Is the Church Losing Her Voice? Panel Highlights from BJU Seminary’s CoRE Conference
At BJU Seminary’s 2025 CoRE (Connect Renew Equip) Conference – Is the Church Losing Her Voice? – nationally recognized speaker and apologist Renton Rathbun led a panel covering a wide range of issues relating to recovering the church’s authority in the world.
Participants included:
- renowned theologian Kevin Bauder
- Armen Thomassian, Senior Minister of Faith Free Presbyterian Church in Greenville, SC; and
- three Seminary professors:
- noted New Testament authority Andreas Köstenberger
- Biblical counseling innovator and influencer Stuart Scott; and
- pastoral leadership and church revival expert Billy Gotcher.
Below are highlights of the panel along with a list of other topics covered. The panel session can be accessed here:
Renton Rathbun: Sufficiency of Scripture is the new battleground (for the church losing influence): Tell us what issues you see that threaten the sufficiency of Scripture in the church.
Armen Thomassian: The ignorance of Scripture. If you don’t know the word of God and self-apply daily… reading God’s word every day and asking, what, what promise is here for me, what command is here for me? What do I need to repent of? … then you’re not going to understand and build that platform to believe the answer.
Stuart Scott: Scientism, where you’re getting trauma-informed epigenetics — my DNA and trauma has passed from generation to generation. [The book] The Body Keeps the Score by (Bessel) Van der Kolk … seems to be the Kool Aid that people are drinking.
Renton Rathbun: We Christianize. We would never say we would obey our lusts, but we do need to find a Christian way to obey our body … and someone articulates it in a book that we like and helps us believe something we want to believe.
Andreas Köstenberger: Experiential revisionism … increasingly, people come to the Bible with their own experience and then seek to validate their experience and even connect their identity wrongly. The Widening of God’s Mercy by Christopher and Richard Hays, would be a good example of how that (thinking) is gaining a lot of respectability in academic circles, also in more mainline churches.
Renton Rathbun: Dr. Bauder, in your talk [you spoke on] how sometimes we try to get [people] to believe in a way that they start depending on, but it’s not the power of the gospel….
Kevin Bauder: The sufficiency of Scripture isn’t just something that we apply to the counseling program, it’s something that we apply to the whole curriculum. It’s great to study philosophy, but we don’t get our theology from philosophy… We apply biblical principle… We need to be asking the questions that the Bible intends to answer.
You can come to the Bible with bad questions. How can I become fantastically wealthy? Whatever answer you get from the Bible is going to be the wrong one, but the Bible has a lot to say about our attitudes toward wealth and poverty.
How can I get rid of my cancer? Any answer you get from the Bible will be the wrong one, but the Bible has a lot to say about physical suffering.
How can I lose my emotional pain? Well, what if God doesn’t want you to lose your emotional pain? The Bible has a lot to say about how you live with inner pain.
Renton Rathbun: When you have people like William Lane Craig out there, whose philosophy informed his theology to the point where he denied the first 11 chapters of the Bible as history, you see what you’re talking about really is true.
Renton Rathbun: Many younger folks today don’t want to [hold onto the fundamentals of the faith], They are more interested in focusing on the failures of how it was dealt with 50 years ago. How do we help them understand the importance of the fundamentals?
Billy Gotcher: You can take and go look at that abuse in any authority realm. Have police ever abused their authority? Yes, but when your house is being robbed, who are you calling? (Dr. Kevin Bauder: Smith and Wesson?)
But failed authority becomes a lame excuse to dismiss authority in life. I like to go back to the Gospel and say, in the cross, in (being) called to die to self, I actually have to submit the authority of God, which means I have to come under the authority of the Word. In the moment I’m trying to use somebody’s failure to dismiss my submission. I’m still a rebel. Their failure never excuses my rebellion.
We’ve got to acknowledge, hey, there’s always been failures in leadership… because we’re still fallen sinners. But that doesn’t mean the authority has changed or the truth has changed.
Renton Rathbun: With the internet and podcasts and blogs … people customize their belief system. I have seen seminary students worship at the feet of YouTube and ignore their own pastors. How do we respond to that?
Armen Thomassian: You need to pray that your own ministry is Spirit-filled…. If there isn’t real fire, they will seek false fire. Don’t point the finger and get upset at young people who are looking for something authentic when you’re not walking with God and preaching Spirit-filled sermons.
Kevin Bauder: We do face a crisis of authority in the pastorate today. John MacArthur has far more authority in the average Fundamental Baptist church than the pastor does… people aren’t looking to their pastor to find the answers to their questions.
If you as a pastor, want to lead your people, the basis of your authority has to be the word of God. When you get up in the pulpit, you don’t get to pontificate with your own ideas. Your job is to proclaim, “Thus saith the Lord.” And if you’re going to do that, you better know what God says. It’s not about your authority, it’s about God’s authority
Renton Rathbun: As Christians, we are looked upon as people that despise homosexuals … we despise homosexuality, but there’s no way for people to distinguish that. So how do I interact with a homosexual couple in my neighborhood (or) family?
Kevin Bauder: Can I suggest a good first step: read everything you can get your hands on by Rosaria Butterfield.
Renton Rathbun: Her newest book, Five Lies (of Our Christian Age),that’s a really helpful one. She’s writing about things that are way more practical than many of her other books.
Renton Rathbun: Has (there been) a deterioration of community in general, the loss of personal one-on-one discipleship … since COVID, has that impacted the church’s voice?
Andreas Köstenberger: I certainly sense a trend toward more generic discipleship, where people talk about spiritual disciplines, but they don’t talk as much about what biblical womanhood, or biblical manhood looks like, specifically. So, I know my wife and I are very committed to mentoring one-on-one. That seems to be disappearing, and so we’re trying to bring that back as much as we can.
Armen Thomassian: This is going to sound hypocritical, given my home is 4000 miles away where I’m from, but people in America … you need to stop moving away from your godly parents not understanding the ramifications on discipleship that has.
It’s a wonderful thing to go into a church, and the grandfather’s catching the grandson [and saying], “Stop running.” And that authority has an impact on community and discipleship. Stay around your parents, if at all possible, if they know the Lord.
Other topics covered:
- Christian nationalism and political activism from the pulpit and in the church
- Sufficiency of Scripture for contemporary counseling challenges
- Cautions for pastors on social media
- Evangelical voices surrendering to the culture
- How principles of fundamentalism should inform preaching
- Cooperation with non-fundamentalists on social issues (like abortion)
- Preparing to “herald” God’s Word to the congregation – and producing a new generation of pastors who can do the same.
