On a presbytery level, make the shepherding committee a household name. When the pastor struggles, his wife does, too. And the local church isn’t always the best place for help. Wives whose husbands are faltering need to know which of their husband’s peers they can call.

Perhaps this is an infrequently shared secret of pastoral ministry; that is, how much of it is driven not by faith in the truths of the Gospel and in the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ, but driven by fear. It is very tempting for the pastor to load the welfare of the church on his shoulders and when he does, he ends up being burdened and motivated by an endless and every-changing catalog of "what ifs."

But please do not repeat the old saw about Anabaptism; if I might be so bold, it will not wash. Neither dismiss us with the vague assertion that there are some Baptists out there who are both Calvinistic in their soteriology and traditional or conservative in our doxology. That is not what we really are, certainly not all we are

H.L. Mencken once famously said of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, “It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense.” What Mencken rightly noticed was the ability of words to persuade us to a certain position without actually demonstrating how that position is the logical conclusion of the facts at hand.

Believers themselves, sadly, sometimes transgress fixed moral boundaries. Abraham and Isaac tried the wife-sister stunt three times and were rightly rebuked by pagans on each occasion (Gen. 12:18; 20:9; 26:9–10). In response to cultural decline, Christians can be self-righteously quick to denounce others for moral degeneracy. But we are often the ones who do terrible things, and we shouldn’t think that unbelievers don’t notice.

Of course, that’s only a personal view. Maybe I have no real style to speak of. For all the pomp, ceremony and lavishness of my night out at the Palace, there is still nothing to beat eating potatoes and salt mackerel with bare fingers and downed with a long glass of cold milk.   There... Continue Reading

“Open a Bible at random and you will find God’s words speaking to those who live with shame.” I have said this many times and didn’t intend it as exaggeration. But I never put it to the test.

In 1961, Henry Morris and John Whitcomb Jr. published The Genesis Flood, which argued for a literal reading not only of the Flood account but also of Genesis 1 and 2, reinvigorating the creationist movement. That movement has since split into six-day creationists and old-earth creationists, as well as other finely tuned variations

The label “complementarian” has only been in use for about 25 years. It was coined by a group of scholars…to try and come up with a word to describe someone who ascribes to the historic, biblical idea that male and female are equal, but different…The label arose in response to the proposition that equality means... Continue Reading

“I have conditional grace at times. And I think the church has conditional grace and I think our model is always to say ‘do we give people what they have earned or what they need?’ They’ve all earned condemnation, I’ve earned condemnation. What I need from God is grace.” To those on the outside, Jerry... Continue Reading