Free Will Baptists: A History of Migrants
At the turn of the twentieth century, very little was known about the development of the Palmer Movement of Free Will Baptists. Since then, historians have gathered and synthesized myriad documents into excellent narrative accounts.[1] Now Free Will Baptist historians need to begin filling in details and applying relevant historical analysis. Our understanding of how Free Will Baptists spread geographically could benefit greatly from...
2017 National Association: Convention Review
by the Helwys Society and Friends Another Convention is on the books. All seven Forum contributors were among the 4,603 Free Will Baptists to attend this year’s meeting in Louisville, Kentucky. We were blessed to be able to represent our churches, provide seminars, watch our young people compete, and worship with our brothers and sisters across the denomination. In this post, we recount some of our reflections from the 81st National...
Why We Don’t Read the Bible
You wake up ten minutes later than you had hoped and it starts: “What if I’m late? What about traffic? What time are my meetings today?” You finally make it to work, but your mind is elsewhere. You remember the family member who is struggling. Or you remember the difficult problem your kid is facing at school. You make it home, and, as you turn on the evening news, you start to worry about the economy and world events. You turn the...
Principled and Pragmatic (Part II/II)
This essay is the second part of a two-part essay which first posted last Monday on the Forum. Part one can be viewed here. Principled and Pragmatic? There are certainly limitations in envisioning these two errors as extremes on a spectrum. It can give the impression that there is a solution for all ministry questions that balances perfectly on the spectrum between biblical principles and practical concerns. I don’t think this is the...
Principled and Pragmatic (Part I/II)
“Did you know that conversion rates for companies using custom visual content are 7 times higher than companies that do not?” I could hardly believe my eyes when I first read these words. They were in the subject line of a message sent to our church email account. I was relieved when, upon closer inspection, I saw that it was not from a parachurch ministry, and the “conversion” to which it referred was not of the spiritual sort....
Recommended Books (Summer 2017)
Reading is a sacred act of creation and memory. Our ability to use words to call worlds historic and fantastical into existence is a part of God’s image in us. When we write, we create new worlds on the page that are fully realized only when our words are incarnated in the mind of a reader. Sometimes those worlds are florid products of our imaginations that are only tangentially tethered to the real world. These creations recall and...
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