Beeson podcast, Episode 493 Matt Burford April 21, 2020 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 Doug Sweeney, here with my cohost Kristen Padilla and we are glad to have you back. We have a two time Beeson graduate in the studio today to tell us about the things that God is doing through his ministry. Now, Kristen, would you mind getting today's conversation started? Kristen Padilla: Hello everyone. We are glad to welcome you to the Beeson podcast and I'm also glad to introduce our guest today, a friend of mine, Dr Matt Burford. He, as Doug has already said, he is a two time graduate of Beeson Divinity School, having earned his MDIV in 2007 and his doctor of ministry degree in 2016. He is the president and founder of Tactical Faith at Christian Apologetics Ministry in Alabama. He also is a state missionary in the area of apologetics and evangelism for the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions. And he is married to Holly and they have two children. And I should also add that they are members of Hunter Street Baptist Church, here in Hoover, Alabama. So welcome Matt to the Beeson podcast. Matt Burford: Thank you for having me on. Kristen Padilla: Yeah, it's great to have you here to talk to us today about apologetics and your ministry at the Alabama State Board of Missions. But first we'd love to know more about you. Who is Matthew Burford? How did you come to faith in Jesus Christ and to do the ministries that you do today? Matt Burford: So whenever I hear somebody say, who is Matt Burford, I always think of what my dad used to always say. Being a Burford means don't lie, cheat, or steal. So the Burford name means something to me, I came from a Christian family in Anniston, Alabama, strong Christian family. My mom's side was Lutheran and my dad's side was, well, they were Baptist to some degree. I grew up in Anniston, Alabama. I gave my life to the Lord at age six. A really interesting story, I was at Blue Mountain Baptist Church, which is in the old mill town outside of Sacks and the Anniston, Alabama. I remember the church, I almost remember the smell of the night that the pastor there just gave a simple gospel message and I still remember thinking, he said something about Jesus knocking on my heart. I went home, asked my dad, my bedroom was on the second floor, what did it mean? And I still remember my father giving the gospel message and me crying. Matt Burford: So there's a simple message that hit a six year old and I still remember bawling in my father's arms. And that's meaningful for me because I think God, I recognized God early and I recognized he grabbed me early for a purpose, for his purpose. And I've always, now I've gone up and down like most people do, but I've always felt like I was his and I've always had this real deep assurance, even in light of my ups and downs and my moral issues, I just have this settled joy that comes from not only knowing Christ, but also having a family that's been devoted to Christ and a family that was devoted to me, surrounded me with love and affection. That's something that I can never pay back from my parents and that is a lifting and jumping off point for me, for everything that I've done since. Doug Sweeney: How'd you get to Beeson, Matt, and what difference would you say not, just Beeson, but your theological education has made in your ministry? Matt Burford: My wife is a medical physician, so while she was going through medical school and medical training, now I was a graduate, we both are graduates at University of Alabama. She wanted to go to UAB, she applied. So I was actually on my way in 1999, to Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and my wife got, we were still dating at the time, but she got her approval for UAB. Things shifted and I thank God that it did. I took a detour on my plans to support her, became a computer based network engineer in town for an accounting firm. And those two or three years, four years while my wife was doing that, I was researching where do we want to go and she wanted to stay for residency here, so I started looking around. Matt Burford: Beeson was always an unknown thing for me because I live in the state and people in the Baptist world know Sanford University and Beeson's always had a great reputation. So in 2001 or 2002, I remember coming up here and saying, "Well I want to visit it. We've come to the chapel before when I was little, we visited here before, but let me see what makes it tick." I was sold the minute I walked in and have never looked back. Doug Sweeney: How about just a word about what difference does it make if you're practicing evangelism apologetics, have you found theological education to be helpful? Matt Burford: I think for me, coming out of a Baptist tradition, especially Southern Baptist, I have a tendency to have this narrow view of what Christian identity is. Especially being in the deep South and being here in Alabama, there's a tendency, I love being back, there's just no doubt about that. I think one of the special things that I will always carry away is just the ecumenical atmosphere here, the ability to talk to other people from other traditions, but the one thing that it ties to in terms of Christian apologetics, is in the apologetic world, we're very mere. Even though we deal with what we consider pseudo issues, we all agree across the board on certain mere issues that we're all trying to argue why is Jesus and the gospel is better than whatever. Matt Burford: So there's this weird kind of connection point between my world in apologetics and Beeson, in that we can still, even while we all have different denominational identity, there's still this kind of merely Christian identity that we can share. And there's something about that that kind of blew these potential barriers for me, that no longer was I tunnel vision on what it meant to be a Christian. Now that Christian, can mean a wide variety of things and I don't have to be afraid of it and then I can actually honor other traditions and other histories that are in the faith. Kristen Padilla: We've already said that you did your doctoral ministry degree at Beeson and your project focused on the role of wisdom in evangelism and apologetics. So what got you interested in apologetics? What is Christian apologetics, for those listeners who may not have a good grasp of it, and if you had to summarize your doctoral project, which it may be too big of a question, but what were some of the big takeaways from that? Matt Burford: So we'll have to go on the time machine 25 years or even more, maybe 26 years now. I was a junior in high school getting ready to take my junior prep, SAT prep course. I remember the teacher saying, Pick a book off your father shelf because in between these tests you're going to have all this time and you can't talk." My dad was an avid reader, my dad and my family were. We got to the dinner table and we talked all the time and not everybody in my family were Christian, some were nominal, some were not. My dad had a book called God and the Doc C.S Lewis and other essays and I grabbed that one and Problem of Pain. I remember in between taking my math and my English, I mean these are seminal moments in my life, so that's the reason I had so much clarity with them. Matt Burford: I remember opening up Problem of Pain and saying, "I'm just going to read it." Within an hour, I was open to a whole nother world and a whole nother dialogue. I've never heard a Christian talk like this, and of course he's dealing with the issue of suffering and pain and the problem with evil. But he was doing it in such a way that even a junior in high school was resonating and taking me into a deep dive into places I have never been before. So I put that aside and started reading God the Doc and other essays and I was sold. And this is pre-Amazon, so it's not like I could just go get a whole bunch of other books, but slowly but surely I entered into this apologetic kind of atmosphere and world. Matt Burford: I could tell you it went from Lewis to G.K Chesterton, to seeking out people that were doing it and applying it today. So Ravi Zacharias's ministry and others, I entered into a world that I really wanted to be a part of. And in the accounting world, so now we're in my life as Holly is in medical practice or in medical education, I found myself as almost like a corporate chaplain. Even though I was in the computer world, I was going to places in my business where I would sit there to fix a mouse or fix a computer and before you know it, somebody is asking me a question, "Oh we know you're the one that's got all these books in your office. Hey, I've got an issue with X." And it would be pastoral, but more often not, they're asking me typical apologetic questions. Matt Burford: So I'm getting training, Praxis style training, even before I'm starting ministry, I'm getting Praxis style training in real world environments. So that really kind of made me want to not only go into theory, but also in practice. So fast forward, I have my education, I get my MDIV, fast forward a little bit further, I don't know how much you want me to go into this, but I started a ministry called Tactical Faith in 2011 when I was doing ministry work at First Baptist Church in Montgomery, when my wife went down there after residency. And that was for a specific purpose to facilitate the life of the mind, let's all think about these questions in a way that we're not afraid of them. That's the kind of thing I want my, I have a great love for my state. Matt Burford: I tell everybody, I'm like a Hobbit, I never left. And there's a reason for that. I've grown deep, bloom where you're planted is what Greg Coco said, who's a big apologetic guy. I had bloomed where I planted and in doing so I've seen how apologetics works in practices in my state. To say that I saw some things that I thought were issues in the life of the mind, a disregard of spiritual formation, a disregarding of character formation. In my cohort, there was a couple of people in my cohort, if not all of them, were steering me at the time in my doctorate of ministry, "Matt, the questions you're having about your ministry, there's already a whole school of thought that are dealing with that in wisdom literature." So I got introduced in my doctoral of ministry, to a whole other area that I wasn't thinking about, that were solutions to the problems that I was seeing. Matt Burford: People seem to think that the nexus in the center of all intellectual pursuits, is the ivory tower university. That's so to a degree, what I wanted to do is I wanted to make sure people understood that the center of nexus are the place where we need to be thinking about these things, like [inaudible] is God's church. So it should be also happening at the local level, the denominational level, whatever. We need to be thinking about these things as a church, in community with other believers that hold us with accountability and in worship and in service in the community. Because I'm a firm believer now that I've done my Praxis and dissertation, that character formation, spiritual formation, is connected to the life of the mind and how you think. So in other words, who says things like working in the world in worship and taking communion and baptism, all affect how you process information. Matt Burford: So you can't listen to a sermon or homily without worship or without the taking of the bread. Habits of behavior and character formation help you in the pursuit of the life of the mind. And I think that's kind of what Beeson has come, I'm paralleling with the history of Beeson. So from what I know with Beeson, that's why we have smaller number of students, that's the reason we have a faculty and student ratio that smaller than any other institution because this incarnational way of education is important. So in other words, our relationship together is molding us together as we're going through this educational time in our life. But the church should be lifetime learners as well, but not divorced from all these other things that are important. I mean, worship with each other is important on how you take information and the apologetic world and the academic world, never think that way, but they can't help but do that in the way that they live. I mean, seeking out service in the community is as an epistemic humility to how you process information. And that's what I worked on in my Praxis dissertation. Doug Sweeney: That's a good word. Dr Burford, tactical faith has been mentioned a couple times in this conversation, but I keep thinking about our listeners, some of whom surely know about it already, but some of whom don't. Tell us what is tactical faith? Why is it called tactical faith? What do you do at tactical faith? Matt Burford: Okay, so when you say tactics in deep South, everybody thinks I'm going to have a wild game supper and wear camo wherever I go. Tactics in the way that I'm spelling it out is actually named after a friend of mine who had a book on, it's called tactics. It's a strategic way to think about the way you're going to present yourself as a Christian. So tactical faith is really kind of a play on word. I don't mind it having those other images because it kind of lends itself to the world that I'm in, but it just means be prepared. Always be prepared to give a defense for the hope that's within you with gentleness and understanding. So in other words, we're always on guard, be always ready. It's not just intellectual pursuits, it's just be always be ready to be God's ambassador wherever you are. And if he's the whole truth and if he's the [inaudible 00:13:26], that means we have at our disposal any way to reach somebody, whether that's intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, we have, I always tell my kid, the utility belt of truth. Matt Burford: This ability to be able to use all things for the glory of God and to compel people to come to Jesus Christ. So for me, tactical faith was seeing the landscape of Alabama and the world that I was living in was in. I was also in this world that I had been introduced to when I was in high school and wanting to introduce the world that I'm in to the Christian tradition of thinking and that's across the board ecumenically. So one of the reasons Beeson was so effective in how I set up my nonprofit because I had a view of the whole church. Denominational, loyalty's important, but the reality is those things are important, but we have a Christian tradition of thinking across the board, that I don't think anybody else has, next to the Jewish tradition, nobody has what we have. Matt Burford: It was also kind of this willingness to say to people, we have smart people too, in an era of anti intellectual-ism that's been going on for the last 50 years. For me, it was reminding people, hey, pastors, teachers, whoever, women and men, here's what we have, you can tape take as deep of a dive as you want on any issue because our worldview can hold up consistently and comprehensively. So I set up a nonprofit that basically it's all volunteer because me and my wife decided that we were going to help be a part of this together. And it's one of those things that has been bringing people all over the country to help with institutions of education, with churches and even with the smallest groups. I've been to the smallest churches you can go to and I have partnered with some of the biggest institutions in our state and it's all to try to hold together ecumenically the idea that we have the truth and we can prepare ourselves intellectually to go out there and talk about the truth of the gospel. Kristen Padilla: What might you say to our listeners who are committed Christians and they care about the gospel and they want others to hear about the gospel of Jesus Christ? What might you say to them about how they could think about apologetics or evangelism in their spaces and maybe what's going on in the culture at large that might be helpful to think about and engage with, as they're thinking about these things. Matt Burford: And so working with the state board, I have had the opportunity to speak to a lot of pastors and I get this question a lot, what is apologetics? What am I apologizing for? I mean if I had a dollar for every time I got that, I could pay off my car or something. But it's a good question. Apologetics basically is to give a defense, it's almost like a courtroom imagery term of saying somebody says something and now you're giving the rebuttal, but it's easier than that. It's speaking about the faith intellectually and reasonably, speaking about the faith and the totality of who you are. So it should be kind of the overflow of all the prep work and devotion that you have. We have verses that I could go into that back why I think that's a legitimate way for us to teach. Matt Burford: Some institutions don't like to talk about apologetics. I think apologetics is a great strategy to get people to think about their faith and get emboldened about their faith. More often than not, a lot of people don't go out and speak about their faith because they think, well, I don't have good reasons for it. Yeah, there's great reasons for it, but I also want to push back against that and say, that's not the only way to reach people to the faith. That doubt itself is, as the great Gary Havermass would say, there's factual doubt, emotional doubt, and there's volitional doubt and we're all somewhere in between that spectrum all the time. What apologetics does is help with the factual doubt part, which is laying out reasons, good intellectual reasons that ground our faith. Matt Burford: But I've seen it over and over and over again, you go into a church, they have issues, you just give out a simple apologetic. Let's just say, I go out and I talk about the four major worldview questions that every reasonable person has. This is an RZIM Robbie's [inaudible] approach. They came from some ministries. I taught this in seventh grade. I taught seventh grade apologetics for a while and if I can teach this to seventh graders, I can teach anybody. Where do we come from? What is our purpose? What is good and evil? Where do we go after we die? All worldviews had to deal with those questions. All people, reasonable people, have to do and we're all after a worldview that's comprehensive and consistent with those four questions. I've done this before, I go in, I just tell him, "Okay, let's look at this world view and let's see how they answer these questions." Matt Burford: Not to go all [inaudible] and presuppositional on you, but the idea that every other worldview is going to borrow from ours. It just will and they can't help it. And that showcases and emboldens the average Christian to say, "I can go out there, even with given these four things and to think about these things in terms of sharing my faith, I could go out there and do that. No problem." What I'm trying to do is get them to enter into a relationship with somebody, evangelism shouldn't stop there, we're asked to make disciples. So for me, apologetics is my way and my means to get people to think about their faith and emboldened by their faith to go out and speak about it. Doug Sweeney: Matt, you also recently took a position at the Alabama State Board of Missions. Is that related to what you do at Tactical Faith? Is it a different sort of ministry there? What are you doing with the board? Matt Burford: Yeah, I think that's fun. They reached out to me last year and asked if I would come and be a part of an apologetic strategy that they wanted and I was happy to do so. I'm part time there and for me it's almost a means for me just to go and minister. Apologetics now has become that tool that helps me go minister to people, leaders and people. I look back on my ministry over the last 20 years and I've had one, whether or not I considered it or not, I mean my ministry is right out of college, it started. It's really about ministering to people and helping people and that's what I think I'm ultimately good at. I mean, I'm not the best at any apologetic. What I do like to do is get involved with people and the Alabama Baptist is afforded me an opportunity to go give back to the denomination that I'm ordained in and tell them, "Listen, you're desired, you're wanted, you're loved, you have a difficult job." Matt Burford: I'm dealing mostly with pastors. I mean I'll talk with layman a lot, but I'm dealing with a lot of pastors on a day in, day out basis, who are having all these issues and they come to me for an apologetic issue, but it ends up going somewhere else. So in other words, it's my accounting firm experience just in the ministry world and now it starts with, "Hey, I need questions about this. Can you help me think about those questions?" And before I know it, I'm in it with them and I'm in the down dirt with them and that's just fun. So for the Alabama Baptist for me it's, yeah, I'm charged to go talk about apologetics and I'm honored to do so, but really what I enjoy is getting in there and helping people and ministering to them. Doug Sweeney: What are ways in which God is at work among Alabama Baptist and Baptist more widely, that gets you excited and would encourage our listeners? Matt Burford: I think if you laid out what all denominations are good at, I think Baptist's historically have been good evangelists. I mean that's what we do, we call people. And I think there may have been a lull for that over the last 20 years or so. But I just went to, and I'm not going to name it, I went to a pastors conference last week alone and I walked in and I saw who was there and I had already made up my mind who these people were. And then when we went out to lunch, they blew my mind. They were talking about things, I sat down and I was no more than sitting down for five minutes at Full Moon Barbecue and this guy goes, "What do you think about quantum theory and multi-verse." Really? And then the conversation went to a certain sci-fi show and while that guy was already evaluating that old sci-fi show based on scripture and a lot of ... So I mean that's fantastic. Matt Burford: So now what we're getting is we're getting, and these were all probably 70 or younger, so now those that are in a certain age group now, it's fun to see that they have more in connection with their grandkids or my kids, than I had with my grandfather. There's more common points of interest between boomers and gen Z than me and that generation that was in World War II. Why is that important? Well, the Baptists are filled with leaderships and lay people like that, who are prepared to go talk to the culture in ways that they've never been before. So allowing me to go in or somebody else, or if I can facilitate somebody else to come in to spark that, I mean, we're all connected and I think to some degree that can be a bad thing. Matt Burford: But as somebody said the other day, and I do agree with him, is that the cell phone is the new Roman road. The Roman road was paved for the gospel to be spread. Now on our phones, we can be connected to the world. So instead of seeing it as a negative all the time, see it as a positive. Then maybe God and his preordained-ness, he knows what he's doing, maybe we're using this technology to spread the gospel in ways we've never done before and now he's equipping his people, even deep South, Southern people to speak to somebody globally. I just got back from, from Tokyo, I got to go and do a vision trip for 10 days in Tokyo. Fantastic experience. We are going to be going back next year. Matt Burford: The state of Alabama, especially Alabama Baptists have had more to do with Tokyo and the progression and the promotion of the gospel, than I ever realized before. So it's my people in deep state Alabama that are over there, traditionally have been doing ... The first IMB missionaries from the state of Alabama, the Southern most part of the main islands. And now five of the missionaries that I met were all Alabamians. And then you think about Tokyo, their presence in Huntsville, or Japan, their presence in Huntsville. I mean that's a hard culture for the soul. I mean it's very hard for the gospel to propagate there. But think about the people of Alabama who God is picking to connect to Japan, they couldn't be any more diametrically opposed. But in God's wisdom and in his Providence, look how they're connected. And I'm sitting back thinking, man, I'm in rural Alabama and these pastors are speaking this way. They are so primed to talk about the gospel, we just need to fan the flame and be a part of supporting and encouraging them to do so. Doug Sweeney: Well, we're almost out of time, but we like to end these conversations with a word of encouragement, aimed right at the heart of our listeners. Anything that God's been doing in your life, God's been showing you in your life, that you've seen God doing in recent days, that could be encouraging for our listeners? Matt Burford: Yeah, I think just realize that your local church and your church community is important and it's vastly important and don't disregard it. Incarnational relationships, even if it's a small group and I go to a Hunter Street, 4,500 people, but my small group is meaningful. Don't disregard your personal devotion. Don't disregard your church attendance and don't disregard the life, all of those things are important and I think that's what we need to force and push back this idea of compartmentalizing all of our life, that everything's integrated body, soul, mind, spirit, all those things are under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. And I think I actually was pretty depressed about it, that nobody was getting that five years ago, but I think naturally the millennial generation, gen X and gen Z, because I taught that group and my kids are that group, I think they're instinctively getting that. Matt Burford: And that's what you get at Beeson, by the way. I think you get at least a dedication to understand that all those things are interconnected. So my word of encouragement is I actually am very positive about the church, when everybody else thinks that culturally we're dying, I think we are set for another great awakening and another great, just great movement of God because he's still on the throne. I mean, I keep telling people before I do a sermon or before I do a lecture, Jesus Christ is our Lord. He's not Gandalf, he's not a fictional character. He is somewhere physically on the throne and everything under his foot. So that means if we honestly believe that, it should change the direction of every day of your life. Before I let my kids go everyday, I always ask them the question, who is Jesus? Who is Jesus? How did Peter answer that? How did he answer it? Do you remember? I'm asking you the question now. Doug Sweeney: In Matthew 16? Matt Burford: Yeah. The Messiah. Doug Sweeney: The Christ, the son of living God. Matt Burford: The Messiah, the son of the living God. Where did he do that at? Do you remember what city? Kristen Padilla: Was that [Capeernaum 00:26:16]? Matt Burford: Yeah. What was so major about that? And that's a pagan city. Kristen Padilla: The other God's. Matt Burford: You remember the gate of Hades is behind them, where you're carving out holes to put little totems of Gods. And Jesus pointed that place out to showcase his messiahship. So in other words, he's saying, I'm taking a pagan city to declare who I am. That's just the way our Yahweh works. And I think even if you're a ... So be encouraged, even when everything looks like it's down, that's the time that God's going to go and just might even take the lowliest person and send them to the most important place, to declare and remind people who Jesus is. Doug Sweeney: You have been listening to Dr Matt Burford, a two time alumnus of Beeson Divinity School. Who is the president and founder of Tactical Faith, a Christian apologetics ministry here in Alabama. Matt also works as a missionary in the area of evangelism and apologetics for the Alabama State Board of Missions. We are very grateful to him for being with us today. We're thankful to you for tuning in. 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 Pasquerilla. Our co host's are Doug Sweeney and myself, Kristen Padilla. Please subscribe to the Beeson podcast at beesondivinity.com/podcast or on iTunes.