Hi, this is Jonathan Levin.

This is Mark Devere.

And welcome to this episode of Nine Marks Pastors Talk.

Nine Marks exists to help pastors build healthy churches learn more at nine marks.org.

And with us today, we have a friend, a pastor friend, pastor of Emmanuel Church in Winston-Salem,

not Emmanuel Baptist Church.

I assure you we are a Baptist church, but that didn't make it into the name.

Are you embarrassed about being a Baptist?

No, I'm no more embarrassed about being a Baptist than I'm about being a Calvinist.

And that didn't make it into the name either. I did many other of my theological distinctives.

Okay, that's Alex DePrema, who has written this great book, Spurgeon and the Poor, How the Gospel

compels Christian Social Concern. And you did your Ph.D. on Spurgeon from the Southeastern Baptist

Theological Seminary. And is this effectively, Alex, your dissertation? No, it's probably

30 to 40 percent my dissertation and the rest of original stuff. So not nearly as technical.

This is aimed at the church, named at pastors,

lay people. I do have a lot of footnotes in the book so historians and students can kind of

trace some of the... It doesn't read like an academic book, though. No, that was, the aim was to

give it to the church. And Alex, is this your attempt to make Spurgeon woke?

I couldn't make Spurgeon anything, I'm sure.

But no, he does not come off in this book as woke.

But he comes off in this book as interested in benevolence, mercy ministry, social concern, those kinds of things, which you actually, Mark, can be interested in without being woke.

So his evangelical social engagement, as you call it, is, you think, typical of him

...