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

In our fourth episode, Stephen Baker and Aaron Prelock take turns naming the five books each of them would call life-changing.

Books worn through. Books read more than once. Books given away, replaced, and underlined cover to cover. Aaron and Stephen talk about why the relationship between justification and sanctification keeps surfacing in the books that mattered most to them, why good fiction belongs on a pastor's nightstand, and why the man who only reads what was assigned to him in seminary has already stopped growing. Reading is good for the soul.

0:00 — Introduction
2:50 — The format: five books each
3:00 — Aaron: Eugene Peterson, The Contemplative Pastor
7:10 — Stephen: John Piper, Desiring God
11:30 — Aaron: Mark Dever and Paul Alexander, The Deliberate Church
16:30 — Stephen: Richard Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Life
22:30 — Stephen: Horatius Bonar, God's Way of Peace and God's Way of Holiness
25:30 — A cheat: Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment
27:30 — Stephen: C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
34:45 — Aaron: J.C. Ryle, Holiness
38:30 — Stephen: Ian Murray, Revival and Revivalism and Evangelicalism Divided
46:10 — Aaron: Edward Fisher and Thomas Boston, The Marrow of Modern Divinity
49:00 — Stephen: Edith Schaeffer, L'Abri
56:30 — Aaron: Harold Senkbeil, The Care of Souls
1:00:00 — An exhortation to read
1:02:30 — Refuge or retreat

In our third episode, Stephen Baker and Aaron Prelock sit down to talk about the part of ministry that many traditional seminary programs simply cannot simulate: the mess.

Theological mess. Historical mess. The mess of sinners and the mess we ourselves bring to the work. Aaron and Stephen talk about why so many young men set out to be the pastor whose church will not have these problems, why preaching and pastoral care cannot be split apart, and why the "clean machine" expectation — that Christians do not sin and good pastors do not either — quietly shuts down the work of sanctification it claims to protect. An old line surfaces near the end: a pastor should smell like his sheep.

0:00 — Introduction
1:30 — What do we mean by "the mess"?
4:15 — Church history is not historical reenactment
7:00 — The young pastor with stars in his eyes
10:45 — Theoretical theology vs. practical theology
13:30 — Leviticus 16 and the linen robe
17:00 — Hospital waiting rooms and Job's counselors
22:00 — Preaching is pastoral care
27:30 — Over-correcting and damned with faint praise
33:00 — Where do you go when you realize you need to grow?
37:00 — Owen, self-knowledge, and the wounded healer
41:30 — The expectation that Christians do not sin
46:00 — Sexual sin, abuse, and the "clean machine" church
51:00 — The hazmat suit: justification before sanctification
56:00 — A pastor should smell like his sheep
1:00:00 — Hospitality, marriage, and the witness of small mercies

In our second episode, Aaron Prelock turns the tables on Stephen Baker, Dean of New Geneva Academy and associate pastor at Trinity Reformed Church in Bloomington, Indiana.

Stephen shares how he went from a small-town Indiana home to a dramatic high school conversion, from a teepee in the woods to a pastors college in Bloomington. Along the way: marriage, ministry under Ted Tripp, a failed church plant in Milwaukee, a closed door to the mission field, and what led him to Trinity Reformed Church.

This conversation covers how he got here, what shaped him, and what he wishes someone had told him before he ever stepped into pastoring.

0:00 — Introduction
1:24 — Growing up in Indiana
4:24 — Conversion in high school
11:26 — Becoming Reformed
14:53 — Bible college
16:55 — Meeting Sebra
18:49 — Pennsylvania and Ted Tripp
24:36 — Marriage and early family life
28:15 — Seminary
30:47 — The Milwaukee church plant
36:54 — A closed door to the mission field
39:13 — The move to Bloomington
43:48 — New Geneva Academy is born
46:33 — Reconciliation
54:35 — On being Dean
1:01:27 — What I wish they'd told me

In our first episode, Stephen Baker sits down with Aaron Prelock, pastor of Bloomington Bible Church and the new president of New Geneva Academy.

Aaron shares how he went from a big dispensational Baptist church to studying John Owen under a Norwegian Lutheran, from a Subaru factory floor to ten years of pastoral ministry in central London, and back to Bloomington, Indiana.

This conversation covers how he got here, what shaped him, and what he wishes someone had told him before he ever stepped into a pastorate — especially about what it means for a pastor to be a shepherd and not just a counselor.

https://www.newgenevaacademy.com/

0:00 — Introduction
2:30 — Growing up in Lafayette, early faith
5:45 — The biblical counseling world: Adams, Powlison, Tripp
10:00 — Bible college and the church in Cedar Rapids
14:30 — Seminary and the shift toward Reformed theology
18:00 — The factory year
22:00 — Discovering John Owen
25:00 — Westminster London, PhD in Norway
30:00 — Ten years pastoring in London
35:00 — Coming back to Indiana, his father's death
38:00 — Becoming senior pastor at Bloomington Bible Church
42:00 — What brings joy in pastoral ministry
48:00 — What I wish they'd told me: shepherding vs. crisis counseling
55:00 — Getting involved with New Geneva Academy