Stephen Baker and Aaron Prelock close out the first season on the thing NGA exists to do, which is train men for ministry inside a local church instead of sending them off to a school somewhere. Both of them were trained that way. They talk about what it gave them: sitting in on elders' meetings, hearing real pastoral situations talked through by the men handling them, preaching a first sermon to a congregation that would tell them afterward how it went. A man who has only been in a classroom, they say, is like a doctor who has never held a scalpel. They're also honest about what their model costs, and Aaron warns against assuming NGA is the only place doing this well. He calls that Tigger syndrome. The wonderful thing about Tiggers is I'm the only one.

00:00 — What Aaron wishes he'd been told about conflict
02:21 — The marriage with no fighting in it
05:22 — Machen's warrior children and the swing away from conflict
11:38 — Jew and Greek: the conflict the apostles insisted on working through
13:58 — Luther at Worms, and the night of prayer before it
15:29 — Defining conflict: friction, from mild to disintegrating
18:30 — Battle mode at the seminary, battle mode at home
21:34 — Triaging the conflicts that aren't your fault
24:43 — Recovering backbone without losing gentleness
28:33 — Mark Dever on church discipline you've just learned
32:28 — Titus 1: certain men must be silenced
34:02 — If there's never conflict in the church, you're failing
39:23 — Students in elders' meetings, watching the mess
41:44 — The elder who raised his head over the parapet
44:49 — The sacraments and the freedom to have it out Thursday night
49:27 — Unanimity, uniformity, and unity
1:00:54 — Conflict-averse men, and the homes that made them
1:06:23 — Timothy's timidity, and Owen on grace changing nature
1:10:18 — Short-circuit conflict, short-circuit sanctification

Learn more about the Frontier Shepherds conference at newgenevaacademy.com

In our 11th episode, Aaron Prelock says he was taught a good deal about conflict, but all of it was about conflict that had already gone badly wrong. What nobody covered was the ordinary kind that gets people to that point: conflict between pastors, between elders, between the leadership and the congregation, and in his own heart on a Monday morning when he doesn't feel like being godly. He and Stephen Baker talk about how the reaction against Machen's warrior children left pastors afraid of conflict altogether, why an eldership that always votes unanimously has uniformity rather than unity, and what a senior pastor who never loses a vote teaches the men under him. The last thing they say is that you shouldn't fear conflict and shouldn't run toward it. You should sanctify it.

00:00 — What Aaron wishes he'd been told about conflict
02:21 — The marriage with no fighting in it
05:22 — Machen's warrior children and the swing away from conflict
11:38 — Jew and Greek: the conflict the apostles insisted on working through
13:58 — Luther at Worms, and the night of prayer before it
15:29 — Defining conflict: friction, from mild to disintegrating
18:30 — Battle mode at the seminary, battle mode at home
21:34 — Triaging the conflicts that aren't your fault
24:43 — Recovering backbone without losing gentleness
28:33 — Mark Dever on church discipline you've just learned
32:28 — Titus 1: certain men must be silenced
34:02 — If there's never conflict in the church, you're failing
39:23 — Students in elders' meetings, watching the mess
41:44 — The elder who raised his head over the parapet
44:49 — The sacraments and the freedom to have it out Thursday night
49:27 — Unanimity, uniformity, and unity
1:00:54 — Conflict-averse men, and the homes that made them
1:06:23 — Timothy's timidity, and Owen on grace changing nature
1:10:18 — Short-circuit conflict, short-circuit sanctification

Learn more about the Frontier Shepherds conference at newgenevaacademy.com

In our tenth episode, Stephen Baker and Aaron Prelock sit down to talk about counseling and what happened to the care of souls. Pastors did that work for centuries, Gregory the Great to Baxter, until Freud arrived, the experts took over, and pastors learned to say we don't go there. In the seventies Jay Adams burst on the scene like Moses with thunder and flame and beard. They talk about why Adams had a first-generation reformer's zeal and defects, why his movement split into a world better at theology and a world better at practice, and why the counseling centers became the new medical model he set out to fight, a certified professional class you trust instead of your pastor. Aaron finished seminary convinced there was nothing me and my Bible could not fix. Ministry taught him otherwise: some bones do not get fully healed, and there is always going to be a limp.

00:08 — What I wish they'd told me about counseling
01:48 — Pastoral care before the word: the Reformation and the Puritans
05:05 — Freud arrives and the church outsources the care of souls
07:51 — We don't go there: pastors from the 1950s to the 70s
08:24 — Jay Adams bursts on the scene
12:02 — Psychologists, the sworn enemies of guilt
14:10 — Baxter's Christian Directory
18:29 — The second generation: Welch's critique of Adams, Powlison
22:23 — Two worlds: NANC/ACBC and CCEF
24:31 — The first rule of biblical counseling: stop feeling
30:38 — Keller, idolatry of the heart, and losing the imperative
37:12 — Do you do counseling? What the word means now
38:40 — The counseling center as emergency room
41:18 — Trust the professionals, not the pastor
45:01 — Exegeting the Bible, exegeting the sheep
47:40 — Lives that will not change; some bones don't get fully healed
51:18 — The place of medication; wine for a dying man
57:42 — The psychosomatic whole
60:24 — Sanctifying mind, will, and affections
61:27 — Next time: training pastors in the church

In our ninth episode, Stephen Baker and Aaron Prelock sit down with Ryan Denton, an evangelist in Vanguard Presbytery who wrote Dead Orthodoxy and Its Cure, which is what this conversation is about. You can have the confession and catechism down cold and nothing in the soul. You can trade the musty building for smoke machines and a slick twenty-five minutes and be just as dead. Ryan talks about why so much Reformed preaching has become lecturing, what the redemptive historical method loses when it drops the imperative, and why the Puritans were called painful preachers, men who aimed the word at the backslider, the formalist, the worn-out mother. Halfway through, Stephen reads the post Ryan took heat for. It ends with a prayer: Lord, help us to preach a felt Christ.

00:00 — Welcome; Ryan Denton joins from Lubbock
01:00 — Family, and church plants in Lubbock, Clovis, and Roswell
02:18 — A year of filling pulpits; twenty sermons in twenty-four days
06:55 — Vanguard Presbytery and the office of evangelist
09:31 — Out of the PCA: Vanguard's origins and distinctives
16:37 — Dead Orthodoxy and Its Cure: why Ryan wrote it
19:42 — Where apathy and formalism come from
22:24 — One ditch into another: Ian Murray and Luther
24:57 — Head and heart fused: experimental Christianity
26:44 — Books: Alexander, Guthrie, Scougal, Edwards
32:00 — Stephen reads the Facebook post
33:53 — Redemptive historical preaching and the missing imperative
38:31 — Painful preachers
40:55 — Apply early and often
43:30 — Law and gospel, antinomianism, and the New Testament's imperatives
47:42 — Preaching to different hearers: real truth to real people
53:31 — Preaching to the conscience: Thomas Boston, Nathan and David
59:16 — Emotions, stepped-on toes, and the preacher's own conscience

Learn more about the Frontier Shepherds conference at newgenevaacademy.com

In our eighth episode, Aaron Prelock sits down with Brian Croft of Practical Shepherding to talk about what no seminary can hand a man: staying. Staying when the church wants you gone. Staying when no one will mentor you. Staying long enough that your body breaks before the church turns. Brian and Aaron talk about why wolves in sheep's clothing and wounded sheep look alike until you stay long enough to tell them apart, the lonely nature of pastoral work, having no category for shepherding as its own work, and how the celebrity preaching conference circuit can overlook faithful, ordinary work.

00:00 — Brian Croft, Practical Shepherding, and thirty years in ministry
02:03 — From the Christian music world to a call to pastor
04:38 — Why eighty percent of pastors don't last ten years
06:13 — Four pastors who refused to mentor him
09:35 — Taking a dying church at twenty-nine
14:17 — Three firing attempts, threats, and a body that shut down at thirty-four
15:10 — Year six: the church turns
18:37 — Haunted by Hebrews 13:17
19:41 — Wolves in sheep's clothing and wounded sheep act alike
22:24 — Every pastor needs an older pastor and a younger one
24:47 — The isolation of the pastorate
26:50 — Lament versus complaining
31:20 — How Practical Shepherding began
37:54 — The lost art of pastoral theology
43:43 — Content to be an ordinary, faithful shepherd
49:43 — "Show me the army"
53:14 — Stop measuring ministry by numbers and money

Learn more about the Frontier Shepherds conference at newgenevaacademy.com

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