I signed a statement this past week. It was a statement that some wonderful brothers and sisters in Christ put together that speaks of our shared passion for the world to come to Christ and our commitment to helping make that happen. That statement is specifically designed to encourage the trustees of the International Mission Board to work to repeal the recent changes made to their guidelines for missionary service that have since cost many, many otherwise qualified candidates from serving overseas. This disappointing conclusion, arrived at by our IMB trustee board, is something that I have publicly communicated my displeasure about for quite some time so I won’t rehash that here. I would ask, however, that you read the statement yourself and consider signing it as well. You can do so by clicking here.

New research came out today that highlighted a recent SBC trend away from baptisms. [click here] Oh, we still say that they are important, and we still communicate that we’re an evangelistic denomination, but the truth is that we are not. No, today we are more known for which side of the methodological fences we stand on than we are known for our passion for connecting disconnected people with the Gospel.

Ed Stetzer has written a great article detailing what these statistics mean for our convention. I would highly encourage you to read his thoughts. You can do so by clicking here. In his article, Stetzer makes a tremendous statement, but one which I predict will not be kindly received by everyone. He says,

The Conservative Resurgence failed to produce a Great Commission Resurgence. It restored our denomination’s value of Scripture but application is often absent, at least in the area of evangelism.

Stetzer is absolutely right. Our battle for the priority of scripture was absolutely necessary. If we are not a people who believe in the supremacy and innerancy of God’s word, we are nothing in my opinion. Having said that, right belief means nothing if it is not accompanied by right action. In other words, orthodoxy must be partnered with orthopraxy for it to be beneficial. Our convention, and the churches that make up her number, claim a great commitment to God’s word. We are proud of our positions. We are so strongly tied to them that the word “innerancy” has almost become our club’s secret password without which one cannot serve. Now, I do not want to diminish innerancy at all, but if our behavior doesn’t link hands with our belief, what good is our belief?

It’s time that we heed well the other words of Stetzer and rally around the gospel. Frank Page’s words from his initial election as SBC president should be embraced. It’s beyond time that people know us for what we are for, rather than simply know us for what we are against. We are for the gospel. We are for the sufficiency of Christ on behalf of those who are separated from the Gospel due to sin. We are for people experiencing grace, hope and forgiveness through the cross of Christ.

In my own town, here in St. Joseph, MO, we have a population of 105,000 in the metro area. Of that number approximately 80,000 are in a group that I refer to as “disconnected”. In other words, they are either unchurched, dechurched or are not involved in the church that they claim to belong to. My passion in life is to help connect those 80,000 disconnected people with the gospel. Our church specifically must do whatever it takes to accomplish that task. Up to this point, we are not fulfilling that task as we should.

Each person reading this post lives in a city or area where the majority of the population does not appear to have an active relationship with Jesus Christ. Our charge must be to somehow connect them with the Gospel. Beyond that, it is time we think creatively about ways to effectively do so. So many of our churches are convinced that if they can just hold another revival meeting, and beat on a few more doors, that will do the trick. Statistics are also bearing out that those methods are simply not seeing success. When we become desperate to fulfill the task that God has given us, we will throw off any unsuccessful efforts and continue to work until we find more effective ways to engage people with the Gospel.

Someone asked me the other day how our church, Frederick Boulevard, was doing. I told them honestly that attendance and finances are at an all time high but that I was disappointed right now. When asked why I shared that our baptisms are plateaued at the same place they were last year. We may have seen a few more, but not many. I’ve shared the gospel with a number of people lately, but I haven’t shared with enough. I’m afraid that too often it’s easy for us to become satisfied in our churches. We want to reach other people as long as we can continue to be happy. The truth is, maybe it’s time that we become uncomfortable for the gospel. Maybe it is time that we step outside of our usual pattern so that our neighbors who don’t know Christ can respond to His grace. Maybe it’s time that we get desperate to complete the task God has given us.

I’m afraid that if we don’t the downward spiral that we are seeing today, will only be the tip of the iceberg.

If you are anywhere in the St. Joseph, MO area and you are not already committed to a local church, you need to make plans to be with us at Frederick Boulevard this Easter Sunday morning! It is going to be one incredible day!

I listened in this evening as the worship team prepared and they sounded incredible! The service will mix a combination of dynamic music, baptism, multimedia communication and a message from Colossians 2:13-15 to celebrate the cross and resurrection in an unbelievable manner.

You can choose between our 8:30 and 10:15 services and also enjoy a continental breakfast served from 9:45-10:45 am in our new building that we’re opening up on Sunday! You will be able to tour the new building which includes our Biblical Counseling Center, the extension of our KidsLife Children Department and the new atrium area that I’m calling Frederick’s Living Room. It will feature comfortable sofas, chairs and tables along with free wifi and coffee.

This Sunday should be one of our most amazing worship experiences yet! I hope you will plan to be with us. 

I love missionaries! To most of you this is no secret. One of the reasons that I appreciate them so much is that I have rarely run into any group of people more involved in persistently thinking through biblical theology and its application in the local context. Guy Muse is a missionary in Guyaquil, Ecuador. He and his wife have served with the IMB in Ecuador since 1987. Guy has written a series of posts that deal with the topic of whether or not a woman is biblically qualified to baptize. I would highly encourage you to read the post and interact with his thoughts. You can access the article by clicking here.

I apologize that I haven’t blogged as much lately. I simply have not had time. I’ve got a number of serious issues I’d like to write about but I’ll need a bit more time to compose articles. Having said that…

…we’ve got a few exciting things that are coming up in the life of our church that I wanted to share about, especially for those who are part of the Frederick Family. This coming Sunday is our big move to two morning services. This is a move that has been a long time coming but with the Worship Center sitting at about 90% occupancy each Sunday, it is sorely needed. Our ushers tell me that we only had 24 open spaces in our parking lot this past Sunday. As such we’ll begin the new schedule this week. This is a great time for you to begin thinking about inviting unchurches friends to join us for worship. Whether it is the 8:30 service or the 10:15 service, it should be an incredible time of worship. We need to pray that we will continue to see growth however. The hope is that 2 services will only be sufficient for a short time. Let’s pray together that we can see a third service beginning in the near future as well! Wouldn’t that be exciting?!!

This Sunday, along with our two services, we have two baptisms. Both of the candidates are fantastic young ladies that have come to faith recently. One of them is the granddaughter of a lady who was a matriarch for many, many years in our church, Ona Lea Dewey. During these baptisms we’ll be showing video taped testimonies of the ladies, which is an exciting new addition to our services. I know, though, that you’ll be excited to hear how One Lea helped lead her granddaughter to Christ even after she went home to be with the Lord.

Also, we have one more month in the Bible and the Bush series. It has been exciting to see people respond to God’s word. I trust that the next month will be even more amazing. As soon as this series is finished, however, we have another exciting series beginning. We’ll be teaching for a series of weeks on the topic of living in community. The series is entitled “life” and will begin the first of March. It should be a fantastic opportunity for us to consider how we are to live together as the Body of Christ.

Over the past two years I have come to love and respect David Rogers. David is a missionary in Spain where he has served for over 15 years. David and I agree substantially on a variety of issues with baptism being one of the more significant. David wrote and article today that can be found in its original form here. I have reproduced it, however, below and I highly encourage you to read it. It is most enlightening.

Please understand that what I am writing here is just an illustration to prove a point. I am emphatically NOT suggesting the founding of a new “Common Loaf Denomination.” I have already written about this on a previous post. At that time, I was using essentially the same illustration to make a slightly different, though related, point, on the difference between planting “baptistic” and “Baptist” churches. Here, I am pulling out the same illustration again, because I believe it forcefully and poignantly drives home a point I have been trying to make on the last couple of posts in my on-going dialogue with Malcolm Yarnell on the Great Commission. I am not writing this as a separate letter in that series, but rather as a sort of detached addendum to the actual letters.

The illustration is the following:

Many Baptists in the past, as well as some in the present, have made such a major issue of the timing and mode of water baptism that it has led them to effectively separate, both in church fellowship, as well as in partnership in obedience to the Great Commission, with other authentic born-again disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ. Let me make perfectly clear that my own views regarding the timing and mode of baptism are totally “baptistic,” and in line with the Baptist Faith & Message.

As “baptistic” Christians, we believe in baptism by immersion, as I understand it, on the basis of three primary reasons:

• Linguistically, the greek term baptizein, translated “to baptize” in the majority of our translations of the Bible in English, means literally “to immerse.”
• Symbolically, we believe, on the basis of Romans 6:3-5 and Colossians 2:12, that baptism is a physical and visual representation of our identification with Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection.
• Historically, in the examples we read in the New Testament (Matthew 3:16; John 3:23; Acts 8:36-38), baptism seems to have been administered by immersion.

In addition to believing in believers baptism by immersion, I also happen to believe in celebrating the Lord’s Supper with a “common loaf” of bread. The reasons for my belief in “common loaf” communion are essentially the same as my reasons for believing in baptism by immersion:

• Linguistically, the term “breaking bread,” generally accepted as referring to the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, directly implies the use of a “common loaf.”
• Symbolically, on the basis of 1 Corinthians 10.16-17, the use of a “common loaf” represents physically and visually an important spiritual truth: the essential unity of the Body of Christ (”For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread”).
• Historically, in the examples we read in the New Testament (Matthew 26:26; Mark 14:22; Luke 22:19, 24:30, 35; Acts 2:42, 46; 20:7, 11; 27:35; 1 Corinthians 11:23-24), it is apparent that the Lord’s Supper was celebrated with a “common loaf.”

*I will leave aside, at this time, the evidence that the Lord’s Supper was also apparently celebrated with a “common cup”, as part of a complete meal, with unleavened bread, and with fermented wine.

Much has been made of the point that those who practice baptism by any mode other than by immersion are effectively disobeying the command of Jesus regarding baptism. By the same token, however, I cannot avoid the conclusion that those who celebrate the Lord’s Supper with individual wafers, or crackers, or pieces of bread, are not truly being obedient to the command of Jesus to “do this in remembrance of me.” Yet, for some reason, as Baptists, we are much more tolerant with those who celebrate the Lord’s Supper in a defective manner than we are with those who are sincerely mistaken in their practice of baptism.

What is the solution to this dilemma? Should those of us who are convinced of the biblical truth concerning “common loaf” celebration of the Lord’s Supper separate from those who still insist on celebrating the Lord’s Supper with individual wafers or their equivalent? Should we form our own denomination that ensures that the missionaries we send out will only teach the churches they plant to practice “common loaf” communion? Or, should we take it to the extreme of refusing to even cooperate on the mission field with those in other groups who are mistaken in their interpretation of this “clear biblical truth”?

I hope, by now, the absurdity of what I am suggesting is obvious. Even though I am totally convinced of the accuracy of my biblical interpretation regarding “common loaf communion,” it would be “nit-picking” for me to separate with other authentic disciples of the Lord Jesus, who are sincerely doing their best to submit to his commands in their own life, over something as secondary as this. Much more important than our differences on this point is our essential unity as joint members of the Body of Christ, who have been given a joint task to fulfill, and should work hand in hand, as brothers and sisters in Christ, to obey together the commands of Christ, to the degree each one of us is able to understand them.

I love and appreciate the Baptist Faith and Message. In spite of what others may think about the document, I am consistently impressed with its thoroughness that is communicated in spite of its brevity. Unlike some other faithful Southern Baptists, I am a fan of all versions of the BF&M, including the newest 2000 version. Having said that, I would like to point out my one point of contention with the BF&M and ask if I’m the only one who sees this as a curious statement, at the very least. Consider with me, if you will, Statement VII:

VII. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper

Christian baptism is the immersion of a believer in water in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It is an act of obedience symbolizing the believer’s faith in a crucified, buried, and risen Saviour, the believer’s death to sin, the burial of the old life, and the resurrection to walk in newness of life in Christ Jesus. It is a testimony to his faith in the final resurrection of the dead. Being a church ordinance, it is prerequisite to the privileges of church membership and to the Lord’s Supper.

The Lord’s Supper is a symbolic act of obedience whereby members of the church, through partaking of the bread and the fruit of the vine, memorialize the death of the Redeemer and anticipate His second coming.

Matthew 3:13-17; 26:26-30; 28:19-20; Mark 1:9-11; 14:22-26; Luke 3:21-22; 22:19-20; John 3:23; Acts 2:41-42; 8:35-39; 16:30-33; 20:7; Romans 6:3-5; 1 Corinthians 10:16,21; 11:23-29; Colossians 2:12.

While I am firmly committed to the theology communicated through the statement on baptism, I do have a question regarding the final statement on the topic of baptism. In the statement we are told “Being a church ordinance, it [baptism] is prerequisite to the privileges of church membership and to the Lord’s Supper.” While I am a strong believer that baptism is necessary, in the sense that it is the first step of obedience as prescribed by the Lord, I am also unconvinced that one is unqualified to receive the Lord’s Supper without having been baptized. I see the biblical admonition to “repent and be baptized”, and as a result of that I can see, from a pragmatic point of view, that baptism can generally be expected to have occurred before someone is regularly partaking of the Lord’s Supper. However, I find it at least curious that, apart from a clear biblical command, we have placed such a restriction in our statement of faith.

I’m interested to know if I’m the only one who finds this strange? Are there others who agree that this is an unnecessary, if not extra biblical expectation?

In keeping with Baptist’s historical love of invigorating dialogue, Drs. Steve Lemke (of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary) and Mark Rathel (my former Theology prof. from The Baptist College of Florida) prove to be both more than capable historians and extremely competent theologians in this example of “Point - Counterpoint” that they engaged in over at the website for The Baptist Center for Theology and Ministry. Dr. Rathel, I think, does a fabulous job of pointing out the strengths of Lemke’s position while maintaining enough distance from Lemke to be able to adequately refute the fallacious positions that Lemke posits. His arguments concerning both historical Calvinism as well as biblical baptism are particularly worth the read. I would recommend that you check it out.

Read Lemke’s article here.

Read Rathel’s response here.