Beeson Podcast, Episode #582 Collin Hansen & David Byers Part One Jan. 4, 2022 >>Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University. Now your hosts, Doug Sweeney and Kristen Padilla. >>Doug Sweeney: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast. I’m your host, Doug Sweeney, here with my co-host, Kristen Padilla. We are excited to be back with you at the beginning of 2022. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all. We want to begin the show this year with a two-part episode featuring our new Beeson advisory board co-chairs. We’ll introduce them to you, learn about the ways in which God has worked in their lives, and then talk with them about the state of our churches and seminaries and the ways in which Beeson might continue to serve God’s people as we follow the Lord Jesus into the future. Before we do so let me remind you that we’re co-hosting a theological anthropology conference next week called, “Alone in the Cosmos? Theological Anthropology for a Scientific Age.” We’re excited to welcome eight leading scholars to our campus to address this question and engage us in conversation. The gathering will begin with a banquet on Thursday, January 13th and end with a lunch on Saturday, January 15th. Tickets are $50. Find out more and register at www.BeesonDivinity.com/events. While you visit our events page, please take a look at the wide range of events here at Beeson during spring 2022. You’ll see our Tuesday chapel series on art and beauty in the Bible. Information about two major lectureships this term. And news about a wonderful array of other happenings. Please come and join us for as many of these as possible. We hope to see you at Beeson or even online this spring. Now, Kristen, would you please introduce today’s guests and get our conversation started? >>Kristen Padilla: Yes, thank you, Doug. Happy New Year, podcast listeners. We’re so glad that you’re with us again. We have on the show today two guests, as Doug has already said. Our first guest is David Byers. He is Managing Principal of Capital Strategies in Birmingham. Our second guest is Collin Hansen. He is Vice President for Content and Editor in Chief of the Gospel Coalition. Welcome, David and Collin, to the Beeson Podcast. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Kristen. >>Kristen Padilla: Well, we always like to begin by getting to know our guests just a little bit better. Collin, you’ve been on the show before. So, our guests hopefully know you by now. But still, we want to ask each of you if you would tell us more about who you are, where you are from, perhaps how your upbringing impacts the work you do today. David, could you begin as our newest guest? >>David: Sure. I grew up in Birmingham, not too far from Beeson. My father, I have three brothers ... My father moved us all out kind of into the country to make sure we always had plenty of work to do. And my father as pretty much an orphan. He had come to Christ through the ministry of a young Wheaton College graduate who moved to his small town in North Carolina and took a job as a youth pastor in their Baptist church, and reached out to the young men in that community. I think he never really quite knew what to do with that when the company began moving him around until we were here in Birmingham and he was invited to Briarwood by a business partner. I remember him telling my mother when I was young that that was the first pastor, Frank Barker at Briarwood was the first pastor he had ever seen who really preached straight from the Bible. So, I’m a beneficiary of a wonderful heritage of being raised from the time I could ever remember in church every Sunday at an evangelical reformed church like Briarwood that was very serious about evangelism and discipleship. I really thank God often for that childhood. I came to Christ as a child and we all have ups and downs but became a Christian as a child and then ended up establishing a career and a life here. My wife is also from the western side of our state and we met just after college. I attended Briarwood for a long time. I six years ago left and went to a small church called Third Presbyterian here in Birmingham in an effort to help a church that at that time was kind of slowly declining with some other families. So, that’s been a real joy for us. So, that’s a little bit about my spiritual background, church background. >>Kristen Padilla: Thank you, David. Collin? >>Collin: So, yeah, I’m from the south, as in South Dakota. I grew up on a farm there. This last year we celebrated, I think, something like ... I can’t remember if it was the 70th anniversary of my grandmother’s journalistic career or something like that. She just stopped writing as a newspaper columnist. My grandmother was a parish visitor in the United Methodist Church. We grew up right next door to her, which in South Dakota means it was half a mile away. She and my grandfather were both lay speakers in the Methodist Church, preaching and conferences and things like that. Then, yeah, she was also the town society editor. So, this would be reporting on “so-and-so traveled to have lunch with so-and-so.” I mean, to the next town over. That kind of thing. So, my grandmother was always involved in the comings and goings of the church and of the community. So, I’ll never forget when she ... My wife, Lauren, is from Birmingham. That was one of my main connections to Beeson originally and I remember my grandmother when she visited down here for our wedding, which was at the United Methodist Church, she went out to my farm (in Birmingham terms) that Lauren’s grandparents were on. And she said, “Well, I’ve never been to a farm before that grows tennis courts and swimming pools, but that’s a new experience.” (laughs) So, grew up on one of those real farms. But I think I’ve adjusted pretty well. I love living here. I’ve loved being connected to Beeson for a long time. I think when you look at my life revolving so much around the community of the church and a desire to write and to publish and things like that. You can see a lot of that especially through my grandparent’s example on the farm. So, don’t ask me anything about actual farm life, but I mean, I learned to do it, but I’m not any good at it. I learned how to use my words and it’s brought us here today. (laughs) >>Doug Sweeney: You guys are both active churchmen to this day. I want to ask you two to tell our listeners just a little bit about that. Where do you go to church? How are you active in your local church? This is one of the things that makes you great board members at Beeson. We just want to learn a little bit more about your congregational lives. How about Collin if we start with you? >>Collin: Sure. I often say I think I go to about the most Beeson-centric church in existence. There would be a competition for that, but I think we have at least four graduates on our staff at Redeemer Community Church in the Avondale neighborhood of Birmingham. I’ve been a part of that church, my wife and I, since 2012 when we first moved here. I’ve been an elder for the last I think six years. We’ve been leading home groups through that, which is a lot of teaching and shepherding. And then as an elder been involved in a lot of the different forms of administration and planning and things like that. So, it’s always been a joy to go back and forth between Beeson and the church to see ... I’ve been the beneficiary of Beeson’s training through my pastors. So, it’s a real easy thing for me to want to give back through the school because I’ve been blessed that way. I’ve got to say, also, all around the community of Birmingham where we live and we know Beeson has a global impact but when you just look around the city I think often about Mr. Beeson’s original investment and I think of just how happy and delighted he would be just to see the difference, if only in our city. We know it’s much more than that. But if he could just go around to the different pulpits in our city and he could hear our graduates preach, I think he’d be just really delighted. That’s been my delight with Jeff [inaudible 00:09:14] and Joel Brooks over these last number of years. >>Doug Sweeney: I think you’re right, Collin. David, you mentioned a few minutes ago that you moved several years back from Briarwood to Third Presbyterian downtown in Birmingham. Tell our listeners a little bit about Third Pres and how you’re involved there. >>David: Yeah, first I wanted to say that Collin may have us on Beeson graduates as a gross number but his church is a good bit larger than ours on a per capita basis. Our two Beeson graduates I think probably top his number. But I’ll affirm everything Collin said about our two assistant pastors who are Beeson graduates. I just could not ask them to be any better. They are theologically deeply trained. Our lead pastor often talks about one of our assistant pastors and said he is just a bible man – he knows so much about the bible. He’s saying essentially more than I do. And they’re also very relational. It’s just been outstanding for me to first experience Beeson through two of its graduates has been an outstanding experience. But yeah, so Doug I think you know this. I really wanted to go to seminary when I was in high school and college, planned to go to seminary and I met my wife and was madly in love and she made it clear that she was not a pastor’s wife. She grew up in a small Baptist church in west Alabama and said that pastor’s wives play the piano really great, they have great voices, and they are big personalities in addition to being good on the flannel board. She said, “Out of all of that the only thing I can do is the flannel board.” And so I remember my pastor saying that if God calls a man, he’ll call his wife, too, to the ministry. And so I thought, “Well, I guess that doesn’t really qualify.” So, like Collin I grew up kind of out on the land, but never quit took to it. I always wanted to read and to write. So, I ended up in law school and then after 12 years of law practice went into business. So, I was ... back to Briarwood. I was very fortunate to be able to observe men at Briarwood. One in particular, Tom Bradford, who is still here. He’s head of the Alabama Christian Foundation now. He had done very well in business but who were the right hand of the pastor when it came to anything that had a business bend to it. When it was budgets our building campaigns or fundraising campaigns that’s what he took care of. I just saw how valuable that was. Without really knowing it, he wasn’t a mentor but he was certainly a model and I watched him from afar. I know that what I really kind of took from that, what was inculcated in my life was that that’s what I want to be like in business. So, I’ve tried to help our church everywhere I can from chairing the finance committee to the search committee for our new pastor to teaching Sunday school and just being there for the pastor any way that I can. And that’s been a great joy, probably some of the more fulfilling parts of my life over the past several years. >>Kristen Padilla: That’s a nice segue into the question I wanted to ask both of you related to your work. I wonder if you can speak more about the work that you do. As you indicated, you’re not on staff at a church but you really see your work as unto the Lord and gifts that you’re using in your work as a service to the church. So, I wonder if you could talk more just about what you do on a day to day basis and how you see your work as a Christian. David, we’ll go right back to you. >>David: Well, I really have always seen my work as the place, other than my family, where I have the most opportunity to manifest my faith and live out my faith. I’ve often thought, “My gosh, if I get to retirement age and I look back and go, ‘that was the greatest theater for you to live out your faith and you just did not do it effectively,’ how regretful I would be about that.” So, I’ve tried to be intentional about that. It’s difficult to be an employer and a discipler at the same time. Those are very different relationships and they can impinge on each other. So, I try to be very thoughtful about that. We have about eight young men who work here. I see myself as really responsible in addition to other staff; eight guys who are kind of like my sons would be. And so I try to be with them impactful in all areas of their lives. One of them right now is in an exploratory bible study with me. We’ll have our ... every year we have our retreat at the beginning of the year to really plan out the year. And I’ll always have a speaker. This year I’m going to have a great speaker. It’s always a topic of Christ in your marriage. Not always business, not always how to sell more, how to do more, but often I want it to be very full orbed in their life to be effective Christian husbands and fathers and young businessmen. So, even in kind of a hardcore kind of fast paced sales world, we try to keep an appropriate perspective about the sovereignty of God, joy, and thankfulness, and try to do everything we can to support all of our folk’s marriages and families and church involvement. >>Kristen Padilla: Thank you, David. Collin, it may be kind of obvious how your work serves the church, but I still think there’s enough there for you to say to our listeners more about just your work and its relationship to church. >>Collin: Well, I think it might not be obvious to everyone. Sometimes people are upset at me about things that I state that sometimes can be critical of the church, or at least of some churches. But I, like David, I thought I would be at least at one point in my life directly in pastoral ministry. And of course that’s the context in which I met Doug at Trinity. That’s what I was studying and preparing for. So, it’s been a long tension in my life. One of the, it was actually an Australian Anglican that was visiting Birmingham ... I was asking him about this. I felt kind of tortured about not being in a church, working directly for a church. He said, “Well, maybe you’re not wanting to be in a church is why you’re able to be good at your job, because,” he said, “you’re in a position to try to serve and to support.” And so the way we often talk about it at the Gospel Coalition is that we’re not on the frontlines of ministry. We’re not the people calling the shots. We’re not the people telling folks what to do. But we take questions that people get in their ministry, whatever context that might be. That might be a mom with her kids or a woman leading a bible study. Or it might be a home group leader or it could be a pastor or whatever. We go to get those answers from people that we can source from around the world. And we bring those back and we publish those or we do podcasts on them or things like that. So, that’s how I see it is that my work serves ultimately, I hope, the Lord and through the church just by being a servant to say what are we hearing about in the church today? How can we help? And let’s go use the internet to be able to mobilize that on a global scale. So, it’s not quite what I expected, but because it’s God’s plan it’s good. >>Doug Sweeney: Brothers, I mentioned at the top of the show that we’re going to make two episodes out of this interview and in the second episode we’re going to get down to talking about the world of seminaries and Beeson Divinity School and what the Lord is doing here and what the future, we hope and pray, may hold here at the Div school. But before we do that, in this first episode I want to ask you what you think about the state of the church, particularly in the US these days? What would you identify as its major challenges, its major opportunities? What’s the state of the church? Again, next week we’ll come back and we’ll talk about how seminaries ought to be serving and addressing the challenges and opportunities of the church. Collin, let me start with you on this one because we all know you’ve written a lot about this already. You probably could get us going pretty well. Here at the beginning of 2022, what would you identify as some of the leading challenges in the US churches these days, leading opportunities as well? >>Collin: It’s interesting that that question is how David and I got to know each other. It was a funny story of David happening to meet my mother-in-law on a plane. Somehow they were able to piece together the work that I was doing. Then David and I met and he was asking me questions as a lay leader, as a layman in the PCA just about what was happening in his denomination and elsewhere. I shared especially some of my concerns along the political lines. That was one way that I think we made fast friends there. But I think, Doug, I’ve been preparing something lately and you and I need to talk about it in the office sometime soon, but I’ve been focusing a lot of my attention lately on the second great awakening. I think especially being here in the South and with the Baptists and the Methodists and the Presbyterians movements that exploded here. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately studying Basil Manly Sr., one of the founders of the Southern Baptist Convention, leading figure in Alabama of Baptists, and really just state. He was the President of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, pastor of First Baptist Montgomery, previous to that pastor of First Baptist Charleston, which people will know in the reformed Baptist community as sort of a fountain head of all of that. But as I’ve been investigating this area that Doug you’re the resident expert on here, it just occurs to me that sometimes the church can grow even sometimes in ways that are evangelical and yet still be culturally compromised. That the success and prosperity of the church, even the conservative evangelical church, is no necessary indication of God’s blessing. As plainly evident in the second great awakening as we see some of the major sins that went untouched by the growth of the evangelical church – namely slavery in the South. So, that’s really what I’m thinking about now is just ruminating over those historical examples as Doug, I think, why you and I get along so well, is I just think in those terms. Because of how I’ve been trained by you and some of our other friends – is to think that there are some answers to be found in our history. Sometimes even painful answers. But that the way we grow in godliness and we grow in our understanding of what God is doing in our day is through some of that investigation historically. And I think Beeson does a great job with our history and doctrine sequence of doing that. And so anyway, you and I I’m sure in the office will talk more about that. But I just want to take a moment to step back and say when I see some of the evident prosperity of the church I don’t necessarily assume that’s always because we’re being godly. Sometimes even that prosperity is judgment because of our cultural compromise that it took to get to that point. So, that’s what I’m concerned about these days and some of what David and I originally meant to discuss. >>Doug Sweeney: Collin, before we turn to David and get his thoughts on the matter, I’ve read some of your work so I know what you think about the answer to my next question, but in what ways would you identify the cultural compromise that we need to be struggling with today? What are some of the main areas in which we’re compromised and need to be more careful and bold in our witness? >>Collin: It’s always a danger ... I’m normally, in these podcasts, I’m normally asking the questions. (laughs) So, it’s a little bit difficult especially when you’re talking with one of the world’s leading experts on the subject that you’re about to opine on. But I would say when it comes to politics evangelical entwining with politics goes back to our very beginning. It’s really difficult, if not impossible, to somehow separate our political witness and behavior from our evangelical faith in American history going all the way back to the Puritan forbearers. And when you go all the way back to that period as well you always see the entwining of, and compromise, especially on racial issues. Now that extends across the entire country, but in an acute form especially as we progress through the 19th century and well into the 20th century in the American South. So, my basic thought would be that some of the difficulties that we face right now of addressing politics as evangelicals, some of the difficulties that we face when it comes to addressing ongoing racial problems in this country, they are not new problems. They are something that goes all the way back to our origins. And I don’t mean to say that we through it all out. That’s not what I’m arguing at all. I’m saying as good evangelicals we go back to scripture and let scripture continue to judge us, because the scripture also brings the consolation of grace and the motivation through sanctification by the Holy Spirit to progress forward. And so I’m never hopeless when I look at that, but I would say specifically I’m worried about the areas of political and racial compromise to certain forms of cultural manifestations of the faith. I’ll just say for clarity’s sake – we’re also recording this, it publishes later obviously but we’re recording in the aftermath of President Trump’s visit to the First Baptist Dallas – and if that’s seen by anybody as an anomaly it wouldn’t be if they understood the history. Does that help, Doug? >>Doug Sweeney: It does. David, what are some of your thoughts on these matters? Where are we today in the US, in the churches? What would you say are some of our leading challenges, leading opportunities, moving forward? >>David: Well, I also have grave concern about the politicization of evangelicalism and don’t really know how or whether to use the term anymore. I graduated from high school in 1977 and so the period of the ‘80s and the ‘90s when the moral majority Christian coalition, those kind of things began to reign supreme, was kind of right in my young adulthood. I saw it from ground zero. I wasn’t at Thomas Rhode Baptist Church but I was at a satellite. I’ll tell you, Doug, my observation was that the same energy that I grew up seeing in evangelism and discipleship was turned toward cultural change through politics. And it grieves me to see that. I almost felt like the people who I respected so much for their walk in Christ wanted a short cut. It felt like America was declining and that it wasn’t enough to speak the gospel and disciple people that we had to get out and use political solutions. And it’s just very grieving to me, because I don’t see the same emphasis at all in the fundamentals of our faith. I see, still, just this thought that politics are going to save us. I’ve always told my kids that one way to look at faith is that we are to do the right thing and expect that God in his providence will honor that to work his will however he will. And so when I see what I really strongly believe are often brothers and sisters who claim Christ, willing to either do the wrong thing, or to sub it out to somebody else, then to agree with it. It’s just very disheartening. I’ll just end with this. Over the past few years I can’t remember, it may be Collin and I’m just not giving him credit for it, but somebody said to me that they had heard somebody say that the reformation was about getting the right understanding of justification. And that we need a new reformation over the issue and the subject and the Kingdom of God. I think there’s such a profound misunderstanding in the Church of the Kingdom of God and where we really are citizens and what our responsibilities are as citizens in the Kingdom of God that has just overwhelmed the evangelical church. I had hope that over the past year or so what we would see is some teaching opportunity in our churches. I don’t know. I don’t see a lot of evidence of that. And so God and his sovereignty will work his will through his church. I know that. But from a human perspective, when I look and see those kinds of things, it’s troubling. >>Kristen Padilla: Thank you, David. We are going to end this podcast here. But we will come back next week to talk more about seminaries in the state of evangelical seminaries. But we always like to end each episode by hearing what the Lord is doing in the lives of our guests, teaching you. So, this week we want to hear from you, David, and then next we’re going to end by hearing from Collin. So, David, I wonder if you can just close out today’s conversation with a word of encouragement to our listeners. You just talked about the state of the church which can sound a little bit discouraging, but I wonder if you can end by just telling us what is God doing in your life these days? >>David: Well, you know, the good thing is that what the Lord has convicted me of is that personally you know you need to go back to what you saw when you thought it was right. And so what I saw as a young man in my church was an emphasis on speaking the gospel as effectively as possible to other people. So, I decided that age 62, if I wasn’t going to do it now that I was never going to do it. When that date came around to pass into glory that I was going to regret that, too. So, I decided that I was going to really emphasize evangelism and be intentional about it. Then I decided that the most compelling rationale to cause me to do that wasn’t guilt. And it wasn’t even gratitude. The most compelling thing would be that if the joy in my own life from my walk with Christ was so overflowing that I could not but tell other people about it. So, I began to pray Proverbs 16:11, John 15:11. That God would teach me what it means to live in fullness of joy and to have Christ’s joy. So, that’s what I’ve really been focused on. He’s been faithful to do that. I’ve been really focused on working with young men, evangelistically, with investigatory bible studies, and it has been more satisfying than anything I could have imagined. >>Doug Sweeney: What a wonderful word and a wonderful way to end this first part of a two-part interview with our new Beeson advisory board co-chairs, David Byers and Collin Hansen. Listeners, David Byers is Managing Principal of Capital Strategies in Birmingham. He is also elder, teacher, lay leader at Third Presbyterian Church here in Birmingham. Collin Hansen is Vice President for Content and Editor in Chief of the Gospel Coalition and an active elder and teacher at Redeemer Church here in Birmingham. We are delighted that they have both deigned to join us this day. We wish you a wonderful New Year. We ask you to tune back in next week and hear part two of this interview. Goodbye for now. >>Kristen Padilla: You’ve been listening to the Beeson podcast. Our theme music is written and performed by Advent Birmingham of the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama. Our engineer is Rob Willis. Our announcer is Mike Pasquarello. Our co-hosts are Doug Sweeney and, myself, Kristen Padilla. Please subscribe to the Beeson podcast at www.BeesonDivinity.com/podcast or on iTunes.