January 21, 2008 by iMonk
How about a little thought experiment? No hidden agenda; just a way to explore the contention that certain things make all the difference.
Imagine for a moment 12 Baptist churches (that may be enough for some of you right there) in my own little Appalachian corner of the world, southeast Kentucky. These 12 churches are scattered across our area, which is almost entirely rural, quite poor, deep in Appalachian culture and all that goes along with it. They are churches dating back a century or more, the people are largely uneducated and some are even illiterate. There are deep problems of unemployment, health care, family dysfunction and substance abuse.
The churches are declining. For the past 15 years, the membership has been ingrown, with no significant influx of outsiders into the area and no significant church growth. The churches are growing older in average age, though several of the churches keep some kind of youth ministry going on. It is very rare to see young couples in church, and the congregations are graying rapidly.
The churches have been led by a variety of area men called to be pastors, with only a couple of local Bible school graduates in the mix. Pastors come and go quickly, with many leaving before two years have passed. Going from one church to another in a type of “Merry-Go-Round” is often a reality. [Continue reading]
November 18, 2007 by iMonk
UPDATE III: If this post has been construed as anti-Catholic, I’m sorry. I assure you that was never my intention. Commending Dr. Witherington for offering up a theology of the supper for those of us who are not Catholics or Calvinists doesn’t seem to me to be ipso facto an attack on Catholics.
UPDATE II: A lot of the book is available in Google Reader.
UPDATE: If you go to “categories” and click “Baptists,” you’ll find several posts dealing with the Lord’s Supper. Here is the first one, which includes an interview with Professor Peter Gentry at the end.
I’m quite sure that when it comes to the sacraments, many of us feel overwhelmed by the amount of Roman Catholic dominated material that is on the net. (NOTE: Amen) Catholic apologists- almost all former Protestants and former Calvinists- are convinced that scripture and tradition are on their side on the issues of the Lord’s Supper and Baptism. Publishers either agree with them or there’s simply nothing being written that’s worth publishing. [Continue reading]
October 9, 2007 by iMonk
Some thoughts on women teachers, an issue that continually puzzles me every time I see a Lifeway stocked with Beth Moore Bible studies for sale to Southern Baptists who can’t say enough about women not being pastoral teachers.
I Timothy 2:8 I desire then that in every place the men should pray, lifting holy hands without anger or quarreling; 9 likewise also that women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire, 10 but with what is proper for women who profess godliness—with good works. 11 Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. 12 I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. 13 For Adam was formed first, then Eve; 14 and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. 15 Yet she will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.
July 20, 2007 by iMonk
The Internet Monk Research Division, headquartered in the Internet Monk compound deep beneath the Boar’s Head Tavern here in the mecca of post-evangelicalism, St. Sadies, Maryland, has been conducting a research project. With the completion of extensive research conducted at the highest levels of professional standards, it’s now time to reveal the results to a world waiting to know the answers to a burning question:
Why won’t Baptists celebrate the Lord’s Supper more often than the average of four times a year? [Continue reading]
July 9, 2007 by iMonk
Here in Kentucky, where the worship wars/generational church division is everywhere and spreading, many churches are attempting to navigate the rocks of a potential church split by using multiple services.
I’ve been associated with multiple services since 1984, when I joined the staff of a large church that had both an 8:30 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. service. Most of my ministry friends are involved in multiple service options and an increasing number of them are doing a “traditional” service early, and a “contemporary” or “blended” service mid-morning. I’m aware of churches doing contemporary first, or even on another day (or evening,) but the contemporary service is increasingly the “lead” service in the Baptist churches I am aware of that are trying to navigate the various divisions that are tearing many churches apart. [Continue reading]
June 24, 2007 by iMonk
When I returned to worshiping at the SBC church down the street, one of the things I wasn’t looking forward to was the “open prayer request” time I’d experienced there in the past. My previous experiences left me with memories of too much information, too much detail, too much time….just too much.
Things haven’t been quite as bad as anticipated. In fact, I’ve been rethinking the place of these kinds of congregational “prayers of the people” in worship, and I’ve decided it’s more important to me than I realized.
I actually have become quite fond of the large prayer list that sets opposite our weekly order of worship. When I say large, I mean probably a hundred names/requests, printed in a large paragraph, to which we add new names (and occasionally remove a few) every week.
The prayer list dominates our “order of service.” It’s the most noticeable thing about our church’s printed presentation of itself. And it makes a statement that I believe is very important.
Evangelicals and more liturgical Christians have both found the idea of “prayer requests” to be awkward. Some people talk too much. Some are too gossipy. Others obsess over embarrassing and needless details, like the names of diseases and details of doctor visits. “Sister Smith had a bad weekend. Her stitches came out…” TMI. [Continue reading]
June 22, 2007 by iMonk
Peter Matthews was raised Methodist, ministered as a Baptist pastor for ten years and now pastors a vibrant growing Anglican Mission in America congregation in Lexington, Kentucky. When it comes to evangelicalism and liturgical church, Peter is the man. He blogs at Guitar Priest, but you need to visit his church or catch his preaching on the web.
Peter’s insights into some of the questions I’m dealing with in recent blog posts will be appreciated by IM readers.
1. You were once a Baptist, now you’re an AMiA Anglican, but you aren’t a Roman Catholic. Can you tell us a little about that trajectory, particularly what moved you out of being a Baptist, but what specifically kept you from becoming Roman Catholic?
I was a Southern Baptist pastor for 10 years. However, I grew up Methodist. So some of the liturgical and sacramental piety of Methodism still hovered in my soul during my SBC years. There was always a longing to get back in touch with the church calendar, liturgy and a greater use and appreciation of sacraments than I was experiencing in an SBC context. Therefore, while still a Baptist pastor I explored the liturgical traditions by reading more than I should have — especially the early church fathers. I found what I was looking for in Anglicanism. Here was a tradition that was overtly liturgical and sacramental but retained the key insights of the Protestant Reformation. I spent a lot of time looking at the Roman Catholic Church and I found much to commend it. Nevertheless, at the end of the day Anglicanism is where I found my home. [Continue reading]
June 21, 2007 by iMonk
Exodus 12:13 13 The blood shall be a sign for you, on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you, when I strike the land of Egypt.
Ex. 12:14 “This day shall be for you a memorial day, and you shall keep it as a feast to the LORD; throughout your generations, as a statute forever, you shall keep it as a feast.
Exodus 12:24 You shall observe this rite as a statute for you and for your sons forever. 25 And when you come to the land that the LORD will give you, as he has promised, you shall keep this service. 26 And when your children say to you, ‘What do you mean by this service?’ 27 you shall say, ‘It is the sacrifice of the LORD’s Passover, for he passed over the houses of the people of Israel in Egypt, when he struck the Egyptians but spared our houses.’ ” And the people bowed their heads and worshiped.
Most of the discussion regarding the meaning of the Lord’s Supper goes on around the intention of Jesus in the words of institution in the Gospels, Paul’s pastoral teaching in Corinthians, and references to eating flesh and drinking blood in John 6. While the discussion is in no way restricted to these passages, there is no doubt that the majority of disagreement occurs around what Jesus intended in words like “This is my body.”
Baptist Old Testament scholar Peter Gentry suggests, however, that the meaning of Jesus’ words may not lie in the words themselves as much as in the context of the meal itself: A Jewish passover meal that Jesus and his disciples were very familiar with, and a meal with considerable scripture devoted to its meaning and description in Exodus. [Continue reading]
June 19, 2007 by iMonk
My first post on the Baptist View of the Lord’s Supper is here.
Last week, I apparently shook up the world of people whose stereotype of me precluded any agreement with my Baptist tradition. In a post surveying some immediate resources for a Baptist view of the Lord’s Supper, I raised the ire of all sorts of people in all sorts of places by saying what I’ve said for 7 years: post-evangelical, emerging or whatever, I would still hand you the New Hampshire Confession of Faith if you asked me what I believe.
So when I wrote on the Baptist view of the Lord’s Supper, I immediately noticed that I fell into two ditches. The first is what others have deduced about the Baptist view of the supper from what non-Baptists have said about it (“bare symbolism,” no presence of Christ, etc.) and what others have deduced about the supper from what Baptists have said about it (“bare symbolism, no presence of Christ) and done with it (“let’s not do it more than 4 times a year, etc.”).
I’ve long ago assimilated the fact that what people deduce about you from the internet generally has a lot to do with their need to feel that you agree with them and you are their ally. (I learned that from my own blog reading.) It’s safe to say that few people who read my site are hungering for the paltry views and practice of the Lord’s Supper that prevail among Baptists. In fact, for many post-evangelicals, it was a journey toward a more reformed, even Catholic, view of the sacraments that brought them to embrace infant baptism and to say they believe in some kind real presence of Jesus in the sacrament of the bread and wine. [Continue reading]
June 14, 2007 by iMonk
SBC Outpost has long been the leader of SBC blogs. I read with sadness today that SBC Outpost is leaving the blogosphere. This post is in honor of Marty and what he modeled and accomplished with that blog. God bless him and his family, and God speed a reformation and true renewal in the Southern Baptist Convention.
Reading over some of the sermons at the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting this week, I was struck by something. [Continue reading]
June 10, 2007 by iMonk
In January of 2006, I wrote an essay covering what I believe about the local church: “Walls That Won’t Fall: Basics for the Local Church.” I’m very happy with this piece, because it covers a lot of things that I believe the Bible plainly teaches and that work for the health of Christians and their churches.
I’m particularly interested in stressing the four “C’s” in the second half of the essay: Creed, Confession, Covenant and Constitution. (The church where I am a member has none of these and no plans to acquire them, so there’s plenty of room for improvement.)
For those of you who apparently missed that I’m a Baptist, post-evangelical or not, you might want to check in with what you missed. Here’s a mini-course about the local church as the basic expression of the Christian movement.
READ: “Walls That Won’t Fall: Basics For the Local Church.”
June 8, 2007 by iMonk
One of the reasons I am doing this series of posts on “The Baptist Way” is to face what is going on in Baptist life today: We’re losing our soul and our identity. We’re becoming the very definition of generic evangelicalism. We need to face what’s happening to us and we need to stop it.
Many of our churches are going to vanish in 20+ years, and they won’t be replaced. As much as we are stressing new churches we are not going to stop the collapse of thousands of our own churches that contained two or three generations of people that defined Southern Baptist life for 50+ years. The megachurches are there, but we can’t be a denomination of mega-churches and do what we do. That’s a pipe dream that’s killing us.
The desperate cry of some leaders for more baptisms is looking completely past the problems of this convention. Our problem isn’t primarily evangelism, but the health of our churches, the state of our leadership and our strange attempts at confessional integrity. (I would call the SBC leadership’s use of the BFM a kind of psuedo-confessionalism. Useful for political purposes and generally ignored otherwise.) [Continue reading]
June 7, 2007 by iMonk
Wyman Richardson has served as the pastor of First Baptist Church in Dawson, Georgia, since 2002. He previously pastored churches in Woodstock, GA, and Burneyville, OK. He is the author of Walking Together: A Congregational Reflection on Biblical Church Discipline, which was published in book, Leader’s Guide, and Student Workbook formats by Wipf and Stock publishers earlier this year. The material is designed to help churches approach the issue of church discipline in a preemptive and preparatory fashion, to lead them to understand what church discipline is before they find themselves in disciplinary situations. Further information and resources can be found at Wyman’s website: www.walkingtogetherministries.com
Wyman is a former BHT fellow and a person whose work on church discipline needs to be part of every church leader’s library. As a Southern Baptist contributor at Reformed Catholicism, Dr. Richardson is a good person to talk to on issues of Baptist identity, the Lord’s Supper, church discipline and tradition. [Continue reading]
June 5, 2007 by iMonk
UPDATE: A related issue to the meaning of the Lord’s Supper is the methodology for receiving it. Alastair takes on the wine in communion issue, along with a number of other questions.
UPDATE II: In this BHT post, I demonstrate the the language of Baptist confessions avoided the word “symbol” until the BFM. Note the change from the New Hampshire Confession.
UPDATE III: Here is a recent IM post on weekly communion. I’ll reference it here, and again in my next post on “The Baptist Way: Recovering the Lord’s Supper.” (soli deo is now almost officially ended, so I am grieving the loss of any kind of communion.)
This post begins a new IM series on “The Baptist Way.” These posts will feature resources and interviews focusing on issues in the Baptist tradition that I feel are being neglected in theological discussion today.
This first post will introduce the Baptist view of the Lord’s Supper. Today, many younger Baptists are identifying with a more reformed theology, and many are moving toward other views of the Lord’s Supper. It will be important to understand the Baptist views, and its strengths and weaknesses, as this kind of interaction/evolution occurs among Baptist evangelicals.
For a short historical look at the various Western views of the Lord’s Supper and their historical origins, visit this page at Luther Seminary. Today’s Baptists have a position deeply influenced by Zwingli, but not completely rejecting the language of Calvin.
If you know nothing about the Baptist practice, visit the Wikipedia entry on Baptist ordinances. (It’s not weaponry.) There are many excellent resources on the Baptist view of the Lord’s Supper. Let me suggest several to reacquaint readers with what Baptists believe. (Consult Baptist creeds, confessions and catechisms for a start.)
Dr. Tom Nettles, professor of Church History at Southern Seminary, has an essay on “Baptists and the Ordinances” with a good summary of the classical Baptist view of the Lord’s Supper. Note especially Nettle’s comments on Zwingli’s so-called “bare symbolism.” [Continue reading]
