{"id":5284,"date":"2025-09-26T06:37:29","date_gmt":"2025-09-26T11:37:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/?p=5284"},"modified":"2025-09-26T06:37:29","modified_gmt":"2025-09-26T11:37:29","slug":"on-voddie-baucham-1969-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/on-voddie-baucham-1969-2025","title":{"rendered":"On Voddie Baucham (1969-2025)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The first time I saw him, he looked every bit the standout football tight end he had been at Rice University. He was 39 years old, pastoring Grace Family Baptist Church in Houston, and had just released his book Family Driven Faith: Doing What It Takes to Raise Sons and Daughters Who Walk with God<\/a> <\/em>(Crossway, 2007). It was May 2008. Alistair Begg had invited me to broadcast my radio program from that year\u2019s Basics Conference for Pastors<\/em> <\/a>at Parkside Church in Cleveland where Voddie Baucham and Jerry Bridges were the speakers. Alistair had arranged for Voddie to be my first guest on the first broadcast. He was a relative unknown to the evangelical world at that time. He was certainly unknown to me \u2013 and I to him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Voddie was waiting for me. He wasn\u2019t scheduled to go live with me until 4:20 pm, but at 3:30 pm, as I made my way up the stairs to the mezzanine where the broadcast table had been setup, Voddie was already there, sitting off to the side in the shadows \u2013 quiet, reserved, almost timid looking with a demeanor that said, \u201cI\u2019m not really sure why you even want to talk to me<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I introduced myself. We talked about the questions I planned to ask him, how long the interview would go, how to control his headphone volume and mute his microphone, if necessary, how many commercial breaks we would take. And then he sat there and watched me prepare for the broadcast, never saying a word until we opened his mic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The subject of the interview was family integrated worship \u2013 Voddie\u2019s passion for seeing fathers and mothers take the lead in worship in their home and then bringing their family to church where the family would worship together intentionally without dismissing the children for their \u201cown\u201d time away from their parents and other adults. It was a concept that \u2013 as a pastor \u2013 I had never ever considered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would never meet or speak to Voddie again after that, though I would hear him speak in person at various conferences. During the 17 years since I first met him, his gospel influence under the unction of the Holy Spirit on his preaching and writing greatly increased, blessing, edifying, and convicting the people of God across the United States. From his early work on family worship, and the call for fathers and mothers to take seriously their spiritual responsibility for the protection of their children from godless ideologies advanced by the state in public education, to his more recent work challenging the woke \u201cwhite guilt\u201d nonsense that has infected the evangelical church<\/a>, as well as taking on LGBTQ+ activists <\/a>who equate their \u201cright\u201d to a perverse lifestyle with the civil rights struggle of African-Americans, Voddie\u2019s voice was clear and prophetic \u2013 prophetic not in a \u201ctelling the future\u201d kind of way but in a \u201crepent or perish\u201d kind of way. He spoke as one having authority because his message was the gospel<\/em>. He applied the gospel<\/em> to every issue he addressed. He recognized that the issue underneath every social and cultural issue was a depraved, unregenerate heart and that until the depraved human heart was regenerated through the power of the gospel<\/em>, there are no remedies to the social and spiritual crises of our times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ours is a short, uncertain earthly life and pilgrimage. Voddie was called to the nearer presence of Jesus yesterday at the age of 56.  Pray for his wife Bridget and their beautiful children and grandchildren.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was looking forward to hearing Voddie twice early next year: at the Clear Truth Conference <\/a>in Toledo in March and at the Ligonier National Conference<\/a> in Orlando in April. \u201cA man plans his way, but the Lord orders his steps.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I will miss him. We will all miss him. The church will miss his prophetic voice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pray that God would be gracious to his church by raising up others to fill the gap left by those godly men he has recently called to himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMoses my servant is dead; now therefore arise!\u201d (Joshua 1:2)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first time I saw him, he looked every bit the standout football tight end he had been at Rice University. He was 39 years old, pastoring Grace Family Baptist Church in Houston, and had just released his book Family … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5285,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5284"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5286,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5284\/revisions\/5286"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}