SBC Voices

Joel Rainey is the Director of Missions at Mid-Maryland Baptist Association, an adjunct professor at Capital Bible Seminary and blogs at Themelios (Twitter - @joelrainey).  As spring and summer approach, mission teams from churches all over America begin gearing up for a busy season. Anyone who frequents airports for either business or pleasure has no doubt seen oceans of identical T-shirts wandering the concourses between connections, and those wearing those T-shirts expect no less than a "great missions experience." Summer has barely begun, and our Association has already had teams on … [Read more...] about Missions Reflections: Why We Go (by Joel Rainey)

Can you identify anything in your current spiritual practice of your faith that has come about as a result of your having read a blog article? Have you ever preached a sermon that seemed helpful to yourself or to others for which you could say that some of the material was contributed through your consumption of blogs? Have you ever had a blog article to touch you profoundly or to lead you closer to the Lord in some way? If the answer to any of those questions is yes, I wonder whether you would consider sharing a brief narrative of your experience in the comments below? Please refrain … [Read more...] about The Impact of Blogging: A Poll

As I read the discussion on Bart's post yesterday my mind went back to a story I heard a Baptist leader tell not too long ago. I wanted to pose this tough question for our discussion. We ought to form our theology based on biblical teachings, not on difficult quandaries such as this, but it is still interesting to ponder what we might do in particular circumstance. For the sake of this article, we need not argue the basics of biblical baptism. Apologies to our Presby friend Les who hangs out here, but the readers of Voices are pretty much exclusively people who are convinced that biblical … [Read more...] about A Tough Question for Biblical Baptists

I lost my dad to cancer in 1999, there was a tumor in his kidney that causes him to loose blood.  He began to loose blood faster than his body could replace it, and he bleed to death over the course of a month.  It was slow, it was crippling but not painful.  He became weak, he became tired and his lost some mental facilities.  Towards the end, he couldn't lift his glasses from his chest and put them on his face.  One day he went to sleep and woke up with Jesus. Bleeding to death from something like what my dad has is an interesting process.  At the beginning, he knew he was bleeding but … [Read more...] about Is the SBC Bleeding to Death?

Baptism is not merely a doctrine; it is a command. In the Great Commission the church is commanded to baptize disciples. If you are an unbaptized disciple and I make no effort to baptize you, that's neither kindness, nor humility, nor generosity; it is simply disobedience. It is the valuing of my relationship with you as your friend over my relationship with Christ as His servant. Granted, there is difference of opinion over whether one is or is not baptized when one has been sprinkled with water contrary to one's will. But I write for those who are of the opinion that baptism is the … [Read more...] about Baptism Is Commanded

I was listening to a message not long ago and was amazed at the quality of the organized outline and presentation. It was way better than anything I'd heard the man preach before. I had a small suspicion growing in my mind. So, I wrote down a few key phrases from the outline and later entered them in the magic machine called Google. Lo and behold, the original author of the message was a man named Criswell - I think there is a college somewhere named after him. Basically, he read the sermon word for word.  It was not a case of using someone else's outline and "making it his own." Nope. It was … [Read more...] about The Internet and the Ethics of Borrowed Sermons

There is a legend in Greek mythology that details the story of a baby on whom a young death was prophesied. This baby's name was Achilles. To thwart this prophecy, Achilles' mother, Thetis, took him to the River Styx, a river that supposedly offered powers of invulnerability. Thetis placed her faith in this river's fabled power, and commenced to dip her son's body into it. Because Achilles was still a baby, however, Thetis had to hold on to him throughout the event, and, as she did, held him by his heel. Therefore every part of Achilles' body was made invulnerable by this magical water, … [Read more...] about What is the Achilles Heel of your Pastoral Ministry?