Mark Terry

I’ve been reading John S. Dickson’s book, The Great Evangelical Recession. It is an accurate, but not uplifting, analysis of the state of evangelicalism in the USA. In one chapter he discusses the expectations church members have of their pastors. He writes about how those expectations have changed over the years. Fifty Years Ago Pastors […]

I’ve been reading articles about what life will be like after the pandemic. Lots of folks long for things to “return to normal,” but many commentators express doubt that things ever will be the same. For example, all the buffet restaurants in our area have closed, and most will never reopen. The Chinese buffet in […]

Some of our recent posts on Voices have proven controversial. Folks have strong opinions about SBC politics, racial reconciliation, and especially President Trump. I thought I would write a post that would be noncontroversial. In the old days, when William Thornton and I were young, pastors would ask their congregations to recite their favorite Bible […]

I realize Voices published a post on this several years ago, but I thought it would be interesting to discuss this topic again. This week on his blog Thom Rainer published the list of best-selling Bible translations as of 2020. This list came from the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association. Rankings as January 2020 (numbers in […]

I learned several weeks ago that the IMB had evacuated and relocated many of its missionaries around the world. The IMB took action after the US State Department advised all American citizens abroad to return to the USA as soon as possible. The IMB offered its missionaries the option of staying or evacuating. Of course, […]

I have been posting about our church’s efforts to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, and I thought I would bring you up to date. We ended public worship on March 22nd. We’ve webcast our worship services now for six weeks, and more people have viewed our services online than came to public worship. We observed […]

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how our church was coping with the pandemic and its effects on our church. I thought I would give you an update and invite our readers to share their experiences, also. We have now presented our Sunday morning worship online for four Sundays. We’ve posted our worship […]

My apologies! I posted this for Mark Terry and forgot to change the author from Dave to Mark! You can color me surprised. Last Sunday, by the order of the governor of Texas, we had to cancel our public worship service. We did have our men’s prayer meeting at 8:00 a.m., assuming we would not […]

Last week William Thornton and J D Greear published articles about the low baptism statistics in the SBC. Between them they mentioned most of the pertinent factors. J D Greear led by lamenting the low level of spiritual fervency in our churches. For sure, he is not the only one to mention that. In the […]

At our church, our staff has discussed what to do about the Sunday evening service. Since I’ve been a member here, we’ve not succeeded in attracting many attenders to the evening service. Our church is a traditional, small-town church in Texas. The church has always held a Sunday night service. Last summer our church staff […]

In recent years our SBC evangelism statistics have declined significantly. Dr. Jeff Iorg, the President of Gateway Seminary (formerly Golden Gate Baptist Seminary) spoke about this in his convocation message in the fall semester of 2019: “Southern Baptists have a declining effectiveness in sharing the Gospel with non-Christians and leading them to profess faith in […]