What I Wish They'd Told Me — Episode 9: Ryan Denton

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 why so much Reformed preaching has become lecturing, what the redemptive historical method loses when it drops the imperative, and why the Puritans were called painful preachers, men who aimed the word at the backslider, the formalist, the worn-out mother. Halfway through, Stephen reads the post Ryan took heat for. It ends with a prayer: Lord, help us to preach a felt Christ. 00:00 — Welcome; Ryan Denton joins from Lubbock 01:00 — Family, and church plants in Lubbock, Clovis, and Roswell 02:18 — A year of filling pulpits; twenty sermons in twenty-four days 06:55 — Vanguard Presbytery and the office of evangelist 09:31 — Out of the PCA: Vanguard's origins and distinctives 16:37 — Dead Orthodoxy and Its Cure: why Ryan wrote it 19:42 — Where apathy and formalism come from 22:24 — One ditch into another: Ian Murray and Luther 24:57 — Head and heart fused: experimental Christianity 26:44 — Books: Alexander, Guthrie, Scougal, Edwards 32:00 — Stephen reads the Facebook post 33:53 — Redemptive historical preaching and the missing imperative 38:31 — Painful preachers 40:55 — Apply early and often 43:30 — Law and gospel, antinomianism, and the New Testament's imperatives 47:42 — Preaching to different hearers: real truth to real people 53:31 — Preaching to the conscience: Thomas Boston, Nathan and David 59:16 — Emotions, stepped-on toes, and the preacher's own conscience