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Christmas Traditions

Truth in Love 134

Dr. Ligon Duncan discusses Christmas traditions.

Dec 29, 2017

Heath Lambert: It is Christmas time and as has become our custom on Truth and Love, we want to invite a Christian minister onto the podcast and just find out some more about him. This week, we are just thrilled to welcome Dr. Ligon Duncan to the podcast. He is the chancellor and chief executive officer of the Reformed Theological Seminary, and by the time you’re listening to Truth and Love, most of you will probably be familiar with that. But we’re glad you’re here, Dr. Duncan because we want to find out some more about you, your family, and how you celebrate Christmas.

Dr. Ligon Duncan: Well, I’m thrilled to be here with you, Heath. Merry Christmas!

Heath Lambert: Merry Christmas to you! So most people listening to this are going to be familiar with you, be familiar with your ministry. But for those who maybe haven’t been introduced to you as fully or may not be aware of all that you’re doing, give us a taste of your ministry and how you came to be in service in that way.

Dr. Ligon Duncan: I grew up in Greenville, South Carolina. My mother was a godly Southern Baptist who strayed into Presbyterianism and is a graduate of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. She actually cataloged the church music library at Southern when she was a student.

Heath Lambert: When is that?

Dr. Ligon Duncan: 1950s. And then she taught, she was a choir director in Baptist churches in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia before joining the music faculty at Furman University in the late 1950s and that’s where she and my dad met. And so, I grew up in a home where my mom was the music director at my local church, and my dad was an elder in my congregation, so the church was very much at the center of life. And, you know, for my earliest days, I remember having conversations with my mom about the Gospel and she was sort of the theologian of my life and we had wonderful conversations. I made a public profession of faith in Christ and was baptized at the age of 10, a lot of people don’t know, I was baptized as a believer.

Heath Lambert: Okay, so you got it coming and going.

Dr. Ligon Duncan: My Southern Baptist Mother, wasn’t ready for infant baptism yet even though she married a presbyterian. I think that was a genuine profession of faith, but I was theologically confused.

Heath Lambert: Okay.

Dr. Ligon Duncan: Even though I’d been taught really good Bible preaching, really good faithful biblical teaching. I think it was a closet Arminian.

Heath Lambert: Okay.

Dr. Ligon Duncan: And I went to a youth conference when I was 14 years old and heard a pastor preaching on Ephesians 1 and I suddenly realized, okay, before I ever reached out to God in faith, He had already reached out to me in grace. And the only reason I reached out to Him in faith is because He had reached out to me in grace. And when I got that straight, suddenly my struggles with assurance just were done.

Heath Lambert: Okay.

Dr. Ligon Duncan: And that had such a profound effect on me in combination with my youth pastor, who was just amazing, really poured his life into me. Plus my mom and dad and a faithful pastor in my home church and I really felt like I want to help people like this for the rest of my life. So, really at an early age, I felt called to ministry. And when I went to Furman to do undergraduate work, I deliberately did history and English, just a good liberal arts background because I knew I was headed to seminary. So, I felt a call to ministry pretty early. I came under the care of my local elders, and our Presbytery examines people who feel like they’re called to ministry. When I was examined, I became a candidate for the Presbytery and really pursued ministry. I went to school for a long, long time because I had to do a master’s degree and then a Ph.D. And so, by the time I was 29, I was ordained.

Heath Lambert: Okay.

Dr. Ligon Duncan: And I became a pastor and a seminary professor, and I’ve done that ever since.

Heath Lambert: All right. Now, another ministry question, because I’m just sitting here listening to you and just knowing that a massive number of people who listen to Truth and Love are going to be attendees at Together For the Gospel, and you are one of the big guys in T4G. So, how did that happen? How did you guys get mixed up together and that become a thing?

Dr. Ligon Duncan: By a friendship. You know, we say Mark Dever is human velcro. Mark is the pastor of the Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington D.C., and when I was in Scotland, doing my Ph.D. work at the University of Edinburgh, Mark was in Cambridge, doing his Ph.D. at Cambridge and we had a mutual friend. I would take the train down from Edinburgh and preach in Cambridge at a Presbyterian Church. He was an associate pastor on staff at a Baptist Church in Cambridge. And this mutual friend of mine, who was studying in Old Testament at Cambridge said, “Hey, you really need to meet Mark Devor. He is the Baptist you.” And I met Mark, and I loved him the first time I met him. In fact, the first time we talked, we talked for three hours.

Heath Lambert: Oh, wow!

Dr. Ligon Duncan: And so, from that time on Mark and I got together every chance we could get. And he was the first one to sort of start telling me personal things about Al Mohler. I knew of Al Mohler from reading articles of his in the Christian Index. Which was, as a presbyterian who went to Furman in the days of the conservative resurgence, and tried to help my Southern Baptist friends not be taken in by theological liberalism, under the guise of moderatism at Furman, I was really dialed into the whole Southern Baptist conservative resurgence. So I read Baptist papers including the Christian Index.

Heath Lambert: That’s incredible.

Dr. Ligon Duncan: And I said, “there is a sharp guy over at the Georgia Baptist paper writing really good articles on stuff,” but I didn’t know him personally. And Mark is the one who said, “oh yeah, you really need to get to meet Al Mohler.” And so it was through Mark that I got to know Al personally and then got to know C.J. Mahaney personally. And we started getting together at least once a year, the four of us, to pray, to talk, to stay up late doing stuff together. And it’s just one of those refreshing things that you do in ministry with friends that kind of recharges your batteries and gets you ready to go out there and, you know, do ministry for another year. And we did this for several years, and one night, you know, 2:00 a.m. we’re in Al’s study in Louisville, downstairs talking. And one of us, I can’t remember who said it, said, “You know, wouldn’t it be great if other ministers had these kinds of friendships?” You know, with like-minded brothers. We’re not all in the same denominational situation. We don’t even have the same kind of jobs, but we share so much core theology, and so many core ministry commitments, and it’s just fun to be with one another. Wouldn’t it be great if other pastors could experience this too? And it was Al who said, “well we really ought to do a conference and try and encourage that through the conference. You know, just sort of invite people into our friendships and then try and get them together out there with other like-minded brethren.” And we all laughed and said, “Yeah, Al, there’ll be like thirty people who will go to a conference like.” He said, “No, it’ll be huge.” And we said, “No, there’ll be, like, thirty people that will come to that.”

And the reason Al said it would be huge is not that anybody cared about the four of us. It was because Al had been noticing the reformed resurgence that was going on out there in the world. And all these young people that are fired up about the Bible, fired up about the sovereignty of God, fired up about the Gospel of grace, fired up about good doctrine, and fired up about doing ministry, evangelism, and discipleship out of the basis of good, biblical doctrine and theology. And he said there’s just a hunger out there for a conference that’s aimed at young pastors that want to live that way. And that could pull them together. And so we ran into what later got called the Young Restless Reformed Movement at the very first T4G. We didn’t create it. It was already there. We just ran into it. And, we provided a sort of a catalyst for it, I think. And I think people got together. I mean that first T4G, we’d ask people to stand up. “Hey, if you’re in Athens, Georgia, stand up.” And, you know, nine guys in the room would stand up. We’d say, “Hey, do you guys know one another?” You would have a Baptist guy, a Presbyterian guy, you know, whatever you call a Sovereign Grace guy, and an Apostolic charismatic or whatever. And they’d say, “No, we don’t know one another.” And we’d say, “Okay, you guys need to get to know one another.”

Heath Lambert: Yeah.

Dr. Ligon Duncan: You know, and that just happened all over T4G and it became sort of an, you know, every other year, family reunion. I mean, I think that’s one reason why… I mean, every year, we have probably fifty to sixty percent new people at T4G. But that means we’ve got about forty percent of guys that just keep coming back because it’s like a big family reunion.

Heath Lambert: Yeah.

Dr. Ligon Duncan: It just keeps growing, and that’s really where it started out of a friendship.

Heath Lambert: Okay.

Dr. Ligon Duncan: I mean, it’s really, it’s a conference that’s a friendship. It was our way of trying to share a friendship and then model how friendships could happen in pastoral ministry.

Heath Lambert: That’s wonderful. I know so many have benefited from that. Now, as we kind of move away from ministry and talk about your family.

Dr. Ligon Duncan: Yeah.

Heath Lambert: Your wife. Tell us about your wife. How did you guys meet?

Dr. Ligon Duncan: Yeah. Anne is amazing. Anne is from Columbia, South Carolina. She grew up in a context where she did not hear the Gospel in church, a very liberal Methodist church. She heard the Gospel from a young life director, and then a really awesome group of conservative Bible-believing students at Furman—she went to Furman as well—shared the Gospel with her. She came to faith in Christ her very first semester, really, her very first week at Furman.

Heath Lambert: Okay.

Dr. Ligon Duncan: And then was discipled, went to really good churches in the Greenville area, taught school for a couple of years, and then went back to our home church—what became sort of her adopted home church, First Presbyterian Church in Columbia, South Carolina. And they had lost their Christian education director. They didn’t have anybody to run Vacation Bible School. And so the elders asked Anne because she had all this education training, “Could you run VBS this year?” She did an amazing job and they said, “Hey, you really need to go into Christian education.” So she ended up going to Gordon-Conwell in Boston and doing a Christian education Degree. Charles Chauvel was there, and he was an orthodox Presbyterian minister and just a genius NCE. And she studied with David Wells and Roger Nicole. That was in the late 70s, and early 80s, Gordon-Conwell was an amazing place. And so, she had a great experience there. She worked in a Presbyterian Church in Montgomery, Alabama as a Christian education director and then was called back to First Pres, Columbia where she was doing Christian education as well. And then, while working there—she’d worked there for six or seven years, and there were about 200 single women in that congregation, a very large congregation, and she was the only female, full-time on staff. And so when female issues came into the church office, a lot of times, the women preferred to talk with Anne about certain things. And she was running into stuff that she had no idea how to deal with. And so she said, “You know what, I really need more training if I’m going to do this.” And so the elders actually paid to send her to RTS to do a counseling degree.

Heath Lambert: Okay.

Dr. Ligon Duncan: And that’s where I intercepted her.

Heath Lambert: All right!

Dr. Ligon Duncan: And so, I actually had to go not only to her father but to the Elders of First Presbyterian Church and ask for her hand in marriage.

Heath Lambert: No kidding? And they said, yes?

Dr. Ligon Duncan: And they did say yes!

Heath Lambert: Good, all right!

Dr. Ligon Duncan: And so, Anne worked in counseling for a few years until we had children. The doctors had told us that we would not be able to have children.

Heath Lambert: Okay.

Dr. Ligon Duncan: And in God’s kindness, He gave us a girl and a boy. And so she worked and did counseling for a few years when we were first married until the children came along, and then she’s been a mother, a wife, and a supporter in ministry. As the kids got older, she got back into doing a little bit of school teaching, part-time school teaching at the school where the kids were going, and is now the school college counselor for women at the high school where my daughter attended and where my son still attends. And you know, she’s just a very, very wise, godly person who has… I mean, people just seek Anne out and they know that they can trust her. She’s just got so much common sense on how to help people.

Heath Lambert: Yeah. So, how long have y’all been married now?

Dr. Ligon Duncan: We’ve been married for 25 years.

Heath Lambert: 25 years, congratulations!

Dr. Ligon Duncan: Thank you.

Heath Lambert: And you’ve got two kids, and they’re how old?

Dr. Ligon Duncan: My daughter is almost 21, and my son is almost 18.

Heath Lambert: Almost 18, so your kids are a little bit older now. Let’s talk about when your kids were more on the young end of things. What did Christmas look like in your home?

Dr. Ligon Duncan:  Well, I mean, really, it looks very similar today. And that’s because Christmas is filled with—in our home—it’s music, church, and family. If I could sort it around those things, we’re a very musical family. And so, you know, we have to fight to not start playing Christmas music in July. And so we just, I love Christmas carols. You know, about November, I start playing stuff in my car. Our Christmas is filled with music, and we like to sing together. We like to listen to music together. My wife loves Christmas. When we were in the process of courting, one of the questions my wife said, is, “Where are you on Christmas?” Knowing that some Presbyterians can be a little bit stuffy about Christmas, you know? And she just wanted to know, hey if you’re not really into Christmas, this relationship is going nowhere.

Heath Lambert: Yeah.

Dr. Ligon Duncan:  So, you know, I checked off all the right boxes. And normally we have like four Christmas trees at the house. Okay, I mean, they’re everywhere.

Heath Lambert: That’s wonderful.

Dr. Ligon Duncan:  She is all about Christmas, but the music is big. And then church. I mean all of us have been in the choir, you know, even as the pastor of the church, the choir director would let me sing in the choir at Christmas time. Just because I love, I mean I love to sing. I took voice [lessons] when I was in high school and college and have sung in a college choir and love to do that. And so music and church are a big part of it. Our church does a lot of special music during Christmas and a lot of people from all over the community come in for that special music. Every year we do a “lessons in carols” service a week or so before Christmas. And just thousands of people from the community come in for that service. And then on Christmas Eve, our church does a family carol service.

Heath Lambert: Okay. It’s less than an hour long. Everybody comes there. They’re wearing Christmas sweaters and, you know, the whole family’s together. You hear the sound of babies crying. Fill in the sanctuary, and we sing Christmas carols. We read the Christmas story from Luke, and I have a brief message where, really, I’m trying to help the young people there shape a Christ-centered view of Christmas, you know, as we get ready to go into that. And so music and church are just a huge part of our Christmas. And then just family, being with family. We’re in Mississippi, and the rest of our family is in South Carolina.

Heath Lambert: Okay. 

Dr. Ligon Duncan: So being with family at Christmas time is really special to my kids. And a lot of times, we’ll get my whole family to come down to Mississippi and be with us and sometimes we’ll go and be with them. But just being able to be with family is really special to my kids. And then because of my schedule, it’s just so nice to have a quiet week where we’re together. I mean, I don’t play golf. I don’t hunt. I work at the seminary, preach the Gospel, and I spend time with family. My family is my… that’s the thing that I do to unwind and to sort of let my hair down and to enjoy, refresh, and recharge. And so Christmas is just centered around those things. Music, church, and family.

Heath Lambert: A favorite Christmas memory?

Dr. Ligon Duncan: Well, I’ll go back to one way back to my childhood when I was probably eleven or twelve years old. My youngest brother—I have two younger brothers—my youngest brother, Mel, had a seizure on, I think, on Christmas Eve. And we almost lost him.

Heath Lambert: Oh dear. And by God’s grace, we rushed him to the hospital. He was revived and recovered fully. I’m not sure whether we ever fully understood what it was. But it was one of those… It was during that time when we were learning about sudden infant death syndrome and all that. And I don’t know what kind of a seizure it was, but he stopped breathing and turned blue, and we had to rush him to the hospital. And so, because of that, we were just totally unprepared for Christmas that year in a number of ways. But just having him was enough for all of us. Mother actually wrote a Christmas letter, a late Christmas letter, about that. I think it got to people in January, just saying that, you know, other than the gift of Christ and salvation, the gift of having Mel back was… we just couldn’t thank God for a better Christmas than the fact that all five of us were still together. So that goes way back to my childhood.

And then, you know, I think for us the first Christmas after… Sarah Kennedy was born in November, and the doctors had told us we’d never have children. And so that first Christmas with Sarah Kennedy at home and seeing Anne as a mother, because she’s a really, really good mother and just thinking, you know, this woman could have gone through life not being a mother. And to see her with Sarah Kennedy in our little house, our little 950 square foot house there in Jackson, Mississippi, with that child was just an amazing, amazing thing. And then the same thing after Jennings came along. I found out about Jennings in Louisville.

Heath Lambert: Oh yeah?

Dr. Ligon Duncan: We were in Louisville for the PCA General Assembly.

Heath Lambert: Okay.

Dr. Ligon Duncan: And my wife was feeling strange, and so she actually called up Al Mohler’s office and said, “Hey, is there like an OBGYN who’s connected to the Seminary, that seminary students use or whatever?” At that time, there was actually an OBGYN that was on the board, and so Al’s assistant got Anne connected with him and she went and visited. And he said, “Mrs. Duncan, you’re expecting.” So I came back in from a general assembly meeting, and Anne said, “Okay, sit down honey.” And I sat down, and she said, “We’re going to have a baby.” And I said, “What?!” And so, we had Jennings in February, so it was a long time before it was all four of us at Christmas. But again, I remember that last year just thinking, you know, this woman is now the mother of a daughter and a son, and how wonderful that is.