The Church Militant Is the Church Missional
In Matthew 16:18, Jesus responds to Peter’s affirmation of Jesus’s messiahship with the programmatic statement: “I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” The reader shouldn’t miss Jesus’s mixed metaphor—the church is like a building project and like a military operation. One should also note that neither metaphor conveys a passive or defensive posture. Both metaphors, on the contrary, denote the ideas of growth, advance, completion, and victory. Read more
“Joy Comes in the Mourning”: How Jesus Wipes Away Tears
Do you know what it’s like to feel the sorrow of a bereaved mother? A mother’s life is wrapped up in the care and well being of her children. When those children are taken away from her or, worse, when they’re wantonly slaughtered before her eyes, it’s like ripping out her heart. She feels empty. She feels as if she no longer has any purpose for existence. Perhaps you’re experiencing that kind of grief. You’ve not been bereaved of your children, but you feel the same kind of empty sorrow. You feel hopeless and without purpose in the world. Read more 
A Brief Theology of Human Death
The Bible portrays death as the consequence of human sin. Death was the sanction that God tied to the Garden of Eden stipulation: “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:16-17). And God’s expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden on account of their covenant breach and treason demonstrated that His threats were not empty. Death became the lot of Adam and his posterity. To borrow the apostle Paul’s language in Romans 6:23: “The wages of sin [became] death.” Read more
Making Disciples: Purposing Reproduction and Practicing Replication
Pastor Bob Selph of Grace Baptist Church in Taylors SC gave two lectures on the subject of “making disciples” for our course on Church Ministry. In the first lecture entitled “Purposing Reproduction,” Bob discusses the biblical basis and importance of discipleship as a vital facet of the church’s ministry. He focuses on the practical ways in which the pastor and church members may disciple one another in his second lecture entitled ”Practicing Replication.” If you’re a church leader and are seeking to equip the saints for works of ministry as well as training future gospel laborers, I heartily commend these lectures. Read more
What If Your Church Isn’t Big?
Christians should not despise quantitative church growth. Quite the opposite. We should desire it. Part of our commission as a church is to “make disciples.” And it normally takes disciples to make disciples. In other words, we cannot view human resources and financial resources as totally irrelevant. If our church is to impact our community for the gospel, to minister to the poor, to train gospel laborers, to see new churches planted, and to send out missionaries, we should long and labor for healthy church growth of the numerical kind.1 Read more
- See my articles “Who’s Afraid of Church Growth?” and “Contextualization & Church Ministry: Does It Matter?“ [↩]
Communication That Connects: Making the Gospel Intelligible
A few years ago I had the opportunity to present the ministry of Reformed Baptist Seminary to a local church. I opened up for questions at the end of the presentation, and one brother asked how the seminary assesses a man’s preaching and teaching ability. I told him that we require our divinity students to preach and/or teach at least four times in the presence of one or more of their pastors, and we ask their pastor(s) to give them constructive feedback on the content, structure, and presentation of the message. Read more
Contextualization & Church Ministry: Seven Ingredients
I would define biblical accommodation as a self-conscious and self-denying accommodation of the gospel messenger and the gospel message in biblically informed ways in order to enhance the gospel’s intelligibility and to remove any unnecessary obstacles that may prevent the target audience from hearing, understanding and/or receiving the gospel. Below I explain and expound the seven elements that make up this definition. Read more
The Baptist Confession on Oaths and Vows
In the 17th century, certain sects of Christendom, such as the Quakers and Anabaptists, denied the legitimacy of taking oaths or making vows. The teaching of this chapter 23 of the 1689 Baptist Confession was designed to clarify the meaning and confirm the lawfulness of oaths and vows when properly used. The 1689 Baptist Confession retains the substance of the Westminster Confession, but it abbreviates the form. Below we’ll use the Confession as a guide to examine the Bible’s teaching on oaths and vows. Then we’ll draw some practical lessons. Read more
Contextualization & Church Ministry: No Compromise!
In our previous posts we highlighted the importance of contextualization for church ministry (Part 1) and offered a basic working definition of what it entails (Part 2). However, since some have used “contextualization” to justify unbiblical ministry philosophies and practices, we need to provide a fuller exposition of what it is and what it’s not. We’ll focus on the latter below, showing that true contextualization doesn’t equate “compromise.” Read more
Sacred Desk or Sacred Cow? Perspective on the Pulpit
Since the days of the Reformation, Protestant churches have traditionally situated the pulpit front and center in the architecture of their meeting places. The purpose of the pulpit’s conspicuously elevated and prominent position is to symbolize the authority and centrality of God’s Word in the life and ministry of the gathered church. The question we want to raise in this brief article is whether such symbolism is necessary or helpful in our day. Read more
