When it comes to the Bible, we, in the English-speaking world, are profoundly blessed for we have at our disposal scores of translations of Scripture. While they range from excellent to abysmal, in many cases even the worst of them is far superior to the best available in any number of other languages. And, of course, we acknowledge that multitudes of languages remain which still have no access at all to God’s Word. Certainly we have little cause to complain and every cause to express gratitude to God. We have the luxury and responsibility even, of not just studying the Bible, but of first seeking out the best translation available. And that is increasingly becoming a daunting task as each seems to have its strengths and its weaknesses. Meanwhile, the translation philosophies that bring about such strengths and weaknesses remain hidden to most readers who prefer to leave such discussions in the hands of the academics.

There are a vast number of ministries serving the church today. Though I am familiar with many of them (by name at least) I have often wondered what each of them offer to us, and what we can offer to them. I thought it might be useful to offer a series of interviews with some prominent ministries to ask just this kind of question—who are you?, what do you do?, why do you exist?, and so on. It is useful, I think, even to know the size of the budgets of these organizations and the number of people they employ. You may be surprised at how big (or how small) some of these organizations really are. So over the next few weeks I will be interviewing representatives from many of these ministries. I trust you will find the interviews interesting and hope they will show you how different organizations are seeking to serve the Lord in such different ways.

First up in the series is Grace to You, a ministry that I am sure is familiar to most of us as the teaching ministry of John MacArthur. In this interview Grace to You is represented by Phil Johnson, the original Pyromaniac. Kudos to Phil who (remarkably) typed this whole interview on his iPhone while flying from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Those thumbs must be throbbing.

How and when did GTY begin?
This year marks the ministry’s 40th anniversary. We technically started with a handful of volunteers on John MacArthur’s first Sunday as pastor of Grace Community Church. There was a man in the church who coordinated the recording of those earliest sermons on reel-to-reel tape. His plan was to make a few copies to send to missionaries. He would make the copies by daisy-chaining tape recorders together in his living room and duplicating tapes in real time. He was doing this on the first Sunday John began pastoring the church, and that first Sunday’s sermon is still in the GTY catalog. It’s titled “How to Play Church.”

Right away, people began to request copies to send to friends and relatives. The guy who was doing the recordings kept having to recruit volunteers to meet the demand for tapes. That was the genesis of Grace to You (known as the Word of Grace Tape ministry in those days).

John’s first Sunday at Grace was in February of 1969. By the end of ‘69 the ministry had outgrown that living room and was moved to the church and placed under the oversight of the elders.

Cassette tapes were fairly new and unknown in 1969, but the need for a more efficient way to duplicate and distribute recordings drove the elders to the new technology. The cassette format made it possible for tapes to be duplicated at high speed and distributed by the thousands.

Tapes were cheap: $1 apiece. And within 5 years the ministry was distributing a million tapes a year. (We get that many downloads in a typical month today.)

In 1978, because of the persistence of one volunteer (named Norm Sper), a daily radio broadcast featuring John MacArthur’s teaching began airing in three cities (Baltimore, Tampa, and Tulsa). Known as “Grace to You,” the program was 30 minutes long, meaning only half a sermon could air each day. Industry experts insisted the format would not work; sermons should be aired on weekends in an hour-long format. Daily programs needed to be live talk or studio-based teaching, they said. Sermons were too impersonal.

John Macarthur himself was skeptical of the format and wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about the prospects of radio at first. But Norm and a staff of enthusiastic recruits worked tirelessly to get the broadcast on the air, and it was immediately successful.

I was living in the Tampa Bay area when “Grace to You” debuted in the autumn of ‘78, and I was a devoted listener from day one.

I came to work for the ministry in 1983, and in 1985 we formally merged the Word of Grace tape ministry with “Grace to You” radio. The resulting organization became a standalone, nonprofit parachurch ministry under an independent board, and we soon adopted “Grace to You” as the name of the consolidated ministry.

Why does GTY exist? What are its chief goals and key emphases?
Our purpose statement speaks to that very point:

As believers committed to God and walking in obedience to Him, we affirm the purpose of Grace to You, which is to teach biblical truth with clarity, taking advantage of various means of mass communications to expand the sphere of John MacArthur’s teaching ministry.

We use mass communications media to expose John’s teaching to as wide an audience as possible “for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ; until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:12-13).

One of our principal tasks is to protect believers from being “tossed here and there by waves, and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming” (v. 14). We accept the God-given responsibility of “speaking the truth in love” (v. 15) and strive for the growth of the church and glory of the Lord, rather than the praise and honor of men.

Our role is not to supplant the local church’s ministry, but to support it by providing additional resources for those hungering for the truth of God’s Word. Media ministries can never substitute for involvement in a biblical church, group Bible study, or interaction with a teacher. Yet we sense the need for more in-depth resources, evidenced by the many Christians and Christian leaders worldwide who depend on our ministry to supplement their own study.

Our desire is that God be glorified through Grace to You’s resources. The Lord Jesus Christ is the Head of this ministry, and we desire to perform our work as unto Him, to reflect Him to all those we encounter, and to operate not in our own strength but through His power (Philippians 4:13).

How can GTY serve the readers of this web site?
We aim to supplement, not supplant, the ministries of local churches by providing resources for in-depth Bible teaching. Our most important ministries have pastors and church leaders in view. We also have a vital ministry to lay people who (for various reasons) aren’t finding adequate spiritual nourishment from the weekly teaching in whatever church they attend.

Who are the key leaders within the ministry?
John MacArthur, of course, and our board of directors. We also have a 6-man management team who oversee our staff on a day-to-day basis, I lead them, and Don Green (managing director) handles most of the hands-on administration. All our staff, starting with the management team, are supremely gifted. The second-newest guy on the management team has been there more than 10 years, so it’s a very stable ministry.

How many employees does GTY have?
Around 50 full time plus 175 volunteers who donate time and energy every week.

What is GTY’s annual budget? How is the ministry financed and how do you ensure financial integrity?
Our annual budget today is about $17.9 million. GTY is funded about 85 percent by donations from our listeners; 15 percent by sales of materials. We manage costs and expenditures carefully. We have been members of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountavility (ECFA) since its inception. We follow standard accounting and reporting procedures, and we are audited annually by a large, independent accounting firm.

How do you expect GTY will be different in ten years? Twenty years?
I expect we’ll have some younger staff members and lots of new media. But we want to be faithful to our purpose statement, and to our doctrinal position. Both of those have remained unchanged for 40+ years.

J. Vernon McGee’s ministry is the model for our future plans. We intend to keep broadcasting John MacArthur’s timeless Bible teaching as long as people will listen—hopefully my successors will still be doing that even long after we’re all gone.

How does GTY work with other Christian ministries?
We obviously maintain an ongoing, informal partnership with our sister ministries, The Master’s College & Seminary and Grace Community Church. That’s a fairly close relationship, even though we are not organizationally connected in any way. It’s based on common ministry goals and strengthened by the fact that we affirm the same doctrinal statement.

We also enjoy friendly relations with a host of other ministries, such as T4G, ACE, Ligonier, Desiring God, etc. Our involvement with these other ministries ranges from conferences in which we are joint participants to staff relationships in which we often compare notes, share ideas, discuss common goals, and seek solutions to common problems.

Speaking personally, what are some of the things you’ve learned from John MacArthur while working closely with him in this ministry?
I’ve learned to appreciate the importance of diligent study, courage in the face of opposition to the truth, and various helps for better discernment. Also, I was pretty much an Arminian until I heard John MacArthur’s teaching on Ephesians 1-2, and that series convinced me that God is sovereign in election.

What are some of the ways GTY has seen evidence of God’s hand of blessing?
The long-term, steady growth of the ministry has been remarkable. No matter what crisis or financial collapse threatens the national economy, it seems God always supplies our needs. The only significant downturn our ministry has ever experienced was owing to bad decisions involving subtle compromises in our development philosophy. We have seen God supply our needs again and again, in miraculous ways, and as long as we have kept our focus on doing ministry rather than getting diverted by fundraising campaigns, every need we have is always abundantly supplied.

How can the readers of this web site serve and support GTY?
Pray for us, partner with us, and use the resources we provide to help spread God’s Word in an increasingly ungodly culture.

I have (slowly) been reading Bruce Gordon’s new biography of Calvin (titled simply Calvin) and recently came to a chapter describing the situation in France during Calvin’s ministry in Geneva. As a Frenchman, Calvin’s influence spread beyond Geneva and into his native land. There Protestants, some connected to Calvin and others not, were being killed as part of a systematic effort to root out the seditious faith. Many were hunted down, tortured and executed.

This short description of such an occasion comes from the pen of Eustache Knobelsdorf, a Catholic German who was studying in Paris. He witnessed the execution of a Protestant in 1542 and wrote out an account. I reproduce it here because it stands as a testimony of God’s truthfulness when he says that he will care for his own, not necessarily by avoiding the fire, but sometimes through the fire.

*****

I saw two burnt there. Their death inspired in me differing sentiments. If you had been there, you would have hoped for a less severe punishment for these poor unfortunates. … The first was a very young man, not yet with a beard, he was the son of a cobbler. He was brought in front of the judges and condemned to have his tongue cut out and burned straight afterward. Without changing the expression of his face, the young man presented his tongue to the executioner’s knife, sticking it out as far as he could. The executioner pulled it out even further with pinchers, cut it off, and hit the sufferer several times on the tongue and threw it in the young man’s face. Then he was put into a tipcart, which was driven to the place of execution, but, to see him, one would think that he was going to a feast. … When the chain had been placed around his body, I could not describe to you with what equanimity of soul and with what expression in his features he endured the cries of elation and the insults of the crowd that were directed towards him. He did not make a sound, but from time to time he spat out the blood that was filling his mouth, and he lifted his eyes to heaven, as if he was waiting for some miraculous rescue. When his head was covered in sulphur, the executioner showed him the fire with a menacing air; but the young man, without being scared, let it be known, by a movement of his body, that he was giving himself willingly to be burned.

After a one-week hiatus, we are back with another edition of Free Stuff Fridays. This week’s sponsor is Bardin & Marsee Publishing and the prize they are offering is a mite unusual. They have offered up six copies of The Waterproof Bible. Now this is the kind of product that might lead you to immediately roll your eyes; but hang on for a moment. The Waterproof Bible is simply a Bible that is, well, waterproof. Available in the NIV and KJV, it is regular-sized Bible but one that you can take with you anywhere. The pages are very difficult to tear and, as you’d expect, you can drop it in the ocean and it will be just fine. The copy they sent to me shipped already-wet just to prove that this Bible truly is not going to get soggy.

Here is Bobby Bardin’s story of how he came to see the need for a waterproof Bible:

As a believer in Christ and one that has always loved to be in God’s creation exposed to the elements, I have often desired to have my Bible by my side for reading here and there. My exploring has led me to mountain tops, river banks, sandy beaches, misty valleys, and hot springs, and has caused me to become soaked to the core while backpacking or paddling. I hate to admit that my Bible has not made it with me on many of these occasions for the sake of protecting it and because I don’t trust a plastic bag not to puncture. Michael and I have been talking about how awesome it would be to have a waterproof Bible for many years now, and we have finally decided to produce it ourselves. Now we can put an end to all the worrying that we have done in the past about our Bibles and take God’s Word wherever our adventures lead.

To make this happen, Michael, Anna (my wife), and I have formed Bardin & Marsee Publishing, LLC to produce the world’s first waterproof, rugged, and tear resistant Bibles. We hope that you find heaps of enjoyment reading God’s Word in all weather environments.

Bardin & Marsee have kindly offered up six copies of the NIV Waterproof Bible for this giveaway so there will be, of course, six winners.

Rules: You may only enter the draw once. Simply fill out your name and email address to enter the draw. As soon as the winners have been chosen, all names and addresses will be immediately and permanently erased. Winners will be notified by email. The giveaway closes Saturday at noon.