What I Wish They'd Told Me — Episode 7: Michael Clary

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. They talk about the winsomeness he built a ministry on and later repented of, the liberalism that signs every formal confession but fights for the heartbeat of none of it, and why conscientious men bury their gifts for fear of a God they take to be a harsh taskmaster." Pastor Clary will be speaking at the Frontier Shepherds conference. Learn more at newgenevaacademy.com 00:08 — Introductions: Michael Clary, Cincinnati, and the Frontier Shepherds Conference 00:58 — Planting in 2010: inner-city Cincinnati to a building in Northern Kentucky 03:30 — Seminary at Southern, and a love for the Old Testament 05:37 — Crew, parachurch ministry, and learning the church is plan A 09:00 — Why Cincinnati, and meeting Michael Foster 12:42 — Three eras of ministry, and the turn from a neutral world to a negative one 16:16 — Preaching Genesis 19, and the backlash that followed 17:41 — Sitting with Tim Bayly: be the father of this congregation 19:20 — The 2022 split that cut the church in half 22:06 — Holding the church together with a clean conscience 24:58 — Courage as the one indispensable lesson 27:09 — The new liberalism: ethical, not doctrinal 28:57 — What Young, Restless, Reformed got right, and where it went off the rails 31:22 — Intellectual respectability, and Iain Murray's Evangelicalism Divided 36:56 — The September conference, and the problem of fragmentation 41:23 — Loser Theology: piety shrunk to inner-heart religion 47:00 — The parable of the talents and the buried gold 53:34 — The fear of a slave versus the fear of a son