why would you want to do this?

This is a faithful saying: If a man desires the position of a bishop, he desires a good work. I Timothy 3:1.

As a young man, in junior high, I answered a “call to preach,” and determined to preach the gospel and the truth of God’s word as the Lord gave me opportunity.

I’ve been teaching Sunday school since I was 12, and filling the pulpit as needed in various ministries for about 30 years. I was licensed to preach when I was 19 by Berean Baptist Church in Hixson, TN and was led into Christian education shortly after college, and have taught elementary, junior high, high school, college and graduate students in Christian schools since 1975. During this period I’ve served as a youth director, worship leader, Sunday School teacher and superintendent, deacon and elder.

For the foreseeable future, I expect to continue working in Christian higher education but believe ordination will allow me to be more engaged in counseling and preaching. While I am open to pastoring a church, certainly in an interim capacity, I believe the work of the local church will be more central to my life as I approach retirement.

A second reason I’m seeking ordination is that I believe the office of elder and pastor are the same, and ordination more clearly marks the pastoral responsibilities with which I have been engaged for several years. An elder should be set apart by the congregation, ordained to do the work of the ministry (Titus 1:5-9).

And finally, I believe the proclamation of the gospel is essential, especially set against the inroads of the emergent church movement. While the dialogue they seek may be important, there is a greater need for a clear and compelling presentation of the gospel itself—the reality of sin and the need for salvation rooted in the person and work of Christ.

I believe many of my own students in a Christian university have a sense of being “followers of Jesus” with no understanding of their own sin and their need of salvation. As an ordained minister I will be able to pursue more opportunities to proclaim the gospel of Christ both publicly and privately.

What labels are you willing to wear?

While I’m not particularly fond of labels, they do provide a helpful shorthand that situates us within particular ways of thinking about and understanding Scripture. While I will go into more detail about particular doctrines later, let me briefly position myself theologically.

First of all, I am a fundamentalist, fully committed to the authority and accuracy of Scripture, a complete and reliable revelation of God’s work in the world through his son Jesus Christ. But while I believe God in his sovereignty provided and protected a reliable, inerrant Scripture for our instruction, I’ve not always had equal confidence in the ways his people have applied and interpreted it.

Much of the teaching of American fundamentalist churches today has no actual grounding in the Scripture itself. The Bible doesn’t prohibit drinking and dancing, for example, although it does forbid fornication and drunkenness. I prefer to focus on what the Scripture focuses on, although many fundamentalist might not accept my reticence in insisting on things the Bible itself does not insist on.

I sometimes say I’m a neofundamentalist, one of many who grew up committed to the authority of Scripture without being committed to everyone’s interpretation of it. However this term has begun to acquire some baggage, so I’m a fundamentalist in the original sense, one committed to The Fundamentals as described by R.A. Torrey and others in a collection of essays written to reject higher criticism in the early 1900’s.

The doctrines defended in this work follow from the Great Awakening and were developed by the Niagara Bible Conference in 1878 and later distilled by the General Assembly of Northern Presbyterian Church in 1910 as what is often called the Five Fundamentals:

The inerrancy of the Scriptures

 

The virgin birth and the deity of Jesus (Isaiah 7:14)

 

The doctrine of substitutionary atonement (Hebrews 9)

 

The bodily resurrection of Jesus (Matthew 28)

 

The authenticity of Christ’s miracles

But while I’m willing to accept this label, I should also say I reject the separation from culture often associated with it by fundamentalists today. I’m also concerned with the demonstrated weakness of the movement to engage in a sort of bibliolatry, an obsession with the Book rather than the Author. And as long as we are relying on labels in this section of these essays, I’m premillennial but not militantly so. I believe in a pre-trib rapture for example but don’t think it matters much. I’ll gladly suffer for my faith if it turns out I’m wrong.

I also think of myself theologically as a creedobaptist, in the reformed tradition, similar to, for example, Charles Spurgeon, whose restatement of the Westminster Catechism more closely aligns with my own doctrinal positions.

Like Spurgeon, I’m Calvinistic in my understanding of how salvation works, while rejecting padobaptism and affirming the historic Baptist commitments to soul liberty and the priesthood of the believer. I believe there have always been independent congregations outside both Catholic and Protestant traditions comprised of faithful, confessing adult believers. I owe a great debt to the reformers, of course, and more specifically to their Puritan heirs.

I also owe a great debt to the preachers of my childhood- Vance Havner, Fred Brown, Warren Wiersbe, thoughtful preachers who took the text seriously and in so doing opened my understanding, and indeed my heart, to the Word of God. More recently this list includes John MacArthur, John Piper, John Lillie—just about anybody named John. I’m drawn to The Gospel Coalition, Together For the Gospel, and others committed to elevating the truth that Christ died for our sins, and that this is both necessary and sufficient.

Last and clearly the greatest among these preachers was my dad, whose grave marker rightly identifies him as a faithful preacher of the gospel—a man whose life and 50-year ministry celebrated the grace of God and its power to transform those who call on him.