Top 2012 Posts
The year 2012 was a great year for the Helwys Society Forum, thanks to God’s faithfulness and your readership. For this, we sincerely thank you, our readers, for your constant encouragement, consistent readership, and critical interaction with us. In an effort to see how God has worked through our ministry this year, we’ve included each contributor’s most successful post from 2012 (according to most viewed). We’ve included hyperlinks to and samples of these articles.
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From Matthew Bracey: America’s Founding and Christianity (Part I): Luther and the Puritan Influence
2012. It’s an election year. Invariably it seems, discussions of American politics lead to discussions of America’s founding. And often tempers flare: “America’s founders were Christians,” some claim. “No they weren’t; they were anti-religious Deists,” retort others.
Amidst such clamor and polarization, what’s the right answer? Is there one? Did Christianity influence America’s founding or not?…
From Jeremy Craft: Rethinking Christian Liberty: How Much Freedom Do We Really Have?
Nowadays, it seems as if Christians are free to do as they please…principles that conform, define, or articulate our Christian freedom are increasingly viewed as disdainful in our postmodern age, and are automatically labeled as legalism. These issues raise important questions about the nature of Christian liberty: What is it? How should it function in the Christian life? What guides our freedom? How does it help us to advance Christ’s kingdom? The neglect to adequately answer these questions has led to the abuse of Christian liberty among evangelicals…
From Jesse Owens: Born Again, Again
In a small metropolitan church, a soft-spoken young woman sits before a group of six boys. It’s Sunday morning in this Sunday school class of 2nd grade boys. At the head of one of those industrial foldout tables, she asks, “If you were to die on your way home today with unconfessed sin in your heart would you go to heaven?” One of the boys quickly replies with a hearty “No!” “Well,” says the young teacher, “we must immediately confess our sins to the Lord so that we don’t die and go to hell for unconfessed sin.”
…This misguided view…teaches that each occasion of repentance and faith is an experience of being born again, again. In an attempt to teach apostasy, she was actually teaching a misguided doctrine: repeated regeneration…
From Phillip Morgan: Musical Thought in the Early Church
On a youth group outing recently, several of our teenagers and I began discussing one of our favorite topics—music. I told them that my musical preferences had changed over the past year in favor of hymns, folk songs, and classical music. When one young man asked why I was making such changes I explained that it was due to some of my recent reading. A New Song for an Old World: Musical Thought in the Early Church has been particularly influential…
From Christopher Talbot: Arminius and Calvin: Partners in Reform
It does not take long to sense the palpable tension between Calvinism and Arminianism. A brief overview of seminaries, blogs, and ministerial organizations shows that countless people divide along the lines drawn by these two theologies. Followers of both Calvin and Arminius have applauded them as heroes of biblical orthodoxy—and rightfully so. Unfortunately, adherents of each school constantly construct straw-men of the other.
Among our strong loyalties and dire convictions, we should ask, “Are these two reformers as different as we’ve often been led to believe?”…
From W. Jackson Watts: Change Versus Tradition: Must We Choose?
“We’ve never done it that way before.” All of us have heard this expression before. Whether at home, work, or church, this sentiment characterizes many, while irking others. It often functions as a conversation-stopper. After all, if past precedent is the final arbiter of all future decisions, progress ceases.
“Change” and “Tradition” are often seen as two distinct, orienting stances for how the church should navigate today’s currents and prepare for tomorrow’s. However, I would like to clarify how fundamentally similar these are…
From a Guest Contributor: Jeff Manning: The Benefits of Expository Preaching
Am I crazy? That thought was on my mind as I stood before the congregation of Unity Free Will Baptist Church on the first Sunday morning of August 1991. I had just been voted in as the Senior Pastor four days earlier, after having served as the Youth Pastor for nine months. As I stood there, safely anchored behind our large pulpit, I proceeded to ask my people to open their Bibles to the Gospel of John. My text that day was John 1:1-18, and in my introductory comments I told the church that I would be preaching through the entire Book of John on Sunday mornings—chapter by chapter, paragraph by paragraph, verse by verse. And by God’s grace that’s exactly what I did. Over a year later after 50-plus sermons, I finished what I had started by preaching from the last section of John 21.
I do not remember exactly what motivated me to preach expositionally through John’s Gospel, but that decision was one of the wisest decisions I have ever made, not just in my pastoral ministry, but in my whole life…
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Thanks, again, and may God continue to work through the HSF ministry in 2013!
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