[This is a transcript of an interview I did with 1819News on courage in early August of 2025. I have highlighted the most important parts. It’s a rough transcription, only lightly edited, but still pretty readable.]
Interviewer: What was your church’s COVID response like? How did your church display courage in that period?
As soon as Covid was a thing, our church did initially stop meeting, just for a few weeks. I don’t remember exactly how long, but just so we could figure out what was going on. We had actually never done anything online. We had done no video services or anything like that. So we quickly made arrangements for that kind of thing. But then within, within just a couple of weeks, it became evident that Covid was not some new version of a medieval plague. It was something to be taken seriously, but it was not something that was going to be life threatening to everyone, and certainly not something that should require the complete shutdown of our lives. And so as quickly as possible, we got back to meeting.
We did some meetings outside, even as we were continuing to figure things out, and then we moved inside, going to two services just to give people a little more space. But then we got back to fairly normal services very quickly.
We did have a number of people who came and worshiped with us regularly on Sundays, who went to other churches, but their churches were not meeting. And so I know that we were back meeting more quickly than most other churches in the area. I was thankful for that.
Obviously, in Alabama, the Covid regulations were not nearly as onerous as they were in some other places, in some other parts of the country. At the same time, I think it was highly problematic the way the whole thing was treated.
One reason that we were very quick as leaders at Trinity Presbyterian to stand up to the Covid regulations and get back to meeting, is simply because we believe that the church is an essential institution. We saw the government trying to delineate what those essential institutions are, and the church was being left out of it. And we said, no, we really do believe that the church is an essential institution. I think it did take some courage at that time to stand up in that kind of way. I always point out that courage requires principles. Courage presupposes love. We are going to be courageous in defending or promoting what we love no matter what. So courage is really driven by love. I would say the problem with the coward is that he doesn’t love anything. You know, there’s an old line by G. K. Chesterton where he says, “the soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.” And so we fought for the right of the church to meet, because we love the church and we love God’s people, and we wanted to guard and defend the public worship of the true God. And so that’s why we did what we did.
Interviewer: So did you did anything from authorities or otherwise affect your church services? Did anybody try to shut you down?
No, thankfully, we were free from any kind of government interference or attempts to shut us down, so we were very grateful for that. Another example of the way that this played out is that we had some people who worked for the government or the military or for corporations that were requiring the Covid vaccine, and we had people who did not want to get the vaccine. They did not believe that the vaccine would be good for them, and they were concerned about being part of, basically, a medical experiment. Our denomination, the CREC, produced a form the pastors could sign for their people, so that people could seek a religious exemption. We saw some success with that as well, where we had some people who were able to escape the requirement to get the shot because of the form that I signed. So we found that to be a helpful thing as well.
Interviewer: What was the effect of all of this on your family?
Yes, that’s a good question. First of all, school was interrupted. For all of my kids, school and work were very much interrupted. However, my kids were very thankful to have a place to gather with God’s people for worship. One thing we’ve always done is we have made a case that as a church – the word church actually means gathering or assembly, so you really can’t be a church without gathering – we have always put a big emphasis on the importance of public gathered worship, because we think the Bible does. It’s something that we see emphasized in Scripture, and so we’ve always tried to emphasize it as well. We had people in our congregation who didn’t want to miss a single Sunday, even though we did miss a couple there. But I know for my kids, it was wonderful to be able to have a place to gather with God’s people and worship, and at least have that kind of normalcy and have that as a kind of anchor. As Covid unfolded, I saw studies start to come out showing the people who still maintained contact with other people, and especially people who continued to attend religious services, did far, far better spiritually and emotionally and relationally than other people. Now I wouldn’t say that we only go to church because of the benefits that it provides, but it should not surprise us that there are benefits that come with obeying God in this area of our lives. So it was a real blessing to my family.
Interviewer: Did you receive support from the community?
There were definitely people that noticed that we were meeting when a lot of other churches were not. And generally the comments I got about that were positive. There were a few naysayers, a few people who thought it was crazy because meeting was dangerous or reckless. But it was important enough to do it, even if there was a heightened risk.
Interviewer: Can you put your finger on any lessons that you learned from that as a pastor or as a church?
I think Covid taught a lot of lessons. I think it certainly taught a lot of people about suffering. I think it taught a lot of people about the importance of community, about how essential the church really is. I think there are a lot of lessons to learn there.
I think the other thing Covid did is it ripped the mask off of a lot of things. It exposed a lot of things. I think it allowed a lot of people to see how our culture, how our government, how the system, really works. And I think it radicalized them – I don’t mean that in a negative way, but I do think that it gave them a whole new awareness of what we’re up against, if we believe in historic Christian truth, and we believe in the principles that have made America a great nation, the opposition to those things is really high up and really runs deep in our government and in our culture. And I think covid really exposed that, and I think in that sense, it provided an opportunity for people on the other side to be courageous in a new way, because they began to understand exactly what we are up against. So we want to stand for those things.
A lot of people think that niceness is a fruit of the Spirit, but it’s not. Sometimes to be faithful, you have to do things that are going to hurt people’s feelings, or you have to do things that will seem confrontational, or will even seem offensive to some people. But that’s just what faithfulness requires. If you want to do what is right, then you have to be okay with everybody not liking you, and you have to be okay with some people not approving of what you do. I think covid was a way that a lot of people learned that lesson. C. S. Lewis says that courage is not a separate virtue. Courage is the testing point of all the virtues. And I think that’s exactly right. And so if you want to be a virtuous person, you’re going to also have to be courageous, because those virtues will be put to the test. And I think covid was, was an example of that, of an illustration of that.
So one thing I’ve tried to do as a preacher is recognize that to be a faithful pastor requires courage, and if what I’m doing actually doesn’t ever require any courage, I’m probably not doing it right. I’m probably not faithful in the way that I should be. So every every week when I go to preach my sermon, I ask myself if it’s going to require courage to preach this sermon. I think about the apostle Paul in the book of Acts – everywhere Paul goes preaching, there’s a riot because he’s saying things that are so contrary to the world and the culture in which he lives. Obviously I’m not expecting riots to break out every single time I preach, but I do think pastors should ask themselves that question, does your message require courage? And I think Christians in their day to day lives should ask themselves that question, What am I doing? What is God calling me to do each day that requires courage. God says I’m to be salt and light. It requires courage to be salt and light. Where am I demonstrating that courage so that I can be salt, so that I can be light?
Interviewer: Growing up, I loved reading about history, and especially on the childhoods of famous Americans. I’ve always been inspired by biographies, by the Bible, by things like this. Do you have historical figures or mentors who have inspired you over the years?
Yes, I do. I have a number of historical figures that I look to as models and examples. Of course, there are many in the Bible. From church history, I would say that Martin Luther and John Calvin certainly stand out. They were men of great courage. John Knox would certainly be another. He had to stand up to the Queen – and it was said that Queen Mary feared Knox’s prayers more than any army. He was a very bold man, very bold in his preaching and his writing. So figures like that really do inspire me. There are so many examples from church history of great pastors and great statesmen who have modeled courage for us in our own history, in our own nation’s history. We’ve got lots of examples of this. So you can point to men in our founding era, men like George Washington, men like John Witherspoon, men like Patrick Henry, who were models of courageous faithfulness, who did what needed to be done, who were faithful in high pressure situations. And I think that’s incredibly important for us, because I think it’s so easy to grow complacent. It’s so easy to take things for granted. And when you when you take what you have for granted, that’s when you lose it. And so every generation has to act in a courageous way in order to defend what it’s been given. And as you know, America as a has a Christian heritage as a nation. I want my family, I want my children, I want my grandchildren to live in a Christian nation, a nation that is largely shaped and influenced and informed by the truth of God’s Word. And we’re not that nation anymore, and for us to get back to being that nation is going to require courage on the part of God’s people.
Interviewer: Another question, and this does take us a little bit back to Covid: Which people in your life help keep you going, during a during a crisis like Covid or other similar situations?
Yes, my wife has always been very supportive. Every man needs a wife as his helper and he needs a band of brothers, other men around them, who can encourage him. As a pastor, it’s the elders who are my band of brothers. The elders here are very careful, very deliberative. During Covid, I knew at every step along the way, that they would have my back and I would certainly have theirs We knew we would stand together in any decision that we made, and it worked out really, really well,
Interviewer: Do you have anything else you’d like to add, especially about courage?
I would say that courage is especially a masculine virtue, and because our culture has become very hostile to masculinity and to men, it does not produce courage. We live in a culture that I would say is committed to safetyism. I think that you saw that safetyism during covid. It’s the idolatry of safety. It’s wanting to eliminate every last risk. It’s when you have governors or mayors saying, “if it saves even one life, then they’re going to adopt this very tyrannical policy.” Safety is important, but safety is never the highest priority. We have to be wise and we have to be courageous.
If you’re a Christian, being faithful to God is your highest priority, and you can always play it safe. People need to recognize that our addiction to safety is actually really hurting. I really like Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Coddling of the American Mind” because he points out that in our society, we’re committed to physical safety, at the expense of emotional and personal maturity. Children often don’t get to grow up and mature in the way that they should, because they have not been allowed to gain any measure of independence, because their parents parented more out of fear than out of faith and felt like they had to constantly control what their child’s environment and make sure that everything is always safe. You simply can’t live life that way. Boats are safest in the harbor, but the boat is not made for the harbor, the boat is made for the open sea. I look at my childhood compared to today – you’ve just got kids sitting at home on screens, whereas when I grew up, and probably when you grew up, we were outside doing things, we had a very active and highly relational childhoods.
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