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What The Bible Says - Good Samaritan's Penny Pulpit by Pastor Ed Rice

What The Bible Says - Good Samaritan's Penny Pulpit by Pastor Ed Rice

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Join us as Pastor Stephen Pope preaches at the pulpit of Calvary Baptist Church in Union Grove, NC If you are a first time viewer ...

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Indonesia's Compassion First isn't knocking down doors, but caring for victims and tutoring at-risk youth living in cemeteries.Inside a cemetery in West Java, a woman rests on a mattress laid on top of a gravestone beneath the oak trees. The graveyard is home not only to the dead but to the living poor, who have nowhere else to go.Residents of the Rose Cemetery community collect garbage, drive pedicabs, or clean graves by day. In the northern section of the cemetery, about 200 families live in brick and tin buildings lining a ditch filled with trash and milky sewage water. At night, many women resort to prostitution to provide for their families. Their daughters are often sold—or kidnapped—into the sex trade. (CT changed the names of the cemeteries and only used the first names of its residents for security reasons.)Compassion First (CF) offered tutoring, parenting classes, and cooking classes for the community on a blue covered porch in the cemetery complex. Recently they moved to a new community center nearby. CF focuses on fighting sex trafficking in Indonesia, and here at the cemetery, that means community development among families vulnerable to exploitation.Susi and Mala, two mothers who have lived in the community their whole lives, noted that neighbors rarely knew one another in the past. CF arrived during the COVID-19 pandemic—initially to provide food for the community and scholarships to the children. Since then, the neighborhood has become much more close-knit and better resourced. For young girls, this could make the difference between whether they are trafficked or not.Susi learned from the cooking class how to make seblak (a spicy dish made of wet crackers and meat or seafood, smothered in sambal chili paste) and now sells it to supplement her income. Mala learned about the five love languages in the parenting class ...Continue reading...

An excerpt from Larry Tye's The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America.“Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?” asked a 1921 Ladies Home Journal article. Whimsical wordplay aside, the question would become a serious one for mid-century America, as parsons and priests blamed jazz for soaring juvenile crime rates, drugs, and extramarital sex. A 1960 poll found that, among Black preachers, just 1 in 5 wanted to let jazz or blues into their services. Decades before, a religion editor at the Pittsburgh Courier had denounced Louis Armstrong’s “sacrilegious desecration of Spirituals.” Duke Ellington’s music was “considered worldly,” counseled the Rev. John D. Bussey, explaining why the local 1966 Baptist Ministers Conference had unanimously passed his resolution opposing a performance.But whatever commandments they were breaking—and there were plenty, from slighting the Sabbath to serial adultery—Duke, Louis, and king of swing Count Basie all seemed to take the Christian faith they’d been raised in seriously. And that faith found its way into their music.For Louis Armstrong, the connection was there from the very beginning, when he learned to sing in his mother’s Sanctified church. “The ‘whole ‘Congregation would be “Wailing—‘Singing like ‘mad and ‘sound so ‘beautiful,” he wrote with his characteristic expressive, idiosyncratic punctuation. “I’d have myself a ‘Ball in ‘Church, especially when those ‘Sisters ‘would get ‘So ‘Carried away while ‘Rev’ would be ‘right in the ‘Middle of his ‘Sermon. ‘Man those ‘Church ‘Sisters would ‘begin ‘Shouting ‘So—until ...Continue reading...

Amid the continued declines, Southern Baptists are celebrating back-to-back years of growth in worship attendance and baptism.Despite years of record-setting declines shrinking the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) to its lowest membership in nearly half a century, Southern Baptists have begun to see some signs of life within their 46,906 churches.Worship attendance, small group attendance, and baptisms were up last year in the SBC’s annual statistical report, released Tuesday, while membership fell below 13 million.2023 marks 17 straight years of decline for the country’s biggest Protestant denomination. It’s down 3.3 million from its peak, with the steepest drops coming during the pandemic. The SBC lost 1.3 million members between 2020 and 2022 alone.Beyond COVID-19 disruptions, Southern Baptists have recently confronted some contentious issues within their convention, responding to sexual abuse and clamping down on female preachers, which have led some congregations to leave the SBC (including prominent megachurch Saddleback Church).But statistics indicate that church departures aren’t a significant driver of membership decline; the SBC was down 292 churches last year, just 0.63 percent of its total.In 2023, membership fell by 241,000, its smallest decrease since 2018. Yet attendance at SBC churches increased 6.5 percent, reaching above 4 million a week for the first time since the pandemic.Attendance at small groups and Bible studies ticked up 4 percent to 2.4 million.With fewer Americans than ever attending church and religious disaffiliation on the rise, leaders see even small increases in engagement and discipleship as worth celebrating.It’s the first time in over a decade that SBC worship attendance has grown two years in a row, though it still lags behind pre-pandemic numbers. Back in ...Continue reading...

Why Wayne Grudem's interpretation of Ephesians 5:21 is untenable.In Ephesians 5:21, Paul instructs Christians to “submit to one another.” These words have traditionally been understood to require mutual submission, even among family members. The reformer John Calvin, for example, acknowledged that the notion of a father submitting to his child or a husband submitting to his wife might seem “strange at first glance,” but he never questioned that such submission is indeed what Paul prescribes.In more recent years, however, this reading of Ephesians 5:21 has been called into question—ironically, in the name of theological conservatism. Many evangelical scholars now assert that the submission in this verse is not mutual submission (everyone submits to everyone) but one-directional submission to those in authority (some submit to others). The most outspoken proponent of this view is Wayne Grudem, a prominent theologian who helped establish the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.Grudem, who recently announced his retirement from teaching, has argued for more than three decades that Ephesians 5:21 could be paraphrased as follows: “Those who are under authority should be subject to others among you who have authority over them.” On Grudem’s reading, this verse requires a wife to submit to her husband, but it does not in any sense require a husband to submit to his wife.In defense of this interpretation, Grudem appeals to the meaning of hypotassō, the Greek verb translated “to submit” or “to be subject.” Grudem claims that this verb “always means to be subject to someone else’s authority, in all Greek literature, Christian and non-Christian.”“In every example we can ...Continue reading...

The Austin City Council in Texas voted 10-1 last Thursday to approve a resolution that one councilmember opposed out of concern it would effectively mandate city authorities to disobey the state Legislature's recent Senate Bill 14 passed last year.