Beeson podcast, Episode 491
Rev. Dr. David Eldridge
April 7, 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 am Doug Sweeney here with my cohost Kristen Padilla. We are glad you have tuned into another week of what we pray will be an edifying conversation. Today on the show, we have another Beeson alum to talk to us about the ways in which God is at work in his life and in his ministry. Now, Kristen, would you please introduce today's guest?

Kristen Padilla:
Hello everyone. Before I introduce today's guest, allow me to say happy birthday to my son, Philip, who turns nine today and listens to each week's podcast with me on the way to work and school. So happy birthday, Philip. Today's guest is Reverend Dr. David Eldridge. He is a graduate of Beeson Divinity School and is senior pastor of Dawson Memorial Baptist Church in Homewood here in Birmingham. He is married to Danielle and they have three sons. Welcome Dr. Eldridge, to the Beeson podcast.

David Eldridge:
I'm honored to be here. Kristen. And Dean Sweeney, thank you for the invitation.

Kristen Padilla:
We're so glad to have you and you have a lot to share about pastoral ministry that I know will bless our listeners. But first, we want to hear more about who you are, where are you from and how did you come to faith in Jesus Christ?

David Eldridge:
Home for me is a suburb of Jackson, Mississippi called Clinton, Mississippi. And I grew up there from kindergarten through Mississippi College where I did my undergrad and then met my wife there at Mississippi College. So that's roots, that's home for me.

Kristen Padilla:
And how did you come to faith in Jesus Christ?

David Eldridge:
Yeah, it's a story that I always enjoy getting to share because really the roots of my faith in Christ stems from the influence of two men. And God used to the power of the Holy Spirit to draw me to him, a football coach and a student minister. So in the eighth grade I had a football coach and a history teacher who just made a tremendous impression upon me as a 13-year old. I didn't know what that necessarily was, but he connected to me very individually. He modeled, really, integrity upon the football field in a way that I had never seen a coach do.

David Eldridge:
And so one day in the eighth grade, he invited me to come to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. I asked him, "Coach Siegel, what is FCA?" And he just said, "Eh, come on David." And so the first gospel message, I literally remember hearing, I'd heard others, no doubt, but I can still remember in the gym of my middle school hearing him preach the gospel. I wasn't saved in that moment, but the seeds of the gospel re-implanted simultaneous to that, I had a church that was literally within walking distance from the school that I was attending. Other friends and myself would walk to the church, play basketball, and a youth minister by the name of Harvey Ellis just poured into me, preached the word and those two convergences, God used to draw me to faith, so I'm very thankful for Harvey Ellis and Greg [Stegal 00:04:51] and the wooing of the Holy Spirit through their life, their ministry and their teaching.

Doug Sweeney:
That is wonderful, Pastor Eldridge. How did the Lord take you from there to pastoral ministry? How did you figure out he wanted you to be a pastor? What's your calling to ministry like and how did you get to a seminary in the first place?

David Eldridge:
So many of the stories that I tell have to do with sports in some respect, especially in those early years of my life. Growing up in that community, was running to the YMCA and would work out and then run home. I was 16 years old. I was getting ready for two a day football practices, early in the morning, late at night. I was going into my junior year of high school and my only vocational aspirations literally were to be what Greg Stegal was to me, a football coach, a history teacher, someone that would pour into young men, young women. And so as I was running, I stopped running. I didn't hear a voice, there wasn't handwriting in the clouds, but there was an undeniable impression upon me at the age of 16 that God was calling me in.

David Eldridge:
And in that moment, the only way I could figure out what God was calling me to do was to do what Harvey Ellis, again, that was the student minister. So in that moment I was running, I stopped. I felt this undeniable impression of God's calling upon my life, and I started running and have never really looked back. I immediately begin to have opportunities largely through the Fellowship of Christian Athletes to speak and share my testimony as an athlete, and God began to use that to give me an understanding of calling. As a 17-year old, a freshman at Mississippi College, I began to be a part time student minister and so I've literally had kids in the student ministry that were older than me, the student pastor, which is always a great irony in so many right ways. And I was a Christian studies, an English major and early own God began to refine a sense of pastoral calling largely through my times at Beeson Divinity School and in my undergrad that was as a student pastor and immediately upon graduation it was into pastoral ministry.

David Eldridge:
And the reason I came to Beeson was because of the sense of calling to pastoral ministry to the preaching, the teaching of God's word, the shepherding of people. And so God utilized that sense of refinement in those early days of my life to bring me to Beeson for what I saw in the faculty that I could see from a distance as I began to survey different seminaries.

Kristen Padilla:
Your first pastor role after Beeson was at a church in the Mississippi gulf coast region, which happened to be in the path of hurricane Katrina in 2005 and I can only imagine what it's like to be a young pastor fresh out of seminary to pastor a church through a natural disaster such as that one. So what was that like? What did you learn about pastoral ministry through that experience?

David Eldridge:
Yeah, it's a wonderful question. It's a question that in many ways brings me back to some of the best of times and the worst of times, I guess, in some respects because in hindsight I can see God's sovereignty in the tragedy that I experienced and saw. 95% of our church members lost the majority of their possessions. Our church took on about five feet of water. Church members literally came back to slabs. There were funerals that I did after hurricane Katrina. So there was a sense in which we saw a lot of just physical devastation, but in the same way in the difficulty of them, my wife was pregnant, Danielle was pregnant with our first child.

David Eldridge:
So the stress, the emotional, the physical, I can still remember the smells of coming back to this church and pulling up the carpet and going back into our house and literally taking all of your furniture, all of your possession ... We didn't have a lot. We were a young couple, but everything that we had, we were pulling it out of our house, putting it on the curb. And there's just something about that, that is emotionally, physically ... it does something to you that is wholly unique in some respects. But at the same time, God's faithfulness in the midst of that season of life was so tremendous in so many ways. One way, immediately we saw the breadth of the body of Christ respond. So we literally had Christians coming from Mississippi and Alabama and Louisiana and Georgia to partner with us, from California to New York City. And so these next months and years, in regard to the ministry that we had, was a ministry to the community largely from volunteers who flocked to that region and the region of new Orleans and going into Alabama, the whole gulf coast area.

David Eldridge:
So they were able to help us reach our community in ways that we never were able to do before. I oftentimes say the best thing that ever happened to our church, were the doors of our church being blown off the hinges. Because in some respects, there was this metaphor that it opened us up to the community. So all after Katrina, I mean our church became through, not my leadership as much as just the wealth of volunteers and other churches that came and undergirded our ministry, we were able to provide physical relief. We were able to provide ministry to people's homes and help them get back on their feet. I remember vividly the first service going back, the sanctuary was just, pews were strung everywhere. So we were able to meet in our fellowship hall in these folding chairs. And you have this remnant of people.

David Eldridge:
I mean literally you have, the church was maybe 40 before Katrina, so we had a remnant of 20 and in that moment, being able to look at these people and the depth of meaning as you're preaching the word of God from Psalm 46 and then you're having each of these couples and each of these individuals come up and receive communion on that day and communion that was literally in solo cups and with bread from a gas station and just the power of the word and the table and that unique experience. It's solidified for me that he is enough. I mean, we, we did not have electricity, but he was enough. We didn't have pews, but he was enough. We didn't have security in the buildings and anything like that. Dogs had strow through and cats and animals, but he was enough.

David Eldridge:
And that was deeply formative to me for the rest of my ministry in every way. So it was a stretching time. There's no denying that. But it was a beautiful time looking back upon it, especially now to be able to see some of those lessons of ministry and foundational aspects that when you're in that sort of crucible of a tragedy, you're refined in so many respects in the midst of that.

Doug Sweeney:
Well let's fast forward to the year 2017, another important year in your ministry journey. That's the year when you were called to be the senior pastor of Dawson Memorial Baptist Church here in Birmingham in Homewood, Alabama. It is one of the biggest churches in our region. And you had to follow a man who's another good friend of Beeson and this program pastor Gary Fenton, who had been there for about a quarter century. What was that experience like for you? What was that year like for your life and for your ministry? What's it like following somebody who's pastored a church so ably and faithfully for 25 years? And how has it been for you at Dawson?

David Eldridge:
Well I always say that it's been beautiful in many ways, largely because I've had the privilege to follow Dr. Gary Fenton. So not everyone has the privilege of following someone who has so faithfully served a congregation like Dawson for 25 years and beloved by the congregation, faithfully led the congregation, but faithfully led the congregation to that point of transition. And as I came in to Dawson, one of the things that he has from day one done is so specifically encouraged me in my ministry. There's no one at Dawson who has been more specific and more consistent in their encouragement to me than our former pastor, Gary Fenton. And he does it in ways that only a pastor would know how to do it.

David Eldridge:
I oftentimes say that he is, I pray that I'm able to have a ministry of decades at Dawson and he has so faithfully written a script by which that baton is passed to the next person that God calls to serve as the pastor. And just little ways, little notes of encouragement where he sees something that only he could be able to see. And by him just sending a note saying thank you for this and this message or thanks for the way that you've ... And we could give a myriad of examples of this, but the specificity of the encouragement has been what really is very sustaining. And one of the great joys of Dawson is, Dawson is a church that has had many men and women that have served on staff, that have served for decades and then have come into a place of transition where they've retired from those roles, but they've stayed in the church.

David Eldridge:
And so I can look across our congregation and see the strength and the health of the church represented by men and women that have faithfully served vocationally as ministers in the church that now are still there. And it says a lot about Dawson, says a lot about those ministers. And to be able to see Gary and Alta Faye in our congregation now that I've been there two and a half years, look and see them in the congregation along with other men and women that have served, just a tremendous encouragement to me. And so one of the things that, coming to Dawson, trying to lead the church and in light of such a long transition, or excuse me, a long faithful ministry that has come before me, is to really say, this is a marathon and there's no reason to sprint. This is the next chapter. It's not a new book I'm trying to write. It's not a new sequel that I'm trying to write, it's just the next chapter in the ministry that God has called us to.

David Eldridge:
So with that, I think sometimes there's a tendency to overestimate what needs to get done in two years and maybe underestimate what can be done in 10 years. So with that mentality, that has been helpful to be able to see the wonderful faithful ministry of the church for 95 years and to be able to build upon that and hopefully to plant some roots, learn names, minister alongside of the people of God, and move forward slowly, prayerfully, prudently. Those have been some of the initial goals. I've fallen short of that, but that certainly has been my goal in the early years of the ministry that God's called me to at Dawson.

Kristen Padilla:
Tell us more about your church, especially for those who might be unfamiliar with Dawson Memorial Baptist Church, its mission and its place in Homewood, Alabama. And then how you approach your ministry as a pastor to that church.

David Eldridge:
That's a great question. One of the things that I'm able to be able to say proudly is Dawson is a church of rich tradition in the best sense of that word, 95 years of history of engaging in our community of Homewood in the community of Birmingham, the state of Alabama, the nation and beyond. So it's a church that has had a rich tradition of evangelism and missions. It has been a church that traditionally, in its best, has been able to not divorce the spiritual from the physical. So we've been able, I think some of the best parts of Dawson had been able to see physical needs and the meaning of physical needs as a platform by which to be able to share the gospel, to make disciples. And so it is a church that is intergenerational. So I look out on a given Sunday and I'm able to see eight year olds and 28 year olds and 18 year olds and 58 year olds and 88 and 98 year olds.

David Eldridge:
And I think we increasingly live in a fairly segmented culture that can sort of focus on, we're going to be an institution that is just for this narrow niche and thankfully Dawson has been a church, the tagline of Dawson Memorial Baptist Church is Dawson family of faith. And families come in a lot of different shapes and sizes and a lot of different looks and nuances, but you really can look out and see a group of people that historically and presently do have a deep love for one another and a deep love for the church. The volunteerism and the servanthood attitudes of the church members, I mean, we really have individuals who, and in some church life you can, you can have someone who serves in the student ministry because they have kids and then when their kids graduate, they graduate from that and move onto something.

David Eldridge:
And I can look at people who have been serving in five-year preschool, Sunday school classes for 35 years and they don't have their own grandchildren and that ministry, but it's just that sense, the tagline, the mission of the church is to be found faithful as God's people and you see that in the individual stories of church members and families that have been faithful for years.

Doug Sweeney:
One of the best things for us at Beeson about Dawson is that it's only about a 10 minute drive away, and so there are strong ties between Beeson Divinity School and Dawson Memorial Baptist Church. Some of those ties have to do with the senior pastor of Dawson, Dr. Eldridge himself, who serves now on our main advisory board, who serves on our Baptist advisory board, who we have featured in our most recent video marketing campaign called, Who You Become, who's been involved in chapels, who's on our podcast. We feel like we're taking advantage of this relationship as much as we possibly can and we're grateful to you for that, Pastor Eldridge.

Doug Sweeney:
But could you say a word about the significance of Beeson for you, for your own life as an alumnus? Dawson is a Southern Baptist church. Beeson is a school that has lots of Southern Baptist, but it's interdenominational at the same time. What's the significance of your decision to attend Beeson Divinity School? And then if I can ask another question without this getting too complicated, what's the significance of Beeson Divinity School for you and your ministry today?

David Eldridge:
I love talking about Beeson because it has been so formative to me and one of the great joys is to be able to, as a pastor to without my fingers crossed, without any nuance, without any disclaimers, to be able to say to young men and women who feel called to the ministry, you need to consider Beeson and to see how God, providentially, has orchestrated many of their paths to come to Beeson. And so I am a tremendous fan of this institution because of the way it has formed me.

David Eldridge:
Like I said earlier, when I was a junior in college, senior in college, when I began to really look at the landscape of seminaries and divinity schools in North America, one of the things that struck me about Beeson Divinity School was the way that the academic life was prize but not to the exclusion of practical PRAKSIS, a spiritual development community. So that was exemplified in your predecessor, Dean George. I certainly looked at the preaching department. At that point you had two of the most unique voices I think in Southern Baptist life and certainly beyond that in Robert Smith and Calvin Miller and the great joy of being able to study under those two men, and I can multiply that with other professors that I had at Beeson from 2001 to 2004 that exemplified this wonderful unity in the essentials and diversity in the nonessentials and charity in the non-essentials. There was a sense in which you could study as a Baptist student and for me I did.

David Eldridge:
I was saved from the evangelistic outreach of the Southern Baptist church. I was formed in that church and then studied at a Southern Baptist college. But coming to Beeson didn't make me less of a Southern Baptist. It exposed me I think to the best of the great tradition in so many respects. I love, Dean Sweeney, the way your friend and former colleague at Trinity, Kevin Vanhoozer, talks about this great street. The analogy may be is certainly it is not as formed as he would say it if he was here now. But you have these different homes that represent different denominational traditions. And one of the things about coming to Beeson, for me, was to expose me to the best of these different homes in this wonderful community of the evangelical tradition. And to see, yes, you know, there's some distinctives, but what unifies us is far greater than those distinctives.

David Eldridge:
And seeing where there were differences helped me refine, one, why I was a Southern Baptist, two convictionally, it helped me refine what I needed to grow in, what I needed to be exposed to more that maybe I had taken for granted in some respects are not carefully thought through. So my experience at Beeson didn't make me less of a Southern Baptist. In many respects, it fully formed me in ways that I think are unique in an interdenominational evangelical community like Beeson has been and continues to be.

David Eldridge:
So looking in my own past of how that continues to form me, one of the great joys of coming to Beeson is to give me, I think, a little bit of a desire to always branch out of my own denominational home that I'm very proud to be of and from and continued to live out of, but to come alongside of various denominational traditions and serve in a local community with them. And so I think, I don't know how it would be different if I had gone to another seminary divinity school, but I can look back and just see just how formative Beeson has and is and I think always will be for my life personally, my spiritual life, my marriage, the parenting of my children, and certainly my pastoral ministry.

Kristen Padilla:
Dr. Eldridge, can you give us a window into what God is doing in your life these days? What he's teaching you, ways that he's at work that would encourage our listeners.

David Eldridge:
I'm deeply encouraged as the pastor of Dawson to see what God is doing in the world. I'll just take a day in the life, so this is the window question. Yesterday I was able to sit and talk with one of our staff members about mission opportunities that Dawson has in Ecuador and the Dominican Republic and China and Turkey. What a tremendous privilege. Many of those are connections to the church, men and women that had been called out of the church that are serving, so they are natural relationships. I left that meeting and I was able to drive to a ministry of our church that is two miles away from the church, called The Learning Center and able to see as I've seen in the past, men and women that are getting their GEDs and so they are church members and other volunteers from the larger community that are literally helping individuals get training for science, math, reading.

David Eldridge:
Also each individual that comes through there has Bible stories and the gospel that is clearly shared. I'm able to leave that experience and to be able to sit down with a person who, one of the books has been very formative in my life is Rosaria Butterfield's, The Gospel Comes With a House Key, and so we did a little bit of study at that. And so I was sitting with one of our staff members and they were talking about how kind of just deeply convicted them of opening their home and how this past Friday night they invited their neighbors over and they had this first step, this first step of building a relationship. So in a place like Dawson, I think what is so formative for me and so encouraging for me is to see God at work in that kind of macro, worldwide level.

David Eldridge:
And then also to intimately see him at work across our neighborhood. And I'm a dad, I'm a husband, and I'm a dad of three boys. And so we're at the baseball field with our neighbors. We were trying to pray intentionally to build this concert relationships and to share the love of Christ in a way that draws people to him. And so that intentionality I think is what God is teaching me and I'm able to see exemplified in many of our church members that are doing that so faithfully and their example cheers me on and inspires me.

Doug Sweeney:
Well, me too. Am I pray that God will teach us all those very same things. You have been listening to the Reverend Dr. David Eldridge, senior pastor of Dawson Memorial Baptist Church here in Homewood. He is a Beeson alumnus. We are proud to say and board member and good friend. We thank him for being with us on the program today. We thank all of you for tuning in. We pray that God will bless you, your lives and your ministries this week. 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-hosts are Doug Sweeney and myself, Kristen Padilla. Please subscribe to the Beeson podcast at beesondivinity.com/podcast or on iTunes.