Joshua Caleb

Children the Team will be working with.

A group of students from Hardin Baptist, including my dad and little sister, are leaving this morning to work with Partners in Christ in Nicaragua.

Keep them in prayer for their safety, wisdom, and boldness.

Pray that the orphans they will be working with will hear the Gospel and believe!

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Yesterday, the United States Postal Service dropped off a much awaited arrival: J.E. Skinner’s 1940 History of the Blood River Association of Baptists.  I had seen this book in Boyce Centennial Library and coveted it, so when I found it on Amazon, I was compelled to buy it.  It is a summary of every annual meeting of the Blood River Association from it’s genesis in 1870 to 1939.  The Blood River Association covers Baptist churches in Marshall and Calloway counties in Kentucky (although at some point it included certain churches in Henry County, Tennessee also), and it would have been my “home” association had they not withheld fellowship from Hardin Baptist in the 90s because we accepted members who were baptized by immersion in non-Baptist churches.

Though I had heard rumors and been told that it was true, I did not believe that the Blood River Articles of Faith was Calvinistic until I saw it with my own eyes.  The following is the Articles of Faith as approved at the first meeting of the association on October 29, 1870 at Jonathan’s Creek Church (which later changed it’s name to Elm Grove, east of Murray, where Jonathan Creek begins its flow toward the Tennessee River).  Pay special attention to the parts I have italicized:

ON ARTICLES OF FAITH

ARTICLE 1: We believe in one true and living God, The Father, The Son, and Holy Spirit, and these three are One.

ARTICLE 2: We believe the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be the Word of God, and the only rule of faith and practice.

ARTICLE 3: We believe in the doctrine of election and that God chose His people in Christ before the foundation of the world.

ARTICLE 4: We believe the doctrine of original sin.

ARTICLE 5: We believe in man’s inability to recover himself from the fallen state he is in by his own free will and ability.

ARTICLE 6: We believe that sinners are justified in the sight of God only by the imputed righteousness of Christ.

ARTICLE 7: We believe the doctrine of election as taught in the Bible is through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth.

ARTICLE 8: We believe that the saints shall persevere by grace and never fall finally away.

ARTICLE 9: We believe that Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are the ordinances of Christ Jesus, and that believers are the subjects thereof; and the true mode of baptism is immersion.

ARTICLE 10: We believe in the restitution of the dead and a general judgment.

ARTICLE 11: We believe that the punishment of the wicked and the joys of the righteous will be eternal.

ARTICLE 12: We believe that no minister has right to the administration of the ordinances, except such as are legally baptized, called and come under the imposition of hands by the presbytery* (pp. 14-15).

*By “presbytery” they simply mean a council formed by two or more ordained ministers.

A friend e-mailed me a copy of the Articles of Faith as published in the 2007 version of the Blood River Constitution.  Some minor word changes occur (which could be accounted for as typing errors) and ARTICLE 6 on the imputation of Christ’s righteousness seems to have been dropped (I am interested to find out if there is a story connected to that.), but as for those articles I italicized, they remain word-for-word the same!

For those unfamiliar with the area, Marshall and Calloway counties are no “Calvinist Paradise.”  Most of the members of Blood River Association churches seem to have been raised on atheological fluff (However, a new generation of pastors give the glisten of a hopeful new day!).  In fact, I would dare say that if most of the remaining Blood River churches were held accountable to these Articles of Faith they would have to withdraw fellowship from themselves “until repentance is manifest.”

While I wish all the Baptist churches in Marshall and Calloway counties could affirm these Articles of Faith, I think it a hindrance to cooperation.  Most larger churches in the counties have already left the association, like Hardin which was the first, because of their Landmarkist requirements.  It is high time to see a new day of Baptist cooperation and mission, and I suggest that this October, messengers vote to replace these Articles with something wider, like the Baptist Faith and Message, and to rid itself of all Landmarkist requirements asking that fellowship be restored with those churches that have left.

OTHER INTERESTING THINGS FROM THE BOOK:

Listen to Skinner’s Landmarkism.  It cracks me up:

It is firmly believed that if Baptists had always kept and preserved their records and made them available to the writers of ecclesiastical history, the fact of their origin with Christ and his apostles would have been so clear and unmistakable that it would never have been questioned, even by the Catholics themselves (p. 8).

Also, in the letters sent by churches with their messengers to the annual meeting, the following are required according to the 1870 constitution indicating these were healthy churches which practiced church discipline (pay attention to my italics):

ARTICLE 4: The letters from the churches shall express their numbers in fellowship; baptized, received by letter, restored; dismissed by letter, excommunicated, and died, since the last association (p. 15).

I grew up on Paul Washer and HeartCry.  Hardin, Kentucky isn’t far from Brookport, Illinois, which used to be HeartCry “central command.”  However, since I’m in Louisville and HeartCry has moved to Alabama, I’ve kind of lost touch, but this afternoon I discovered a delightful gift: the HeartCry Missionary Podcast!  I haven’t had time to indulge yet, but what I found is a wealth of sermons from Paul and others on everything from missions to “the ungodly, demonic, worldly, sensual practice of (recreational) dating.”  I whole heartedly recommend you subscribe!

Over the past few days, I’ve been refreshed by reading Iain Murray’s Revival and Revivalism.  I thought the following quote was especially pertinent for the week of July 4th and the poor state of our Baptist churches.  I’ll leave any judgments to the reader.

The Baptists of Virginia initially profited from the War in that it brought all persecution against them to an end.  But the event also marked the end of their spiritual advance.  Robert Semple, who was fourteen years of age when the Peace Treaty was signed in 1783, observed:

The war, though very propitious to the liberty of the Baptists, had an opposite effect upon the life of religion among them.  As if persecution was more favorable to vital piety than unrestrained liberty, they seem to have abated in their zeal, upon being unshackled from their menacles.  This may be ascribed to several causes…Perhaps many did not rightly estimate the true source of liberty, not ascribe its attainment to the proper arm.  In consequence of which God sent them liberty, and with it leanness of soul.  This chill to their religious affections might have subsided with the war, or perhaps sooner, if there had not been subsequent occurrences which tended to keep them down.  The opening a free trade by peace served as a powerful bait to entrap professors who were in any great degree inclined to the pursuit of wealth.  Nothing is more common than for the increase of riches to produce a decrease of piety.  Speculators seldom make warm Christians.  With some few exceptions the declension was general throughout the State.  The love of many waxed cold.  Some of the watchmen fell, others stumbled, and many slumbered at their posts (75-76; Quote from Robert B. Semple, History of the Baptists in Virginia [1810, rev. edn 1894; Church History Research and Archives, Lafayette, Tenn, 1974], 55-56).

I saw this done for the entire ESV NT on the ESV Bible Blog, so I thought I would try doing it for the book I’m preparing a series for: Philippians. It is called wordle.

In my last post, I mostly joked about my experience in Indianapolis at the SBC, but now I’ve had some time for reflection and am ready to make a more serious assessment.

We are a people obsessed with numbers. The big headlines of the past year focus on our declining numbers, declining baptisms, declining churches, and declining Lottie Moon giving. Most numerical indicators harbinger the SBC as a dying denomination. (Cue pessimism and blame shifters now: It is a lack of relevance. It is a lack of tradition. It’s the Calvinists. It’s the Revivalists. It’s Al Mohler. It’s Johnny Hunt.)

It has been evident for some time now (for about fifty years) that we no longer live in the 1950s. We all know that morality has declined, and we all suspect that prosperity and affluence is declining as well. Between the California Supreme Court and the almost certain election of Barak Obama, the America of tomorrow seems to be decidedly amoral. The advancements of the Chinese and Indians along with the rising price of oil and food seem to paint a grim picture for the wealth of the SBC and the entire American church. Giving, at least for now, will be less in a market where our dollars have decreased in value.

During his report on Golden Gate Seminary, Dr. Jeff Iorg spoke of living in a pagan culture where there is no Christian subculture to which the Christian can escape. For most Southern Baptists living in the South, this is hard to understand. In Louisville, we can visit Bardstown Road and witness paganism (I am speaking of paganism in general, not specifically of the pagan religion. Also could be identified as worldliness.) first hand but even there it is tamed by its minority status. However, thanks to the influence of the entertainment mediums that have flooded our existence, this small minority is rapidly becoming a majority, even in the South.

I see this even in the four-year difference between my sister and myself. When I was in high school, in rural Kentucky, I only knew of a few homosexuals, and they were persons on the fringes of the social network. In my sister’s class (She graduated last month.), homosexuality is rampant, accepted, and celebrated even among those at the center of the social network.

A different world lies before us. It is a world of declining morality, declining prosperity, and a dying denomination. Since I’m a Calvinist, I have the hope that God could miraculously turn things around by sending a Great Awakening. However, as a student of the Bible, I am even more confident that God will glorify himself through our weakness.

In Let The Nations Be Glad, Piper comments on the scattering of the church following the martyrdom of Stephen:

The lesson here is not that God is sovereign and turns setbacks into triumphs. The lesson is also that comfort and ease and affluence and prosperity and safety and freedom often cause a tremendous inertia in the church. The very thing that we think will produce personnel, energy, and creative investment of time and money for the missionary cause instead produce the exact opposite: weakness, apathy, lethargy, self-centeredness, preoccupation with security…It is a strange principle that probably goes right to the heart of our sinfulness and self-sufficiency: Hard times, like persecution, often produce more personnel, more prayer, more power, and more open purses than do easy times (95).

Dr. Mohler struck this same chord during his report on SBTS, saying:

I’m here to tell you that God is doing something in this generation.  This is a generation that has had to swim against the tide from the very time they were tadpoles.  I want to tell you as you look to the generation to come that they are either going to be deeply and convictionally Christian or deeply and convictionally pagan.  There is not going to be anything inbetween.  In this post-Christian, secular age we now face the challenge of recognizing that we’re going to know who the Christians are, and we’re going to know that pretty quickly.

We twenty-somethings have the unique opportunity of watching this change happen. We will see many churches close. Perhaps, we will see mega-church campuses turned back into arenas and shopping centers or, even worse, into mosques, kingdom halls, and Mormon churches; and my child, who arrives in February, will probably live a less comfortable and affluent life than I have, but he or she will be able to know Jesus with more clarity than I am able to conjure.

As the gray-heads go home to Jesus and attendance to the Annual Meeting declines, let us rejoice in the Lord that he has chosen to humble us that we might love him more wholly, live for him more faithfully, and preach him more fervently.

I will end with the words of Adrian Rogers and of his Lord. Yesterday, on Love Worth Finding, I heard the late Pastor Rogers say, “Let us pray for revival, prepare for survival, and look for his arrival.”  Amen, and as we die, Christ shows that our most fruitful days are still ahead, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:23-24)