The following is a formatted transcript of my YouTube address. You can watch the full-length video directly embedded below or listen to it on the Into the Pray podcast here.
The Snare of the Fear of Man
Did you know that there are different species of the fear of man which has a paralysing effect on us? The Bible says that the fear of man is a snare, (Proverbs 29:25) and you may know personal deliverance from the fear of man on the streets—maybe proclaiming the gospel and knowing a spirit-primed ability to be able to proclaim the gospel with boldness, as Paul said in Ephesians 6:20. But there are also species of the fear of man that affect us, I think, not on the godless, lawless streets of Great Britain, but within the church—with brothers and sisters in the Church. Might I say, particularly those who we admire, love, and respect the most. That’s where I think the fear of man can be most potent.
I want to confess something today as I do this video as quickly as I can, which is to say that I have recognised something of that in myself—something of the fear of man in and amongst the men in the land who I love, respect, and admire the most. I’m not talking about the flakes who are preaching heresy or those who are grossly immature in ways that we might have caricatures of in our minds. I’m talking about the men in the Church whose doctrine is sound, or whose doctrine is largely sound at least.
An Unwitting Prophetic Sign
I want to share a little story, a little word of testimony. A couple of years ago, less than two years ago, I had a personal invitation from Iain H. Murray—one of the finest men in the country, now in his 90s, who has written many world-class biographies, including J.C. Ryle’s. A fine biographer, writer, and pastor. Now, I’m not claiming for a moment to know Iain in any particular intimacy as friends, but I did have a phone call from him about 18 months ago having been in email correspondence with him.
During that phone call, Iain Murray brought to me a prophetic word. It wasn’t a prophetic word in his mind, and he didn’t describe it as that, but during the course of our conversation, there was what I have no doubt was an example of the word of knowledge by the gift of the Holy Spirit. I’d had a dream the night before his phone call. It’s not an everyday occurrence to have a phone call from Iain Murray, one of the founders of the Banner of Truth Trust.
Of course, he didn’t know anything about the dream I’d had the night before, but it was one of those dreams that I’ll never forget—a dream very clearly of the Lord. Within the dream, there was a central motif of a candle being lit that caught fire onto a curtain inside a house. The candle caught fire onto the curtain, and the whole house was then brought down. During the phone call with Ian, he said to my wife, Mairi, who he was speaking to at the time after I’d passed the phone over, that he didn’t believe that the Lord had lit the candle of my ministry for no reason. That is a word-for-word quote of what Iain said. I then subsequently relayed back to him what I believed was his unwitting, unknowing sense of interpretation of that dream.
The Pain of the 2025 Conference
Shortly after that, I was invited to the Banner of Truth Pastors’ Conference of 2025. I didn’t want to go because I knew intuitively—and know even more now by personal experience—that if I am in and amongst 300 pastors, mainly from the UK, and in the rubbing of shoulders and sharing of hearts, I knew that if I shared what was truly on my heart, I would be treated in a certain way. I very nearly turned the invitation down. The encouragement was to come along, see what was happening, see the ‘positive things’ the Lord is doing.
Without mentioning any individual guys in question, my time at the conference was painful in the extreme for two reasons: one, because of the lack of corporate lament and repentance; and two, because of the patronising, blinkered, obtuse, hard-hearted response from individual men to the sharing of my heart in the flow of conversation.
For anyone who knows me and Mairi, and the conviction of our heart and the stance we’ve taken over years, it is that the churches were closed in 2020 as a judgment of the Lord because of the profound unfaithfulness of the churches across the board. I’ve written about it extensively and worked it out in a scripturally sound way. As I anticipated, exactly what happened was exactly what I thought was going to happen. I was treated as an immature, unteachable, slightly off-the-rails, misguided fellow who really just needed to get back into church and find a church to become a member of.
The reason I started off by saying I felt paralysed by the fear of man is because instances like that are weighty. It’s not a weighty thing to have men who you don’t respect or love attack you—being accused of being a cessationist by people who are just part of the charismatic circus doesn’t bother me. What bothers me is when men who I respect, love, and admire behave in a certain way that they think is mature—believing it’s the fruit of their solid doctrine—when in fact it’s the exact opposite. It has taken me this time to put my money where my mouth is and tell the world what I think is happening. Before the Lord, I’m sorry it has taken me this long to pluck up the courage to challenge the Banner of Truth men—the finest men, as I consider them, in the country—to call them to repentance and issue a rebuke.
During the conference, I listened, leaned in, and prayed for there to be the kind of content from the pulpit that would be proportional to the day and hour we are living in—a proportional response, a call to repentance for the Church to be on their knees across all of its peaks and troughs, and to respond to the hour in which we are by a radical abandonment of business as usual. In order to facilitate that, all the while we think we’re repentant or experiencing biblical lament and distress whilst refusing to let go of business as usual, we’re manifestly proving we’ve not understood biblical repentance. We’ve not understood crisis moments and junctures in the life of the Church where it’s not possible to repent and respond to the Lord as He means whilst we continue to do everything that we’ve always ever done.
And so my feedback very recently to the guys at Banner was to point that out and to say somebody had said, “I was so glad that you had enjoyed the conference,” but I hadn’t enjoyed the conference. I’d come away distressed and upset and in pain—not just because of the absence of an appropriate word and call to action, a call to repentance and prayer at the time, but because of the oh-so-predictable response of men to the prophetic word, to the word that is harder to bring and harder to hear. That word is: the Church is in a far worse condition, more precipitous, than we understand it to be. The declension, the moral slide, the kind of deferring to each and everyone’s camps as being the arbiter and the umpire of that which is true—that’s the problem. And that’s why there wasn’t a sense in my own heart of these men having heard the Spirit of the living God; and so, in fact, I think there is a resisting of the Holy Spirit.
I sat opposite a man who is almost exactly my age, a principal of a theological college in Newcastle—a fine guy, a guy who I probably would to some extent get on with because of our similar age. But he did not have a clue what I was talking about when I sat opposite him for half an hour or an hour over coffee and tried to express something of my observation and strong inclination to say that there’s something missing from the pulpit—there’s no call to repentance here, there’s no lament, there’s no distress. He wanted me to know, well, there’d been some lyrics in some of the songs that had conveyed biblical repentance, or there had been some kind of passing reference in and amongst the notices and the many, many book plugs. You see, there are some things as part of our business as usual that are simply incompatible with the kind of repentance that the Lord has for His people, and that we refuse—we don’t even recognise. And one of them would be a penchant and quite a carnal obsession with books and writers and church history. So the guy I was chatting to didn’t understand what I was saying, and more than not understanding, he wanted me to know that I was wrong—a kind of immediate lurching to a position of alienation rather than any sense of a chord in him being struck.
I gave my feedback about the 2025 conference, and I must say I don’t know how the 2026 conference went because I wasn’t there, and I would love to and hope to hear the messages. It was a theme of revival, I noticed that Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones was quoted on the back of the brochure for the conference, because of course Lloyd Jones is well thought of in direct connection to revival and so on.
Now, this here is how the email went, and I want to simply give you the overview and then summarise as quickly as I can. I expressed my concern about the absence of what was said at the conference—it was mainly an absence rather than something being present that was wrong; it was just the absence of there being a kind of radical postural recognition of the need to repent and a change of what we always do. There was just fine biblical, doctrinal teaching, but there wasn’t anything there that made me think these men are feeling disturbed in their own private closets. And so the email came back to me from a well-meaning guy, I think a good guy, and he basically wanted to kind of, I suppose, insinuate that I couldn’t possibly know what was going on in each of the pastors who were present. Banner pastors often represent rural ministry, often difficult, often lonely, and the pastors’ conference was a time for fellowship and relationship—and the word he used was mirth, a time for eating and relaxing together in conversation. And none of those things are wrong, none of these things are bad, but my point is the way that that was then used to deflect from what I was saying was quite wrong.
The Core Concerns
1. Corporate Climate vs. Individual Morale
The critique I offered was focused entirely on the public direction and corporate climate of the 2025 conference—specifically the absence of a sober, root-level, focused lament for the current state of the Church and nation. The response to what I shared pivoted to the ‘individual weather’ of the attendees’ private lives. By focusing on the exhaustion and need for mirth among rural pastors, the Banner platform is effectively shielded from a necessary critique regarding its public responsibility. These two realms are not mutually exclusive, but using the personal weariness of pastors to deflect a challenge regarding corporate direction is a misstep.
2. A Misinterpretation of Motive
To suggest that a call for public, corporate repentance somehow implies a lack of empathy for what individual men are facing privately is a categorical error. Biblical lament is not an attack on tired pastors; it is often the only honest pathway to true, spiritual refreshment. True safety for a heavy heart does not come from an institutional buffer or a bit of levity, but from the safety of radical reality before God.
Did you hear that? The safety of radical reality before God. This is what we refuse when we refuse to let go of our business as usual, including our church life through the seasons, but then in our conferences we are resisting the radical reality of the spiritual condition before God—the state that we’re truly in.
3. A Conflict of Paradigms
Ultimately, this is a clash of fundamental outlooks. One side appears to be prioritising institutional maintenance, individual morale, and safe fellowship. The other is looking soberly at the reality of the hour and calling for a radical, root-level postural change—one that is proportional to what we have witnessed and are witnessing across the Church. When these two meet, the insistence on precision and truth will frequently be misconstrued as harshness, negativity, or ‘strife.’ The tension felt is the loneliness of carrying a shared burden that the institution is simply not yet willing to share.
My question is: what will it take for the institution to come to a place of being willing to share the burden that I’m expressing?
The Tipping Point: Modern Idolatry
What was it that tipped me over into sharing this today and plucking up the courage to do this? Well, it was an email from the Banner of Truth that I received about 30 minutes ago—a circular. And, within it, their call to prayer buoyed me. I thought, “Wow, maybe something has happened. Maybe they have been convicted, maybe they’ve heard something, maybe even something that I’ve said has resulted in something fruitful.” And to my profound sadness and disappointment, I then saw underneath what I thought was going to be a kind of national call to repentance and prayer was a building fund—an opportunity to give a number of millions of pounds that’s needed to build a new Banner of Truth building.
Now listen, I love the Banner. I love the inception of the Banner, I understand how it started, why it started, and the lack of Puritan literature at the time under Martyn Lloyd-Jones’s influence for the last 50 plus years—I understand that. Reformed theological literature is golden. But this is idolatry: this refusal to listen to the call to repentance that sacrifices on the altar before the Lord our preferences, our respectability, our comfort, our tradition.
This man I told you about who sat opposite me and just couldn’t understand—he’s the same age as me but he’s been brought up in Scottish Presbyterianism and can’t hear anything else! When the call to repentance and prayer is treated with contempt, as it was in my experience when I went to this conference, but we’re willing to call the nation to some kind of prayer in order to see a new building rise out of the ground at the sum of millions of pounds, we are proving that we are idolatrous whilst being completely unaware.
Dear reader, I don’t need a reply from this, I don’t need a reply from you, I don’t need anybody to leave a comment, and I don’t need a reply from the Banner. But what I do need to do is be faithful to that which God has put on my heart, and to speak that which He has said—refusing, come what may, to be paralysed and trapped by the fear man. The fear of man is a snare, and that applies within the Church perhaps more so than outside of it.
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