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Transcript
Host: Hi everyone. Today we are with David Strope, who is the interim national representative for the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches. He’s joined by his newly appointed replacement, Clare Jewell. We’re talking about their roles in leading a Baptist network. So David, let’s start with the obvious question. Everyone wants to know, what is a national representative?
David: Yeah, it’s really a fun job. People that are part of our fellowship kind of know the parameters of the office. When I travel and I introduce myself to a businessman and I say, they ask me what I do, I say, “Well, to put it in your terms, I’m like the CEO of a small mom and pop company, and I’m responsible to lead the ministry.”
The title is representative in that I’m largely out in churches, connecting with pastors, connecting with churches, trying to help churches understand who we are, how we can assist them in their ministry. And so a lot of the role of the national representative is mixing and interacting with churches and with pastors and doing all we can to assist them, help them and encourage them, train them, and really mobilize them to more effective ministry.
Host: Clare, is your new role as national representative more like the New Testament sense of a pastor, an elder or a bishop? Which of those words describes your position now?
Clare: Oh, that’s a great question. I probably grab the term “shepherd” more. You know, in the sense of shepherding the shepherds, you know, trying to give guidance. You know, you’re not in a position of authority over any of the pastors. You’re there to encourage them, to maybe feed them spiritually a little bit at times, depending on their you know, everybody’s situation changes from time to time. I think that’s a key part of it, encouraging them, maybe giving advice or counsel, maybe talking them off the cliff a little bit, sometimes instruction.
One of the things I’ve been doing up to over the last several years is being a connecting point. So I’m learning something from a pastor over here in California, and then I’m in Florida having a conversation, and this pastor needs to know exactly what that pastor is doing, and then so connecting dots. So that’s why, you know, “shepherd” might not quite capture it, but it’s that idea of coming alongside in partnership. You know, it’s not an authoritarian role at all. It’s more of an encouragement role, maybe offering help, instruction, when that’s appropriate, or when maybe they just haven’t been exposed to something that I’ve been exposed to because I’ve been in multiple churches around the country.
David: And if I were to jump on to what he says, I think a modern parallel in secular culture, I’ve often thought of the idea that we’re coaches. We come alongside, we train people, we encourage them, we influence them so that they can be effective in doing their ministry. Now it’s different in the sense that in a church setting or even in an association, we train and we coach. We also do. Now the coach in a basketball game, he doesn’t play, but I think that’s an interesting parallel when you think about what is our role. When we’re talking about trying to help churches, you’re really coming alongside them, try to try to coach them, help them, urge them forward, to think a little broadly, even beyond what their immediate focus is.
Host: Clare, the GARBC’s national representative doesn’t wield any real authority, doesn’t have any real power. So what do you do to persuade and influence people and churches?
Clare: I think it comes from one year experience, you know. So we’ve all have experience, but varying experiences. So I think it comes from experience, and then I really believe, because I experienced this over the last several years, is that it comes from having knowledge, of being exposed to situations, circumstances and people that the average pastor just can’t be exposed to. When I was pastoring, I was in my pulpit 45–50 times a year, so I’m not around in all these other churches. So you have the power of influence, the ability to influence, because of your experience, and then because of maybe a knowledge base you have that you can’t have unless you’re out in these other churches and interacting with other pastors.
David: And I would just follow up with what Clare has mentioned, I find it interesting, whether it be a pastor in a local church or now in the role that I have played, or that that Clare will serve, is that you look at 1 Timothy 3, and the qualifications listed are mostly, not totally, but mostly about what the bishop, what the one who aspires to the office of the overseer, of what he is.
That the leadership ability, and I have found that to be true, to be honest with you, entering the ministry that I did for the last two and a half years in a rather, shall we say, unique context, unexpectedly, I got thrust into this role, that a lot of the ability I had to lead came not because of any specific skill, but had more to do with the presence of godly character.
And the qualifications that are listed in 1 Timothy 3 are almost all about who the man is and not what he does. And a lot of ministry, although it is activity, it’s service, but a lot of the ability to influence and lead people, to move people forward, really flows from character and from a commitment together about who we are.
Host: But we’re in a crisis of Christian leadership right now, where every time you look at the headlines, you see another ministry leader who has failed in one form of integrity or another.
David: It’s pretty simple. I think I can only speak regarding myself. I think the core of that is a personal, individual, real relationship with God that is fostered daily. Part of every day has got to be on our knees with an open Bible and and fostering, developing, displaying ourselves for the purpose of godliness. I think it’s being able to have a good spouse, good wife. We can fool other people. We can’t fool our wives, and they’ll yank our chain as necessary as they should. And I think that is helpful.
And then I think a lot of the difficulties that you see in the larger realm of Christianity today are groups and individuals who have lost specific accountability in a local church context where a pastor or a church member, no matter the size of the church, lives and exists within the covenant community in accountability, whether you’re the pastor or deacon or a church member. And I think many of these ministries have morphed well beyond that level of accountability, and they become islands to themselves and almost with no accountability whatsoever.
So those are the basic things in my life, I think, to God’s grace and to no personal credit on my part, that for whatever reason, my joy and my delight every day is to grab a cup of coffee and open my Bible and spend an hour with the Lord. And to be able to, especially in later years, to be able to have a meaningful prayer time with my wife, and we bare souls with each other and with God, and then to be rightly related to my church.
And especially now, I’m only a church member. I’m not a pastor anymore in the specific sense of that term. So now I function within the context of my church membership, we function in a small group, and we hold each other accountable in that regard. And I think a lot of the crash and burn things that we’ve seen is because those things have been lost in those people’s lives, to their regret, to the to the harm to the cause of Christ. And so those are, I think things that, to me, are important.
Clare: Yeah, I would come, I would come at it from two ways. And I think the first one is an offshoot of the two that I want to focus on. And this will be pretty brief. But one I think you’ve got to let the Holy Spirit preach to you. So I’ve talked about this with people. I’ve been out of the pastorate for 10 years now. I’m working in a mission organization. People ask me, what do I miss most? Well, what I miss most is sermon preparation, actually, and it’s because of that 10 hour approximately a week that you’re digging in the Word. And before you can go into the pulpit and preach it to somebody else is allowing the Holy Spirit to preach it to you. And if you’re not doing that, that’s a problem, I think.
And then tied to that, the two things I wanted to mention was, I just think it’s a lack of humility and love, and I think they’re connected those two things. Humility, because you know you’ve lost sight of who you are, you know, you’re just a sinner saved by grace. And then on the love side, there comes a point where, whenever we cross lines, that we’re loving ourselves more than we love God and more than we love our spouse, our kids, our grandkids, whoever’s involved, our church, and we’re all capable of crossing that line for temporary moments in our lives and sometimes in ways that bring a lot of destruction.
So I really come back to it’s a lack of humility and a lack of truly biblical love. I talked to a young man a couple of years ago who made some decisions that broke apart their family. And I said to him, I said, “You know, the one thing you cannot say right now is that you love your children more than you love yourself.” And he didn’t like it, quite honestly, but I think it’s true, you know? And I said, “Look, I’m only saying that, not based on emotion, but the reality of the choices that you’ve made.”
Host: Clare, the GARBC’s Council of 18 has sketched out a vision and ministry direction for the next few years. How will you be a part of that?
Clare: Yeah, the biggest skill I’ll focus on that one that they mentioned, that actually attracted me to it was they wanted somebody that was a networker. And that’s what I’ve been doing. As a executive director for North America, for ABWE, I’m networking with pastors all the time. I have no pull, I don’t have much money to offer. And so you just have to build relationships and network with people, and you become kind of like a personal, walking, living library, in a way, it would be a good way to say it. And so you’re networking with people, and that’s what they wanted, somebody that could build connections and network with our pastors, churches, but then with our associations, our local, state, regional and then also with some of our supporting agencies, whether that be mission agencies or schools. Those would be the two main ones. But there are some other subsidiary ones.
But being able to build relationships, connect with those people, get them engaged, build partnerships. Another one I didn’t mention would be like consultants that work at helping churches be revitalized. You know, that was part of what I did for Generate, a ministry of the GARBC. And I think that’s why they, one of the reasons they even considered me for the role.
David: And I would say, from my limited experience as interim national rep, one of the most fun things was to renew those connections, or to make new connections. And that was just a great delight to connect with pastors and churches and groups of pastors and associations and really facilitate those kind of connections. That was one of the highlights of being able to serve.
Host: David, who is in this network, or maybe, is our network changing in an era when some organizations have dropped Baptists from their name? Are we networking with different people now?
David: That is a good question. I would remind myself, and I think we remind each other that our commitment to our core theology has not changed in any semblance whatsoever. We have clarified our theological suppositions as culture has moved into areas that our forefathers never thought that we needed to address. So we have clarified our commitment, but we are, yeah, our statement of faith is as clear as it was 92 years ago, our commitment to to our our theology.
I think we all understand when we talk about the people with whom we are identified, that the name Baptist itself is of relatively recent origin, historically. Authentic New Testament churches and how they work together has gone by different denominators through the years, but their commitment to core theology has remained the same. And so we’ve, of course, gone through historically, we went through our approval system, we networked, and now we have no formal relationship with, for example, some of the sister ministries or agencies, but I think that we still gladly connect and encourage and invest in and receive ministry from sister ministries that are virtual overlap with who we are.
And some of them are people with whom we’ve worked in the past, and there are new people that we work with, and we’re glad to do that, and because our core theology binds us and we understand there’s a breadth of how theology gets implemented into local church life. And one church may do one thing, another church in another town may do a different thing, but our commitment to our core theology remains fixed, and we’re hoping to be honest with you, and especially in this day where, where Christianity in North America is under increasing societal pressures, and even some of the institutions with whom we previously worked there, they’re no longer existing because they’ve gone out of business.
So there comes a point at which you know when the when the culture around you increases its pressure, it does push people who who used to squabble sometimes over rather tertiary items, we realize we agree with each other and so let’s, whether formally or informally, let’s encourage each other and cooperate in collective ministry. That still is our heart, it really has always been our focus.
Host: And Clare, if networking is one of your new responsibilities, is there anybody you won’t network with?
Clare: Well, it depends on what that means. So I’ll use a illustration from the role I’ve been in with ABWE, EveryEthne, we’ve talked about it in concentric circles. So unless you know somebody is apostate, we’re saying, hey, well, we can work with you at varying levels, depending on how much agreement that we have.
So when you talk about networking as a national representative, that’s obviously a little bit smaller group, not quite as broad as what I would be in a mission agency, but it would depend on what kind of networking. So relationally, learning from each other, that’s going to be pretty broad. I want to learn from people in other denominations and even people that we disagree with doctrinally, not because I think we’re wrong or we’re going to change something, but just they’re learning and doing things that we can learn from them. They can learn from us.
In terms of networking together, like partnering to plan a church, or partnering to develop leaders. Those are that’s going to be a closer in circle, you know? That’s going to be people that we’re really aligned with. So I would say the degree of networking would vary depending on the alignment of doctrine, would be a simple way to say it.
Host: Thanks again to David Strope and Clare Jewell for their time with us today. Find out more at garbc.org.
