Seminary classes, personal experience inspired Bledsoe’s response to cult

When pastor Derrick Bledsoe led a teaching series about cults for his church, City on a Hill DFW, he was inspired not only by a course taken at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, but by firsthand experience as well.

Bledsoe earned both a Master of Divinity (MDiv) and a Master of Theology (ThM) at Southwestern and currently is pursuing a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) at the seminary. While working toward his ThM, Bledsoe took a class on new religions and cults and wrote a paper about The Way International, a cult he had almost joined before coming to faith.

“I grew up in a very broken home—lot of drug and alcohol abuse, dad’s in prison, very checkered past,” Bledsoe said. “I was 20 years old when I met my wife (Jessica), and her one condition for marrying me was that we needed to find a church and go to church together.” Bledsoe said he was not a believer at that time.

A friend of his from high school invited them to “a church of some kind,” Bledsoe said, adding he thought it was strange that they met in a home instead of a building. He described the experience as strange.

“It was very controlled,” he explained, adding the group leader asked individuals to speak in tongues and then interpret what they said. The leader then would ask another person for a word of prophecy, and that person would respond with, “Thus says the Lord.”

“So that was weird. But other than that, it was like a pretty normal Bible study. … If you didn’t know anything about the Bible, there wasn’t anything super strange about it.”

The couple only attended that one time. Jessica refused to return, he said, telling him something was “off” about the group. A friend invited them to City on a Hill DFW, where Bledsoe said he came to faith in 2007, and has been with the church ever since. He became senior pastor of the church in 2021.

Bledsoe was teaching Wednesday night classes at the church in 2020-2021 and, having done so much reading and taken so many notes for the class on cults, decided it would be good information to share with the church. He did a series of videos that can be found on YouTube. The video on The Way International has generated the most response, with tens of thousands of views.

Bledsoe explained that following the death of cult founder Victor Paul Wierwille in 1985, infighting over who would be the new leader led some members to splinter off into their own groups. However, he said, all groups retained the core teachings of The Way, primarily the rejection of Christ’s deity.

A woman from one of those splinter groups emailed Bledsoe earlier this year, writing that she, her husband, and some friends had been devastated by the video and were looking for answers. Bledsoe credits a Christology seminar he had taken under Malcolm Yarnell, research professor of theology at Southwestern, with helping him respond. Because of the seminar, he said, “this was very, very fresh on my mind, and I had been thinking deeply about it ever since. I just was pouring out not only Scripture verses,” as well as how early church councils resolved the proper understanding of the deity of Christ.

He also sent them videos of a series he was preaching on the Gospel of Mark that dealt with the deity of Christ. He said the couple and their friends believed and not only did not return to their fellowship of The Way, but also have talked about Christ to several people in the fellowship. Others have left as well, he said.

Bledsoe said the seminary class on cults may have given him the idea to do the cult series of videos, but “it was the Christology course that made me realize how crucial the identity of Jesus really is, and how deficient … the modern church’s presentation of Him is. And when I was given this opportunity for these two families that had been told that Jesus is just a mere man, to really proclaim to them the full glory and supremacy of who He is, within a day, their whole theological worldview crumbled under the weight of it, because the Scripture is so clear about who Christ is.”

Yarnell called it “a profound joy to watch as the theological fires of advanced students at Southwestern Seminary are being stoked by a deepening appreciation for what it means to say that Jesus Christ is the one Lord God come in the flesh.

“Derrick Bledsoe is but the most prominent example of a wave of graduate students whom God the Father is calling out to glorify His eternally begotten Son,” Yarnell added. “This comes in a day when, it must be sadly admitted, many evangelicals have shown doctrinal ambiguity regarding the true deity of the living Word of God. Derrick’s influential work with a group whose founder directly rejected the deity of Christ demonstrates, I believe, that a revival of Christ-centered piety may be at hand.”

Bledsoe said that when he came to faith in 2007, “I very quickly had this sensation that I needed to be in ministry.” He was mentored by James Reeves, founding pastor of City on a Hill DFW, who earned both his MDiv and his Doctor of Ministry degrees from Southwestern Seminary. Reeves told him he would need at least an MDiv if he was going to be in ministry.

“And I didn’t even have undergraduate education at the time,” Bledsoe said. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in linguistics from the University of Texas at Arlington in 2012, then began his studies at Southwestern Seminary in 2015. He currently is working on the prospectus for his PhD and hopes to get approval to begin the first chapter by the fall. He’ll try to finish his dissertation by the end of the year.

“It’s my goal,” he said. “It’s a lofty goal. It’s a lot of work.”

Bledsoe has to balance his dissertation writing with writing his weekly sermons and taking his three young daughters to gymnastics and ballet classes.

“I do a lot of sermon-writing and dissertation-writing in lobbies and Starbucks and little places [where] I can fit it in,” he said, adding he keeps his evenings free of writing for time with his family, only working if family members are busy with other activities. “I am very, very intentional.”

“I just gotta write fast during the day,” he added with a laugh.

Looking back on his time as a Southwestern student, Bledsoe said he has received more than an education at the seminary.

“One thing I appreciate about the seminary … is that the professors here through the years have always been very godly individuals, to the degree that everything I’ve learned, while it has been academic, … there has always been a spiritual edge to all of it that I’ve really appreciated, especially as a pastor,” he said. “I don’t get to go to church that often—I’m typically the one preaching—and so coming to seminary feels, in a lot of ways, like ministry to me, and I’ve always loved that.”

Bledsoe said all Christians could benefit from the more theologically rigorous education the seminary provides, regardless of whether they are called to vocational ministry.

“I think all the time about, what would our church look like if 20 percent of our people attended seminary in some capacity?” he said. “How would that shift the dynamic of the church? And I just can’t help but think that it would greatly strengthen the church in a way that is kind of unimaginable.”