Episode 48: On Core Seminars and Sunday School
What should Sunday School look like at church? Mark Dever and Jonathan Leeman walk through the advantages of having Sunday School at church and how it can benefit a congregation during this episode of Pastors Talk. They give advice for making Sunday School a valuable learning time and suggest useful topics for courses. The conversation ends with who should teach Sunday School and how to equip them well.
- What Are the Advantages of Sunday School Groups at Church?
- How to Make Sunday School Valuable
- Topics for Sunday School
- Who Should Lead Sunday School?
Transcript
The following is a lightly edited transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.
Jonathan Leeman:
Hi, I am Jonathan Leeman.
Mark Dever:
And I’m Mark Dever.
Jonathan Leeman:
And welcome to this episode of Nine Marks Pastors Talk. Nine marks exist to equip church leaders with a biblical vision and practical resources for building healthy churches. Learn more ninemarks.org.
Mark Dever:
I think your tone sounds indifferent today, don’t you?
Jonathan Leeman:
So now you’re judging my tone.
Mark Dever:
Well, now it’s new. You
Jonathan Leeman:
Make fun of my clothes next.
Mark Dever:
No, I think you’re good, man. But I just, you don’t sound that interested in our topic.
Jonathan Leeman:
I am excited about this topic because I have found that it is a remarkable tool for equipping the saints for the work of ministry.
Mark Dever:
Then why didn’t you ever come except when you were teaching?
Jonathan Leeman:
That’s not entirely true.
Mark Dever:
Help me understand entirely the board entirely.
What Are the Advantages of Sunday School Groups at Church?
Jonathan Leeman:
We’re talking about Sunday school slash as we call you call them at core seminars. Core seminars. Did you have core seminars when you showed up in the church? Look at me changing the subject.
Mark Dever:
Not even going. I’m just curious about your own thoughts about attending.
Jonathan Leeman:
I came whenever I was able to come with various family obligations being what they were and so forth.
Should Core Seminars Be Required for Elders?
Mark Dever:
And so do we require the elders that our church to come to core seminars?
Jonathan Leeman:
No, we don’t. No, I wasn’t aware of that.
Mark Dever:
No, we don’t. Should we? I don’t think so. I don’t think so either. There are a lot of pastors who are when you hear the word Sunday school, they’re very big on Sunday school and trying to require it. We are the opposite of that. It’s like if you want to sleep in our
Jonathan Leeman:
While you’re assuming I was sleeping in.
Mark Dever:
No. Well, it depends on when in your life we’re talking about. My whole concern for these course seminars was getting brothers able to teach God’s word publicly. So my word to the teachers has always been to work on the manuscript.
Don’t care about how many people are sitting in front of you. Try to make the manuscript better. You can actually find our course seminar manuscripts and handouts downloadable for free online at Capitolhillbaptist.org.
Jonathan Leeman:
Click on resources. Click on core seminars.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, they’re slightly hidden, but I mean it’s all free and just, but there it is.
Jonathan Leeman:
Capitalhillbaptist.org. Click on resources.
Mark Dever:
The curriculum is so expensive generally.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah, it is it.
How to Make Sunday School Valuable
Mark Dever:
So we’re trying to serve other churches and we’re trying to serve our own congregation in giving just good systematic topical theological teaching.
Jonathan Leeman:
I’ve had a lot of pastors tell me that they have gone to the website, and found those manuscripts and handouts. As
Mark Dever:
You said it’s everything from Old Testament prophets to dating. Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
We’ll get there in a second. Tell me what you found when you got to Capitol Baptist. It wasn’t that.
Mark Dever:
No, I got here in 94 and the congregation was about 130 people. And of those 130, I would say most of them were probably at Sunday school. It was a very churched Sunday schoolish culture.
They were mainly in their seventies and eighties. There were two different senior men’s classes. There were 60 to 75 and then 75 to and above or maybe 60 to 80, then 80 and above classes. Seriously
Jonathan Leeman:
Age graded. Yeah, they were all the way up there.
Mark Dever:
And then there were three senior women’s classes, again, graded by age. It’d be like 70 to 80. 80 to 90 above 90. And it wasn’t so much that age-graded. These are the cohort of people they probably came into church with back in their twenties or thirties or forties and they just stayed together in their Sunday school classes.
Jonathan Leeman:
But that’s I think more typical, isn’t it, for churches that still do because a lot of churches, but churches that still do Sunday school class, I have my class, I go there every week. It’s kind of a permanent part of
Mark Dever:
My, yeah, it’s like your sub-church. It’s a small group. Before there were small groups
Jonathan Leeman:
And what are the advantages of that structure? Are there?
Mark Dever:
Well, lemme just finish below the age of 60, there was just one large class for young people. 18 to 60 was young people and then there was a high school and kids class.
So it was a very senior citizens heavy-graded class situation. But it had devolved into from a fully graded Sunday school program with promotions, I’m sure for probably a century from junior high to senior high and from fourth-grade class to the fifth-grade class and things like that.
Jonathan Leeman:
So I think a lot of planners show up and or not planners, pastors of new pastors, young pastors of churches and think, ah, we don’t need this anymore and then get rid of it. And then their plants, they don’t do them. But you’re a fan of Sunday school.
Mark Dever:
You mentioned planting and I know brother, you’re involved in that right now when you’re planting, you’re doing something from the ground up, brand new. And I do think the wind is pretty stiff against any kind of time commitment.
I think for all the downsides of church planting or planting a new church, the upside that partly gets is I can get rid of all these taxes of these old requirements of the last congregation and we’ll just do the best bit. Sunday morning service will make it short and have communion in there and communities short and it’s just like, we’ll get it done. And so us and God,
Jonathan Leeman:
90 minutes,
Mark Dever:
Us and God are good after an hour and a half and that takes care of it for the week. And there are advantages to that. There are disadvantages to that. So you asked me about a new pastor comes Sundays will get rid of it.
What would you think? I’m not sure what I would’ve done if I had come here and there was no Sunday school or there were no evening services for that matter. What I did in God’s providence.
I received the very tail end of a traditional large Baptist church partly probably because of my conservative nature, but also probably more conservative strategy. I tried not to get rid of things, but to improve them at least things that I saw value in and I saw something that I could connect to the teaching ministry that I was responsible for.
Jonathan Leeman:
I have a form here. I have Why not fill it with good content?
Mark Dever:
That’s right. If people are willing to give that time there’s an established pattern of giving that time. So we’ve probably talked at other times about the Wednesday night Bible study or the Sunday evening service, and how it works on Sunday.
Well, this is a part I don’t talk about as much. It’s that nine 30 to 10 30 hours as our church meets Sunday school. And I tried to come up with a series of topical teachings that would help prepare more guys to be teachers of God’s word, really prepare them to be elders.
And teaching the material was more important in my mind than the people sitting there learning the material. So I’ve always been concentrated on trying to create opportunities for people to teach.
Jonathan Leeman:
That was the goal. That
Mark Dever:
Was my self-conscious goal from the very beginning.
Jonathan Leeman:
And so what you did is you created a different kind of Sunday school course curriculum structure.
Mark Dever:
That’s right. So it’s not age-graded once you’re
Jonathan Leeman:
In or a permanent class.
Mark Dever:
That’s right. Once you’re in high school, boom. You come to this assembly where we meet at nine 30 and all the teachers stand up and they announce what they’re going to teach and they each kind of pitch for their class and then the assembly lasts five minutes.
Then you just go to your classes. Now our hope is that you’ll stick with one class throughout the duration of that class, but we don’t take attendance. You don’t need to do whatever you want. So that means that the teachers are always there trying to hone their material and make it better.
We give them a manuscript,but they don’t write it now. We have these things that teachers before them have written and then their goal is to make the manuscript better
Jonathan Leeman:
And their own.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, that’s right.
Jonathan Leeman:
Put in some of your own illustrations.
Mark Dever:
That’s right. That’s right.
Jonathan Leeman:
And so forth. So the overall structure is less, here’s my class. You’re a permanent part of it. So I remember when I was at one church, I was in Bruce Ware Sunday school class and everybody knew that’s Bruce Ware Sunday school class and it was a great Sunday school class, whereas this is topic specific.
Mark Dever:
So Jonathan Lehman used to be an elder at our church and used to teach in our course seminar classes
Jonathan Leeman:
Once upon a time when he came, he was often sleeping in.
Mark Dever:
He was a good teacher. And you started that Christian government class. Didn’t you start that?
Jonathan Leeman:
I did, yeah. f
Mark Dever:
Well, that was a great class. I think we’ve kept it, even though you’re gone, we,
Jonathan Leeman:
I don’t know.
Topics for Sunday School
Mark Dever:
I think we have, and we’ll just change it up a little bit. Take the content, change it up, keep using it, keep personalizing it to whoever’s teaching it, and keep trying to refine it. So the point was never to have a Mark Devwe pastors class or John Lehman class. It’s just we try to have these topics that are addressed and we try to continually improve how we can best address these topics.
Jonathan Leeman:
So just to give the listeners a concrete idea of what this looks like works. So over the course of a year, you have six basic tracks and each class lasts for six or seven weeks.
Mark Dever:
That’s the shorter ones
Jonathan Leeman:
Or 13 weeks.
Mark Dever:
And occasionally there might be a 26 week
Jonathan Leeman:
One. So yeah, that’s right. So there’s the basics track. You come in, you take the basics tracks, what’s in the basics track.
Mark Dever:
Well, the thought is that’s really there for the high school student or for the person who’s just become a Christian or the person thinking about becoming a, or the person trying to disciple other people. It has all those different utilities.
Those classes are usually really small and they actually presume you’ve already done the membership matters class. So the membership matters class is actually the most basic
Jonathan Leeman:
That’s ongoing all the time.
Mark Dever:
All the time. It’s six classes. It’s always in rotation. So you just
Jonathan Leeman:
Come in, it’s that CD repeat button.
Mark Dever:
That’s right. So you just have to come in. What’s a CD?
Jonathan Leeman:
You have 500 of them sitting by your window.
Mark Dever:
So you come in and you take a membership class, you have to get all six of them, and then you have a membership interview, and then the elders vote on that, and then the congregation votes on you. Then you’re a member,
Jonathan Leeman:
Right? Then you’re jumping into the base if you want.
Mark Dever:
So if you want to, that’s right. Then you go into the basics class. And in that, we have a fear of man that’s just been starting again here recently, the class on fear of man, two ways to live gospel presentation, class on guidance, finding the will of God, meeting with God, basic disciplines of the Christian life, how to study the Bible, interpreting the Bible, unity and diversity in the church, explaining Christianity and following Jesus basics of the Christian life.
So all those are six. That’s an awesome track. All of those are six or seven-week classes. And as I say, those classes are very basic. They’re usually very small. There’ll be a handful of guys there, people, five people, 10 people in those
Jonathan Leeman:
Classes. Fear of man, why’d you guys do that? Why did you choose that?
Mark Dever:
I think it’s because we had one brother here at the church who was interested in exploring it. We all 15 years ago read Ed Welch’s book when people were God is small and we’re impacted by it. And because we’re here on Capitol Hill where people’s lives are determined by curing the favor of other people.
So it’s an occupational hazard for politicians and those who work for them. So it’s just true of all fallen children of Adam. But I think the vocational atmosphere that we are in here on Capitol Hill is unusually kind of like Hollywood would be. It depends on how people think about it.
Unlike New York, which is going to be what can somebody do for me in terms of money? Well, politics and public life are very much dependent on how people think of me. So anyway, fear of man seemed like a very appropriate idea in scripture to give more airtime to trying to help break it out specifically in somebody’s life and using a class to tackle that topic.
Jonathan Leeman:
Look at your contextualizing.
Mark Dever:
We do it all the time, man.
Jonathan Leeman:
It’s such a basic part of discipleship. Right? And the other one that stands out to me in the guidance track or the basic tracks is the guidance
Mark Dever:
Class. Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
Why is that in the basic track?
Mark Dever:
Well, because I had a long conversation just this past week with a friend who’s a Christian and she was concerned about everybody in her Bible study talking about God telling me to do this and God told me to do that. And it’s just so common today that Christian liberty and mature prudence are evacuated by, in my understanding, specious claims to divine guidance, which really stunt someone’s growth.
They don’t take responsibility. They don’t think carefully. They look for feelings and impressions, and I think God is well able to give us feelings and impressions. We don’t have to get ourselves attuned. We don’t have to try to lift our hands just the right way, tilt and just the right way. And then maybe we’ll get it.
Jonathan Leeman:
It Mark looks like a TV antenna right
Mark Dever:
Now. What’s a tv? What’s an antenna anyway? How old are you? No, no. I like these relevant contextual, these relevant things. But I think it’s so common in people’s parlance right now in a way, I don’t think it was 40 years ago to say, God told me this.
God told me that. And I think that threatens the authority of scripture. I think it threatens what God is doing in people’s lives. I think it threatens Christian liberty, it encourages legalism bondage.
It encourages self-defensiveness because you use that so you can’t have a conversation about it. God told me to do this. Who are you to question it? I just think it’s like a weed growing in the garden.
Jonathan Leeman:
So there’s a sense in which if your fear of man is responding to people, especially in Washington DC though probably everywhere too really right guidance in some ways is responding to the state of the way. Many Christians in America today tend to talk
Mark Dever:
Kevin Young’s book. Just do something that’s great and just go get an antidote, and make a decision.
Jonathan Leeman:
So that’s the basics track. Then I jump into the Bible overview track, which rotates back and forth between the Old and New Testaments for 26 weeks on each. I’ve taught the Old Testament once upon a time about a decade ago, and then there’s a history and theology track. What’s in that?
Mark Dever:
Well, we would like people to do the Bible track first. We’d like ’em to get an overview of every book in the Bible in the Old Testament and the New Testament class. So literally in 45 minutes, you’ll have a lecture on Romans, and this is just somebody giving a basic weight and balance of the book of Romans.
Here’s what it’s about. So that they get familiar with the 66 books in the Bible. Once they have that, then we have two longer classes each a quarter of a year, church history and systematic theology, and then some shorter ones.
Theology of the church, particularly global Christianity where we try to up our game and understanding the history of the church outside of the United States and Europe and the ancient Mediterranean world.
Jonathan Leeman:
That sounds like I never sat through that. That’s awesome.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, it’s very good. It is Christianity in Africa, which of course is older or it’s as old, at least as Christianity in Europe and not quite as old as Asia. And then the rest of Asia, Iran, Iraq, and everything further East China and then also in Latin America.
So we try to include, that’s global Christianity. And then we have a class on biblical theology that you may have first written, or Michael Lawrence’s first
Jonathan Leeman:
Read it. Michael Lawrence wrote the book and then I think I converted his book into the class and then it’s been refined every time since.
Mark Dever:
And his book was picking up those themes that I laid out actually in the nine marks chapter. Those five, five aspects. So we’ve had a class on biblical biology for quite a while, and it’s really useful weaving the themes of the Bible together. Redemptive history.
Jonathan Leeman:
So the fourth track is Christian roles, biblical manhood and womanhood, marriage singleness, dating, and courtship parenthood. Some of those are 13 weeks, and some of those are six or seven. Any comment on that?
Mark Dever:
Well, that’s just so much the core of our lives. It’s in those relationships. How do we do these things? Well, we have a lot of young people here who are single. They thought about that theologically.
What’s the utility of their singleness? How can we help them understand it and think about it? Well then how do they begin initiating a relationship with somebody of the opposite sex for purposes of marriage ultimately?
Jonathan Leeman:
And in the process, you’re thickening the culture in this place in those different domains.
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
So even if not everybody goes to the dating class, they tell their friends 20
Mark Dever:
More people have now been taught about it, and the notes are there on the website. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told somebody, Hey, why don’t you download those notes, read them, and then let’s get together and talk about it?
Jonathan Leeman:
So it’s kind of understood, Hey, this is what the elders generally teach on dating. Here’s what elders generally teach on parenting. And you have a thick culture of all of those things or back to guidance.
Mark Dever:
So one rotation of the class probably isn’t going to fix all the problems in your church, but if you’re dropping this thing literally in annually, for anyone who’s interested, it’s, it’s a kind of catechizing of the church. And that culture slowly but surely gets created in the church.
So you have to be patient. But if you wait five years or a decade this way of doing it, and it’s just voluntary, we do not pressure people to come to Sunday school, but we let ’em know it’s there and we try to win them by the quality of it.
Jonathan Leeman:
So back to the plant conversation, when we went out to plant here at Chevrolet Baptist, and we’re about five weeks old now because we’re meeting in elementary school, we’re logistically constrained in a pretty significant way. And so right now, all we have is the one service.
Yet in our conversations, we all recognize the value of this and what’s happened here. And as you put it, catechized in a congregation in all these different ways.
Mark Dever:
Well, it says you guys will know, at least it’ll be as the culture if you don’t do any of this other stuff. That’s right. It’ll be as that culture slowly degrades, have new people joining who don’t have that shared
Jonathan Leeman:
Heritage. So our first 60, they got it.
Mark Dever:
Oh yeah. And you guys are in a sense, you’re going to be feeling you’re traveling super good and very light for this is just the bee’s knees. That’s right.
Jonathan Leeman:
For a lot.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, but be careful about problems ahead. No,
Jonathan Leeman:
I feel that. And so we were like, how do we do this? Do we feed this stuff through our small group structure? I’m not sure how we’re going to do it, but one way or another, the stuff here is so valuable. There’s a Christian discipleship track that covers stewardship, suffering, and discipling how to grow, and then there’s an engaging,
Mark Dever:
You don’t sound very excited about that track.
Jonathan Leeman:
I think it’s great.
Mark Dever:
It’s a really good track.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah, it’s the stewardship one that is so useful again, for
Mark Dever:
I would say of all the core seminars, that’s got to be in the top five for how useful people find that. Just clear teaching on what you do with your money, what you do with your time, how to understand yourself and not as an owner, but as a steward. Really good stuff. Very practical.
Is Sunday School a “Mini-Seminary”?
Jonathan Leeman:
And then the final track is engaging the world with evangelism, Christians in the workplace, neighboring apologetics, and missions. So it’s kind of a mini seminary. Is that what you’re doing here?
Mark Dever:
Yeah, it certainly is covering some of the same things. It’s doing it in the context of one local church and it’s doing it more specifically. There are no assignments. We don’t ask the people in the class to read things.
We don’t ask ’em to write papers. But yes, as far as auditing, if you could imagine auditing a seminary, this would be a lay level of that. And with more of the Christian life thrown in.
Jonathan Leeman:
So a lot of people use their Sunday, they like Sunday school classes. They see it as a time of conversation and discussion. Are you doing
Mark Dever:
That? No, we don’t do that.
Jonathan Leeman:
No, you’re doing more information transfer.
Mark Dever:
This is very much information drop. I mean, this is just, I hope there are humans there, but even if not, I can give this manuscript and if they want to come, we get something from it, God bless them. So no, we concentrate on the front of the lecture, not on q and A times.
Now, outside of those times, there can be lots of q and conversations, but because the time is so constricted, by the time you have that assembly done, 9 30, 9 35, then five minutes to walk to the class is nine 40. You’re starting, you better get out at nine 20 at the latest 9 25, get to the, sorry, 10, 20, 10, 25.
You’re going to get in the morning service where seating starts at 10 30 and the service formally gets at 10 45. You got 40 to 45 useful minutes.
Jonathan Leeman:
Now a good teacher I find can work in a little bit more q and time and do some stuff.
Mark Dever:
So you look over your master carefully, you see where a couple of the key
Jonathan Leeman:
Points would be, what’s the main burden I want?
Mark Dever:
That’s right. And you see a couple of key points like, ah, people talking about this for a couple of minutes would probably help the information get into people’s minds better. And you allow for that.
Jonathan Leeman:
So you talked about this as an opportunity to raise up more teachers.
Mark Dever:
So we’ll have 60, 70, 80 guys involved in teaching these core seminars in the space of a year. Because each class, by class, I don’t mean one Sunday’s work. I mean a six or seven-week stretch,
Jonathan Leeman:
Like the Old Testament or
Mark Dever:
13 weeks
Jonathan Leeman:
Marriage class
Who Should Lead Sunday School?
Mark Dever:
Will have a lead teacher and one or two other teachers,
Jonathan Leeman:
Junior teachers.
Mark Dever:
That’s right. And the lead teacher will be responsible for being there all the time. It’s not like they trade-off. They’re there throughout and should be giving feedback to the other two teachers and one of the other two teachers when he’s teaching.
So like I said, if it’s a 13-week class, let’s say the lead teacher teaches six of them. One of the junior teachers teaches four, the other one teaches three, and they can decide who’s going to be in town when and who can be here, which Sundays. And they just completely are trying to multiply the number of people who can teach that material.
Jonathan Leeman:
What I loved about that is when I was the senior lead teacher on biblical theology, I taught it three or four times. I worked on a manuscript. I wouldn’t say I was bored of teaching it, but I just felt like, okay, here’s a great opportunity to get somebody else to teach that class. Justin Sauk had been my junior teacher for several rotations of it, and I wanted to go to the Christians and government class and write that thing from
Mark Dever:
Scratch.
Jonathan Leeman:
So I just handed it off to Justin and said, okay, Justin, you’re a senior now. You go find a junior. And off it went. And then I went off and did the other class, the Christians in government.
Mark Dever:
Well, and just thinking every year we’ve got somebody in the church planning to teach through the book of Genesis in this course of art class planning to teach through the Book of Exodus, through the book of Leviticus, through the book of numbers, through the book of Deuteronomy, through the book of Joshua. I mean, just the biblical knowledge you’re building up in the people in the church. Slowly but surely by doing this blesses not just those individuals and those people sitting in the class, it ends up blessing the church as a whole.
Jonathan Leeman:
Do you encourage untested unseasoned teachers to teach?
Mark Dever:
Yes. We will sometimes want to see them teach small groups first, but there are some people who just seem more natural in a classroom setting to be gifted or in a lecture kind of thing. And well sometimes trial some pretty untested guys that we think would have potential if they have interest and desire to do it,
Jonathan Leeman:
And what kind of feedback is given.
Mark Dever:
We have a service review time where we try to give comments to all the core seminar teachers. They’re fed through somebody who asks them to take down the comments or they’ll be there in person. And the comments are pretty basic, usually like, you understood this well, it was great.
You need to call on names. When you ask people questions so people get to know each other, you need to give them more time. You need to speak more loudly. You need to look up sometimes from your manuscript. Just really basic stuff.
Not usually heavy criticisms of the manuscript. The manuscripts have been worked over so much by this point, but sometimes there’ll be comments on too much time on this. We need to be dealing with this instead.
Jonathan Leeman:
I found guys the first time teaching, and as a junior teacher weren’t very good, but after several chances and some feedback, they improved pretty quickly.
Mark Dever:
I think that’s true 80% of the time, 70 or 80% of the time. I think 20 or 30% of the time you just help to identify a brother who has gifts in other areas.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah, that’s certainly true. Okay, now let’s be real for a second. Mark, your church has a thousand-plus members.
Mark Dever:
Not anymore. Your church has taken a big bite and we’re going to be down to about nine 50 this coming Sunday night. Isaac just gave us the numbers. Oh, that’s fine. Feel better having nine-50.
Jonathan Leeman:
Wouldn’t rather have eight 50, but still, you have a lot of, well-read and smart type-A folks. Here we are in
Mark Dever:
Washington. No, again, you’re not here anymore. No, it’s
Jonathan Leeman:
Not. Here we are in Washington. You have a lot of resources to call on, but now I’m somewhere, maybe I got a hundred members, maybe I’m the only guy who, I’m the senior pastor, only pastor.
I can teach. Maybe one or two other guys can teach. I can’t jump into this. What do I do? This big six-track, year-long, elaborate structure. I mean, this sounds glorious, and I only, yeah,
Mark Dever:
Aaron Minoff and I started this with four tracks when we had probably about 180 people in the church. So if you’ve got people who are willing to teach you and one other guy, you can have a track or you can have two tracks. You just start with where you are, and what you got. Don’t worry about this. Ours has grown into this.
Jonathan Leeman:
So the pastor can teach him himself, even if he’s Sure.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, if he’s got time interest, and ability, I wouldn’t want it to detract from his main preaching ministry.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah,
Mark Dever:
It’s been wonderful having this conversation.
Jonathan Leeman:
Me too. I have one last question. So for the guy starting, what are the top three or four classes they should start with? What’s most important about this
Mark Dever:
Chart? Yeah. Okay. Membership matters.
Jonathan Leeman:
Certainly good
Mark Dever:
Old Testament, New Testament, church history, systematic theology,
Jonathan Leeman:
Those four.
Mark Dever:
Oh yeah, no doubt in my mind.
Jonathan Leeman:
Explain, you got to give people, because most guys are thinking, well, why not evangelism, mark, why
Mark Dever:
Not parenting? You have to give people a deep background of all of it. Everything else grows out of that.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. Great to have the conversation.
Jonathan Leeman:
Well, thank you. I enjoyed it as well. Love you, man. You too.
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