On Pastoring, with Bart Barber (Pastors Talk, Ep. 243)
What does it look like to pastor a church in a healthy way? Mark Dever and Jonathan Leeman have a conversation with Bart Barber, Pastor of First Baptist Church of Farmersville, to discuss why expositional preaching is essential for the life of a healthy church. Barber shares how his preaching has changed over the years and they discuss the nine marks of a healthy church. They finish their conversation by emphasizing the importance of trusting God’s sovereignty when pastoring.
- Why is Expositional Preaching Important?
- How Has Bart Barber’s Preaching Changed Over Time?
- Pastoring a Church Where You Are Known
- What Does a Healthy Church Structure Look Like?
- Trusting God’s Sovereignty When Pastoring a Church
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, this is Jonathan Leeman.
Mark Dever:
This is Mark Dever.
Jonathan Leeman:
Welcome to this episode of 9Marks Pastor Talk. 9Marks exists to help pastors build healthy churches. Learn more at 9Marks.org. And today we have a special guest with us, Pastor Bart Barber.
Bart Barber:
Hi.
Jonathan Leeman:
Bart
On Bart Barber
Mark Dever:
From Farmersville, Texas, which if I’m not mistaken is part of greater Dallas.
Bart Barber:
Well, it’s close to greater Dallas. Maybe. Yes.
Jonathan Leeman:
It doesn’t feel so…
Bart Barber:
I always tell people, that whatever you imagine when you hear the words Farmersville, Texas, that’s largely what it is.
Jonathan Leeman:
Lives up to its name.
Bart Barber:
I think so.
Mark Dever:
And you actually farm along with pastoring?
Bart Barber:
We have a small farm with some cattle, yes.
Mark Dever:
Did you have that farm before you were pastoring?
Bart Barber:
No. Although my grandfather was a cotton farmer, that’s a recent development for us.
Jonathan Leeman:
Define some cattle.
Bart Barber:
I have 23 heads, including calves, including the calf crop right now.
Jonathan Leeman:
How many hours a week does that take you off work? That sounds –
Bart Barber:
Very little. I’ll go early in the morning. It’s more work right now because we had a cow die calving, but the calf survived. So I bottle feed a calf first thing in the morning, last thing at night.
Mark Dever:
And that’ll last how long?
Bart Barber:
Two months, maybe three.
Jonathan Leeman:
These are beef cattle, dairy cattle?
Bart Barber:
Yes, beef cattle.
Jonathan Leeman:
Okay.
Mark Dever:
Are there dairy cattle in Texas?
Bart Barber:
Oh yes.
Jonathan Leeman:
Bart has served as the pastor of First Baptist Church of Farmersville since 1999.
Bart Barber:
Yes.
Jonathan Leeman:
Is that correct?
Bart Barber:
Yes
Jonathan Leeman:
He did his undergraduate at Baylor and then an MDiv and a PhD at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Bart Barber:
That’s right.
Jonathan Leeman:
I’m still saying true things?
Bart Barber:
Yes.
Mark Dever:
Where you both served as trustees.
Bart Barber:
We did. And got to know each other.
Bart Barber:
That’s how I got to know him. Yeah, I’m very grateful for the opportunity.
Jonathan Leeman:
Wife and kids?
Bart Barber:
So my wife, Tracy, met her at Baylor. We’ve been married for 31 years. And we have a son, Jim, who’s 20 and is a student at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. And my daughter, Sarah, is a senior in high school and a cattlewoman. She shows cattle.
Jonathan Leeman:
Does she show cattle?
Bart Barber:
Yes, goes to the fair. Did you not ever go through the barn at the fair?
Jonathan Leeman:
I did. Lane County Fair in Eugene, Oregon.
Mark Dever:
All right. All right. All right.
Jonathan Leeman:
I got something. Bart, we’re going to start with a pop quiz.
Bart Barber:
Okay.
Jonathan Leeman:
According to the First Baptist Church of Farmersville sermon archive –
Mark Dever:
Uh-oh. Somebody’s been doing some work.
Jonathan Leeman:
What book of the Bible have you preached more than any other book?
Bart Barber:
Oh my.
Jonathan Leeman:
You have 78 sermons in this book.
Bart Barber:
I’m going to say, Matthew.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yes. Can you guess second? 68 sermons.
Bart Barber:
Genesis?
Jonathan Leeman:
John.
Bart Barber:
John. Okay.
Mark Dever:
Oh, wow.
Jonathan Leeman:
And then Luke.
Bart Barber:
It’s a good focus on the gospel.
Mark Dever:
It is.
Jonathan Leeman:
Luke…
Bart Barber:
We’re in Luke now.
Jonathan Leeman:
And Hebrews are tied for third at 62 sermons each.
Mark Dever:
No love for Mark.
Bart Barber:
Present company.
Mark Dever:
It’s all taken up in Matthew and Luke, so why worry about him?
Jonathan Leeman:
Here’s question two. What is the one book of the Old Testament you seem to have entirely neglected? And I went through them all and you… According to the sermon archive, have preached from every book of the Old Testament except one.
Bart Barber:
So this is not accurate, but Ecclesiastes, I think, is probably – is that the one that’s missing?
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah. Do you assume it’s not inspired?
Bart Barber:
Well, no. I’ve done that on Wednesday nights and I’ve only been there 24 years, Jonathan. I’m working my way.
Mark Dever:
There are 66 books in the Bible.
The Gospel in Leviticus
Bart Barber:
I will tell you that until not long ago, Leviticus was – had not been covered, but I preached through Leviticus a year and a half ago. I had told our church, to be praying for me as I’m doing sermon planning for the coming year.
I mentioned some of the books I’d not been to yet and had a deacon come up and say, I hope I’m dead before you get to Leviticus. And I said, Leviticus it is, off we go. You’re going to love Leviticus or I’m going to die trying one or the other.
Jonathan Leeman:
Did you preach the gospel from Leviticus?
Mark Dever:
What did the guy say after the sermons?
Bart Barber:
Oh, you know what? He liked them.
Mark Dever:
Okay. Everybody survived.
Bart Barber:
Yes.
Mark Dever:
Excellent.
Bart Barber:
Listen, Leviticus is great preaching. You can preach the gospel out of Leviticus quite a bit.
Mark Dever:
Certainly have the roots of substitution.
Bart Barber:
It is. I mean, you’ve got really just right out of the bat, you’ve got the different kinds of offerings, and they point to repentance, and they point to faith and confession of Yahweh as Lord and substitution, you have the atonement there. How could you not preach the gospel out of Leviticus? It’s amazing.
Mark Dever:
Holiness, ethics, love. Yeah, love your neighbor.
Why is Expositional Preaching Important?
Jonathan Leeman:
Bart, as I said at the beginning, 9Marks exists to help equip pastors. We love pastors, and that’s what we want to talk to you about today, just pastoring and so forth. I started with those two pop quiz questions. Why is expositional preaching essential for the life of a church?
Bart Barber:
Well, we have the promise that God works through the foolishness of preaching. You can take that to the bank and cash it. And I believe in the supernatural power of the proclaimed word over the course of time.
I think if you’ve got 24 years to invest in a church you can get to the end of that. I can say this about my own life. I couldn’t name three sermons I heard in small rural SBC churches growing up, but the cumulative effect of preaching shaped my life.
And so I think it’s like your biological growth. You don’t point to a day and say, I gained four inches on August 3rd, but a good diet, and a healthy life, will produce incremental growth in someone. And so I believe that expositional preaching addresses the leadership needs, the sanctification needs, and the evangelistic needs of the church in important and significant ways.
Mark Dever:
You don’t think topical sermons are wrong.
Bart Barber:
No. So I’ve done the occasional topical series. For example, we talked about the Gospel of John a while ago. When I finished expositional preaching through the Gospel of John, I immediately followed that with a series on the Trinity because John is a very Trinitarian book and we had touched upon it all the way through. And when we got to the end of it, I wanted to seal the deal and just take a moment to make sure everybody was anchored well in Trinitarian doctrine before we moved on.
Cumulative Effect of Preaching Over Time
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Mark, any reflections on the cumulative effect of preaching over time?
Mark Dever:
Bart, I love what you said about you don’t remember any particular sermon really, and yet you don’t grow four inches in one day. I think I too, I grew up in a First Baptist Church in Madisonville, Kentucky. Harold Purdy was the pastor. He was a really faithful expositor of God’s word.
He was doctrinally careful. I think he could have preached in our pulpit any of the sermons that he preached over the 20 years, I would have heard him growing up. And I think that’s, now I think Western Kentucky may be a little bit more conservative and more doctrinal than a lot of parts of evangelicalism in America, but, certainly, I experienced I think exactly what you’re talking about, just a long period of not remarkable, but remarkably faithful handling of God’s word and profited from it.
Jonathan Leeman:
The fact of the matter is we’re exposed to all kinds of messages all week shaping us and inundating us. Feeding us in the way we think and then we exposed week after week, not to the wisdom of man, but the wisdom of God. Scripture shapes you.
Mark Dever:
It’s just recalibrating us at the beginning of every week as we come together on the Lord’s Day. That’s how we start a week.
Bart Barber:
And I can say my testimony would be a little different from yours because I grew up in a very small church in Northeast Arkansas, where we got a new pastor every two or three years. And some of them I couldn’t name even today from the earlier years of my childhood.
And not all the preaching was great. I wouldn’t dishonor any of those men by name at all, but I would say that not all the preaching was great.
But even in poorly executed preaching, by a faithful pastor who’s trying his best but hasn’t had the benefits of preparation that other people may have, still, every week I was pointed to the fact that God’s Word is important. I was led to read it every week in the service. We were too small of a church to have something to pull out the kids to.
So instead, I sat there on those hard wooden pews, and I had a mama who’d make sure I paid attention. And even if the preaching, even on weeks of the preaching may not have been great, I had the Word of God open in my lap. I was reading it. I was being pointed to the gospel, and that had a strong effect over the course of my life.
How Has Bart Barber’s Preaching Changed Over Time?
Jonathan Leeman:
How has your preaching changed since you showed up at First Baptist Farmersville in 1999?
Bart Barber:
I think dramatically in some ways. Mark, when I started there in 1999, I had not learned as much as I’ve learned now about expository preaching. I would have called myself an expository preacher, but I had much to learn about how to execute that.
Mark Dever:
Why would you have called yourself that in 99? What was in Bart’s mind that made him think I should be, I am an expository preacher? Was it John MacArthur? Was it something you heard at Southwestern Seminary? Was it your dad? Was it the church growing up? What? What?
Jonathan Leeman:
You mean, a good thing to be valued.
Mark Dever:
Well, good or whatever. I mean, why do you think you were, you were, were wanting to be that because not everybody does.
Bart Barber:
So my dad was not a preacher, so I didn’t, I didn’t get that from him, but he did value the word of God. John MacArthur had been an influence. I preached my first sermon when I was 15. I had a library that quickly included quite a bit of John MacArthur in it when I was a teenager.
So I’d read about expository preaching at seminary. I did hear a strong case made for expository preaching at Southwestern Seminary. I had been helped to see that the topical preaching would reflect a lot of me. I would probably wind up using scripture to state my views and probably abusively so.
And I had seen that some, I had seen some of the damage that can do pastorally even. Not just in the proclamation ministry of the church, but in caring for the flock because isn’t there a great temptation if you don’t have some guardrails up in the way that you’re preparing sermons to use the pulpit to grind your axes for things that you’re unhappy about, about what the congregation may have done to you or refuse to do with you or whatever.
And I’d seen some of that and I just knew that there was a danger of abusing the pulpit and dethroning God and putting in his stead my own agenda. I heard the case that expository preaching was a good way to guard against that and I thought, yes, that’s what I want to be.
Jonathan Leeman:
So you had the right arguments and understanding of it, at least in theory, but you said your preaching changed from 99 to 2023.
Bart Barber:
It did.
Jonathan Leeman:
You grew in exposition, your ability to do that.
Bart Barber:
Yes.
Jonathan Leeman:
How so? Are there other ways you would say your preaching has changed?
Bart Barber:
Oh, I’d say a few things that have changed that. One, even though my doctoral work was not in preaching, it was in church history. I was at school with people who were getting PhDs in preaching.
And this was a time when Southwestern was really trying to focus on this text-driven preaching approach. And so interacted with fellow PhD students and what they were learning, noticing some of the books they were carrying around and getting a peek at them.
And then another thing, honestly, software started coming along that really, once you get a copy of Logos and put it on your computer, then you have a set of tools that can help you with that.
And then the last thing I would say, actually, a guy who was very much on the left of the theological spectrum, who was one of my Greek professors, I’d taken Greek and Hebrew at Baylor.
And so when I came into Southwestern, I didn’t have to take the learning the language courses. I went straight into book study courses at Southwestern and the guy named Lauren Cranford, who taught the book of James in Greek and taught a very exacting exegetical method for applying Greek.
I’d never seen anything like that, even though I’d taken nine semesters of Greek at Baylor. I had never seen anything quite like that very rigorous approach to using the Greek language to come to a sound understanding of a text. And so all of those things helped me grow in the actual execution of preparing an expository sermon.
And I think I’ve got plenty of room to grow left still. Lord willing, I hope to continue to improve and I hope that I’ve improved some. Reminds me of an old story about Jerry Clower who gave his first speech at a graduation and his uncle who was sick had come anyway.
And after it was over, Clower said, he went down and said, Uncle, I sure hope you get better. And uncle said, my goodness, son, I hope you do too. And so that’s, that’s sort of what I’m hoping for that I get better as time goes on.
Jonathan Leeman:
Mark, you’ve been at Capitol Hill since 94, the end of 94. How has your preaching changed one or two ways?
Mark Dever:
Oh, I think it’s going to do various. I think when I first got here, I was really aware of the kind of sermons they had been hearing and I tried to be kind of in that mold, which was half the length, much less dense than my preaching in Cambridge the previous six or seven years. So the church I was at in Cambridge in England was used to very dense, long sermons.
Here it was retired folks, who loved the Lord. I didn’t know they were particularly well taught. So I just tried to lighten it way up 25, 30, 35 minutes. But then after just even a year, the people who started to come and who were responding, I think gave me the ability to try to do more in the sermon.
So I went back from just notes to more of my manuscript style, which I think is more natural for me. And I would say over the last, probably the same amount of time that Bart’s been preaching at his church, 25 years, that style has been pretty set. I think I can tell a little bit in my preaching what I see in Spurgeon’s preaching changing over the years.
His earlier sermons, if you read them from the 50s, 1850s, and ’60s, they are longer, they’re thicker, they’re more detailed, they’re more sub-points. If you read a sermon of his from the 1880s, man, it’s stripped down, it’s much clearer, simpler points, sharper. I aspire to that change in my preaching and I would say there has been some of it, but I don’t want to exaggerate it, but that’s the direction I’m looking for.
Jonathan Leeman:
The beauty of godliness I’ve observed in older men is often that kind of things becoming simpler, in some ways more compassionate, gentle, and humane. And I would think you see some of that in a man’s preaching, assuming he’s a Christian and growing in humility. You see that in the course of ministry.
Mark Dever:
Well, as a pastor, you see a lot of sin in your own life. You see a lot of sin in other people’s lives. You see the Lord redeem. Yeah.
Pastoring a Church Where You Are Known
Bart Barber:
How does it change your preaching that you have a congregation of people who now know you and love you? Cause when you first come, that’s not the case.
Mark Dever:
That’s true. It calls, I think it calls out good preaching from you. I think I think you have sympathy and you feel that. And I think it’s the interaction with the congregation and conversations and things that you pray about together, things that you know are in people’s hearts to do to circumstances of their lives. Yeah. They just bring it out of you.
Jonathan Leeman:
How would you answer that?
Bart Barber:
So I think it’s a two-way street. I think they know and love me and therefore listen more sympathetically to my preaching. It’s harder for me to preach a really bad sermon these days because they just can’t conceive of it.
The ones who, you know, that I’ve known for a long time. I would also say the application is enhanced by that. I preached just this last week from the gospel of Luke and one of the points of application that I made that actually two weeks ago and it was, where Jesus’ mother and brothers had come looking for him and they reported it to him and they said, you know, my mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and obey it.
Luke chapter 8. And you know, one of the points that I made was even if you come here alone because your husband won’t come or because your parents aren’t believers or whatever, you’re not without a family here. Because Jesus made a family out of those who come.
That’s not a point of application that I would have thought to make probably 24 years ago. But I know the stories of those who are seated out there in the pews. I didn’t think I did that great. In fact, the matter is I’d been traveling for other responsibilities and it’d come in tired.
I just felt a little empty that morning, really. But I had a lot of people come up and just hug me for that sermon. I think part of it was because that connected with them and the application. They knew that I loved them and that God’s word was comfort to them.
Jonathan Leeman:
Something I noticed watching Mark’s preaching from the 96 through 2018. He got a lot more weepy as time went on too. Have you gotten more weepy?
Bart Barber:
Yes.
What Does a Healthy Church Structure Look Like?
Jonathan Leeman:
Okay, we’ve thought about expositional preaching. Now if we go through the nine marks you may not notice.
Mark Dever:
I think we have time to go through all nine at this rate, brother.
Jonathan Leeman:
No, we’re not. There are actually a couple of different versions of the nine marks, but we’ll leave that conversation for another time. Number one, expositional preaching you agree with.
Bart Barber:
Absolutely.
Jonathan Leeman:
Biblical theology you agree with.
Bart Barber:
Yes.
Jonathan Leeman:
The gospel, you agree.
Bart Barber:
Yes.
Jonathan Leeman:
Conversion, you agree.
Bart Barber:
Yes.
Jonathan Leeman:
Evangelism, do you agree with evangelism?
Bart Barber:
Yes.
Jonathan Leeman:
Membership and discipline, six and seven, you agree?
Bart Barber:
Yes.
Jonathan Leeman:
Discipleship and growth, you agree?
Bart Barber:
Yes.
Jonathan Leeman:
Number nine is biblical church leadership. Do you agree with 9Marks?
Mark Dever:
Well, before you get to that, I was looking for a quote on the loving nature of our congregations. It’s never a bad time to quote Marilyn Robinson and Gilead.
Jonathan Leeman:
And sometimes
Mark Dever:
When the preacher says often enough, when someone saw the light burning in my study long into the night, it only meant I’d fallen asleep in my chair. My reputation is largely the creature of the kindly imagining of my flock.
I choose not to be disillusioned in part because the truth had the kind of pathos in it that would bring on sympathy and its least bearable forms. Well, my life was known to them all, every significant aspect of it. And they were tactful.
Jonathan Leeman:
That’s good.
Bart Barber:
I love that.
Jonathan Leeman:
So I’m thinking back to our conversations.
Bart Barber:
Sure.
Should Elders Be Paid?
Jonathan Leeman:
Now you’re with a plurality of elders. Am I right in thinking you’re not quite lined up with us on that?
Bart Barber:
So I don’t know that anything that you’ve stated up to this point would be a point of departure. I would just say that I would argue for the payment of everyone who’s an elder, or at least for the idea that everyone who’s an elder is owed payment.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah.
Bart Barber:
And deserves payment.
Jonathan Leeman:
Like I can turn it down.
Mark Dever:
Paul seems to say that when he writes to the Corinthians.
Bart Barber:
I think so.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, I could see that.
Bart Barber:
I think so. And so sometimes, at least, although this is my first time sitting in this room and talking to you guys, but sometimes as the ideas in the 9Marks are implemented out in churches, there’s a sense that having elders who are not paid is not just circumstantial, that it’s an important feature of the system.
That provides certain solutions such that if a windfall came and you could pay all of your elders and did, you’d need to go find some who were not paid, who were not on staff. And so for churches that are implementing it in that way, I would have a friendly disagreement about whether that was needed.
Obviously there are people in the New Testament who were not paid and Paul would be one of those. And there are a lot of people today who are not paid or who are not paid enough because the church can’t or because it’s not expedient at that time or because they have reached retirement or have reached a point where they’re financially in a position where they wish to give the gift of their service.
And I’m fine with all of that, but I’m acknowledging that even if you’re retired and well off or whatever, you’re owed support, a workman’s worthy of his hire. And if you serve as an elder, then really the church ought to, if they can compensate you for that.
Mark Dever:
Do you want to interact with that for a moment?
Bart Barber:
I wish you would. That’d be great.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. So I think, uh, I think we’re in an area of freedom because in some ways of the different examples of Paul and Paul’s letters. So I think you can have five elders in a church. I think they can all be paid and you can say it workman is worthy of hiring.
You can quote that or you can have five who none of them are paid circumstances. Maybe don’t allow it, or maybe they all choose to in order to do something else. And that’s really between them and the Lord and in that congregation.
And I think any combination of those you can have. So I think how 9Marks probably hit at least a lot of Baptist churches in the 90s was they weren’t used to having an office called elder. And so if you look over at Presbyterian or Bible Church world, they’re going to have non-paid elders.
And so people are just immediately thinking that. And then in defense sometimes the Baptist would say, oh, well our staff, at least that are ordained, they are our elders. And I think that’s theologically true, that there’s no question there.
So then in that kind of standoff, I would say to my Baptist friends from the 1980s and 90s, brothers, the fact that a church might have more men who are godly and know the word and are able to teach it, at least in private or in Sunday school or discipling others, even if not preaching sermons, more than they do pay, would pay, could pay, in my mind is a sign of spiritual health. And it’s also a sign that people are not writing checks to the church as if the responsibility for spiritual growth is in the staff’s hands.
Now I know nobody’s going to advocate that, but that was my fear I think in the nineties that’s what I saw too common in churches. And so when I see these three staff elders and six lay elders who are godly men meeting the biblical qualifications, to me that does seem like a sign of health. So if you don’t have that, I don’t think you’re in any kind of disobedience.
But I don’t assume that when Paul talks to Titus in Titus chapter 1 about making sure that there are elders in every town, he’s assuming that all of those elders are full-time supported. So I think I would say there’s justification for having unpaid elders in churches. And I wouldn’t push it anymore than that.
Bart Barber:
Jonathan asked me once, I want to clarify, I’m not talking about full-time support because once along the way in a conversation about this, he said, so you’re saying that if somebody got 20 bucks a year that you would consider that to be…
Mark Dever:
Jonathan’s like that. You got to be careful with Jonathan. I’ve learned this over the years.
Bart Barber:
…to which I said, yes, I would feel better about that.
Mark Dever:
Well, done, Bart. Well done. Keep the dragon in his box.
Jonathan Leeman:
I see. I’m making things up now. I see. I have no recollection of that. Okay. Well, the areas of agreement. If I recall, you believe strongly in the importance of polity and conversations about polity in general.
Bart Barber:
Yes, I do.
Jonathan Leeman:
Many of our evangelical friends have…
Mark Dever:
We had a super interesting conversation the other day where you mentioned different phases of Baptist history.
Bart Barber:
Oh, yes.
Mark Dever:
And this one you said you thought was sort of marked by polity.
Bart Barber:
I think so.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, you want to talk about that for a moment?
Bart Barber:
Sure. I’ve been telling people sort of the story of the Southern Baptist Convention as a play with three acts in it. I think the first is the Landmarkism Movement, which was ascended in 1845.
Mark Dever:
Which if you’re from Arkansas and I’m from Kentucky, we’re both kind of nephews of…
Bart Barber:
Absolutely. I tell people, really, there’s a lot of that in me. If you dial the dial up to 10 on the Landmarkism and then take it down to about seven and a half. That’s where I was at that time. What I call ontological ecclesiology.
Mark Dever:
That sounds very like something Jonathan would say.
Bart Barber:
In other words, an ecclesiology that centers around what is or is not a church, what makes you a church.
Mark Dever:
Essential questions are always great.
Bart Barber:
Right. For Landmarkers, being a Baptist church is what makes you a church. What does my church have to be to be a valid church, to be a true church? That was the question that was on everyone’s mind at that point.
Landmarkism became very divisive in the SBC and beyond. And there came a time when people just got sick of it, really. And I think what displaced Landmarkism, I used to say this, I used to say that we replaced landmark ecclesiology with no ecclesiology at all.
That’s got a ring to it. But the more I’ve thought about it, that’s not actually true. I think what happened is we replaced that ontological ecclesiology with what I would call a teleological ecclesiology. So this is more along the lines of what my church have to do in order to be an effective church.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah. You’re thinking, now you’re thinking 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s.
Bart Barber:
So there’s a gradual shift. There’s time on the margins.
Mark Dever:
Gaines Dobbins, Southern Seminary, Professor of Church Administration.
Bart Barber:
Very much. It’s a Gaines Dobbins. But I’ve even used it to talk about, if you want to go more recently, I think that W.A. Criswell was very significantly along those lines. His emphasis at First Baptist Dallas is the multiplication of different ministries, and different staff positions.
It was something that was really focused on finding ways that the church could be on a mission and could accomplish some things that would make it an effective church. And I think stating it that way helps it to be…
Mark Dever:
Positive, not negative.
Bart Barber:
Yeah, that’s yeah, positive.
Mark Dever:
What are the brothers trying to do? They’re brothers in Christ to honor the Lord and be faithful in their churches. And what does it look like in that decade?
Bart Barber:
Absolutely. And so I think that’s… theme that continued until the 1990s, until the 2000s. I think 9Marks is a big part of changing, pivoting the way that Southern Baptists have started talking about the doctrine of the church. And I think that what we’ve moved more into now is how does my church needs to be structured in order to be healthy.
Which it’s not just structure. You look at the 9Marks, we just went over those. A lot of those, some of those are very practical mission-oriented things, right? Expository preaching.
Jonathan Leeman:
Membership and discipline.
Bart Barber:
Membership and discipline. But it is very ecclesiologically centered, which is a good Baptist thing to be. The Baptist movement is an ecclesiological movement at its heart.
And so I think that we stand really at the transition out of more of that kind of teleological movement to something that’s more centered upon organization and structure where people, because there were things that went wrong with this idea of it doesn’t matter how we’re structured, doesn’t matter how we’re governed, doesn’t matter as long as we get the job done.
Emphasizing Structure in the Church
Mark Dever:
Jonathan, does it sound good to change from emphasizing purpose, in the 20th century to emphasizing structure, in the 21st century?
Jonathan Leeman:
When you put it like that, you want to say, of course, both.
Mark Dever:
Well, and ontology, you want to bring in the 19th century, what he says. What a church is, does, and how it does it.
Bart Barber:
None of these things would have survived if they weren’t good.
Jonathan Leeman:
But I think Bart’s exactly right. I think those emphases have come forward in those particular moments, at least in some broad conception. And I think emphasizing purpose and mission to the exclusion of structure and some of these polity-type questions ultimately leads to an unfaithful, unguarded church.
Mark Dever:
Well, or yeah, it could be most charitable. Because those polity things which it shoves us over toward, sorry, some of my hearers, Anglicanism, where our Anglican brothers and sisters are often so good on the gospel and soteriology. And yet when it comes to the church, the local church, it’s going to be very different from Anglican congregation to Anglican congregation because the whole thing is set up assuming a parish model from the Roman Catholic Church just inherited.
And it just… The local church does not, I love John Stott. I mean, he even had a good book on the living church, but if you look at the doctrinal distinctives of Anglicanism, unlike say our Presbyterian brethren, who have a lot in common with us on this stuff.
Polity in the Church
Jonathan Leeman:
They care about polity.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, our Anglican brethren are just like, whatever, we want to see people come to Christ.
Jonathan Leeman:
And what polity and church life in general do, I think, is both protect and as you’ve said so well, Mark, put on display the gospel. On that first one, it really does protect it over generations.
Mark Dever:
Prongs that hold the gem of the gospel.
Bart Barber:
In ethics or in ecclesiology, teleology needs guardrails.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah, that’s exactly right.
Bart Barber:
Otherwise, you don’t want to have a bad purpose in ethics or in ecclesiology, but something has to be there to keep you on the road.
Mark Dever:
Well, somebody has to be willing to do the hard thing of saying, Harry Emerson Fosdick, I know you believe in believer baptism. I understand you’re a good communicator. I believe you think the Bible is in some sense the word of God, or at least contains the word of God, and I believe you think modern people are lost, and I believe you want to help them.
But I just want to say there’s a court here that’s going to adjudicate whether or not you are undermining the true gospel of Jesus Christ, and regardless of how popular you may be, we are going to press these charges against you. And there has to be some structure to do that.
So you can’t just leave it to the employment of a megachurch pastor deciding, okay, I can hire you or fire you. No, there has to be a Jesus-y, and I would say that’s Galatians 1, that’s Matthew 18, a structure where that accountability can come to life.
Bart Barber:
Agreed.
Jonathan Leeman:
Brothers, I’m going to change the conversation. We only have a few minutes left. I want to think briefly though about your church, Bart, and pastoring in a small town. As I see it on the web, Farmersville, Texas is a town of about 3,800 people, 3,808 as of 2021.
Mark Dever:
It’s 3,800 people in a suburb of Dallas.
Jonathan Leeman:
It’s not though.
Bart Barber:
It’s really not.
Mark Dever:
All right. I’m just wrong. I’ve never been there.
Jonathan Leeman:
Your church has a little over 300 members, is that right?
Bart Barber:
Right.
Jonathan Leeman:
Which means you’re almost one-tenth the town.
Bart Barber:
That’s right.
Mark Dever:
Well, and that’s also larger than most Southern Baptist churches.
Pastoring in a Small Town
Jonathan Leeman:
Thoughts on the dynamics of pastoring in a small town?
Bart Barber:
So, first of all, Mark, you’re right. It’s a large church by Southern Baptist standards, but it’s the largest church I’ve ever been a member of. And I’ve grown up in really small churches.
Mark Dever:
And was it the same size when you got there?
Bart Barber:
It was a little bit smaller when I got there. Farmersville is starting to grow a little bit.
Mark Dever:
I wonder why that is.
Bart Barber:
Yeah, it’s because someday we’ll be a suburb of Dallas. That’s why, but I’m not yielding the point. In a small town preaching the gospel there. First, let me say a lot of people do it in different ways.
Some people become very civic and get involved in city government or neighborhood organizations or things like that. That’s never been what I’ve done here at FBC Farmersville. I wanted people not to be confused about what they associated me with.
I wanted to be present in the community, but I wanted always to be present wearing the hat of the pastor of First Baptist Farmersville. And I think in a small church or in a small town, maybe much like a large church, people knowing that you love that place and love those people goes a long way for being able to touch them and reach them, which is a challenge when you first get there because you don’t.
Because you’re brand new, you don’t even know these people. It’s something that you have to grow, you have to grow quickly. The community of Farmersville has a community spirit. It’s my hometown, I’m here in Washington, D.C., I can tell you one thing I have to accomplish before I leave is to go visit Farmersville’s favorite son, Audie Murphy.
Mark Dever:
Oh, wow.
Bart Barber:
Who was born and raised in Farmersville? We have three parades a year. It’s a very patriotic town. One of those is Audie Murphy’s birthday. We have Audie Murphy Day every year in June.
And coming to love that town and what it thinks about itself really opens the door for you to reach people there because you’re an outsider, to begin with. And as you try to reach lost people, it’s one thing about the people in your church.
People in your church, they’re going to accept you because you’re their pastor, they want you to succeed. But to start to reach lost people in the town, you have to open doors to the town itself. And in a small town, they’ll create a reputation for you quickly.
You either live up to it or you don’t. But there’s a first impression that everybody passes around at the coffee shop in the morning. And then you have to work through that, that something that opens doors for you to share the gospel.
Jonathan Leeman:
Does that mean it’s more important to be involved in civic-type things as a small-town pastor versus say the suburban pastor where nobody gets involved in that stuff and then living out in the suburbs and the pastor doesn’t need to, whereas you’re in the small town, you got to show up at the coffee shop and you got to go to the, you know, Fourth of July parade and you got all of those things.
Bart Barber:
You do need to go to those things. It does make a difference to attend to those things, but everybody can do it differently based on what their interests are. Not everybody in the town is going to do all the things, but you have to find your place and fit in.
I tell you, funerals are important in a town like that because you’ll get a hearing from people because everybody’s related to everybody in a town like that. So there are people that are never going to come to your church who if you do enough funerals, which you will, they’re going to come to hear you at funerals. And so the way that you preach the gospel whenever you’re involved in those events is a doorway for you to reach to other people in the community.
Mark Dever:
Bart, any word to pastors who are pastoring churches in small towns like Farmersville, but that are further away from cities? So their towns aren’t growing. Any wisdom on what they should be thinking as they’re watching their church, the same size, their towns shrink a little bit.
Jonathan Leeman:
Everything feels stagnant.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. A little bit different than your situation.
Trusting God’s Sovereignty When Pastoring a Church
Bart Barber:
Sure. So I’ve been there everywhere before I came to Farmersville. I’ve been there and you really have to reach a point where you are invested in the flock allotted to your charge, rather than the idea of where’s my ministry going, or where’s this institution going?
Because first of all, I think, I believe, always kind of had faith that if I did that, if I took care of the flock allotted to my charge, then I’m making the impact for the gospel. I’ve had people from small churches like that reach to do great things. Not in that church because they moved off, went to school and they went somewhere else.
But God used them, used the foundation they had there to do great things. My youth group in Lake City, Arkansas, Wayne Sanders was the pastor there. He had two sons, John and Keith. John, Keith, and I were in the youth group pretty much in First Baptist Lake City.
And Keith is the pastor of First Baptist Church in Keller, Texas right now, doing an amazing job there. And I’m serving at First Baptist Farmersville and John is really faithful and… So there comes a point where you have to look and say, God’s sovereignly going to do this community, whatever he’s going to do.
People are going to live here or not. They’re going to move away or they’re going to come in. However, even if people are moving away, that means that you’re a sending church. You’re sending people somewhere.
So love those people, invest in those people, send them off well. And a lot of people who come out of small churches can have a big impact when they land somewhere else. Invest in that.
Jonathan Leeman:
Mark, that’s where I like the language I’ve heard you or somebody around Capital Baptist use, it was Jamie, I forget. People are here for two or three years at Capitol Hill. You’re trying to fill up their backpacks.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. That was Aaron Menikoff and I used that language.
Jonathan Leeman:
And send them off.
Mark Dever:
And to court seminars, trying to get to that whole pack of material in three or four years, assuming that’s how we’ve got them, it’s usually to the stewardship.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah. Amen. We’re basically out of time. My last question for you, unless you got anything, if you have been traveling around recently and talking to other churches, if you had a soap box, what one or two things would you want pastors throughout the U.S. to know? Like, oh man, this is my burden to know this. Pastor?
Bart Barber:
Right. I think the first thing that I would say to pastors is you have the opportunity to be a presence that anchors your people in the sure and certain truths of the gospel in a world that is increasingly using technology to anger them and make them panic. And so I think that that’s a major enemy that we have going on right now in our country and so many ways.
Mark Dever:
We’ve learned to reach into the more irrational parts of our brain and manipulate us.
Bart Barber:
Completely. And in a way that moves entirely away from all nine things that are listed as the fruit of the spirit. So, for that to happen though, pastors have to reach that stability in their own selves. So you can’t be whipped around by the factions and dissensions and anger and all of those sorts of things.
You’ve got to be someone who is also rooted in that. I think that’s important for a couple of reasons. I think it’s important because people who have a default state of turmoil, the cause, that’s what the world has put in them, are going to bring turmoil into your church, and that’s not going to be good for you or your church.
When that’s who they are, when they come into worship, when they come into decision-making for the church, it’s a bad thing. The second thing that I would say, perhaps related to that, be optimistic.
Trust in the—where we started this whole conversation— trust in the fact that there’s supernatural power in the preaching of God’s Word, there’s supernatural power in loving and caring for the flock. And if you do those things, they overcome all the other things that you’re worried about and have that kind of optimism and communicate it to your church.
Mark Dever:
One of our pastors did that superbly just this past Sunday night, Paul Billings. He was speaking to us from Acts 28:28. Paul, the apostle says, therefore, let it be known to you that this salvation of God has been sent to the Gentiles. They will listen.
Bart Barber:
Yes.
Jonathan Leeman:
Praise the Lord.
Bart Barber:
So I just, sometimes we as pastors can sound like the priests in Malachi. They’re talking about, oh, it’s so tiresome, so difficult, this service of the Lord. God really owes me for putting up with this.
And I think that’s offensive to God. And the fact of the matter is, it’s amazing to serve the Lord. It’s amazing to serve his churches. Everybody’s job is hard. Not just the pastor’s job, everybody’s job is hard.
But you have the advantage of knowing that unlike the business I grew up in with my family, unlike manufacturing lamps to go into hotel rooms that will, even before they wear out, the hotel will decide to change styles and just rip them out and throw them away somewhere. You and your work are doing something that is eternal and beautiful and amazing and rejoice in that. And we should all be optimistic.
Jonathan Leeman:
I think it’s a good final word.
Mark Dever:
Amen.
Jonathan Leeman:
Brother, thank you for your time.
Bart Barber:
It’s been a delight. Thank you so much.
Mark Dever:
Good to have the time, brother. Thank you.
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