What I Wish They'd Told Me

In our ninth episode, Stephen Baker and Aaron Prelock sit down with Ryan Denton, an evangelist in Vanguard Presbytery who wrote Dead Orthodoxy and Its Cure, which is what this conversation is about. You can have the confession and catechism down cold and nothing in the soul. You can trade the musty building for smoke machines and a slick twenty-five minutes and be just as dead. Ryan talks about wh...

In our eighth episode, Aaron Prelock sits down with Brian Croft of Practical Shepherding to talk about what no seminary can hand a man: staying. Staying when the church wants you gone. Staying when no one will mentor you. Staying long enough that your body breaks before the church turns. Brian and Aaron talk about why wolves in sheep's clothing and wounded sheep look alike until you stay long enou...

In our seventh episode, Stephen Baker and Aaron Prelock sit down with Michael Clary to talk about the lesson eighteen years of ministry kept pressing on him: courage. The courage to preach Genesis 19 as it stands. The courage to father a congregation and preach the sharp truths of God's word rather than simply befriend it. The courage to keep a clean conscience while half his church walked out. Th...

In our sixth episode, Stephen Baker and Aaron Prelock sit down with Andy Constable, pastor of Niddrie Community Church in Edinburgh and a Frontier Shepherds speaker, to talk about the schemes, Scotland's poorest communities. Scotland has healthy churches in its richer areas, but in the schemes the churches are dead or dying, and Christians are too comfortable to move. Andy tells how a London stude...

In our fifth episode, Stephen Baker and Aaron Prelock sit down with Jake Menzel of Church of the King in Evansville to talk about the word Reformed men are afraid of: ambition.  Ambition they've been trained to distrust. Ambition that draws on the Father's pleasure instead of earning it. Ambition for a man's sons and grandsons, and the church he's been given. Jake, Stephen, and Aaron talk through...

In our fourth episode, Stephen Baker and Aaron Prelock take turns naming the five books each of them would call life-changing.  Books worn through. Books read more than once. Books given away, replaced, and underlined cover to cover. Aaron and Stephen talk about why the relationship between justification and sanctification keeps surfacing in the books that mattered most to them, why good fiction b...

In our third episode, Stephen Baker and Aaron Prelock sit down to talk about the part of ministry that many traditional seminary programs simply cannot simulate: the mess. Theological mess. Historical mess. The mess of sinners and the mess we ourselves bring to the work. Aaron and Stephen talk about why so many young men set out to be the pastor whose church will not have these problems, why preac...

In our second episode, Aaron Prelock turns the tables on Stephen Baker, Dean of New Geneva Academy and associate pastor at Trinity Reformed Church in Bloomington, Indiana. Stephen shares how he went from a small-town Indiana home to a dramatic high school conversion, from a teepee in the woods to a pastors college in Bloomington. Along the way: marriage, ministry under Ted Tripp, a failed church p...

In our first episode, Stephen Baker sits down with Aaron Prelock, pastor of Bloomington Bible Church and the new president of New Geneva Academy.  Aaron shares how he went from a big dispensational Baptist church to studying John Owen under a Norwegian Lutheran, from a Subaru factory floor to ten years of pastoral ministry in central London, and back to Bloomington, Indiana.   This conversation co...