I was born and raised in Orange County, California, about fifteen minutes by freeway from Disneyland. When I was fifteen, my family moved to the mountains of central California. Our house was at 6,000 feet, in a pine forest, and overlooked Bakersfield. I went to high school in a nearby town called Tehachapi. I did well academically at Tehachapi High, and played football and golf. I also met my future wife, Anne. She was three months older than me, but a whole year ahead! My father, with whom I was very close, died suddenly when I was seventeen, toward the end of my junior year. I skipped my senior year in high school to start college with Annie, who had consented to marry me.
Annie and I married in 1982, after one year of college. We were eighteen. The first years of our marriage we were both full-time students. She got a B.A. in English Literature in 1985, I got a B.S. in Physics in 1986. To pay the bills, I worked full time in a grocery store, first as a box boy, then as a liquor clerk (that’s right, I sold alcohol and cigarettes!), then as a checker, and then as a front end manager. During that time we started going to church. Neither of us had a background in any church, so this was all new to us. The Lord guided us to the Lutheran Church, where we began to take instruction and get involved. We were baptized and confirmed together on a single morning in the summer of 1983 at St. John’s Lutheran Church in Bakersfield. In only a few years, I would be starting classes at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, but I had no thought of that then!
I spent four years—from 1986 to 1990—at Concordia preparing to enter the pastoral ministry. The first of our two sons, Jack, was born in 1986, and the last, Stephen, in 1990, making for nice bookends to our seminary years! I was ordained at St. James, in Lafayette Indiana in July of 1990, and served fifteen months there as an assistant pastor, before taking a call to be sole pastor of Hope Lutheran Church in Jacksonville, Arkansas. I was in Jacksonville for just shy of twelve years. During that time I received a commission in the U.S. Army as a chaplain. I served in the Army Reserve and the Arkansas Army National Guard for a total of twelve years.
I came to First Lutheran in Benton in December, 2002. My path to this congregation was not at all typical. The congregation was very small and struggling and couldn’t afford a full time salary for a pastor. Meanwhile I was planning to enter law school full time in Little Rock (that is a very long story), so I wasn’t in a position to handle a large congregation. By calling me to serve as their pastor, First Lutheran was certainly thinking outside the box, and so was I! But the Lord blessed the whole thing, and is blessing it still! I served as pastor at First Lutheran while going to law school full time. I passed the bar in 2006, opened a law office in Benton, and practiced law full time in a variety of ways—criminal, bankruptcy, probate, and insurance defense—all the while serving as pastor. On until January 1, 2022, I essentially hung up the practice of law (although I still maintain my law license) and returned to full time pastoral ministry, still at First Lutheran.
Approach to Worship
Perhaps the single most important task of a pastor is the leading of the congregation in public worship. This entails not only the conduct of individual services, but the totality of a congregation’s public worship life. The pastor not only leads, but teaches what public worship is, and how it is to be done. The Divine Service is a way of teaching about Christ and His kingdom. It does not belong to an individual pastor, or to an individual congregation, or even to a single denomination. It belongs to the Holy Christian Church, which has been worshipping the Tri-un God since the ascension of Jesus all the way to the present day. Because of this, I employ rites and ceremonies that have a proven place in the worship practices of the universal church, and are expressed in the Lutheran heritage. To put it plainly, and with very few exceptions, I stick with the hymnal.
Approach to Membership
A Christian congregation is not just a thing individual Christians may choose to join if it suits them. Jesus commands His people to “love one another”. This love that Christians are to have for other Christians is the least that Christ asks of His redeemed, and it finds its most concrete expression in the relationship that a Christian has with a local congregation. A Christian who willfully declines to participate meaningfully in a congregation of fellow believers is not obeying this commandment.
The pastor of a congregation is required to keep account of the sheep in his care (Heb. 13:17). As a baseline, then, I expect all members of the congregation to worship every Sunday. I ask further that when a member is not going to be in worship for some reason, that they contact me, preferably before the service, but at least afterwards. I don’t mean this to be a burden. Really, it’s just a curtesy. I don’t expect or necessarily even want an explanation. I understand how life goes! A brief call or a text or an email will do. And if a member is unable to gather with the others in worship for an extended period of time—due to chronic illness, for example—then I expect that member to follow the services online, and to make arraignments to meet privately with me for devotion and communion at regular intervals. But a person who doesn’t join in public worship, nor keep in regular contact with me, nor make any arraignments to meet with me to commune occasionally, that person can hardly be said to be a member of the congregation!
The Value (and danger) of Denominations
I do not care for “non-denominationalism”, because a non-denominational congregation, by definition, is not subject to the oversight of anybody but itself. This is not what we see in the book of Acts, or in the New Testament epistles. There, the apostles and their associates paid close attention to what was going on in the congregations that were springing up as evangelism proceeded. Furthermore, a non-denominational congregation is either being disingenuous about its theological orientation. What I mean is this: A Baptist congregation is still a Baptist congregation, even if it restyles itself as “non-denominational”, and it owes those who gather to worship there to admit that. And if it’s not Baptist anymore, then what is it? A congregation should be a part of a denomination.
A denomination should adhere to a doctrinal confession, and represent some level of doctrinal and ecclesiastical oversight, and that should be no secret. The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod adheres to the Book of Concord—these are the official doctrinal statements of the Lutheran Church collected together in 1580—and our denomination’s subdivisions and congregations and schools and pastors are expected to adhere to this doctrinal confession as well. This is necessary and very good for the individual Christians who fill our pews and send their kids to our schools. The members at First Lutheran in Benton are entitled to know what their pastor is supposed to be preaching, and that other congregations and schools of our synod are teaching and practicing the same way.
Now, a denomination can only be as good as its confession of faith—that is to say, it can only be as good as what it believes and teaches. To the extent that a denomination’s doctrinal standard deviates from apostolic doctrine, it is doing a disservice—to say the least—to the kingdom and to Christ and to Christians. But even if it has an excellent confession of faith, if it will not be bound to that confession, nor exercise discipline over its own congregations, that denomination likewise harms the body of Christ. Every Lutheran denomination has an excellent confession of faith—the Book of Concord! But not every so-called Lutheran denomination actually holds to that confession. The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, and First Lutheran Church in Benton, Arkansas, do.
Having said all this, I agree that denominations are not an unbridled good. But at least congregations affiliated with a denomination can be judged according to what that denomination says it believes, or according to what it historically used to stand for. But a stand-alone, non-denomination congregation is dangerous precisely because it does stand alone. Again, this is not the picture of a congregation that the New Testament presents. It is not enough for a congregation to profess that “it follows the Bible”. I want to know what it means by that, and whether it is accountable to anyone else for what it teaches.
The Church and Politics
We should not avoid talking politics in church, any more than we should avoid discussing morality. What else is politics but public debate about public morality? What we must avoid, as much as possible, is partisanship. Elective abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, transgenderism—indeed, human sexuality generally, including marriage, family and children, the proper relationships of men and women to society and to each other—all these issues deserve time, attention, teaching and preaching! Just because they are politically sensitive is no reason for the church to be silent about them!
But there are other issues too, less flashy but perhaps even more profound, that have serious political implications and about which Christians must be aware: the growing secularism of our society, for example, or the profound confusion not just about what is true but about what “truth” even means, or the proper role of government, or the proper role of the Christian religion in the public sphere, or the foundational place of the Judeo-Christian World View to Western civilization generally and to the American understanding of government and law and individual rights particularly.
Preaching and teaching needs to address the world in which Christians live, and that world is filled with political issues about which the Scriptures have much to say. The Church does a disservice to Christians, and to the world, if it tries to avoid these topics because it wants to “stay out of politics.” The Church needs to address political issues honestly and directly, and, as much as possible, to avoid partisanship.
Theological Liberalism
I see theological liberalism as a kind of idolatry. It combines certain modernist philosophical leanings (e.g. Rationalism, Naturalism, Anti-Supernaturalism, and Existentialism) with historic Christianity in an effort to make Christianity more palatable to the modern mind. The result is a mutant, quasi-religious thing, which is neither really very modern, nor very Christian. It is far more destructive of the Christian Faith than the confessional and ecclesiastical divisions that have historically plagued the Church. Faithful pastors and congregations and denominations will steer clear of it. This is the primary reason the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America are not in fellowship with one another, and why in some cases member congregations of the ELCA can hardly be called “Lutheran” at all. Theological liberalism has done great damage to the entire Christian Church. The United Methodist Church, to the Episcopal Church in America, and to the Anglican Church in the West, in fact, all the so–called “Protestant Mainline Churches” in America have nearly destroyed themselves with theological liberalism, much to the dismay of a great many of their faithful members. Roman Catholicism has also had to contend with this. Theological liberalism is the great modern heresy—or as Pope Pius X called it wat back in 1907, “the synthesis of all heresies”. The bottom line is this: an apostolic Church must be faithful to apostolic teaching, and not to modernist sensibilities and philosophies and cultural fads.
First Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod) 