Church Life & Practice
The Lord’s Supper is a sign and seal of our mystical union with Jesus Christ. It is also a means by which Jesus unites the different members of his church into one body. […]
Abraham Rothe (1666–1730) was a German Lutheran theologian and pastor from Żary in what is now western Poland. He defended his Dissertatio theologica de efficacia baptismi (1692), from which this excerpt is translated […]
We live in an age of denominations and distinctions, and many bemoan the seemingly constant influx of new denominations by way of church splits and schisms. The total number of Protestant denominations today varies based on who is doing the talking (and often based on their denominational affiliation as well!), but most estimates put it […]
The church is the crowning achievement in the work of salvation, planned by the Father, accomplished by the Son, and brought into reality by the Spirit (Eph. 1:3–14). The Father’s “plan for the fullness of time” is to sum up all things in heaven and earth under the headship of Jesus Christ (Eph. 1:10). This […]
We’re not Baptists yet. We still have a lot of questions.” The couple sitting across from me in the pastor’s study had been visiting our church so long that I had wrongly presumed they were already Baptists who were just new to the area. But over the course of our conversation, I discovered that these […]
In the summer of 1824, Samuel Miller, long-time professor of church history at Princeton Theological Seminary, offered this counsel to students preparing for ministry: His words were meant to impress upon them the necessity of creeds and confessions for maintaining the unity, peace, and purity of the church. No church can hope to maintain a […]
Do you remember “sword drills”? Growing up Baptist was not all bad. In those days at least, that was where you went if you really wanted to know the Bible. I learned the “Romans Road,” which led me to the doctrines of grace, in spite of my youth pastor who didn’t think I should keep […]
The English Puritan search for the New Testament’s pattern or blueprint of how to “do church” formed the matrix of Baptist origins in the first half of the seventeenth century. Of the two Baptist communities that emerged in this era—the General Baptists, who were Arminian, and the Particular Baptists, who were Calvinistic—the latter were far […]
“Woe Is Me If I Preach Not the Gospel!” (1 Cor. 9:16) St. Paul’s heartfelt exclamation of his calling before God has echoed down through the ages. The Christian church in all its many forms is called to preach the gospel—that is its purpose. There are many subsidiary activities that the church engages in, such […]
In October 2017, I was a newly minted PhD shopping a revised dissertation manuscript around to a handful of publishing houses. Not long after an evangelical house decided to take it on, I found out that my title—something involving the phrase “the evangelical mind”—would be the first part of the project to feel the editor’s […]
I understand evangelicals when they wonder why we can’t communicate the gospel through methods more in tune with our culture. Preaching can seem boring or too formal and hardly able to compete with the entertainment we can so easily access. This, however, is not about novelty versus tradition. There is something much deeper in this […]
When one moves beyond the few stereotypical doctrines and the solas of Reformation theology into its riches and depth, there can be many surprises and discoveries, even on points we as evangelical Protestants thought we knew and understood. A good example is the word of God as it is proclaimed, which Lutheran and Reformed traditions […]
(PART FIVE OF A FIVE-PART SERIES) How do you solve a problem like Maria?How do you catch a cloud and pin it down? Oscar Hammerstein wrote these words to introduce the character of Maria in The Sound of Music. It’s actually a song of frustration, sung by three nuns in the abbey where Maria is […]
“How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church” by C. Christopher Smith
How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church By C. Christopher Smith Brazos Press, 2019 222 pages (paperback), $16.99 Some of the most profitable, God-glorifying, and personally challenging conversations I’ve had in the last decade occurred with a deacon in my local church. With our union in Christ at […]
The church I attend was born 140 years ago, a classic little white clapboard. The first time I saw her, I sighed at the thought of calling her home. The front is a blocky triangle, due to the addition of bathrooms on either side of the original facade (post-Victorian weaklings decided they were needed, and […]
