’s a cloud of witnesses that’s watching, and they are noticing. They are noticing. They are noticing that you held that person’s hand as they took their last breath. They’re noticing. And the host of heaven notices. And our King Jesus notices. And it’s all going to be worth it one day, because you will be the ones that are hailed as the great servants of Christ. If you can hold on to that hope, then I think it will help a lot.

Matt: Yeah. Well, that’s a good word, I think, to close on.

Richard: Zarathustra?

Matt: I think so. Would you all agree? Yeah? Yeah. Well, thank you, men, for your labor amongst us these last few days. Can we thank them together? Yeah. Thank you.

Alistair: Thank you, Richard. Thanks, Willie.

Matt: Well, Alistair, before we sing together, would you mind praying as we close?

Alistair: Certainly.

“This is the one to whom I will look,” says the Lord: “he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word.”[10]

We bow before your greatness, Lord. You sit supreme in the heavens. And we marvel that you would love us, that you would pick us up and give us the privilege of serving you as we serve your people. We thank you for the opportunity to think out loud with one another now, and we pray that, as I said last night, that the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts may be found to be acceptable in your sight, Lord. You’re our strength and our Redeemer.[11]

And we pray, Lord, as we have this final session, as some perhaps have to move on, that we will part with your blessing and that we might prove in the time that you give us always to be a help and never a hindrance to one another as we seek to follow Christ—and in whose name we pray. Amen.

[1] Proverbs 27:17 (ESV).

[2] See Ephesians 4:29.

[3] C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (1955), chap. 14.

[4] See Luke 24:27; John 5:39.

[5] John 8:44 (ESV).

[6] William Still, The Work of the Pastor, rev. ed. (1984; repr. Fearn, UK: Christian Focus, 2010), 44. Paraphrased.

[7] See 2 Corinthians 4:7.

[8] J. C. Ryle, Holiness: Its Nature, Hindrances, Difficulties, and Roots, enlarged ed. (1879), chap. 13. Paraphrased.

[9] Friedrich Nietzsche, “Of Reading and Writing,” in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883–85).

[10] Isaiah 66:2 (ESV).

[11] See Psalm 19:14.