Mark Terry

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 […]

For most of my fifty years in ministry, I’ve served as a foreign missionary or seminary professor. However, in my senior years, I’ve been called to serve as the Teaching Pastor of our church. This new responsibility has prompted me to think about the calling of pastors. For sure, it is a high calling, and […]

We often declare that all Southern Baptist churches strive to be true New Testament churches. I don’t disagree with that aspiration, but I wonder if we give sufficient thought to what that means. It seems to me that we often idealize the New Testament church. That is, when we speak of the “New Testament Church,” […]

Last week I posted an essay on Baptist church autonomy. As I did the research for that essay, I found some interesting material in Howard Forshee’s Broadman Church Manual. This manual is quite helpful, and I’ve given copies to several new pastors. In his book Forshee quotes from Lee McCoy’s book, Understanding Baptist Polity, sharing […]

In the past months, writers and commenters here at Voices have used the word autonomy often. The word basically means “self-ruled.” For example, some nations have regions that are semi-autonomous, meaning the region has a measure of independence. What does this word mean in the context of the Southern Baptist Convention and its churches? To […]

In recent weeks we’ve commented extensively on the need to revoke the ordination of pastors who have been convicted of child/sexual abuse. I’m confident our Voices writers and readers agree on that. We have not discussed how that can be done. That thought prompted me to do some research on revoking ordination. I checked the […]

I appreciate that Tony Jones has shared lots of missionary prayer requests with us. As an emeritus IMB missionary (Latin for “has been”), let me share some suggestions about how to pray for missionaries. Missionary prayer requests are not new; in fact, they go back to the Apostle Paul. Here is his: Continue steadfastly in […]