Ouch and Amen!

Reflections on the Multigenerational Legacy of Voddie Baucham

A couple of months ago, I had the privilege of speaking at the Kingdom Come Conference at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. This conference was hosted by the Institute of Faith and Culture, and the theme of the conference captured the urgent need for this cultural moment.

The theme was about “The Christian Citizen”. It was purposefully designed to mobilize Christians for faithful civic and cultural engagement in their respective vocations. For far too long, many Christians have resigned their faith from the public square. And for fear of being labelled “political” or “intolerant”, most Christians have become comfortable with being secret or closet Christians. Too afraid to blow their cover or to even come out of their closet of complacency and comfort.

Most pastors are also sheepishly silent when it comes to tackling political issues head-on, and their tongue-in-check sermons often lack the potency to speak truth to power. Their exegesis and hermeneutic feels myopic. Cultural isolation becomes a false sense of piety. This form of piety keeps many stuck in the closet of a privatized faith devoid of godly ambition and meaningful gospel witness. And their silence is loud. It is far more deafening than the cultural noise around us.

Thankfully, the conference was headlined by strong clear and consistent voices that are widely recognized as unapologetic thought-leaders in our culture today. Yet one clear, courageous, and consistent voice was not there—Voddie Baucham. His absence was the reason I was on that stage, speaking on behalf of him, his family, and his ministry.

It was a great honor to stand where Voddie once stood proclaiming the truth of the gospel with both clarity and conviction. In my talk I reflected on the gospel-centered mission and vision that animated his multigenerational legacy. This moment felt bittersweet. I could feel the pinch of his absence, and the very weight of his signature phrase, “If you can’t say amen, you outta say ouch!” But this time, I had to hold both the amen and ouch in tension as I wobbly walked the tightrope of unfathomable grief and inexpressible gratitude on that stage.

It has often been said, “Never meet your heroes, they will only disappoint you.” But over a decade ago, I had an even greater privilege of meeting my hero—Voddie Baucham—in South Central Africa, Lusaka, Zambia. I affectionately called him, “Mudala”, which simply means elder, wise one, or old man in Zulu. I was an eager student from South Africa thrilled to be part of a first-of-its-kind semi-Classical, Liberal arts, Christian worldview university. This is not your typical seminary or Bible college, but a fully-fledged university that brings all disciplines of learning under the lordship of Christ.

This is where our journey began and our relationship took root and grew over time. I got to sit at his feet and stand on his shoulders—and I almost left no book unread in his library. He quickly became my mentor, teacher, and friend. I grew to appreciate his multigenerational vision of the gospel, a vision that has profoundly shaped the way I think about God, marriage, and family. I got to know a flawed yet faithful man behind the pulpit.

Voddie wielded that phrase like a scalpel on the pulpit. “If you can’t say amen, you gotta say ouch!” he would declare with his deep booming voice. And suddenly those who heard him felt the presence of the Holy Spirit and power of God’s word. His preaching was more than a shallow show of performative theatrics but a spectacle of the power of the gospel not to entertain but to expose, confront, and save.

And in 2016, I had my own firsthand experience of both the ouch and amen.

It was two years after Voddie’s TGC article on Ferguson went viral and followed by his debacle at the Time to Speak conference in Memphis, TN, that the idea for his book Fault Lines had already percolated in his mind. The research process was steady but slow, it took us nearly five years to complete. I worked as his research assistant for his last two book projects Fault Lines and It’s Not Like Being Black. It was an arduous and meticulous process of combing through countless databases and an almost endless stack of academic literature and books.

This process drastically changed my life. It taught me that writing requires prayer, prayer, and more prayer. It requires devotion to the Lord, dependence upon the Spirit, diligence and discipline. Voddie showed me that writing is and must be a spiritually transformative process.

He was a man of few words, and he did not waste words. He was a master-storyteller. He sharpened my research and writing skills by inviting me into the very trenches of his own writing and research process. He would often say to my young long-winded self, “Tshepo, land the plane or you will run out of gas and crash!” Voddie knew how to make a point stick while sticking to the point—a skill that I am yet to learn.

His discipled me in more ways than I can count. In the classroom, as in life, Voddie embodied his signature phrase. For him, teaching was more than just filling minds with information; it was about discipleship. His teaching pressed on your weak spots, exposing where you leaned on cultural assumptions rather than God’s Word. I remember vividly the times he challenged my own thinking. It was an ouch—and—amen moment. But it also grew me. He knew when to let the ouch linger long enough to humble you, and when to lead you into the joy of amen.

No aspect of his life revealed Mudala’s commitment to multigenerational faithfulness than his family life. He often said that failure at home was failure everywhere else. He believed that more than anything else. And he lived that out in his own home. It was far from being picture-perfect but it was powerful and living picture of the gospel in the home. Yet his family life was always lived in the tension of the ouch and amen. It exposed selfishness while expressing God’s sanctifying grace. His marriage and family life has become a beautiful tapestry of the power of the gospel to let the world see both the ouch of our sin and the amen of God’s gracious forgiveness.

So to stand at the Kingdom Come conference where he once stood and would have stood if the Lord had not called him home was a humbling experience. He has now joined the church triumphant in the heavenly places with Christ. The baton has passed on to us, and the harvest is still plenty for the church militant. Our work still continues yet the Lord knows how much I miss him. But even this loss I count as gain for the sake of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ.

As I land this plane, I can only say: Ouch…but Amen!