Submitted by philip on Fri, 03/07/2014 - 11:04 Senior Pastor Brian Crain and his wife Hannah stand beside the Baptist Collegiate Ministry sign on the LSU campus. In the background is the chapel the new church plant is utilizing on Sunday’s. The new start rents the LSU BCM’s facilities to hold Sunday services and is averaging 50-55 at the moment. They have had 14 people indicate they wanted to join the church and several more interested in being baptized during March. By Philip Timothy, Managing Editor BATON ROUGE – Listen to him speak and it quickly becomes apparent Brian Crain is driven, passionate about his work and on fire for the Lord. Listen just a little closer and you will hear a quiet confidence as well. Impressive, considering that at only 28 years of age, Crain is the lead pastor of a new church plant in Baton Rouge, Progression Church, where he and his core team of six families (17 people) are seeking to reach the millennial generation. “A year before my wife and I left to come here, I began praying about who God wanted us to reach,” Crain said. “I was reading a book, Millennials, by Thom Ranier (President and CEO of LifeWay Christian Resources) on the unchurched. Ranier said the millennial generation – … [Read more...]

By Kelly Boggs, Editor What did you do on Darwin Day 2014? If you are like me, you totally missed it. Someone had to call my attention to the celebration of all things evolutionary, after the Feb. 8 event had taken place. A little research allowed me to discover the website of the International Darwin Day Foundation (IDDF). According to the site: “Darwin Day is an international celebration of science and humanity held on or around Feb. 12, the day that Charles Darwin was born on in 1809. Specifically, it celebrates the discoveries and life of Charles Darwin – the man who first described biological evolution via natural selection with scientific rigor. “More generally, Darwin Day expresses gratitude for the enormous benefits that scientific knowledge, acquired through human curiosity and ingenuity, has contributed to the advancement of humanity.” The IDDF website encourages enthusiasts to ask elected officials for proclamations declaring Darwin Day a recognized and official celebration in their jurisdictions. You can even send a festive e-card from the IDDF site. One that caught my eye was a colorful depiction of the ascent of man with the encouragement, “On Darwin Day Let’s Resolve to Evolve.” A recent Pew poll on the … [Read more...]

By David E. Hankins, Executive Director of the Louisiana Baptist Convention In 1892, William Wrigley began placing two pieces of chewing gum in every order of baking powder purchased from his fledgling company. He hoped this “premium” would increase sales. To Wrigley’s surprise (and profit), the gum became more popular than the baking powder. Wrigley’s new brands Juicy Fruit and Spearmint became household names, and the Wrigley Co. grew into a multi-billion dollar business. (It sold to Mars, Inc. in 2008 for $23 billion.) Thanks in large measure to William Wrigley, chewing gum developed a life of its own. Even though it had existed in some form for centuries, chewing gum became a part of Americana. Do you remember baseball cards with chewing gum enclosed? Today, kids still practice blowing bubble gum to see how large a bubble they can make without it getting stuck on their face and hair. Gum chewing is touted as a remedy for refreshing your breath, cleaning your teeth, calming your nerves, and performing emergency repairs when a more ordinary adhesive is unavailable. Millions of people of all ages like to chew gum. One reporter said of Wrigley, “He taught the world the gum chewing habit.” Of course, gum chewing has its … [Read more...]

By Darrell D. White, retired judge, Founder and President of American Judicial Alliance The recent Ken Ham v. Bill Nye debate over origins science drew a large audience, showing how vitally important is this issue of God vs. random natural selection causing macro-evolution (amoeba to man evolution). How very sad it is that today’s public school students are denied access to information about the many scientific problems with Darwinian macro-evolution. Scholarly observations published over twenty years ago in ‘The American Biology Teacher’ analyzed 1991 biology textbooks and found the same problems impeding the acquisition of critical thinking skills that are evident in the current editions: “...(I)t should be apparent that the errors, overstatements and omissions … noted in these biology texts, all tend to enhance the plausibility of hypotheses that are presented. More importantly, the inclusion of outdated material and erroneous discussions is not trivial. The items noted mislead students and impede their acquisition of critical thinking skills. If we fail to teach students to examine data critically, looking for points both favoring and opposing hypotheses, we are selling our youth short and mortgaging the future of … [Read more...]

By David Crosby, Pastor First New Orleans I have found the long-sought secret to the vitality of the Baptist movement. It’s called swarm intelligence, the “collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems.” Heretofore the most useful metaphor for Baptist cooperative work has been the “rope of sand” introduced by James L. Sullivan in his booklet, “Rope of Sand Strength of Steel” in 1974. This metaphor gained prominence in Baptist life and thought as denominational servants and theologians attempted to communicate to Baptists and others how things work in our convention. Swarm intelligence is an upgrade in at least two ways. First, it is a biblical metaphor: Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest. (Proverbs 6:6-8). Baptists definitely fit in the “no commander, no overseer or ruler” group. We are fiercely independent. All of our churches, entities, and conventions are self-governing and autonomous. Jesus is Lord, of course, just as God is sovereign over the ants. But as far as social and business structures are concerned, Baptists have no commander, no pope or bishops. A second … [Read more...]

By Russell Moore, President of Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission Kirsten Powers and Jonathan Merritt recently wrote an article for the Daily Beast accusing conservative Christians of hypocrisy and unchristian behavior for suggesting that some persons’ consciences won’t allow them to use their creative gifts to help celebrate same-sex weddings. Since I was a key example of this hypocrisy, I’ll respond to that charge. At issue is a response I made, reposted this week over at The Gospel Coalition, helping a Christian wedding photographer think through whether he ought to work for a same-sex wedding. In the photographer’s question, he grapples with the question of how his conscience ought to play in this decision not only as it relates to weddings of people who, for all he knows, might be involved in all sorts of unbiblical behavior. Powers and Merritt suggest if he refuses to photograph one “unbiblical wedding,” he ought to “refuse to photograph them all.” As a matter of fact, they say, to do anything else is to be “seen as a hypocrite” and to “heap shame on the gospel.” More specifically, they point to my advice that the photographer doesn’t have a moral obligation to ferret out the circumstances behind every wedding he … [Read more...]

By Jim Law, Pastor First Baptist Church Gonzales Someone has said that judging others is one of the favorite indoor sports of humanity. Indeed, judging others just seems to flow naturally from a fallen heart. Even among the ranks of the redeemed, believers battle with sinful, judgmental attitudes. In fact, one of the crushing criticisms leveled against Christianity have been those instances where professing believers have been cruel, harsh, and condemning in their action toward others. Instead of providing a covering of comfort in the blows of life, believers have been known to shoot their wounded.  These cancerous thoughts and actions can defile many, thus falling woefully short of the command of Jesus who taught, “Judge not, that you be not judged.” Matthew 7:1 In context, the crosshairs of this command were upon the Pharisees whose judgments were so severe and without mercy that Jesus rebukes them for noticing the speck in another’s eye while ignoring the log that was in their own eye. Like the Pharisees we too can be good at speck inspecting and log ignoring. Like the older brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son, we can rehearse the failures of others without taking a breath, but are often very slow to embrace our … [Read more...]

By Bob Stewart, Professor of Philosphy and Theology at NOBTS Worldviews are like navels.  We all have one, but we don’t often think about it. There is no shortage of talk or books these days about “worldviews,” whether the worldview in question is the Christian worldview, the naturalist worldview, the enlightenment worldview, the Muslim worldview, the New Age worldview or whatever the worldview flavor of the month is. But what exactly do we mean when we use the term worldview? To a degree that depends on who is speaking (just as what is understood depends on who is listening).  Apparently worldviews are also like pornography – we all think we know a worldview when we see one but nobody can produce a definition that satisfies everyone. Simply put, there doesn’t appear to be much agreement on the answer to this question. For this reason, it seems best to me to begin by laying out what I mean when I talk about worldviews, especially what I mean when I talk about the Christian worldview. A worldview is a set of basic beliefs through which we view reality.  Simple enough; but what does this mean? Among other things it means that a worldview is not simply a single belief but a group of beliefs that shape and influence how we … [Read more...]