In our seventh episode, Stephen Baker and Aaron Prelock sit down with Michael Clary to talk about the lesson eighteen years of ministry kept pressing on him: courage. The courage to preach Genesis 19 as it stands. The courage to father a congregation and preach the sharp truths of God's word rather than simply befriend it. The courage to keep a clean conscience while half his church walked out. They talk about the winsomeness he built a ministry on and later repented of, the liberalism that signs every formal confession but fights for the heartbeat of none of it, and why conscientious men bury their gifts for fear of a God they take to be a harsh taskmaster."

Pastor Clary will be speaking at the Frontier Shepherds conference. Learn more at newgenevaacademy.com

00:08 — Introductions: Michael Clary, Cincinnati, and the Frontier Shepherds Conference
00:58 — Planting in 2010: inner-city Cincinnati to a building in Northern Kentucky
03:30 — Seminary at Southern, and a love for the Old Testament
05:37 — Crew, parachurch ministry, and learning the church is plan A
09:00 — Why Cincinnati, and meeting Michael Foster
12:42 — Three eras of ministry, and the turn from a neutral world to a negative one
16:16 — Preaching Genesis 19, and the backlash that followed
17:41 — Sitting with Tim Bayly: be the father of this congregation
19:20 — The 2022 split that cut the church in half
22:06 — Holding the church together with a clean conscience
24:58 — Courage as the one indispensable lesson
27:09 — The new liberalism: ethical, not doctrinal
28:57 — What Young, Restless, Reformed got right, and where it went off the rails
31:22 — Intellectual respectability, and Iain Murray's Evangelicalism Divided
36:56 — The September conference, and the problem of fragmentation
41:23 — Loser Theology: piety shrunk to inner-heart religion
47:00 — The parable of the talents and the buried gold
53:34 — The fear of a slave versus the fear of a son

In our sixth episode, Stephen Baker and Aaron Prelock sit down with Andy Constable, pastor of Niddrie Community Church in Edinburgh and a Frontier Shepherds speaker, to talk about the schemes, Scotland's poorest communities. Scotland has healthy churches in its richer areas, but in the schemes the churches are dead or dying, and Christians are too comfortable to move.
Andy tells how a London student ended up under Mez McConnell at a church with, from a student's perspective, nothing to offer, and how Niddrie holds word and deed together without sliding into pietism or the social gospel. Fruit comes slowly there: a woman thrown out of the kids' club came back twenty years later and was saved. A line from Andy's new book on addiction surfaces near the end: behind every single smile is a story of wicked rebellion.

Learn more about the Frontier Shepherds conference at newgenevaacademy.com

00:00 - Introducing Andy Constable
00:46 - Ministry this time of year: the church weekend away
02:05 - Niddrie Community Church: a century of gospel presence in a scheme
03:11 - The UK class system and working-class ministry
06:43 - From London to Edinburgh
07:16 - Meeting Mez McConnell and a church with nothing to offer
12:21 - Word and deed: avoiding pietism and the social gospel
17:28 - The long game: a conversion twenty years in the making
19:55 - From intern to pastor: Mez's training model
22:45 - A training church: indigenous converts, three plants
26:50 - Christians too comfortable to move
27:46 - 20 Schemes: 18 churches in 13 years
31:30 - Whole-life discipleship at Niddrie
36:29 - Loving people, not just books
39:24 - Addiction and the Local Church
43:57 - "Behind every single smile": respectable and unrespectable sins
48:14 - The Ragged School of Theology
52:09 - Frontier Shepherds this September

In our fifth episode, Stephen Baker and Aaron Prelock sit down with Jake Menzel of Church of the King in Evansville to talk about the word Reformed men are afraid of: ambition.

Ambition they've been trained to distrust. Ambition that draws on the Father's pleasure instead of earning it. Ambition for a man's sons and grandsons, and the church he's been given. Jake, Stephen, and Aaron talk through why a man who won't believe his sanctification has not believed his justification, why Reformed devotion becomes a contest over who feels worst about himself, and why feeling bad is not the same as repenting. Or, as Jake puts it: before you die, let the world see the best you that you knew how to become.

00:00 — Meet Jake Menzel and the Frontier Shepherds conference
01:46 — Why Evansville is a hard place to plant a church
07:10 — Why plant here at all: "God was calling me home to my people"
09:24 — Coming back to the Lord at 17, then off to IU
12:04 — Trial by fire at a secular university; charisma that outruns character
14:55 — Three years at NGA and seven years of campus ministry
16:51 — Godly ambition and how young men have changed in twenty years
22:24 — Bloomington vs. Evansville; when a church never grows past campus ministry
28:46 — A hard demographic shift and the cost of defining who you are
32:46 — How do you fuel ambition without burning out?
34:32 — The baptism of Jesus: the Father pleased before the Son has done a thing
36:22 — Haddon and the center-field fence
39:39 — If you don't believe in sanctification, you don't believe in justification
42:03 — The feedback loop of self-loathing — and why it isn't the gospel
45:39 — Godly ambition rooted in the fatherhood of God
49:43 — The little-league coach who can't let his son fail
53:47 — Better or bitter
56:41 — The smallest, most fearless kid on the team
1:00:36 — Ambition for growth, not greatness