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Please remember we're moving over to the new site, today, so your comments won't make it. When we're ready for comments, we'll post an "All Clear" on the main page. Thanks to Joseph who's working behind the scenes toward going live with the new design. (TB)
There are a number of reasons we love the Sprouls, most definitely including Vesta and RCJr. Here's another. Praise God for this faithful shepherd. (TB, w/thanks to Nate)
While we're on the subject of money...
Over the years countless times I've given thanks to God, but also to Dad and Mom Taylor (Ken Taylor and Margaret Taylor), for the way they handled the money God poured out on them.
One of the minority of privately held Evangelical publishers left standing today is Tyndale House Publishers and it's owned entirely by Mom Taylor now that her husband, Ken, passed away a few years ago. (Prior to his death, Dad owned 51% and Mom 49%. Sweet, huh?)
Tyndale House has published a number of best sellers and Dad held personal copyright on some of the best-selling books in the Evangelical publishing world including the Living Bible and The Bible in Pictures for Little Eyes. Then of course, Tyndale's goose that lay ten thousand golden eggs was Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye's Left Behind series which reached sales (books and related merchandise) of over a billion dollars.
Add up the numbers and you'll see how high on the hog Dad and Mom could have lived and how much money they could have left their children...
This Wednesday Baylyblog's new design will go live. To help with the transfer we'll be shutting down comments for a day or so, likely starting Tuesday evening. So if you run into problems commenting Tuesday night or Wednesday, please be patient.
The work that's gone into the new design has been heavy since we're not simply switching from one blogging software to another--TypePad to WordPress, for instance. Baylyblog is being transformed into a site running on the open source content management platform, Drupal.
There are a number of features this will allow, but search is the big winner...
No servant can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth. - Luke 16:13
Recently we've spent time on Guidestar downloading and reviewing IRS 990s filed by various Evangelical ministries including Ligonier, Grace to You, Grace to You/Masters College and Seminary, Insight for Living, and Desiring God.
Like accountants, our Internal Revenue Service holds to a high doctrine of original sin--much higher than today's Reformed pastors and congregants. Taking money and conflict of interest seriously, the IRS requires nonprofits to file Form 990 answering a whole host of questions the government believes should inform the giving of those inclined to support these ministries. Then the information collected through the 990 is made a matter of public record. Here are some of the questions...
My wife Mary Lee just forwarded this pic, commenting "I'm not dead yet." (TB)
It's hard to move and have to find a new church home. All of us have done it and those of us a part of Clearnote Fellowship want to make your work a little easier by telling you why we love our Clearnote churches in Bloomington and Indianapolis. So read on and spend a little time learning about the work God is doing within Clearnote Fellowship.
First, a few words about our doctrine and denominational roots. If this stuff isn't your brand of coffee, click through and start reading about our ministries.
The roots of Clearnote Fellowship are deep into the Presbyterian Church in America: I've served as a teaching elder of the PCA in Wisconsin and Indiana for almost twenty years; six of Clearnote Church, Bloomington's elders have been members of PCA churches; son Joseph Bayly who pastors Clearnote Church, Indianapolis was a part of the PCA's campus ministry (RUF) and attended a PCA congregation while studying at Vanderbilt; we have referred many families moving away from Clearnote Church, Bloomington to PCA congregations across the country; and several sons of our church now serve as PCA pastors.
This to say the people of Clearnote Fellowship have decades of experience as members and officers of the PCA, so those of you moving and looking for a PCA church in Bloomington or a PCA church in Indianapolis will find the congregations of Clearnote Fellowship to be spiritual homes where you and your children will thrive. Come and visit our Bloomington or Indianapolis congregations...
Continue reading "Looking for a church home in Bloomington or Indianapolis?" »
(TB: This post first ran on Baylyblog in 2004. It is a tribute to Mom Taylor and David's and my mother, Mary Lou Bayly. Both are mothers in Israel and we give thanks for them to our Heavenly Father. But of course, we also give thanks for our own wonderful wives! The tribute starts with a poem Dad wrote on the back of a Mother's Day card he gave to Mud just a couple years before his death. The reference to three and four at the end of the poem is Dad alluding to their three children who had already died and their four children who were still alive.)
To M.L. (Mary Lou)
Mother’s Day, 1982
—to celebrate your creation of children
What a Holy Spirit calling:
To create an infant
within yourself
Your very inmost self—Nourish, protect, prepare
Then bring to birth
Nurse, feed
—run between stove and table in teenage—
Teach, discipline, hope, expect
Love
And all the while pray
with faith in God
Bring to safe harbor
through calm and storm
and monstrous waves
to wholeness
and useful life
on earth
in heaven
That God should call
three to live and serve there
four to live and serve here
What a calling!
My mother-in-law studied for her degree in Home Economics during the late '30s and early '40s, graduating summa cum laude from Oregon State University. After marrying her childhood sweetheart, she gave birth to 10 children in 14 years. Her husband, engaged for most of the years when the family was young as editorial director of a religious publishing house, brought home low wages, so frugality was a necessity and the degree served this young mother and her family well.
Then came the frontal assault on housewifery and motherhood carried out largely by a new and powerful aristocracy...
Pastor David Wegener and his wife Terri have been a great gift to the ministry of Clearnote Church, Bloomington while on home assignment under the Presbyterian Church in America's Mission to the World this past year. Terri has taught women's Bible studes and David has attended session meetings, taught in Clearnote Pastors College, sat on the Pastors Council of Clearnote Fellowship, and preached. So watching them prepare to return to Ndola, Zambia, I've been thinking about when David and I first met at a presbytery meeting of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA).
David and I served as teaching elders in the same PCA presbytery for almost twenty years, now. Time has flown. God is good.
The rest of this page is a discussion of whether or not Reformed credo and paedobaptists should ever acknowledge one another's existence or worship together.
Meanwhile, I've taken the former text of this post, updated it, and posted it under the title, Looking for a church in Bloomington or Indianapolis?
(TB)
(TB: This post is written by our American-African correspondent, David Wegener.) Recently, Tim passed on a mutual friend's heavily-annotated copy of Frank Schaeffer’s Crazy for God and I read it pretty quickly...
Although our good Gov. Mitch Daniels endorsed him, I'm pleased Senator Richard Lugar lost the primary last night. It was time for new leadership.
Speaking of new leadership, the PCA's Covenant Theological Seminary has moved former president Bryan Chapell over to the position of Chancellor and is searching for a new president. You can count on Bryan's stint as Chancellor being quite short before he moves on to another institution.
Sadly, I fear this leadership change has strengthened the hand of Covenant's faculty...
Continue reading "Dick Lugar, Bryan Chapell, and Jack Collins..." »
(Chancellor Richard McCartny explaining new non-discrimination policy to Vanderbilt University Town Hall Meeting)
MCCARTNEY: I’m Catholic. What if my faith beliefs guided all of the decisions I make from day to day? ...As a Catholic, if I held that life begins at conception, I’d have a very big problem with our hospital. Right? Would I not? . . . I would, but I don’t...
The Presbyterian Church in America's Reformed University Fellowship now stands alone in complying with Vanderbilt University's new non-discrimination policy...
(TB, w/thanks to John W.)
The ads for Doug Wilson's lectures we ran on campus buses had the universal symbols for man and woman, alongside the text "Different by Design." They were vandalized, ripped and pulled down. Our sidewalk chalkings of the same were smeared into illegibility. Now this ad is posted on campus buses and it's ho-hum business as usual with no vandalism at all. Your tax dollars at work,citizens of our own constitutional representative democracy.
(TB, w/thanks)
Here is a man who loves the sinner and hates the sin. The world doesn't see it that way. One of our Clearnote men writes, "If you don't know Ron, he's an assistant football coach at the University of Nebraska. I had the privilege of meeting Ron when he spoke at my high school prom some years ago. He is a dear brother who continually risks his worldly comforts to promote God's Kingdom.
(TB, w/thanks to Taylor and Andrew R.)
Not just educational apparatchiks, but Russel Moore. For an earned doctorate Christian spokesman to fail to distinguish between condemnation and shame and bullying in an article like this is an indication of not yet being ready for prime time. Or rather, of allowing prime time's baubles to get to you.
Tell me, good Russell, precisely what sorts of things do you think Christian students should say about sodomy on public campuses? Or is the very name 'Sodomite" off limits because it hurts? Is it "rhetorical pornography?"
(TB, w/thanks to Kamilla)
(TB: Here's good original new music for your worship.)
From our public education correspondent, this heads-up. And this one. And this one. When we read of "bullying," keep in mind that educational apparatchiks know no difference between bullying and shaming. Sadly, Christians long ago gave up on shaming as a tool of protection of immortal souls. But shaming is not dead. The shaming of the Christian conscience still works just fine. (TB, w/thanks to...)
For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not in cleverness of speech, so that the cross of Christ would not be made void. - 1 Corinthians 1:17
Formal recitation is to liturgy as reading manuscripts is to preaching. Both are helpful, particularly for beginning pastors. Charles Simeon read his manuscripts for the first five years or so. But at some point, a preacher should preach in a way that allows him to speak to his flock and specific sheep on the fly. And this is to depend upon the Holy Spirit to illumine the needs of the day rather than simply the needs of the race or of believers or of his flock annually or monthly.
The pastor who pastors knows how often family members he's heard about in counseling will show up unannounced on a Sunday morning and place themselves under the preaching of the Word. Shall he simply read the sermon he prepared with no thought of them? Is that pastoral? The pastor who pastors knows how often he will see the eyes and posture and faces of the souls in his flock and know...
With the senior year men of Clearnote and Reformed Evangelical Pastors Colleges this morning, we were discussing Iain Murray's Evangelicalism Divided.
This is one of the most important books for any officer of Christ's Church to read today. In it Murray exhaustively documents the history of the herding instincts of men like John Stott and Jim Packer who chose to acknowledge as "Christians" and to make common cause with fellow British Anglican churchmen who denied the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Birth, and the substitutionary Atonement (for instance). Then Murray exhaustively documents the rotten fruit of their terrible compromises.
We discussed why Martyn Lloyd-Jones refused to go along with such betrayal of the Church, warning against it when men like Stott and Packer were such promoters? One student said he thought Stott and Packer wanted to protect their clout whereas Lloyd-Jones was willing to lose his.
Which took me back to the Wired piece on Klout I read last night. It's a web business that rates men on the basis of how many they influence or lead--hence the name "Klout." The author, Seth Stevenson, starts out by reporting that the perfect Klout score is 100. Justin Bieber's Klout is 100 and President Obama's 91. Influence and leadership, you know.
Officers of Christ's Church are constantly choosing whether to keep or lose their Klout...
Considering the movement towards employing art for an experience of trascendance among Reformed types today, it may help to study what others have done in a similar vein.
A quarter century ago, the world’s greatest tightrope walker, Philippe Petit, requested permission to display his prowess high above the nave of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City. The performance was described as follows:
When William T. Manning, a former Bishop of New York, was asked whether salvation could be found outside the Episcopal Church, he replied, "Perhaps so, but no gentleman would care to avail himself of it."
- Jervis Anderson, Profiles, "STANDING OUT THERE ON THE ISSUES,"The New Yorker, April 28, 1986, pp. 46 ff.
The aim and effect of the liturgical system is to make the mass of worshippers as independent as possible of the individual minister; the aim, if not the effect of our system, is to make individual ministers as valuable as possible to the worshippers, for their instruction and edification.
The one system may secure a uniform solemnity and decency, but the other system tends to secure the more important qualities of fervor, energy, and life; and we believe, whatever fastidious critics may allege, it does to a considerable extent secure them.
At lowest, the non-liturgical method secures that the worship of the church shall be a true reflection of her life, and therefore, however beggarly, at least sincere.
- A. B. Bruce, The Training of the Twelve
; n., p. 58.
(TB)
(TB: this just in from our American-African correspondent.)
I'm not sure there's ever been a better band than Cream. Listening to White Room just now. Loud.
Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker, and Clapton? Nothing and no one else.
And best album?
Here's a video of Hiding Place being sung in suport of missional preaching before and after the song. (TB, w/thanks to Nate and Phil)
Feminists are masters of stratetgic incrementalism.
Sexual orthodoxy was repudiated about two decades ago in the Dutch Christian Reformed Church but some of the denomination's classes (presbyteries) still refuse to seat women who have been ordained. This causes CRC leaders to fulminate against this insult to their woman officers. In the midst of an in-house CRC discussion of the problem, one CRC leader commends Tim Keller's practice...
Continue reading ""Most of (Redeemer's ministry leaders) were women..."" »
Here's some good and bad news.
The good is that "World" magazine reported it.
The bad is that the PCA's national coordinator of RUF, Rod Mays, says he agrees with the decision of Vandy's RUF chapter not to join all the other campus ministries who have united in refusing to sign Vanderbilt's new nondiscrimination policy. RUF will sign the new policy, justifying their signature by saying they don't have student leaders and they don't want to lose their institutional influence.
Under the new policy, Vandy has required one ministry to remove the words "personal commitment to Jesus Christ" from its requirements of its leaders. Another ministry got into trouble for disciplining a member for his sexual immorality...
ClearNote Church
Bloomington, Indiana
