Panel Question Time (Basics 2026)

Bob Lepine: Would you thank Greg and the band for the great job they’ve been doing today? Awesome.

So, guys, come on up. Alistair, Hershael, Todd, come on up and join us. We are going to do a lot of Q and A. You guys ask a lot of questions. We have—I’ve got these written-out questions here, I’ve got more electronic questions here, and I’m going to kind of go back and forth. And we have grouped some of these into groupings, because some of you ask very similar questions, so… And we’re not going to be able to get to them all, but we will do our best to power our way through these.

So, first of all: Alistair, Hershael, thank you for today, for taking us through the Scriptures and… Very helpful.

We had a number of questions here. Some of these men who are here are not in full-time pastoral ministry. Some of them are lay elders, or they’re just men who love the Lord and wondering about: How do you know if you’re called? How did you know that you were called? So maybe we’ll start there: How did you know that you were called to pastoral ministry, and when, and what was the confirmation of that?

Hershael York: Man, I was ten years… I trusted the Lord when I was seven. Some people wonder about childhood conversion. Not I! I’ve never had a serious doubt about the reality of what the Lord did in my heart as a seven-year-old boy. When I was ten, I felt such a compulsion to ministry. And I went in my dad’s study—my dad was a pastor—and I said, “I…” I mean, I was hem-hawing around. I said, “I know how this sounds. I know people are going to say I’m doing this just ’cause you’re my dad. I know it sounds ridiculous that a ten-year-old feels called to preach. But I feel like the Lord’s calling me to preach.” And I was worried about, you know, what my dad would say. And he just went, “Hersh…” He said, “You know, the Lord will clarify things later on.” He said, “But, you know, if the Lord calls you when you’re ten, you need to just say yes when you’re ten.” He said, “Just get in the habit of saying yes to God.”

That was great advice for a ten-year-old. It’s great advice for a sixty-six-year-old. And just get in the habit of saying yes to God, and the Lord will—I think he’ll make it clear. I think he does this through his Word. I think he does it through desire, through gifting, through the testimony of others, and through opportunity. I think the Lord uses those things.

But, you know, I would just say: If you pray above all else that you want your life to bring glory to Jesus, he will clarify the way he wants you to do that.

Bob: And for you, from ten, there was never a turning point where you thought, “Maybe a baseball player, or maybe a…”

Hershael: No. I did think about what that ministry looked like. I went through a time… You know, I was a freshman at Michigan State. Anybody looking at my life on the outside would have thought I was a good Christian kid. But I was cold, and I went through… It was the spiritual nadir of my existence, and—incredible—my dad… He was pastoring in Detroit; I was at Michigan State. He did some things that were just amazing things, that just spoke to me of his love. And the Lord really convicted my heart through that. And it was in my freshman year, alone in my dorm at Michigan State, I got on my knees, and I said, “Lord, I don’t know what you want me to do, but whatever it is, I’m going to do it.” And it was just a confirmation.

Later, you know, that summer I spent in Brazil doing mission work. Year later, I was called to Ashland Avenue. It was really very much focused from the time I was—just before I turned nineteen.

But I was always under that compulsion: “The Lord’s going to use me.” Again, I didn’t know, really, exactly what it was going to look like. I began, you know, music and youth ministry there at Ashland Avenue. Very—within two, three years, Brother Range started using me more. I started preaching, teaching a lot more. And he said to me, “You know, you need to be a pastor.” I was feeling that. So the Lord just confirmed it, you know. He opened those doors of opportunity and used desire and all that and confirmed it at every stage.

Bob: I’m going to jump over you and go to you, Todd, ’cause your story’s very different.

Todd Smith: Yeah. Yeah, mine’s different. I started in business and was in business for about twenty years. And there was a growing sense in me that God was stirring ministry. And I didn’t have a ten-year-old’s kind of view. I didn’t have a Damascus Road experience, though that would have been nice, but this growing desire. And I think a guy—you know, a guy doesn’t know whether he’s called, but I think the body knows. And one of the things that I started doing in this process was just, like Hershael said, saying yes to the Lord. And then I started asking guys that I trusted and respected that would speak truth to me. And I just said, “What do you think?” And I really needed to know that. I was, you know, married, I had three kids, and I was about ready to blow up my life. And I didn’t want to do it because I had this, like, unction in my stomach. That could just be bad Mexican food. And so I really wanted to have godly men around me speak into it. And so, about a two-year process.

Bob: And where was the point where you said, “Okay, I think this is for real”?

Todd: Yeah, I think it was a mentor of mine finally put it to me and just said, “Stop wasting time. Go.” And I went. And next thing I know, I signed up for seminary, went to seminary, and then finished seminary, and then came out and planted Crossroads.

Bob: When you took that turn, was there an escape hatch? I mean, like, did you go into it thinking, “Okay, if this blows up, I can still do this”?

Todd: Yeah. I’m that way. I like, you know, chicken exits. And so I had a few of those just in case I was reading something wrong. ’Cause I didn’t have a voice from heaven. I didn’t—you know, there wasn’t any clarifying call that way. It was really depending on the body and these godly men in my life that would speak truth.

Bob: Alistair, what was your story?

Alistair Begg: I was four years old.

Todd: I don’t think your pack’s on.

Bob: Is your mic on? You might need to flip the switch. Yeah! You’ve done that before.

Alistair: Okay!

Bob: Now it’s on.

Alistair: Yeah. Good. That wasn’t caught.

Bob: Are you sure you’re called? ’Cause you don’t know how to use the electronics very well.

Hershael: Powerless preaching right there.

Alistair: I tell you: I was very cold. That’s why I got this sweater.

Bob: Oh. “Called,” not…

Alistair: But, succinctly, I would be similar to what Hershael has said. I had the benefits. My father was not a pastor, but my upbringing was like Timothy’s: grandmother, his mother, that whole thing.[1] And so from my early days, pastors meant a lot to me. When I was small, I always wanted to shake their hands at the end of the service. I loved them.

But even when I started to sense something in my heart that I might be useful in the kingdom, the one thing I was sure about was that I wouldn’t be a pastor, because that would be scary. And there had been many pastors in my house—people like your dad, you know, presumably. And I used to get left sitting beside them like this while my mother was making lunch. And they would say things like “Aye, sonny! Maybe you’ll be a pastor one day.” And I was like, “I don’t think so!” And I was studying. I was doing youth stuff with music. And always in the back of my mind, I thought, “Well, you could do, like, sports ministry. You could do music ministry. You can do all these kinds of things. You don’t have to become one of those guys.” And it wasn’t because I didn’t appreciate them, but I just didn’t see myself in that role.

And I had come back… This is very memorable to me. I had been on a weekend with another guy down in Bournemouth, and we were doing a youth event. And on the Monday or the Tuesday of that week back in college, I volunteered at lunchtime that I didn’t like these weekend things anymore. And somebody said, “Why? What’s wrong with them?” I said, “No, there’s nothing wrong with them. But I don’t like the experience of going on a Friday, meeting a whole new bunch of people—especially young people—and then come Sunday night, we get in the car, we drive away, and we probably won’t ever see them again.”

And one of the lecturers in the college, called John Balchin—a Baptist minister with rather thick glasses—he looked at me through these thick glasses, and he said, “And I can tell you exactly why that is.” And I said, “Go ahead.” He said, “And that is because God has given you a pastor’s heart. If you were an evangelist, you could go and leave and go and leave. You can’t do that.” And I thought, “No, that can’t possibly be.” Because I was twenty-three years old. And who would want me, or how could I ever do that?

And that’s when the whole thing came from Derek Prime in Charlotte Chapel. And I went to be with Derek with the proviso that if the call of God into pastoral ministry was realistic, then whatever sense I had subjectively would be objectively ratified by the response of the congregation and by the response of the elders. And if that were the case, then we would proceed, and if that were not the case, then it would be time well spent, and it wouldn’t matter.

And so, as I said earlier today, on the second Sunday of October 1976, I was ordained to the gospel ministry. And I have never, ever conceived of anything other than that from that day.

Bob: I was in my twenties, wondering if I was called to pastoral ministry, and had the first opportunity in my life to go hear John MacArthur speak and waited in line afterwards to ask him a question and said, “How do I know if I’m called?” And he gave me—is it Spurgeon’s answer? “If you can do anything else, do it.”[2]

Alistair: Yeah. If you can stay out, stay out.

Bob: And I remember thinking, “Well, that’s stupid, ’cause I can do other things.” I mean, it was like, “I can cook hamburgers. You know, I can do radio—the other things I’m doing.” What I didn’t realize was—he wasn’t saying if you vocationally can do other things; if your heart can do other things, then do them.

And so I served as a lay elder in two churches, and that’s at some level a call to pastoral ministry—maybe not full-time vocational pastoral ministry—but eventually got into bivocational pastoral ministry, because there was a need, and I had the availability and the burden, the unction in my heart. And that’s when I kind of went, “I guess I can’t do anything else, because I just keep getting… This is what I want to be doing. I want to be discipling God’s people. I want to be shepherding God’s people.” And I think that’s part…

So, if you could sit down—one of these guys asked—if you could sit down with yourself at the beginning of this, now, from where you are, go back and give your early pastor days your best wisdom, what would you say to yourself today as you’re starting over? What advice would you give him?

Alistair: Slow down. Slow down. When you’re young, you think you can accomplish more in a year than you can, and you underestimate how much can be accomplished in five years. That would be the first thing I’d say.

And the second thing I’d say is: You can’t drive people from behind. You can only lead them from the front. So a ministry that was very imperative, very hortatory—you know, “Come on! Come on!”—I’m glad I figured out fairly early on that that wasn’t the way to go, that the indicatives were fundamental to the imperatives that followed.

Bob: How about you?

Hershael: Similarly, I would tell myself to lighten up. I started out so young, you know? I was twenty years old, on staff at a big church, doing a big job. And, you know, I felt like I had to look older and heavy and all that.

Alistair: You do look older!

Hershael: Yeah. He needs to be in the balcony on The Muppets.

And when I got married, you know, I took that into my marriage for the first several years. I was hard and just overly serious and heavy. I would tell myself, “Lighten up!” and, you know, “The joy of the Lord is my strength,”[3] and the fruit of the Spirit: peace, joy, love…[4] You know, if you’re not fun to live with, you really can’t claim to be filled with the Spirit and showing the fruit of the Spirit. It took me a few years to figure that out. And that’s what I would tell myself.

Bob: That’s… I think that’s a tweet. “If you’re not fun to live with, you’re really not…”

Hershael: Yeah. I think it’s a shortcut to… It’s not the only criterion, but seriously! If the people you’re around don’t enjoy being around you, you can’t claim to be filled with the Spirit or showing the fruit of the Spirit or like Jesus. Those people loved to be around Jesus. They were drawn to him. And it took me several years to figure that out.

Bob: Todd, what would you tell yourself?

Todd: I’d say the same thing that Alistair said: Slow down. I came in, you know, guns a-blazing. And I thought Jesus said that Todd would build his church. And he had to put me in a hospital bed to remind me, no, that he would build his church.[5] And there was just—there was a sense of, I was going to, you know, either—I wasn’t going to rust out for Jesus, but I maybe would burn out for Jesus. And then I realized: Neither one of those are helpful to Jesus. And it was realizing that it’s the Spirit’s work. It’s the work of God. It’s his ministry. It’s his church.

Bob: One of the questions here is about—from a pastor who’s in his sixties, and he’s asking, “How do you know when it’s time to back out?” And both of you men over the last two years have done that. You stepped away from your role at Buck Run. You stepped away from Parkside. How did you assess that? What led up to you doing that?

Hershael: You know, for me, it was really a strategic decision. Chris was just a really remarkable preacher—humble. I just thought he was a good match for Buck Run. You know, Buck Run’s 208 years old; I was the seventy-seventh pastor.

Bob: Oh!

Hershael: Do the math on that.

Bob: Yeah.

Hershael: And I was the first one to make it twenty years. And other churches were coming after Chris. He had other opportunities. And I thought, “You know, I can do this for three to five more years, no problem. But we’ll lose Chris. He will rightfully go somewhere else. Or we can plan a transition, and the guy that I love, I discipled, I trained, I mentored could be here thirty-plus years. And in that sense, then I’ve had a fifty-year ministry.” And that just made better sense to me.

And, you know, my life was unusual in the sense that I had another ministry. I was truly bivocational, you know, teaching at the seminary. I didn’t have to have that income. That wasn’t my only ministry. So it just made sense. I felt led of the Lord to do it, and I think it was a good decision.

Bob: And you were looking at the good of the church going forward as a part of that decision.

Hershael: It absolutely was. And, yeah. I mean, it was, I thought, the best thing for Buck Run.

Bob: Alistair, what about you?

Alistair: Well, I’ve always admired people who stayed places for a long time. And… But having said that, there’s no peculiar thing about longevity. You could stay a long time and stink, you know, so we’re not going to make an issue about longevity.

When we had our fortieth anniversary at Parkside, then people would say, you know, “So what happens next?” And my immediate answer was “Well, as long as I am ambulatory, as long as I am still learning, as long as people are still growing in this context, then, you know, why would I stop?”

And then, in the next, you know, twelve, fourteen months, a number of things happened completely unrelated to anything to do with me. But Klopp, who was the manager of Liverpool at the time, announced the fact that he was going to retire, right at the height of his success. And I thought, “Well, that’s an interesting thing.” And then there were some other things just like that. And then I began to say to myself as I drove around, “Well, that’s a fair enough answer that you gave, but what if it’s not the right answer? It maybe sounds a little bit like it’s all about you, Alistair. What about your wife? What about your children? What about your grandchildren? What about the role that you have beyond this immediate pastoral involvement? And how do you want to spend, you know, the next period of time that you have?”

And as I thought about it, I said, “Well, you know, you’re going to have to go sometime. So I might as well go when I feel like going rather than when they kick me out.” And so that’s—I made that determination. I talked with Sue a little bit about it. I think she was caught off guard by it. I think, in retrospect, I might have taken longer to work through that along with her, but the deed is done.

But I thought, “You know, I’ve spent my life”—you know this from pastoral ministry—telling your children, “I’m sorry, I can’t come to your game. Sunday’s coming. I’m sorry I can’t do this. I’m sorry I can’t do that.” Spent fifty years by myself in pastoral ministry with my wife sitting by herself in the church. Tonight, it was fun to sit together on the front row and have her arm through my arm as we sang in praise. Well, I thought, “Well, before I die, I’d like to do that a few times. I’d like to teach my grandchildren how to drive a stick-shift car.” And so, for all these masterfully spiritual reasons, I just decided, “I’m going to do this.”

Again, though, to say what Hershael’s saying: I mean, Truth For Life has been a huge part of my life for thirty years. And in that sense, I, too, have been bivocational. And so, it wasn’t as if I was stepping away into no-man’s-land, because all it’s meant is that I haven’t retired as much as I have realigned my activities or reprogrammed things.

Bob: I want to ask both of you: Since leaving… There’s a sense of identity that comes with pastoral ministry. There’s the discipline of weekly, in-the-Word sermon prep that—Alistair, you were talking about this in your message today—it’s a part of what fuels your own spiritual life and your own soul. Now, all of a sudden, you don’t have that urgency that—you’re not driven to do that. And you’re not the lead pastor anymore. Have you had a sense of “What’s my identity? And how do I pursue new spiritual disciplines to replace what was my spiritual routine?”

Hershael: Those are two questions. I have not struggled at all with the identity thing. You know, I’m not a backward-looking person. It’s just not who I am. And my thinking is: You know, at the end of the day, I go home to Tanya, whom I absolutely love and adore. At the end of life, I’m going home to Jesus. I’m okay. I mean, there’s nothing lost here.

But do I miss that—I don’t know what to call it. It’s more than a discipline. I mean, there was just a joy. Two years working through Luke! It’s just like, “Ah! I love that so much!”

So I’ll tell you what I did. I knew I was going to miss that. January of ’24, when I stepped down, I started… I knew I was going to miss that, just working through a book. So I bought an interleaved ESV. You know, every other page is blank, right? And I said, “I’m doing the M’Cheyne plan through the Bible. And every day, I’m going to write my own little notes and commentary on”—you do four readings in the M’Cheyne plan—“I’m going to do it on every passage.” I’m about a month in. It was like the Lord is just speaking to my heart, and he said, “That’s not for you. That’s for Stella”—my granddaughter, my oldest granddaughter. And I went, “Yeah! This is for Stella.”

So I wrote the whole year. Minimum of an hour a day, I filled up that Bible with my thoughts on the Scripture and my love to Stella. And I would, you know, personalize different passages. Proverbs 31—virtuous woman—I said, “Oh, Stella, I think this describes your gran.” You know, “She’s the virtuous woman.” Then I think it’s verse 15, somewhere down there, it says, you know, “She rises [early] while it[’s] yet night”; I said, “Maybe not this verse.” But, you know, I mean, 2 Samuel 11, David sleeping with Bathsheba; I said, “Look how stupid! Look what he lost! Stella, don’t be stupid. Don’t…” You know, I mean, notes like that through the whole thing. And on December the thirty-first, I gave it to her. And then I started Henry’s. And so I’m on a plan of doing a Bible for all five of my grandchildren. And it has—it’s been remarkable! It’s very time-consuming. I take it with me when I travel, and I write in the back of the Bible where it’s gone with me. And man! You know, when I’m dead and gone, they’ll read that!

Bob: Yeah, they will.

Hershael: I wanted to point them to Jesus. I want them to hear my voice saying, “Follow him. Be faithful. Love the Word.” And so, do I miss preaching? Yeah! But that really has—just that daily, systematic going through it, commenting on it—it has been a sufficient substitute for me.

Bob: Okay.

Hershael: It’s been wonderful.

Bob: Alistair, identity and spiritual disciplines?

Alistair: Well, I’d like to see your notes, ’cause I do the Murray M’Cheyne thing. I’d like to see what you wrote all the way through Ezekiel.

Hershael: We’re in it now, you know.

Alistair: Yeah, I know we are.

Hershael: Yeah. And we’re in it now. Okay.

Alistair: That’s what I’m thinking. I read it this morning.

Hershael: Yeah.

Alistair: I don’t know what I’d have written—like, “Help!”

Hershael: It’s like—it’s a lot of “These guys are really bad. God really…”

Alistair: Yeah. “Don’t get yourself on the wrong side of this one, Stella.”

Hershael: Yeah, that’s right.

Alistair: I miss my congregation. I miss the privilege of being able to look out and see people that—some of them I held in my arms in their baby dedication; many of them I baptized. Now they’re parents. Some of them are grandparents. I miss that. There’s no preaching anywhere that can replace the reality of a long relationship, however long that relationship is with your church family. So I do miss that.

I’m exercised about the issue of personal discipline. I haven’t been successful. Actually, I haven’t been unsuccessful, ’cause I never tried it. But that’s a good word from you.

And the identity thing? I always like to tell myself, “Alistair, first you’re a Christian; then you’re a pastor.” And my identity as a Christian is in Christ. Whether I’m called Pastor or whatever I’m called, it’s still that. So I haven’t wrestled with that either. I don’t know whether that’s ego—I don’t know what it is—but I haven’t really thought about it. Yeah.

Bob: Let me ask all three of you: One of the questions is about navigating theological disagreements among leaders, among elders, on secondary issues but issues about which people are on opposite sides and passionate. How do you preserve unity as you navigate those waters? Todd, you had any of that?

Todd: Yeah, I think my first pass at it would be: Go slow. Do some coffees. Do some lunches. And what I mean by that is: Listen. Hear their side. Hear where they’re coming from. I think it’s easy to immediately take your positions and “Ready, aim, fire” versus “Let me understand where the brother’s coming from and to really hear him out on whatever the issue might be.”

And I have found that to be very helpful—just being willing to listen and to hear the brother out before we immediately say, “Here’s the definition of our sides.” And just take the… It just takes time. You’ve got to work on the relationship just as much as you do on the issue at hand.

Bob: That’s good. Alistair, any thoughts?

Alistair: Well, it depends what the issue is. Let’s take, for example, the chestnut of musical style within the framework of a church. I have always been of the position that our congregations—we had three different morning congregations—that we would never divide over age, that we would never divide over style, that we would never divide over liturgy; that somebody has got to decide what it’s going to be. The person who has the helm is the person who has the rudder is the person who has the Scriptures. And so, in the framework of leadership, then it falls to us at least to establish that position—and then, hopefully, to bring people with us and to tell the congregation that “this is how we’re going to approach this.” And you have to deal with the fallout of that, but at least you know what you’re doing. If you go at it any other way, then you end up—and I don’t mean this in a demeaning way—but you end up with the people who like drums, the people who don’t like drums; the people who like the prayer book, the people who don’t. And you’ve got different congregations. You might as well just split it all up. That would be one thing.

When you come to other issues, though… Let’s take the issue of baptism. Let’s take the issue of the Lord’s Supper. Let’s take the issue of eschatology. Let’s take the question of Arminianism and Calvinism. Let’s take all these things that people can have big views on. Once again, the Scriptures have to be the framework, and we have to, from the beginning, make sure that the congregation understands that we’re going where the Bible leads us. We’re not starting with systematic theology. We’re starting with biblical theology.

So, when we got to John chapter 6, it became very clear who was in charge of the sovereign work of salvation. So, we were very clear on that. We never adopted a position on it. We never called ourselves by any adjectives. But you just listen to your congregation pray.

Someone comes along and says, “No, I don’t think we should do that. We should do the next thing.” How do you handle that? You’ve got to do it, as you’re saying, sensitively, firmly, and sensibly.

I’ve always been greatly helped by… And I got in trouble with my good friend John MacArthur for saying this, but I said that I was a product of British evangelicalism rather than the product of American fundamentalism. Not all my friends liked that. They thought I was taking the higher ground. But I wasn’t trying to say anything other than: Martyn Lloyd-Jones, when he did his lectures in the 1940s on “What Is an Evangelical?” he dealt with the issue of being schismatic, the issue of being ecumenical, and he addressed them both. But the most helpful thing in his little booklet is at the end of it, he has an appendix in which he says, “Here are six things that I will not part fellowship with my brethren over.”[6] And that goes right down the line of eschatology, baptism, and so on. It doesn’t mean that he didn’t have a view on it but that he wouldn’t use it as a point of division, and he wouldn’t allow it to become a point of division in his church.

I don’t know how successful we have been at that. But if you read Dallimore, his two volumes on Whitefield, one of the things that comes across clearly is that Whitefield started to get himself in trouble with the church back in England because he was doing these sermons, like, in a local Baptist farmer’s place. And they wrote to him from England to say, “Hey, hey! You’ve got to get yourself sorted out here. You know, we’re Anglicans!” And Dallimore observes—he says, “Whitefield, unwittingly, was establishing the cause for evangelical unity.”[7]

But the question then comes to: Well, what do you regard as primary and secondary? And then that becomes more complicated.

Bob: Yeah.

Hershael: The only thing I would add (I agree with my brothers): You really do need to admit how much personality enters into this. And there are some people that are just argumentative. And then there are some people who are irenic. And I watch both of these, and I go, “Well, you know, these two people disagree on these things, and they’re getting along just fine. And then these two people disagree on something much more minor, and they’re at each other’s throats.” Well, that tells me something: that a lot of it has to do with your attitude, and especially from the leader. I just learned: If I get uptight about something, my whole church would get uptight about it. And if I was like, “Hey, you know what? We’re okay with this. This does not interfere with our mission. We’re clear on the Scriptures. We’re trying to… You know, we got some people that hold this position.”

And I would… Like, you know, especially on the issue of, say, Calvinism: Buck Run’s 1818 doctrinal statement is very Calvinistic. It’s just really clear. But then the last line of the doctrinal statement says—this is the last line of it—“[But believing that] ‘Christ tasted death for every man’ shall be no bar to communion.”[8] So it’s like they laid out this whole very particular view of salvation, and then it goes, “But, you know, if you have a general view of the atonement, you can still be a member here.”

Well, when I became the pastor in 2003, I read that, and I went, “Oh, I love this!” Now, they hadn’t looked at… When I became pastor, they hadn’t even look at that document for the last hundred years. But boy, I brought it out! I was like, “Oh, I’m right where this is.” And I just think that’s sort of the spirit we need to have. And I think if you will just have that spirit… Don’t get uptight about stuff! Don’t feel like you have to intellectually dominate and pin people and get them to agree with you. Just chill a little bit. Do it in an irenic fashion. And just tell people, “We’re not going to divide over this secondary issue.”

Now, again, primary issues—I’ve told people, “Hey, it’s great that you believe that, but you just need to know that’s not where our church is. And if you really do believe that, you probably will be happier somewhere else. You’re welcome to stay here, but you’re not welcome to teach that. And if you feel, like, the need to express that a lot, then you really can’t stay.” And I’ve just said that about that flatly, and it usually worked.

Bob: I heard you talk—somebody came to you and asked, “Is Parkside Reformed?” And I love the answer that you gave them.

Alistair: Which was?

Bob: They said, “I’ve been coming here for six, seven weeks, and I’ve just never heard you address—and I’m wondering: Is Parkside Reformed?” And you said, “It seems to me like hearing that said is going to be important to you—hearing that language: ‘Reformed,’ ‘TULIP.’ And if that’s what matters to you, you’re probably not going to be happy here—which is not to say we’re not Reformed. It just means you want something a little different than who we are.”

Alistair: Yeah. My mantra has been for so long “The main things are the plain things,” you know, “and the plain things are the main things.” We’re going to go through the creeds. We can go through the Westminster Confession, whatever else it is. When you take out all these other elements, the central truths of the gospel are unequivocally clear. And so…

But the flip side of that is: It’s one thing to say, “If you do not believe that, you can’t teach this here.” It’s another thing to say, “You have to teach this if you’re going to be here,” as opposed to “We give you freedom in relationship to that.”

So the person says, “This is our view, and it must be proclaimed.”

“I don’t actually believe that.”

“Well then, you might as well go somewhere else.”

I never wanted to say that to people. I wanted to be able to be as accommodating as I possibly could.

But by the same token, if somebody was a pedobaptist… (You know how messed up I am on this.) And if someone was a pedobaptist… (According to you, that is!) Someone was a pedobaptist, I would tell them, “Look, you can settle happily here, provided you’re not going to use the men’s Bible study as a mechanism for you to promulgate this view. You can hold to it, and you can live by it, but you just can’t…” But I wouldn’t use that as a reason for them not being embraced in the fellowship or whatever.

Bob: They could be a member at Parkside.

Alistair: Yes.

Bob: Yeah. All right.

COVID was one of the places where the rubber met the road on preserving unity in the body, because I know for us, we had people who said, “Well, if you’re going to require masking, I’m not coming,” and others who said, “If you’re not going to require masking, I’m not coming.” So I just looked and said, “Who do I want not to come? And that’ll be our… That’s how we’ll make the decision!”

Hershael: It was crazy.

Bob: But that took some leadership skill to try to preserve unity as you walked through it. Was that a challenge here in California?

Todd: Oh, it was a massive challenge.

I was going to add to what you were asking about, particularly with elders and leadership. We operate here under—we call it a “guard, guide, gift” model. And so our elders are responsible to guard our church—guard it theologically, financially, culturally. And then the staff guides the church. And then the congregants are the gifts to the church, and they provide the giving of the church. That really helps us stay out of each other’s lane.

So when we’re talking about secondary, tertiary issues that are not doctrinally based, we really are able to stay in each other’s lanes and say to an elder, “You’re starting to step into a guide issue that we’ve delegated to staff,” or vice versa: The staff is guiding, and they’re now wanting to set some spiritual doctrine. That’s got to be with the elders. And so we try to follow each other’s lanes that way.

Bob: That’s good.

Somebody asked about the issue of lording leadership—lording over others.[9] First of all, how can you tell the difference between leading and lording? Secondly, how can you tell whether you’re crossing the line? And then, if you see a fellow elder crossing the line, what do you do?

Hershael, what do you think?

Hershael: Again, the spirit and the attitude really matters here. You really do need to be able to distinguish between your preferences and then doctrinal positions that are clear. And if I’m insisting that the church go by, you know, my preferences that are not doctrinal, no matter what it costs, no matter how much disruption it causes, I’ve made that about me. And, you know, I think that is lording it over.

I’ll never forget when I went to Ashland Avenue as pastor. There are two stints on staff and then came back as pastor, and my predecessor had—buddy, if he wanted something done, he called in every chip. He put everything in it. He was going to get it done. And first time I met with our leaders and threw a plan out that I thought was a great plan, they were just really ambivalent about it and had what I thought were silly objections to it. But I just thought, “Well, this wasn’t a key thing.” So I just said, “Hey, I’m just going to withdraw this.” They couldn’t believe it! They were like, “What?” I said, “Look, if I can’t sell you on this, I don’t want this hitting the floor of a Baptist business meeting. This will… You know, we don’t have to do this. I’m okay. Let’s just move on.”

You know what? I never, ever brought up another thing they didn’t just absolutely go for from then on. It was like once they saw that I wasn’t going to do that, it gave them a trust in me. And Buck Run was that way. I had twenty years that they trusted me. Even when I went there, there was stuff they were doing that I was really not—I just didn’t approve of. I thought, doctrinally, it was wrong. But they said, “Well, you teach us, and we’ll follow you if you show it to us in the Word.” And that’s what I just tried to do. The spirit of gentleness—you know, I think that really, really matters. You’ve just got to ask yourself, “Am I making this about me, my preferences, or am I really making it about the church bringing honor and glory to the Lord Jesus?”

Bob: Todd, any thoughts?

Todd: The thing that came to my mind is one of the things I try to practice is if I know I have somebody—am I not on?

Bob: No. You’re on. I’m just making sure I am.

Todd: If I know somebody is directly against maybe a new idea or some type of new program, and they really have say in the matter, I will go to them and say, “You know what? I’m not going to ask you to buy into this. I’m going to ask for your permission to try this.” And I have found that if you approach people with that—particularly ones that are holding a strong position—they’re willing to let you take a try. And I tell them, “If this is a flop, it’s completely on me. And if it’s successful, it’s because of everybody else.” But that person who maybe was, maybe, against where we were going is now like, “I’m more willing to give you permission”—versus “You’re not asking me to buy into your idea.” And I think that’s where the rub comes, is, people don’t want to buy into the idea right away—which is fine.

Bob: Did you find what you were looking for?

Alistair: Yeah. Three things. Two of them are Derek Prime. He told me, “You’ve got to learn how to go into a meeting knowing your own mind but without your mind made up.” If you go in with your mind made up, then you’re going to have to fight for your position. If you go in knowing your own mind, then if you have any spirit of humility about you at all, you will listen to the other positions.

The other thing from Derek Prime was: He was describing somebody who at the induction service of the new minister… The minister was on the receiving end of the deacon or whoever it was—sort of used it as an opportunity to leave the minister in no doubt about, you know, how things were going to shake out. And the fellow—the minister—stood up and said before the congregation—he said, “I thank you for all that you have said, but you need to know that while I will be your servant, you will never be my master. I have only one Master: the Lord Jesus.”

And part of the challenge, I think… I know they talk a lot about “The ministers might be bossy or they might be pushy.” Goodness gracious! We’ve got to do something! Right? My biggest problem is the guy in the church who thinks… Like, I had a guy in Hamilton—big man! Big man! And he had a stick that he brought to church with him. And then he needed a knee replacement. And he got his knee replaced, and I went to visit him in his house. And it was just him and me—the big guy in the chair. And he says, “Son, I’m going to tell you: If you ever come away with any heresy, I’ll take this stick, and I’ll just rattle it against the pew like that.” I said, “Thank you! That’s nice! That’s been a real encouragement. I hope your other knee goes bad as well.” Yeah.

And this is the third one. This is a note from Mr. Caird, who was the church warden in St. Giles’ Cathedral, sending a note to the minister of the time, the Reverend Charles Maher. And part of what he said to them was this: “I know we are not everything we ought to be, and no doubt we need a lot of scolding, but we’d all be a great deal better than we are if only you would try sometimes, instead of lecturing us, to show us that you love us.”[10]

And so, the congregation need to know that we love them. And that’s why we teach the Bible to them, and that’s why we want to be as clear. And sometimes that’s hard to receive. But as long as they know that we have that genuine affection for them, you can get away with murder.

Hershael: Hey, I’ve got to say something, just—you’re the only one that will appreciate this, but I got to say it. J. Sidlow Baxter…

Alistair: Yeah.

Hershael: He was describing a large man in his church in Edinburgh.

Alistair: Charlotte Chapel.

Hershael: He said, “’Twas not that he was so tall, but oh, the girth of the man! He was a Sabbath day’s journey round!”

Did I nail that impression or not?

Alistair: Oh! It was very good. That was very good. Very, very good. That was worth the price of admission right there.

Bob: What’s that book in your lap?

Alistair: It’s just one of my little black books.

Bob: What’s in it?

Alistair: Well, at the moment, different things. Scribbles. I keep… For example, here’s a quote: “When I get a little money, I buy books. And if any is left, I buy food and clothes.” That was Erasmus.

Bob: As you come across something, you just pull out your book and write it down?

Alistair: Yeah.

Bob: How many books like that do you have?

Alistair: The first one I had I lost. The second one I have. And the third one I have here. But Joy now is taking all of these things and digitizing them. But… Digital is good. It’s accessible. But I still write out all my talks. I’m very tactile. I use my iPad or my laptop to write an article or a letter or a book. But I’m still a pen-and-paper guy.

Hershael: You “write yourself clear.”

Alistair: Yeah. I try to.

Bob: Yes.

Let’s talk about burnout. ’Cause some guys are wondering—they’re feeling burned out, thinking, “Should I leave the ministry? I’m exhausted. What do I do with burnout? How do I handle burnout?” Did you ever have a burnout season?

Hershael: No. I mean, again, part of this is constitutional. I take no credit for it. I just… I can’t explain it, but I never have. And, you know, it’s been hard. There have been seasons.

Bob: Okay, that’s enough for you. We don’t want to hear any more from you. Alistair, no burnout for you?

Alistair: No. Not yet. There’s no way you can get burned out here, ’cause this air conditioning, it’s blowing right at your head. It’s absolutely freezing up here, isn’t it?

Todd: But you’re awake.

Hershael: I’m about to start spooning you.

Alistair: No, I mean, but when you read a guy like John Stott, who had a very rarefied environment. You know, he always spoke about that you must make sure you isolate one day a week, one week a month, and something else. You know, he had… And he was in a peculiar position. But the principle was…

Hershael: And he was single.

Alistair: And he was single. Right. And he liked birdwatching, even though he was single. And…

Bob: Maybe that’s why he was single.

Alistair: Yeah, yeah. Maybe that’s why he was single. Yeah. He’s watching the wrong birds.

No! But, I mean, there’s a lot. And this is, again, where in our relationship with the lay leadership of the church, we’ve got to establish certain things. So, for example, when I came in ’83 and they told me what the job was—and just in passing, he said, “And there will be two weeks of vacation.”

And I said, “No, there won’t!”

And he said, “Pardon?”

I said, “Are you kidding me?” I said, “You get two weeks of vacation in America?”

“Oh,” he said. “Yeah, that’s standard, you know. And after you’ve been here x, you get three weeks and four weeks and everything.”

I said, “Well, I’m not going to go for that.”

They said, “Well, what do you want?”

I said, “I want six weeks, and it can involve seven Sundays.”

And because they were so desperate, they said, “Okay.”

But we proceeded from that. But, I mean, unless… Again, you’ve got to work really, really hard to do this job. If people know you work hard, then they’re happy for you to take time. If you’re sitting around in Starbucks with a laptop, kidding yourself and everybody else that you’re really involved in evangelism when you’re just sitting in Starbucks, then don’t be surprised if the people think that you’re whatever you are. I was able to explain to my congregation that I wasn’t lazy, but I was incompetent. And they bought that. They saw it quickly!

Hershael: You can deal with incompetence better than laziness.

Alistair: Exactly. Exactly.

Bob: Burnout, Todd?

Todd: Yeah. I’m… I guess I’m different than the Nephilim here.

Alistair: Watch your language!

Todd: Yeah. I mean, I already alluded to the fact that I ended up in the hospital. I just… There was a sense that I had to do everything. It was probably a pride issue. And some of it was not pride. It was just practical, ’cause there really wasn’t anybody else in the early days. And so there was a sense that, as I said, that Jesus said, “Todd will build the church,” and so I went hard and went long. My wife knew I was in trouble. She was praying that God would do something. I told her later on, “I wish you would have told me you were praying for this.” Because God stopped me and, you know, gave me a health crisis that I had to deal with. And so, yeah, I was proverbially burned out. I don’t know what you would call it, but I was exhausted.

Bob: I had a conversation more than a decade ago with a pastor from Texas—Tommy Nelson, pastor at Denton Bible Church. Tommy was—he was a hard-charging, go-get-’em guy, getting ready to preach through Romans. He was really looking forward to it. One Sunday afternoon, his wife walks in. He’s watching a football game, and she says something to him, and he hears her, and he can’t respond. He can’t speak. He’s sitting there. He can’t get up. He’s very aware of it, but he can’t do anything. And she thinks he’s had a stroke. Takes him to the hospital. They check him out. He’s not had a stroke. They do all kinds of diagnostic testing. And they came back to him and said, “Here’s what’s happened: Your adrenal glands got stuck open, going all the time, and your body said, ‘We can’t handle it,’ and shut down. You had”—they used to call it a nervous breakdown, right? But that… He was six months out of church and out of the pulpit because it took him that… He said, “I was shuffling through the Kroger store, you know, like I was only half…” It took him a long time to recover.

I ask him when I was talking about this—’cause I said, “When you’re preaching on Sunday, what was your day off, your Sabbath?” He said, “I didn’t have one.” He said, “I loved what I was doing. I didn’t think you could get burned out loving what you’re doing.”

Alistair: Was he watching the Browns or what? First of all, he was a Sabbath breaker to start with!

Bob: And that’s… He had no… I mean, when I sat with him, it was a warning to me to just say, “If you’re not resting—even if you don’t feel like you need rest, you need rest, right?” And so, burnout—the guys I’m talking to about burnout are guys who are typically not resting, don’t know how to rest maybe?

Hershael: And I think I’ve been able to do that. I mean… And I do think that’s one reason. Tanya and I have really—we’ve always kept something on the calendar we’re looking forward to getting away. Saturday, we’re going to the Pacific coast of Mexico, where there’s a hurricane right now. But…

Alistair: You just blow in.

Hershael: Yeah. You know, as long as I’m with her, I’m okay, you know. And we’ve done that. And it has helped me refresh my spirit and my soul. And I think that’s a strategy. Just, the Sabbath principle is a creation principle. It’s not a law. It’s written into the constitution of the universe. You need to observe that. And I think if you will… My dad used to say, “Come apart and rest, or you’ll come apart.”

Alistair: It’s not a law? Like there’s only nine commandments now?

Hershael: Well… I’m saying it wasn’t abrogated… The Sabbath was given before the law.

Alistair: Yeah. Uh-huh. And constituted in the law.

Bob: Here we get a chance to see how two people who don’t agree on a particular issue…

Hershael: Yeah. It was. It’s in the law too.

Alistair: This is a secondary issue!

Hershael: Yeah.

Bob: If you had a chance to sit down with a young pastor today, and you were telling him what you’re most concerned about, about the future of the church—where it’s going and what he needs to have his radar and antenna up for—do you know what you’d tell him?

Hershael: Yeah. I’ll tell you: Pornography to me is massive. As a seminary professor, I was a trustee of the International Mission Board. Both missionary candidates, seminary students, I saw this. I quit asking guys, “Have you?” and it started becoming “When was the last time?” This generation is raised on it. It’s ubiquitous. Parents are giving their kids cell phones and computers and iPads when they’re eight years old. I mean, I’ve had students at Southern tell me they’ve been addicted to it since they were eight. It’s just… In marital counseling that I’ve had to do, dealing with couples whose view of sex is so skewed and perverted because of what they have seen. It has shaped this generation.

When Tanya started teaching SWI—the Seminary Wives Institute at Southern—when we first went there, the number one question submitted to her was “My husband just wants to have sex all the time. How can I match his level or tone him down?” I called it the frisky seminary student question. Fifteen years later, the question flipped to “My husband never wants to have sex. How can I get him interested?” There’s only one explanation for that. And I tell everybody this: Go on YouTube; watch “The Great Porn Experiment” by Gary Wilson. He’s a sociologist. It’s not a Christian video. It just tells you what happens to the male brain on pornography. This is affecting our culture—I mean, why young men aren’t getting married, why we’re having fewer children. I mean, there’re just so many things that come out of… The pornography culture, I think, is one of the reasons our society embraced homosexual marriage and transgenderism so readily and easily and quickly. Because porn just eroded any kind of floodwall against that.

Bob: So what can that thirty-five-year-old pastor and the local church do?

Hershael: Well, you’ve got to talk about it. You’ve got to be open and honest about it. You’ve got to hold people accountable. You have to give people an off-ramp: “Hey, we’re here to help you.” You know, we’ve got to take the shame out of talking about it. It’s better for you to come confess and face it than to just, in silence, act like you don’t have a problem when you do.

And you need to counsel couples. I used to think only men had this problem, and then, boy, did I found out differently! Because it’s so ubiquitous. And what people are bringing into their marriages now—the sexual experiences they’ve had with same-sex attraction… I mean, this is just something my generation just didn’t deal with on this scale. And this… You know, the church is going to have to talk about it.

Heath Lambert’s book Finally Free is a fantastic resource I would recommend to you. There’s several good things out there. But you can’t just pretend this isn’t there. And it’s in pastors. You know, Jesus talked about cutting off your hand and plucking out your eye.[11] I’m pretty sure he’d be okay with you only looking at a computer when someone else is in the room with you. You know, if you’ve got to get radical about it, get radical about it. But don’t allow yourself to be sucked into this. It will rob you of the joy in your marriage, of power in your preaching, the power of the Holy Spirit. I mean, it’s just massive. And because it’s so available, so ubiquitous, and so deadly, it’s just destroying our churches from within.

Bob: Todd, if you’re sitting down with a thirty-five-year-old young pastor and saying, “Here’s what I’m concerned about for the future”—you as a pastor, what would you… We’ll say pornography might be one of the things you’d talk about. Anything else?

Todd: Yeah, I think the church is too busy chasing worldly things. We’re constantly—whatever the shiny new ball is, we’re chasing it down, and we’re forgetting the basics. That’s why we have a church culture that doesn’t know doctrine. You know, the surveys come back, and the things that “evangelical Christians” believe or don’t believe is shocking. And I think it’s because we get off track. We start chasing down political things. We start chasing down cultural things—the newest toy, the newest invention. And Satan, if he can’t make us fall: At least make us distracted. And, you know, that’s why Paul says, “Of first importance, I came, and I preached Christ to you.”[12] And I think the church has to get back to the “first importance” stuff.

Bob: Alistair?

Alistair: Well, I’m just listening. I accept both of what’s been said. The challenge is there.

I actually want to… What I want to say is not what I’m concerned about but what I’m excited about: that I’m excited that young men who are the age now that I used to be are convinced about the gospel, are committed to the church, are prepared to take on the challenges that you’re mentioning, and are excited for the future.

I’m now of the vintage that I don’t want to be sitting up here with these gentlemen looking like two of the Muppets from up on the balcony, you know, who never said a decent word in their lives, I don’t imagine. They just—well, they just make noises. And you get these old guys, old ministers, and they’re just like, “Look at this! Look at that! Look at the next thing!” No, look at the future.

They asked J. C. Ryle on one occasion, “What are we going to do now when all you guys all die off?” And J. C. Ryle said, “Don’t give a thought to it, because God has yet brighter stars in his universe.”[13] And he always does, and he has. And God is sovereign over this. And the darker this stuff is, the beauty of purity—convinced purity in the lives of young people, girls and boys—at the foundational level is the answer to this. You don’t mortify the flesh by mortifying the flesh. You mortify the flesh by “the expulsive power of a new affection.”[14]

And when our hearts and lives are filled up in that way… I mean, I remember when I used to chase this American girl down for day after day and year after year and after year. And when I was so fixated on her, it wouldn’t have mattered to me if five beautiful models had walked stark naked down Fifth Avenue, because I was completely consumed by that.

And that is the key to your marriage. And that is the key to the thing. What in the world do you want to waste your time or your energy on stuff like that for? And you’ve got to model that for your kids and your grandchildren. And if pastors are prepared to take it on at that level, then, you know, the future is bright, because God is sovereign over all these things. He’s not caught off guard by AI or pornography or anything else. He’s sovereign over the whole mess—and you, the future.

Remember the song by old George Burns? Remember?

At a bar down in Dallas an old man chimed in,
And I thought he was out of his head.
’Cause being a young guy, I just laughed it off
When I heard what the old man had said.

He said, “Never again will I turn young ladies’ heads
Or run and chase after the wind,
’Cause I’m three-quarters done from the start to the end,
And I wish I was eighteen again.”[15]

And I wish I was eighteen again, in this sense: that if God said to me tonight, “I’ll rerun it for you. Would you take it?” I’d take it in an instant. So I’m jealous for the future of the young guys in this place, with all the challenges, whatever they are.

Take England in the seventeenth century into the eighteenth century: as dark and as horrendous a place as you can imagine in world history. And what happens? A lady has a baby. What’s her name? Mrs. Whitefield. And another lady has a baby, and his name is Wesley. Right? God’s in control of this stuff.

Bob: So, we’re going to end with worship this evening—with music. And before I let you men go, I want to let you men know that tomorrow morning, breakfast is going to be at eight here. And it is—I got the menu handed to me—scrambled eggs with or without cheese, bacon, O’Brien potatoes, mixed berry overnight oats, vegan yogurt parfait, and blueberry lemonade. So, pretty good menu. Eight to nine out on the patio for breakfast. We start in here at nine o’clock when we have our session. But I’m going to pray for us and have the band come out and lead us in a final time of worship before we end this evening.

Lord, thank you for the wisdom of these brothers and for the way that you have spoken to us through them. Thank you for the guidance of your Word, which is what we ultimately submit ourselves to. And I just pray that you would continue to stir in our hearts, Lord, a fresh longing to want to follow hard after you and obey you and keep our hearts and minds fixed on you and not be distracted by lesser things. And I pray that you would give us wisdom to be better pastors as we continue to move forward. We ask these things in your name. Amen.

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[1] See 2 Timothy 1:5; 3:14–15.

[2] C. H. Spurgeon, “The Call to the Ministry,” in Lectures to My Students (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2001), 24. Paraphrased.

[3] Nehemiah 8:10 (paraphrased).

[4] See Galatians 5:22.

[5] See Matthew 16:18.

[6] D. M. Lloyd-Jones, What Is an Evangelical? (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1992), 87–90. Paraphrased.

[7] Arnold A. Dallimore, George Whitefield: The Life and Times of the Great Evangelist of the Eighteenth-Century Revival (London: Banner of Truth, 1970), 438. Paraphrased.

[8] John Taylor, Baptists on the American Frontier: A History of Ten Baptist Churches of Which the Author Has Been Alternately a Member, annotated 3rd ed., ed. Chester Raymond Young (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1995), 349.

[9] See Matthew 20:25–26; Mark 10:42–43; Luke 22:25–26.

[10] Charles L. Warr, The Glimmering Landscape (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1960), 117. Paraphrased.

[11] See Matthew 5:29–30; 18:8–9; Mark 9:43–47.

[12] 1 Corinthians 15:3 (paraphrased).

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

[14] Thomas Chalmers, The Expulsive Power of a New Affection.

[15] Sonny Throckmorton, “I Wish I Was Eighteen Again” (1979). Lyrics lightly altered.