Alistair Begg has been in pastoral ministry since 1975. He graduated from the London School of Theology and subsequently served in Scotland at Charlotte Chapel in Edinburgh and Hamilton Baptist Church. In 1983, he became the senior pastor at Parkside Church near Cleveland, Ohio, where he continues to lead the congregation and teach God’s word Sunday by Sunday. Alistair is also the Bible teacher on the daily and weekend program Truth for Life. Truth For Life is distributed through 1,900 radio networks across the United States and can also be heard on the Truth for Life website , through YouTube, via podcast, and by way of numerous other listening platforms. Alistair is the author of several books. He and his wife Susan were married in 1975 and have three grown children and eight grandchildren.
The following is a transcript of a section of an interview with Alistair conducted by the ACR during the 2025 CMS Summer School, Katoomba, where Alistair was speaking on the book of 1 Peter.
Mike Leite: Alistair, I’d love to hear how you came to call Jesus your Lord and Saviour?
Alistair: I had the privilege of being brought up in a Christian home. My mother and father were Christians before they married, from different backgrounds. The world into which I was brought was that world. Kind of a Deuteronomy 6 thing, but my dad had parents who were godly in the Highlands of Scotland. So taken to church, dropped off in Sunday school, the usual stuff. I was very small, young.
I had one sister who had been born, and one Sunday I came home from the Sunday school, and I was obviously exercised about things because I asked my dad, how old do you have to be to trust Jesus? And I don’t remember the conversation, but my dad obviously spoke with me and said, it’s not about how old you are, it’s about this, it’s about that. And in that context, I remember so vividly, we knelt down together by a chair in the family room, and he led me in prayer, and essentially led me to Christ.
I went, and this is the strangest thing, that I went the next day to school, to my primary school, and I asked the teacher if I could sing a chorus to the class. Well, I can’t sing, but there must have been something about that chorus that was supposed to convey whatever had happened to me, whatever that meant. And that was the genesis of it.
When I was 15, 16, then you find out whether you’re floating on the divine afflatus of a family structure, or it’s your own. And in that context, I was baptised when I was 15. And that was, I think, if it was in Lutheran terms, it would be your confirmation.
Yeah, and then I was involved in stuff from there with school friends and everything, so that the reality of Christ as a saviour and a friend, and somebody that is very important to tell others about, was then part of my later teenage years as well.
Mike: Praise the Lord! What has ministry looked like for you as a pastor over the years?
Alistair: Well, I started in the mid-70s. Charlotte Chapel, in Edinburgh was and is strong in its Bible teaching. And I inherited all of that. I was caught up into that. I was the assistant to the pastor Derek Brine, not the assistant pastor.
Derek said, ‘If the hand of God is clearly on you, and that is acknowledged by the leadership and by the congregation, then you can be ordained to the ministry. But I don’t want you to come under the notion that that is a for sure thing’. So I did whatever Derek told me to do.
I taught the discipleship class. I visited like a crazy person, up and down the stairs of all the tenement buildings, going to nursing homes, going into schools. And he gave me one Sunday a month when I could preach in a local church, if they wanted me to preach.
And since there were so many churches in Scotland at that time without pastors, they would take anybody just about. And so, I got the opportunity to go and do that. That then opened up to a church inviting me to actually come there on a permanent basis.
And when I got there, I did just what Derek had done. You know, I taught the Bible. We had the prayer meeting. We did the Bible study. I worked with the young people. We were evangelistic in our fervour. We were trying to just build things up. We enjoyed a wonderful six years there. Many young people came to Christ.
Mike: And how did you get from there to Parkside in Ohio, America?
Alistair: Yeah, well, somebody gave my name to this church in Ohio. And it all sounds a bit of a joke… so, there was a prayer meeting, and somebody says, ‘We’re looking for a minister in our church’. And this other person says, ‘Well, I’ve got a name for you, but you have to go a long way to get this person’, never thinking that they would actually follow through on that!
And so, it was quite bizarre. And with their initial invitation to me, I said no. For all kinds of reasons. But in large measure, because I didn’t have any hankering to go to America. I had an American wife, I’d been to America quite a lot since 1972, and it was now 1981. But when the call came a second time, it was a bit like, you know, the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time. And Cleveland, Ohio is not the obvious place you’re going to go in America. There are places you might like to go. And yet, I’ve discovered along the way that there is no ideal place to serve God, except the place he sets you down.
And so, when we finally went there in 1983, it was a heart-rending experience, really. Because I was going across the ocean on a one-way ticket. And the rest, as they say, is history. I mean, it’s been a long journey.
Mike: Yes, you’ve been at Parkside 40-ish years?
Alistair: Yeah, I’ve been there for 41 years and by the time it gets to September this year [2025], I’ll finish up at 42 years. It is incredible actually, because time is such a strange thing.
Mike: Was it quite a different ministry back then to now, or did you inherit something that already had some size and complexity?
Alistair: No, no. I inherited a fledgling congregation where there had been one pastor before who had graduated from Ted’s in Chicago. When I came I’d started to do the only thing I knew what to do, and I started to teach the Bible. After three years, we sold the building. We moved into a local high school because of the growth. We thought we’d be there for maybe two years. We ended up being there for seven and a half years doing church in a way that was just radically different, which was both arduous and fascinating. Eventually, in 1993, we opened the building where we are now, and then it’s just grown and gone on from there.
Mike: Well, let me ask you some questions about preaching now. I’ll start with a broad question. When you come to the preaching task, what sort of general convictions do you bring to the task? What are you trying to keep in mind? What are you hoping to achieve?
Alistair: Well, standing way back from it, that the Bible is a book about Jesus. The old Sunday school stuff in the Old Testament is predicted in the Gospels, is revealed in the acts, is preached in the epistles, is explained in the book of Revelation. It’s anticipated. The Bible is a book about Jesus. Take your eyes off Jesus, you lose your way around the Bible. Guys like Goldsworthy have helped me a lot. I’m saying to myself all the time, Did you offer Jesus to them? So that is at least one mechanism to prevent us from going off on a tangent or turning it into 43 topical studies.
In teaching the Bible, I also want to see unbelieving people become committed followers of Jesus Christ. So, I want to teach the Bible with clarity and relevance so that unbelievers will be converted and that believers will be established, discipled in such a way that they, in turn, are taking that same message into their workplace and into their sphere of activity.
Mike: Now, don’t take this comment the wrong way… but since John Woodhouse has put me on to you, I’ve listened to quite a few of your sermons. And I find them edifying. But it’s quite different to our style of preaching in Sydney. I’ve labelled it ‘good different’. You know, Alistair’s preaching is ‘good different’, like Aldi! And I don’t know if you’ve listened to much Sydney preaching – I assume not because you’re only here for the week – but we’re fairly influenced by John Stott’s style of preaching. Very expository, almost exegetical, almost line by line, verse by verse. You probably saw an extent of that with John when he was over in Ohio with you – verse by verse preaching.
Are there particular ways that have influenced your style of preaching? Or people? Or is it just formed naturally out of yourself?
Alistair: Well, I’m influenced by all of these things. You know, Stott is fantastic. But if you read Stott’s commentary before you try and preach, don’t tell me you’ve found a better way to thread the needle. Because he was so masterful at it. Therefore, it’s wonderful to read and to benefit from. But to try and attempt it, the average person shouldn’t.
Because there was about Stott an X factor. He was unusual. There is about Dick Lucas an X factor. He is unusual. Dick is not Stotty. And Dick will say strange things in the midst of his talk. But in essence, it’s truth through personality. So, I’ve just developed my own way over time. I don’t think it is there as an example to be followed. But it is true to myself.
And I cannot do your kind of preaching. I cannot do it in those huge, big chunks. I mean, at Parkside, we’re going through John 17 at the moment. I think I’ve done 11 or 12 sermons so far. I was being interviewed by Kevin DeYoung. And Kevin said to me, ‘I don’t understand how you are able to do what you’re doing. Because all you do is you just really read the text, and then you say what’s in the text, and you apply it in ways that many people can’t even think of. And it’s effective’. And I said, ‘Well, yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I’m of the conviction that nobody knows how to preach. That preaching is such an awesome thing, that it should humble us, but it shouldn’t paralyse us. But I always tell my guys, listen, be yourself and forget yourself. And to forget yourself is more important than to be yourself.’
I guess I’m just true to my own mantra. I just do it [preach]. And that’s why I would never be a good teacher. Because people who do stuff – do things instinctively or naturally – they usually don’t know what they’re doing. That’s why some guys like Wayne Rooney, who was one of the great footballers, has already been fired three times as a manager. Because he knows how to do what he does. But he doesn’t know how he did what he does. Therefore, he can’t tell me how to do it.
So yeah, I take that as an encouragement that it was good different rather than bad different.
Mike: Definitely an encouragement! I’m very thankful for the gift you are in your ministry to us. How do you stay fresh then in preaching? I mean, 42 years! That’s a long time in the one church. And I’ve heard it described in this sort of way… Every week there’s a right sense, in which as we bring forward Christ, we need to preach something that is true and good and life-changing and life-altering, because it is good, and because it is the gospel, and it is life-altering and transformative. We want people to become more like Christ… that’s what we desire.
Alistair: Right.
Mike: But that’s a pressure. It’s one thing doing the itinerant thing, but you have been so long in the one parish, the one church. How do you stay fresh?
Alistair: It’s the steady week-by-week ministry that keeps your nose to the grindstone. If people say to me, ‘Well, you’ll be finishing with a pulpit, now you can go roaming around the universe’, that doesn’t hold any appeal to me at all. And in the steady week-by-week, some weeks, it’s good. Some weeks, it’s great. Some weeks, it’s horrible.
I used to joke with [my wife] Sue in the early days – I still actually do it, but it’s going to run out of impact. When I came home on Sunday night after the evening service, I’ll come in the door, take my shoes off, and say, ‘Tomorrow, I’m going to get a proper job’. And she used to say, ‘Oh, honey, today’s been a great day’. She doesn’t say that anymore. She says, ‘Oh, shut up. I don’t want to hear your nonsense’.
I don’t know that I actually think about whether I’m fresh or not. I remind myself: Endure hardship. Do the work of an evangelist. Discharge all the duties of your ministry.
It’s a bit like a marriage in some ways. Faithfulness is demanded of us and is accompanied by tremendous benefits, which may be more present at one time than at another time. But we’re not deciding whether we’re faithful in order that the benefits might be accruing. It is the Lord who rises with healing in his wings.
But how do I keep fresh? I’m reading all the time. I’m engaged with my colleagues all the time. I’m asking them questions all the time. And I can’t get over the fact that God gave me this privilege! You know, you sometimes get up from your desk and walk up and down the room, and say to yourself, ‘They actually give me money in order that I can be able to read my Bible right now so that I can try and tell them what I’ve discovered’.
Mike: Can I change tack slightly here and ask about your preaching frequency? We’ve just put out a survey to all senior ministers asking about how often they preach. Now Parkside is a fairly large church, with a big team. I think I saw on the website that there are 12 pastoral staff and 20 support team members. So, how often do you preach?
Alistair: My preaching frequency has been essentially 40 weeks out of the 52. And if I were in another context and doing things again, and didn’t have the radio thing [where Alistair Begg’s sermons are broadcast], then I would be far more willing to share in the teaching through a book. But I’m jealous for my pulpit, I don’t give it out to anybody. And I’m gratified by the fact that my guys, none of them deviate from the course. That is, they follow the course of ‘Let’s pray together, here’s the Bible, let’s go’. It is a shared responsibility. But the person who has the preponderance of the pulpit, of the word of God, that person has their hand on the tiller for the longest time, the prolonged time, and is going to be the most influential person, and the influence will be simply the influence of being the servant of the word over a consistent period of time. Up until Covid, I was preaching four times a Sunday. I had three morning services plus the evening service, and the evening service is a different service.
Mike: Last question, sort of a self-indulgent one. I’m 10 years into the preaching task. What’s your wisdom for a still young-ish preacher like me? What’s your wisdom for me, brother?
Alistair: Work really hard not to lose the wonder… that the routine doesn’t squeeze out the sense of privilege and joy. I resist everything that would allow you to say, ‘Well, this is becoming somewhat mundane now, or this is routine’.
Part of it has to do with the danger of becoming more capable, and the more capable we become, the danger is that we start to believe our own stories. We need to take our task seriously without taking ourselves too seriously. If we get that reversed, then we’re in trouble. I guess what I’m saying is, make sure we don’t lose the wonder of the preaching task. Whatever’s involved in doing that. For me, reading biography, poking around in things, and just remember that in marriage as in ministry, really the key is doing the basics well most of the time. I always ask the question to my associates, ‘Are you encouraged, brother? Are you in good heart? It’s such a great privilege to be a servant of God’s word, that he speaks through his word. And that he uses the most unlikely people in the process.’
And be yourself. Your DNA is yours. He made you exactly as you are. To use you as you are. You’re not a clone. You’re not a copy of this guy or that guy. You are Mike.
This interview was first published in the ACR’s Easter 2025 journal.