“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?
“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.”
Continue readingAnother 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 reasons. Who would have thought, for example, that the word “Popain” in a list of local settlements where members lived actually refers to “Pope Hayne,” an old farm just down the hill from us?
Continue reading…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.
Continue readingI 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.
Continue readingI 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.
Continue readingMy 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.
Continue readingI first became aware of William Allen, eventually a Colonel in Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army, when I was researching my 2019 (privately printed) book commemorating the tenth anniversary of our Baptist chapel’s burning down shortly before I moved to Devon. As Captain Allen, together with his lifelong friend Captain John Vernon, and a couple of other Baptist “other ranks,” he was an early leader, and almost certainly founder, of the Baptist Church, Kilmington, now active and growing with weekly congregations upwards of 150 people.
Continue readingTwo buzzwords have been niggling at me recently. The first is “climate breakdown,” much used by Chris Packham to pretend that we, and not God, are in control of the weather and have completely spoiled it – but it’s a pleasant June day and the birds are singing anyway. The second is “spiritual breakthrough,” a term that has begun to be bandied about prodigally in prayers even at my own church, though I’ve noticed it occurring ubiquitously elsewhere for a year or two. You can be sure that when a non-biblical buzzword comes into fashion, somebody has been monkeying around with the theology, and that is true in spades for “breakthrough,” as I’ll demonstrate.
Continue readingMy pastor took an excellent line for his teaching on Pentecost Sunday last week. His main thrust was how the glory of God filled the completed Tabernacle in Exodus, and likewise the completed Solomonic temple, in 1 Kings, but after its judgemental departure (“Ichabod”) before the temple’s destruction by the Babylonians, it is not mentioned as filling the second temple built after the return from captivity. Instead, in fulfilment of the prophecy of Joel, at Pentecost God’s glory (later termed the shekinah) came to dwell within every believer born again in Christ. God is no longer represented in a sacred place, but in his sacred people.
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