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