Beeson Podcast, Episode #
Dr. Adam Dooley
Date

>>Announcer: 

Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University. Now your host, Doug Sweeney. 


>>Doug Sweeney:

Welcome to the Beeson Podcast. I'm your host, Doug Sweeney, and I'm joined today by Dr. Adam Dooley, who has served as the senior pastor of Englewood Baptist Church in Jackson, Tennessee, since 2019. He's a pastor's pastor, a prolific writer, and serves Beeson, I'm proud to say, as a fellow in the Robert Smith, Jr. Preaching Institute. He will be speaking this summer at Beeson's preaching conference, July 14 to 16, here in Birmingham, Alabama. We're thrilled to have him on the show with us today. Thank you for joining us, Dr. Dooley. 
>>Dooley:
My privilege to be here. Thank you, Dr. Sweeney. 
>>Sweeney:
I'm sure some of our listeners know about you already, but just for those who don't, let me introduce you briefly to them. Can you tell us just a little bit about how you came to faith in Jesus and then how and when you figured out that the Lord was moving you into ministry? 
>>Dooley:
Yeah, well, I am a native Kentuckian and grew up in Berea, Kentucky. I made my initial profession of faith when I was nine years old and grew up in a small Baptist church. I'll never forget, I felt convicted of my sin and I went forward and told the pastor I wanted to be saved. And then, like we do in a lot of our Baptist churches, they hugged me, and they stood me up, and everyone came around and hugged me and told me how proud they were of me. 
>>Sweeney:
That's great. 
>>Dooley:
It was great. It was really encouraging. But no one really set me down and just talked to me about the gospel and what it meant to really surrender my life to Christ. And so I've looked back on that and I've wondered, you know, was that my conversion or was that the beginning of my coming to faith in the Lord? I really struggled from that point forward with whether or not I was truly saved. 
That lasted until I was in high school, and I got involved with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. It was there that I really just came to a better understanding of the gospel and really just wanted to surrender myself fully to Christ. And so I look back on that and I tell people, I know Christ has changed my life. I'm not sure if that happened when I was a nine-year-old boy or when I was in high school, but that's how it looked for me. And, you know, God used the Fellowship of Christian Athletes to call me to ministry as well because I stayed involved through high school. 
And then my senior year of high school before that year, we went to a camp in St. Simons, Georgia. To go, we had to raise money for the trip. We did that by going to churches, and we would lead services, and they would take up an offering for us. Because I was an upcoming senior, I was the spokesperson for our group, and so the speaking part of that service was always given to me. Those presentations became very sermonic, and so much so that people started saying, hey, God's calling you preach. And I would say, well, I don't know what that means, but I don't believe that's true. And the result of that, Dr. Sweeney, my senior year of high school, those same churches started calling me back to fill the pulpit when their pastors would be away. These were small churches in central Kentucky. But my senior year, I preached 32 Sundays in and around my hometown. 
>>Sweeney:
Still not thinking that you were called to preach. 
>>Dooley:
That's right. That's right. 
>>Sweeney:
Well, this is very accommodating of you. 
>>Dooley:
Yeah. I mean, I was literally taking Sunday school lessons and trying to rework them into sermons. And then finally, I went to my pastor and I said, look, you got to show me how to preach because these churches are calling and I don't know what I'm doing. And so he sat me down and he said, well, here's what you need to do for every passage. He said, first of all, choose one passage and don't skip around. And then he would say, every verse, explain it, illustrate it, and apply it to people's lives. 
And you know, after all these years of preaching, that's basically still exactly what I do. And all of that culminated when I graduated from high school, I had preached so much in my hometown that they, being my high school, asked me to preach the baccalaureate service when we graduated. So I did that, and I preached on James chapter four, your life's a vapor, it appears for a little time and vanishes away. So you ought to say, you know, if the Lord wills, we'll do this, we'll do that. And the theme of my message to my classmates was, hey, we get one life. If you don't devote it to Christ, then you are wasting your life. 
And while preaching, the Spirit just overwhelmed me that I was not doing what I was telling them to do. I was pre-enrolled at the University of Kentucky for pharmacy, and I walked from the platform that day and bowed my head and said, okay, God, if you want me in ministry, I don't fully understand what all that means, but I will pursue that. And I withdrew from University of Kentucky, enrolled in Bible college, and have never looked back since then. 
>>Sweeney:
Wow, that's wonderful. So in Bible college, were you still preaching? How'd we get from that point in your kind of ministerial formation to you being a fully-fledged pastor? 
>>Dooley:
Yeah, so my first year of Bible college, I was preaching. And quickly, the same pastor who helped mentor me brought me on staff to lead the student ministry in my home church. And I did that for two years. I tell people I was the worst youth minister in the history of the church because, you know, really all I wanted to do was preach. And so that was very formative for me. I learned so much from my pastor. 
He let me lead business meetings. He tasked me with leading our Vacation Bible school. I taught a senior adult Bible class. And really what he was doing was letting me experience every part of the church. And so I did that for two years. And then I went at 20 years old, maybe 21 years old, and pastored my very first church, the Freedom Baptist Church in Mount Vernon, Kentucky. A congregation of about 50, and I've been pastoring ever since then. 
>>Sweeney:
Wow. So did you fit seminary in there somehow? How did that work out? How'd you combine the studying you were doing with the pastoring you were doing?
>>Dooley:
Yeah, so I went right out of high school to Clear Creek Bible College, which is also in Kentucky, and that's in Pineville, Kentucky, and there's not a lot to do there. Was bored enough that I just took extra classes and ended up graduating in three years. And, I've always been fairly good as a student. And the Dean there at the college said, “Hey, you ought to go to seminary.” 
And I was so green that I didn't really even know what seminary was. And, he explained it to me and I said, well, where's the closest seminary? And he said, well, that would be Southern Seminary in Louisville. And so I said, great, I'll go there. And so I went straight from Clear Creek to Southern Seminary. I'm still pastoring that church in Mount Vernon, graduate with my MDiv in three years and Herschel York who was the main preaching professor there, said, “Hey, you ought to consider getting a PhD.” And I said, well, okay, that's what I'll do. 
So I just kept going. And while working on my PhD, I went and pastored my second church, which was in Richmond, Kentucky, and got married during the PhD program. Yeah, that's how the journey began. And it's funny to me to look back on all that because I was so hesitant. And now, of course, I can't imagine my life being any other way. But first pastor in my family, we really just knew nothing about ministry or what it would look like. And God was really patient and gracious during those days. 
>>Sweeney:
Your PhD was in preaching? 
>>Dooley:
Yeah, that's right. Studied under Danny Akin at first, and then Dr. Akin went to Southeastern, and so I finished with Herschel York there, and my minor was in systematic theology, and so those were great years at Southern. Can't say enough good about my experience there. 
>>Sweeney:
We mentioned at the top of the show that you arrived at Englewood in Jackson, Tennessee in 2019. How many churches have you pastored from the time that we've just been talking about up till 2019? 
>>Dooley:
Yeah, so because I started so young, I've pastored a number of churches and really churches of every possible size. So the first church there, Freedom Baptist, church congregation of about 50 people. And Dr. Sweeney, I lived as a single pastor in a five-bedroom parsonage while I was with that congregation. Yeah, that was great. And they fed me every week. I mean, it was great. And then I went to Red House Baptist while I was in seminary, and that church was a little larger, about 200 or so, but God really did a work there. 
And in about a four-year period, we grew to about 600 or so, which in Kentucky, that's a larger church. 
>>Sweeney:
Yeah, it sure is. 
>>Dooley:
And so I really thought I would stay there because my parents were members, I had teachers that I was now pastoring. And it was just a great, great time. My brother was one of my deacons. It was a great time. 
>>Sweeney:
And that worked well? Sibling rivalry didn't get in the way there?
>>Dooley:
You know, not only did it not get in the way, but my brother's a high school English teacher. And out of all of that, he became a preaching deacon. And today he is a bi-vocational pastor also in Kentucky. So just a lot of great things that I look back on that were not just formative, but really major encouragements to me throughout my life. 
And so when I graduated from the PhD program, I got a call from Red Bank Baptist in Chattanooga. And honestly, I thought that was a joke because of the similarity in the name, but it turned out to be a real invitation. And that that was a larger church. And my wife and I had I'd only been married a couple of years, and we actually said “no” to that opportunity five times. 
But over about nine months of talking with them, the Lord just made it very, very clear that He wanted us to go. And leaving my home state was a challenge. But again, in hindsight, you just see how God was using that and how it really shaped our ministry and our family. And it was just a great, great move for us. Had a great experience there. 
Had our first two children there in Chattanooga. We went from there to Dauphin Way Baptist Church in Mobile, Alabama. I can talk more about that if you'd like. That was the most challenging ministry opportunity that we had for a lot of reasons, not the least of which my son got leukemia while we were there. So we spent three years flying from Mobile to Memphis, Tennessee to St. Jude Hospital. Man, that was so hard. Really, the only time I've ever prayed about quitting the ministry was during that time. 
So, fast forward, the Lord brought my son through that. He's about to graduate high school, by the way, and is doing great today. Had our third son while we were in Mobile during all of that as well. Went from there to Dallas, Texas, to First Baptist Church of Sunnyvale, Texas and had five amazing years there. And then that's when God called us here to Englewood in West Tennessee. And as you said, we've been here since 2019. 
>>Sweeney:
Yeah, Beeson people know that Union University is in Jackson, Tennessee. We've had lots of great Union students come our way. Did the Lord use Union at all to attract you to Jackson, or was that really not part of what happened? 
>>Dooley:
Well, you know, yes, there are a couple of things about that. One, for years, I, too, loved and appreciated Union and said, hey, I want my children to go to Union University one day. And so I was very familiar with it. I had preached chapel several times at Union, and Dub Oliver, who is the president there and one of our deacons here at Englewood, is actually one of the people that recommended me to Englewood without my knowing it. 
>>Sweeney:
How did he know you? 
>>Dooley:
Just from my preaching in chapel at the school. 
>>Sweeney:
Wonderful. 
>>Dooley:
Yeah. I mean it, when I say the Lord has used preaching to really shape every part of my life, it's not an exaggeration because, you know, we had a great initial meeting, but I would have never dreamed that from that he would recommend me to one day be as pastor. And so that was great. 
But other interesting story, I'll tell you, Dr. Sweeney ... When I was in Mobile, I preached at the Kentucky Baptist Convention while my son had leukemia. And because we were flying to Memphis every week, I did not want to fly up for that convention. So I actually drove from Mobile to Paducah, Kentucky. And for your listeners who know geography, that put me driving right through Jackson, Tennessee. I stopped and took a break at a Dairy Queen across the street from Englewood. And because I had pastored in Tennessee previously, I knew of Englewood, though I really didn't know much about it. I knew Dr. Phil Jett, who was the longtime pastor here, and he used to rave about how great Englewood was. 
So just to put that in context for you, I am in my most difficult ministry assignment ... My son has weekly trips to St. Jude for three years. We are in year one of that. We're exhausted. We're discouraged. And I look up, and here's Englewood Baptist Church. So I pull over in the parking lot, and I'm like, why do I know this church? 
And it takes me a minute to piece it all together. Then I realize I'm an hour from St. Jude Hospital right now. Well, then I pulled the church up on my phone, and they're looking for a pastor. Again, no embellishment whatsoever. I sat in the parking lot and I prayed for about 45 minutes, knowing nothing about the church, but asking God to let me be the pastor at Englewood because it was so close to St. Jude. Well, when you fast forward, they called Jordan Easley to be the pastor. And I remember going home and thinking, man, that was so silly of me. You don't go to a church because of a hospital. And so my son gets better. We moved to Texas. Life is great. We love Texas. 
And about eight years later, I get a phone call one day in my office, and a gentleman says, “Hey, this is Mike Montgomery. I am the chairman of the search team at Englewood Baptist Church.” And I'm telling you, I was right back in that parking lot. And while we were content and happy where we were, I knew immediately - the Lord is going to answer those prayers in a way and in a time that I never would have forecasted. 
>>Sweeney:
Marvelous. The Lord and His providence are real in our lives. So what's going on these days at Englewood Baptist? What's the Lord doing now? 
>>Dooley:
You know, Englewood is such a wonderful place. Just has a history of growth and impact for the kingdom. I'm happy to say that is continuing today, we're really in a season of reaching a lot of people. We have discipleship as our heartbeat. We really are taking seriously the responsibility to live out and share what we believe so that we're not educated beyond our obedience level. 
So we're seeing that in groups of men and groups of women together that are walking together to grow in their faith. Englewood's a church that loves the word, and so it's just an incredible joy to preach here week in and week out. We're also in a season of, I don't want to say rebuilding, but Englewood is somewhat of a legacy church and so what that means practically is that we have some aging buildings and so we're working through that and trying to modernize and take some steps that we've needed to take for a while. 
So there's lots of great things going on and I'm this summer will mark seven years here, and we are just praying the Lord will give us many, many more years to serve here with these great folks. 
>>Sweeney:
All right, so I've got our seminary students in mind right now, pastors who are listening, prospective seminary students, people who want to come hear you talk at the preaching conference this summer. You have spent many years, we've heard about already, preaching. You've also taught preaching. You've written about preaching. You're a great guy to have on the show for some advice about preaching. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the teaching and writing about preaching you've done? Maybe tell us a little bit about what you take passion in the pulpit to be all about, to quote the title of one of your books. And what is it to, let's say you're speaking to Beeson Divinity School students right now, what is it you want them to know, us to know, about passion in the pulpit and the importance of preaching? 
>>Dooley:
Yeah, well, the whole idea of passion in the pulpit is centered around the concept of biblical pathos. And when I was in seminary, I really came to conviction that this is an overlooked discipline, because we tend to focus on the logos, to use Aristotle's terminology, of a biblical text, because we're so anxious to find out what it means. And we should be. I don't in any way want to take the focus off of that. But I came to a conviction that tone shades meaning. And part of understanding the logos of a text is to really focus in on the pathos of the text. and to discover the emotive structures surrounding any given passage of Scripture. I think that we erroneously equate passion in the pulpit with the gusto or the personality of the preacher. 
You know, Phillips Brooks was famous for saying, that preaching is truth through personality. And I think we have erroneously equated that with you just put your personality on the text and that's how you communicate truth. While it's true every preacher has his own unique personality, it's also true that the Bible has its own personality. And so what I emphasize in the book is that we really need to focus in on the idea that my personality must be subject to the guardrails, the emotive guardrails of the text. And so I want to emulate or elicit whatever the pathos of any given passage is for the congregation when I preach. 
>>Sweeney:
So how do you do that? I can intuit I think what you mean as a seminary guy, but to say prospective seminary students, people who haven't had a lot of formal education but are kind of tuned in right now and want to follow what you're doing, practically what does that mean you do? 
>>Dooley:
Well, that's what the book is all about. What I tried to do was create the hermeneutical steps necessary to discover the pathos. So, for example, if you consider the genre of a given passage, there are different rules of interpretation and for understanding certain emotional buzzwords that appear in the text. 
It's different if you're looking at prose versus poetry, for example. You've got to look at the world behind the text and think about the historical setting and the need that's being addressed. You have to think about the world in front of the text. And a lot of times, simply by asking, what is the author doing with the text, it helps you get a sense of his emotive design as he appeals to his audience. 
A lot of times we might equate appealing to people's heartstrings as a form of manipulation, and it certainly can be. But if the apostle Paul is appealing to his audience and their emotional heartstrings, why shouldn't we do that? 
So let me give you a couple of examples. In Galatians 1, when Paul is indignant that they have forsook the gospel and so quickly abandoned salvation by grace through faith alone. He's angry. He's indignant. And what I'm saying is that because of that, when we preach that, there ought to be a righteous indignation at the very thought that we would ever add human works to the gospel of grace. We ought to convey that and we ought to elicit that in our people. We want them, not just to doctrinally understand the concept of salvation by grace through faith alone. We want them to be angry at anything in their life that would threaten the simple gospel of Jesus. 
Give you another example. In the book of Genesis, if you look at the narrative from chapter 12 all the way through chapter 22 of Abraham's life. You know, we often preach Abraham as the great hero of the faith because he's the father of the faith. But if all we had was Genesis 12 through Genesis 21, I would conclude Abraham had little to no faith. Every promise that God gives him in chapter 12, he doubts. God promises that he will give him descendants, but he doesn't trust God for that. And as a result, he tries to have a child outside of God's design. God promises to give him descendants, and he doesn't trust God. He not only tries to have a child out of God's design, he takes Lot along when God told him not to take any of his relatives. 
Lot was a backup plan. God promises to give him land, but when Abraham comes into the land, he quickly runs to Egypt during famine. because he doesn't trust God to take care of him in the land. When he gets there, he offers Sarah, his wife, to Pharaoh because he doesn't trust God to keep his promise to bless those who bless him and to curse those who curse him. So Abraham is lacking faith at every opportunity until Genesis 22. And when he offers the sacrifice of his son, Isaac, to the Lord, by that point, the reader ought to be saying, oh, here we go again. He's going to drop the ball again. And can you believe God's giving him another chance? Why would God do that? And that's what I want the congregation to feel. And then I want to turn that, and I want them to feel that about themselves as well. Why does God give me a second chance? 
I'm no different than Abraham. And here I go again, dropping the ball again. So these are the kind of things you look for in the text, and it shades the meaning so that it's more than just this cold orthodoxy that we understand here. It ought to move our hearts. That's how I define passion in the pulpit. 
>>Sweeney:
That's great, and it's so interesting to me that we're talking about this today. I've just returned from speaking at a pastor's conference, and one of the things we talked about was the question, is it right to try to preach to people's affections? I've written a bunch of books about a guy named Jonathan Edwards who argued famously and controversially, we should. So long as you do it from the text and you teach the text through people's minds to get to their hearts, you ought to be trying to get to their hearts. You ought to be trying to raise their affections from the pulpit. 
>>Sweeney:
Well, that's right. And just as Edwards had so much resistance, particularly in reform circles, that's what we see today. I mean, there's almost an attitude that this is less important. It's less scholarly. I don't know what category we would put it in. What I'm arguing is that it's not a substitute for faithfulness to the text. It is a means to be faithful to the text. It's not emotion for the sake of emotion. I believe this so much ... that if a preacher has to choose between his disposition and the disposition of the text, he should choose the text - not his personal disposition, which is where, incidentally, I think Phillips Brooks got it all wrong. 
>>Sweeney:
Yeah, I agree. 
>>Dooley:
The humorous thing to me is that Brooks' concept of truth through personality wasn't the idea of truth being communicated through personality. It was truth coming out of personality. It was an existential lie that made the preacher the source of truth rather than the biblical text. That's not what people mean when they quote him, but that's what he meant. And I think we have to be very careful in just saying, well, passion in the pulpit is just the personality of the preacher. Because maybe for different motives, that puts you in the same place where Phillips Brooks put you with his famous statement. 
>>Sweeney:
Yeah, it sure does. It's a dangerous thing to try to upstage the Word of God in the delivery of sermons. 
>>Dooley:
Yeah, amen. 
>>Sweeney:
Well, we're just about out of time. I want to remind our listeners that you're coming to Beeson this summer to speak at our preaching conference July 14 to 16. Do you know what you're talking about yet? 
>>Dooley:
I don't. I just accepted that invitation, so I'm super excited to come. 
>>Sweeney:
All right. I'm pretty sure we're going to do a podcast or two about the conference beforehand, so we'll have more opportunity to advertise it with people, but save the dates. July 14, 15, and 16 here at Beeson. Dr. Dooley, thanks for being with us. One last question. 
Our people love to pray for the ministries of Beeson, the work of the Lord at Beeson, and the pastors and others who are connected to us in one way or another at Beeson. As our listeners are praying for you and praying for the folks of your church in days ahead, how should they pray? 
>>Dooley:
Well, I would say a couple things. For me personally, ministerially, I just pray that I will be faithful to the things I've said today. My ministry hasn't changed since that initial calling. I like to think I'm better equipped than I was in those days, but the goals are the same, and I want to be just as faithful to God's word today as I was back then. 
Personally, I would also say you can pray for me. I have five children. One's about to graduate high school, and so we're in the middle of trying to discern what his future is going to look like. So pray with us about that, and that God will just direct us. 
And for our church, just pray that we keep having impact for the kingdom, and making disciples who make disciples. 
>>Sweeney:
Okay, listeners, this has been Dr. Adam Dooley. He is the senior pastor of Englewood Baptist Church in Jackson, Tennessee. Please pray for him. Please pray that he'll be faithful to the kind of preaching and the kind of theology of scripture that he teaches others. Pray for his family. Pray for his oldest boy, right, who's thinking about going to college now or whatever the Lord has for him next. Pray for wisdom there. Bear in mind that we are praying for you and we love you. We thank you for tuning in. We remind you to come to the preaching conference July 14 -16 and we say goodbye to you for now.
>>Mark Gignilliat:

You’ve been listening to the Beeson podcast; coming to you from the campus of Samford University. Our theme music is by Advent Birmingham. Our announcer is Mark Gignilliat. Our engineer is Rob Willis. Our Producer is Neal Embry. And our show host is Doug Sweeney. For more episodes and to subscribe, visit www.BeesonDivinity.com/podcast. You can also find the Beeson Podcast on iTunes, YouTube, and Spotify.