---
title: 'Princeton and Missions (with Chad Vegas)'
type: video
hasMedia: true
requiresPurchase: false
authors:
- 'Jonathan Master'
- 'Chad Vegas'
date: 2026-10-13
collection: 'Dead Presbyterians Society'
subcollection: 'Season 4'
topics:
- 'Missions'
- 'Foreign Missions'
url: https://confessional.org/dead-presbyterians-society/season-4/princeton-and-missions-with-chad-vegas
---

# Princeton and Missions (with Chad Vegas)

What can the missionary vision of Old Princeton teach the church today?In this episode of the Dead Presbyterians Society podcast, we welcome Chad Vegas to discuss the new Log College Press book Princeton and Missions, exploring the missionary convictions, theological foundations, and enduring legacy of old Princeton Seminary.

[Watch](https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/1234502057)

## Transcript

Greetings from the past. Welcome to Dead Presbyterian Society. My name is Jonathan Master.

I'm the president of Greenville Seminary, and today we have a special guest. We're here with Chad Vegas, who's the pastor of Sovereign Grace Church. Chad also is the co-founder of Radius International, and he teaches submissions classes here at Greenville Seminary.

Good friend. And what we're here to discuss with Chad is a new book by Log College Press entitled Princeton and Missions, and we're not gonna be able to go through every chapter because it's such a rich volume, but we want to at least introduce you to it. So Chad, thanks for coming on today.

Oh, I'm glad to be here. Thank you for having me. So we are trying to explore American Presbyterianism on Dead Presbyterian Society, and Princeton Seminary looms large.

I think many times when people think about Princeton Seminary, they think about it in terms of some of the technical debates that happened, writings on the inspiration of Scripture, writings against German higher criticism. They kind of defense of the faith and a positive system of reform doctrine, but this focuses on something that people don't appreciate about Princeton as much as they should, which is the focus on missions. Yeah.

I was excited about this particular volume and sort of brought up and pressed on the idea of what if Log College Press put together this volume largely as a result of my work in Radius, and as we were working in Radius and training students, I'm continually looking for resources, voices who write and teach on missions in a way that's compelling and biblical and understands the centrality of the church and sending and really has a sort of clarion call to this task, and I found thin, thin resources mostly, very few number of them, until you came along at one of our Radius conferences and did a session on Princeton and missions and talked about Princeton's motto of, one of their mottos of being a nursery for missionaries, and you did a session, I remember, on J.W. Alexander expressly, and I heard that, and Brooks Buser, who is the president of Radius, also heard it, and we thought, where has this been all our lives? And so then, you know, at your encouragement, I started reading more of these guys, and as I read J.W. Alexander and considerations on four missions, and as I read Archibald Alexander and Samuel Miller, I was just thinking, I feel like these men have lived in my head my entire ministry developing all this missions work, and I've never heard of them or read them before, and it was just amazing to hear these guys say it in ways I wish we could have articulated it, you know, but we weren't, we didn't have the resources to articulate things the way these men did, and it's just compelling, and it was shocking to me how little people think of Princeton in that way. Right, right. Yeah, I think that's right.

I think most people don't realize, first 50 years, Princeton Seminary, about 30% of their graduates went off to serve, mostly among unreached languages or unreached people groups, and that's kind of an astonishing statistic, just to think about seminary education in general, and then when you step back and say, why was that? One of the reasons, I think there are several, but one of the reasons was the professors, the faculty members, were writing and thinking about this at a really high level. Oh, and preaching sermons at Presbytery or at their GA, their General Assembly, but also to the students in the chapel, right, that are so compelling. I mean, you read them and you're moved.

I joked with my friends as I'd send them stuff, you need to read this because as I was reading it I thought, should I stand up and sing a hymn right now? Right. Should I pray? Because I just didn't read it and think I was intellectually stimulated. I haven't thought about it that way.

Wasn't that a clever turn of phrase? It was far more than, these guys are great rhetoricians, it was, oh my, they've made me contemplate the Lord and his grace to us and the call to the mission field in a way that has struck me to the heart. I don't know what to do with it. I'm humbled by it, I'm challenged by it.

A couple times I started wondering if I was really saved, you know, is my love for Christ like this? You know, so it was very helpful. I mean, I don't want to give the opinion that they cause you to lack assurance, but they certainly have... They press you on your duties as a Christian. Absolutely, absolutely, and cause you to realize there are some real areas that I need to repent.

Yeah. So, it's helpful. If you were to take a step back, I want to go through some of these specifically and ask your thoughts on them, but if you were to take a step back, you mentioned at the beginning that you're always on the lookout for good missions literature and sadly it's hard to find, and then you stumble upon these or introduced to them.

What do you think are the big differences? I mean, what are the things that they emphasize that we should be emphasizing more or that modern missions literature has missed? Yeah, I think there are a few things. One, they're deeply biblical. So, a lot of modern missions literature seems as if it has no real connection to the Bible.

It has a connection to cultural anthropology, to sociology, to various discussions of what people have heard that's happening overseas, and therefore this is a model we ought to reduplicate. Little conversation about what does the Bible say about these things with real depth and clarity, and these men don't have their missiology growing out of what they've heard as being practiced in the field, and then they're trying to find a way to justify it by the Bible. It's quite the opposite.

They're in the Word of God, and out of that is coming this. This is what we need to be doing, and it's compelling. So, that's one area where it's distinct.

Two, it's not cold and academic. They're rigorous, biblically, theologically. They're rigorous, but it is heartwarming and challenging and encouraging.

Like I said, there were times I was repenting. There were times I was singing, and I'm not an emotional guy, but I was really moved a number of times by their messages, and they take on objections. This was what was a lot of fun for me, is there are so many of the objections that we deal with now in the missions world from both, let's say, the more pragmatic side of the missions world and from the more principally reformed side of the missions world that we deal with, that these guys were answering 200 years ago and answering really well.

The clothing of our language and some of the cultural situations are different, but it's the same fundamental issue, right, in principle, and that was really helpful. So, I think it's the biblical fidelity. It's the passion and the sense that this is a preacher speaking to me, like Christ is speaking to me, and I would say they have a wonderful way of applying all of this that answers so many of the questions that are immediately coming up in your heart and mind as they're speaking.

Those things are what make it compelling. It's why this volume, when it comes out, will be on my required reading list for my students and at all the seminaries where I teach missions, because there's no other volume I'd rather them read. It's the one volume I'll probably push on my church, like if you want to understand this, you need to read this volume.

It's going to be right at the top of my list, like it'll be there, and then read the autobiography of John G. Peyton, and you'll pretty much be covered like you'll get it. Right. Yeah.

So, I know that you dove deeply into Princeton sources, selected 12 chapters that were, well, they weren't chapters at the time, but we made them into chapters, sermons or addresses that were given that are now chapters, but of the 12, so you love them all, and there were things that you had to leave on the cutting room floor that probably belong in here, but just because of space, what were ones that stuck out? I mean, you mentioned a couple experiences where you're reading through something and it just hits you where the Lord really convicts you. What were some of the ones that had that effect? So, one would be Caspar Hodge, Senior, not Junior. Junior was not great.

Senior, I had never read him, son of Charles Hodge. He's not somebody I had ever even heard of until I was reading through all the resources on the Law College Crisis website, and his particular chapter or sermon at the time was really challenging in regard to the idea that missions is essential to the life of the church. In other words, he actually makes a statement that might be shocking in the Presbyterian world, but he says, if your church isn't growing, it's dying, and he doesn't mean what people think about in the church growth world.

That's not what he's getting at. He's getting at the notion that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Christ, and he's come to give life to the church such that the church shines the light of the gospel to the ends of the earth, and so if, you know, the light of the lampstand is no longer shining, Christ is going to remove the lampstand. That's the nature of the church to shine forth, and so there's something seriously wrong in the health of the body of that church if the light of the gospel isn't going forth from it, and so if it's not growing, it's dying.

Really compelling the way he comes after that. That was challenging. J.W. Alexander's consideration for foreign missions that was really directed at the seminary students.

It's an article I already—it's one of the few articles I walk through in my missions course. I say, you have to read this before this session, and we're going to walk through that article. It's one of those articles that is deeply unsettling, encouraging, makes you wonder if, is my love to Christ such? He has this one line where he says that the minister of the gospel doesn't get to say to the Lord, I will follow you thus far and no further.

Like, I've cut it off at South Carolina or California or whatever. I will follow you wherever you want me to go. That's what the Christian says.

That's especially what the minister of the gospel says. He's a soldier who belongs to a general who allocates him to the field that he—and you read through that, and it's really compelling. Archibald Alexander, some of his calls to the church with regard to mission are amazing.

So I loved everything he did. I mean, I loved everything all these guys did. Samuel Miller's sermon that is directed to Zion, where I think I had to look at the exact name of it.

We have it here. Zion called to awake. I didn't know what to call it but a trumpet blast.

Yeah, in your introduction, you say something like there's no other word I could use than trumpet blast. It's a trumpet blast of the church. Like, wake up.

This is what we're called to do, and oh my goodness. It wasn't the most moving sermon of his that is in this volume. The most moving sermon of his has to do with a young missionary who went from the seminary to Africa, died really quickly, and then he talks about how sort of the dead, this young man speaks to the church that we would consider a travesty, a waste of a life, and why actually it's anything but that.

That was a moving sermon. That's probably the most personally moving sermon I read in the volume, but Zion awake is the one that made you want to charge the battlefield. Archibald Alexander, Samuel Miller, C.W. Hodge, and then the J.W. Alexander one.

As you thought through what you wanted to include, you're trying to pick the best ones, but you're also trying to hit certain themes to make sure that there are certain things that are touched on. Talk about that a little bit. What were the things, having read through a wide range of sources, what were the things that you said, we really have to have something that speaks to this, and it's already written? Yeah, I think one thing you have to have, that you have to speak to, especially in our current moment, is what is the mission of Christ's Church? Right.

And that is attached to what is the mission of the Christ, and what is the mission of the Holy Spirit, right? And so I wanted volumes that addressed both of those issues, or sorry, chapters in this volume that addressed both of those issues. And so Archibald Alexander comes after that quite well, so does Caspar Hodge. They both come after that quite well, from a different angle.

Yeah. One more on the mission of Christ in his church, the other on the mission of the Spirit, largely in his church, but very helpful. I wanted something that also addressed what does it mean to be a called missionary, right? And what sort of character do you have to have? What sort of training do you have to have? What sort of constitution do you have to have? How do you... Why is that an important question? I think most men show up at seminary already knowing they're gonna return to their hometown and pastor their home church.

Like they've already sort of narrowed the field of where they're gonna go. They've not considered themselves as soldiers of Christ, being allocated wherever Christ wants to send them. They've not... And then you have this other subset of men, though, who come in saying, I'm gonna go to the foreign mission field.

And in both cases, you want to ask, well, do you have the graces and giftings for the pastoral office? And by the way, if you want to go to the foreign mission field, do you have the physical constitution to even handle it? Do you have the right... There are a number of providential circumstances in your life that need to be there for that to be the case. Are you even decent at learning language? Physical constitution matters because it's gonna be hard, right? So there's a number of those. Does your wife have the physical constitution to handle it? Questions like that need to be answered.

Don't just assume you're gonna go. But for the guy coming saying, I'm gonna minister domestically, what makes you think you have the right to decide that coming in the door for training? I mean, J.W. Alexander is gonna just flat-out say, if you're not willing to go wherever Christ sends you, including the foreign mission field, then you're not qualified for pastoral ministry at all. Yeah, if you haven't seriously considered that this might be your calling, then you shouldn't.

Shouldn't do any pastoral ministry. Because essentially what you're saying is, is that I'm willing to minister the gospel as long as it's the place I want to. And it's like, well, that's not the call of the gospel minister.

So I wanted a chapter on that to address those issues. I wanted a chapter that addresses, for example, how do we understand Luke 4 and gospel ministry, especially because the idea of gospel ministry or evangelism being to lost people and not just a kind of social gospel, which Green addresses quite well, that becomes a real issue in mission circles. Archibald Alexander, one of our chapters, he addresses a number of objections about going overseas.

I wanted something addressing all these kinds of objections that come up, some of which he's coming from a different context, like we shouldn't go to heathens because they're not yet westernized enough to go. And he's gonna answer that. Well, I would say we have the exact opposite problem, which is we shouldn't go to heathens because we're going to mess up their pristine culture, sort of.

Right, right. Sort of that kind of woke multiculturalism has brought in this idea that there's some pristine native culture out there and we're gonna come and ruin it with Western Christianity. And we're coming at it from a different angle, but the central objection is the same.

And so in principle, he's dealing with that. There's not enough in the missions world on the centrality of the church in sending and the responsibility of the church in sending. And they take that for granted.

I mean, they prove it. It's not that they don't address it, but I mean, they absolutely are committed to that. Yes.

And they're standing up at their general assembly, calling the church to this. Right. You know, J.W. Alexander expressly has a quote from John Rice saying the Presbyterian church is a missionary society.

That's what it is. That I think is startling to people to hear. Yeah.

But he just comes right after that and it's very helpful. So I wanted to address a number of these issues I've run into throughout the years. Now, they're not going to address what's happening with disciple making movements in the current missions world because they've never heard of it.

Right. But if you understand what they're teaching, the implications of it answer all those questions. Yeah, I was struck by the William Henry Greene.

I know that B.B. Warfield later than that talks about, you know, has an article about essentially pitfalls that missionaries fall into. That's not what it's called, but that's essentially what it is. And he talks about sort of social gospel type stuff, although that's not the language that he used.

But you can tell that's what he's talking about. It's surprising to go even a little further back and have William Henry Greene sort of addressing those kinds of issues. Oh, it's excellent.

Yeah. You know, Kevin DeYoung addressed it in his book on the mission of the church and and really look for. And but you've got William Henry Greene addressing that way, way, way before.

Yeah. You know, Kevin DeYoung was a glimmer in his parents. Right.

Before his parents were. Well, before before that kind of social gospel movement was was a thing, at least or at least was recognized as a major force. Yeah.

He must have been seeing little signs of it. Yeah. Yeah.

Because he addresses it quite well and very helpfully. Another objections come today, which I was glad to put in this article in The Dead Speaking by Miller sermon, really, on The Dead Speaking by Miller, is there's a kind of risk aversion that currently exists. It's a waste of your life to go and suffer and die young, which will happen inevitably to some people who go to these places.

They just will. They'll run into diseases their body's not used to. They'll run into suffering under governments they're not used to.

There's a number of things can happen. And that that sermon, The Dead Speaking, comes right after these objections. And I'm increasingly hearing these objections from young people now that it's unwise to go places where you're going to risk your life.

You could be much more useful just staying here and being safe. It's unwise to go to places where it's going to be there's going to be a risk to the safety of your wife and children. You should just go single.

In fact, just went crazy on X or Twitter recently that there was a post by a guy saying that any man who takes his family to any place that's pastorally difficult or dangerous doesn't love his family and therefore is not qualified to be in ministry. And then it was just went on thousands of replies about why no one who goes into foreign missions should even be married. They should all be single.

I wanted to jump on and reply. I didn't. But I wanted to jump on and reply and sort of in a smart aleck way say you're right.

No one going into anything difficult like ministry should be married. The church has never experimented that idea before. What could possibly go wrong? Yeah, it's interesting.

I think people have those objections even just to pastoral ministry here. Oh, yeah. But it's more amplified, of course, when you talk about overseas.

Oh, for sure they do. I think young men are less and less interested in ministry for a variety of reasons. Lack of honor in the office that maybe used to exist culturally.

Low pay. How am I going to provide for my wife and children? Those are real questions. I understand why they have them.

But it's becoming a kind of assumed posture of many in the church that the answer to those questions is, well, then don't do any of those things that might cause it to be difficult for you to care for your wife and children. Well, yeah. And Miller's point is that our lives are to be poured out for the glory of God.

And God is glorified in profound ways. Absolutely. At the death of someone even very young and promising and, you know, in a difficult circumstance.

Absolutely. But he's not like glib about the loss of his life. No, no, no.

Nor does he think you should run out there and do something that's going to get you killed. Right. He's just coming back to this young man was gifted and godly.

And we were all excited to see him go and thankful for what the Lord is going to do. And he was so unbelievably gifted and godly that it was a travesty to see his life cut short. And yet it's glorifying the Lord in ways it's not a waste.

It's glorifying the Lord in ways that we could never have imagined. And I think it's moving for that reason and helpful, challenging. As I read through these essays or these these addresses, I think they're for everyone, every Christian.

I mean, I think every Christian should read this should be exposed to these arguments. There's like you said, the language will resonate with some people more than others. But but it's all very, very important stuff.

But let's talk about a few categories. What you talked about, what a seminarian or a potential somebody thinking about pastoral ministry will gain from this, will learn from this. What about someone who's who's past that point or who's in another vocation? They're Christians serving in their church, maybe ruling elder, maybe just a member, a faithful, godly member of a church.

Why is this stuff that they need to read? Well, I think for one, if you're already a minister or a missionary, there are a couple of these chapters that are going to be incredibly encouraging to you to persevere, to keep going. That was one of the other things I didn't talk about is I wanted to find something that presses for current gospel ministers to keep going, which they do. And they're quite encouraging.

So I would say for the men who are out there, whether domestically or foreign in gospel ministry, you're going to be deeply encouraged to keep walking forward. I think for the pastors in the pulpits across the United States who read this, it's going to challenge them to think about, what's the purpose of our church? Does the light shine forth from this place? Am I distracted by other things? Have we missed it? And let's face it, at some point in our ministry, most of us have missed it in ways that we regret later and we try to correct. And I think for the average missions committee person or church member, I'm talking about outside of, like I would love to see every session, every group of elders, deacons in the country read this.

But the average member, I think, will say, oh, this is what the church is about. This is why it matters. This is why I need to be constantly praying for the folks that we've sent.

This is why I need to be following up and encouraging them. Because you're going to see the challenge that this is and be encouraged by it. And really, even when, for example, J.W. Alexander's quoting that the Presbyterian Church is a missionary society, which I think he would have said, swap in the Baptist Church, doesn't really matter.

The church is a missionary society. He then goes on to say, every member of the church is a member of that missionary society, not to do everything in their power, to see the gospel go forth. So it's for, all of this is for everybody in the church.

I would love to see it go into all the hands of all the radio students we have, every seminary student who's thinking about pastoral ministry. There have been times in the history of the church where we have seen an unusual grace poured out on the church by the Spirit to engage the work of evangelism missions that I would like to see again. There was an unusual amount of that under these men.

And so I think maybe if their voices are heard again, it might awake Zion to do what she's called to do. Yeah, there's a difference between saying, you know, your church should move from 3% of its budget into missions to 7% of its budget into missions. I mean, that's good.

We should rest on those things. But to actually saying, the whole orientation of your understanding of what the church is needs to be reframed in terms of these biblical priorities. That's a different kind of discussion.

It's a totally different discussion. I've been saying everywhere I go, and these guys say it much more helpfully than I do, I think, but I've been saying everywhere I go, I don't want you to think about missions as we need to bolster the missions program, like we need to bolster the women's program or the men's program. I want you to stop putting it as one of the programs of the church and understand your church is a lampstand.

It's a light to the world. Yes, it's a temple where in which the Holy Spirit dwells and you worship, but you're also a light of the gospel of the glory of Christ to every tribe and tongue and nation to every neighbor and co-worker and family member and friend. And if the light of the gospel isn't shining forth from your church, then your church is not doing what she is.

I mean, she's not fulfilling what she is by nature, a lampstand. And Christ gives a pretty serious warning when he says, I'll remove your lampstand to the church in Ephesus in Revelation 2. And I think, I don't know that we take that seriously. I think we think of missions as it's nice.

We have some odd people in our church who like to wear foreign clothes and eat foreign food and sit on a missions committee, and isn't that sweet, and we'll encourage them once a year with a kind of missions-focused weekend. And I want to say that, fine, have a missions-focused weekend. Great.

Let the odd people get together and have their food. But that's missing the larger picture, which is that your church exists as a missionary society. That's what she is by nature.

And if you miss that, you've missed it. Right. You've missed it.

You put these in a essentially, there's a chronological order to this. Is it more than that? Is there an order that you'd want people to read it in? Are there themes? Or depending on who's reading it, would you say start here? Yeah, maybe. Like if I had a young seminarian, I'd probably tell him to start with the J.W. Alexander article on Considerations of Foreign Missions.

If I'm talking to a man who wonders about the mission of Christ and His Church or a missions committee, I might have them start with the first chapter by Archibald Alexander and the last chapter by Hodge on the nature of the church in that sense and its mission. If I were talking to someone struggling with the cost of all this, I might have them read The Dead Speaking by Samuel Miller. If I was with a pastor who said, I want my elders to read one article that will wake us up, I'd go to the Samuel Miller article on Zion Awakening.

So I think that's how I would probably counsel people to read it. And to some degree in the introduction, I give a bit of a breakdown of the chapters. But I'm a guy who likes to read historical theology in chronological order to see thought developing.

And so that's why I'm glad to see it in that order. Yeah, and you can see how even in the outworking of Princeton Seminary and God's work at that seminary in the early years, there was a sort of building process that took place where different faculty members put their brick in the wall with respect to thinking about missions. And you could sort of see that develop.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. But because there are different articles that touch on different things, you could use it as a reference book.

You could have it on your shelf and say, because this is the issue we're discussing, this is the article we need to read. Or you really could read it sequentially. I think everything in here is really worth reading.

If it's a work of God, it's God's grace in this generation of men. We don't want to take away from that. But if you were to say, from humanly speaking, what were these men getting in their Bibles? What were they picking up on that so many of us are missing? I mean, you've mentioned some themes, the purpose of the church, the call to sacrifice, the nature of ministry.

Is there a thread through all of those where you say, here's what they see in their Bibles? And today, 2026, many Christians just kind of pass right over that? Yeah, I think that would probably be summed up in the chapter we have by W. Alexander on love to Christ. If there's something that comes through, it's that 2 Corinthians 5, 14, the love of Christ compels me. They saw Christ's love to them and their love in response to Christ as the north star of everything they did in ministry.

That's how it reads. I didn't ever get to spend any time with them personally. But when I read them, I think these men were effusive about Christ's love to them and their love to Christ in return and how their whole life was lived with that sense that, look how he's loved us and what else would we want to do but give everything we have for him? And with a sense of their own mortality in light of that, they didn't seem to value safety and comfort and prosperity in the ways that we do.

Fascinatingly, a couple of them, even Archibald Alexander talks about how he's pretty confident America will become the most powerful, prosperous nation the world has ever known, which is sort of prescient for a guy speaking of the birth of a nation. But it was because of a lot of the principles that he saw coursing through our country. It wasn't a nationalistic sentiment.

It was a sentiment like, when we see the church exalting Christ and doing what she's doing, how can God not bless us in a number of ways? And I think that's right. They capture the spirit of when he's coming out of Isaiah 54, and he says, Christ is going to receive his reward. So expect great things from God, right? And because he's going to receive his reward, attempt great things for God.

What would keep us from making the tent bigger when we know that Christ is going to fill it with his reward from the nations? So they don't have this sort of small-minded, oh, gee, hopefully somebody likes our reformed church mindset. They think, this is the gospel. This is Christ's church.

Christ will not fail to receive his reward. So we need to go out with all of our might and collect the reward, if you will, right? Go out and get what's his. And that just pulses through all of these men.

Well, I'm grateful that you put the time in to compile these chapters. This is an, I think, an immensely valuable book and really appreciate you talking about it today. Yeah, I'm thankful to be able to talk about it.

I'm really thankful Long College Press is doing this. I think it's one of the best things I could imagine being involved in. Well, we appreciate it.