Monthly Archives: July 2025

The pen is mightier… but words will never hurt me.

Posted on 29/07/2025 by Jon Garvey

“The pen is mightier than the sword.”“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”These can’t both be right, surely?

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On singing Bethel songs in church.

Posted on 24/07/2025 by Jon Garvey

“O.K. Listen up, Guys. I’ve got a song for the worship band to do. It’s from Ike Watts’s new album.” “That’s good, His ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’ is glorious. But isn’t he – well – a little… old? That song must have been written back in the 1990s.”

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Sola Scriptura works – while you let it.

Posted on 23/07/2025 by Jon Garvey

Another week’s break between posts here, and once more it’s not because of sunning myself on the Jurassic Coast, nor even our upcoming Golden Wedding Anniversary this weekend (“…and it don’t seem a day too long…”), but because of further digging into the highly interesting history of my own Baptist Church. I spent a morning at the Exeter records office photographing the Church proceedings book we kept from 1653 until 1795, when it was borrowed by John Rippon, of hymn-collecting fame, and not returned for over a century. I spent most of the last week transcribing the archaic handwriting and spelling, correcting the chronological order, all garbled for several contingent … Continue reading →

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If it ain’t in the Bible…

Posted on 14/07/2025 by Jon Garvey

…it ain’t biblical. In my research on the English Civil War founders of my own church, I came to the conclusion that a single aberrant doctrine – Fifth Monarchism – had caused our Baptists in particular, and other Puritans more generally, a lot of trouble with both Royalist and Commonwealth governments that might, perhaps, have been avoided by more critical biblical thinking. It taught me the importance for every church’s leaders to “watch your life and doctrine closely,” which in this context means watching what your church believes or practices that might diverge from biblical teaching, with bad consequences. That responsibility is not, of course, limited to leaders.

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A bit more on NDEs

Posted on 11/07/2025 by Jon Garvey

I closed my previous post with a quotation from Jesus in which he states that Scripture is sufficient for salvation if people are willing to believe God, and that even someone returning from the dead (he clearly means primarily himself, but it applies equally to the rich man or any NDE experiencer) will not convince evil men.

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Near death experiences

Posted on 09/07/2025 by Jon Garvey

I laid myself open when I preached on the Ascension last Sunday. I majored on one of the things I find most wondrous – that there is an embodied Man in heaven, ruling all things on the throne of God. I unpacked scriptures around that. In passing, I warned people against the hundreds of YouTube videos along the lines, “God took me to heaven, and gave me this message for the world…” Even the apostle Paul was told to keep quiet about what he heard and saw, whether in or out of the body he knew not, in his one view of the third heaven.

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Pleading the fifth (monarchy)

Posted on 02/07/2025 by Jon Garvey

My lack of recent posting is largely explained by research for a project on the Particular (ie Reformed) Baptist founders of my church, which is celebrating its official 370th anniversary next Sunday, from when its records began, though it is probably closer to 378 years old. Two of the main founders, William Allen and John Vernon, have a bigger documentary footprint than I’d realised, and were somewhat significant figures in the Parliamentary army during Britain’s Civil War. Allen became Cromwell’s Adjutant-General in Ireland, and Vernon his Quartermaster-General.

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