Hope for the Weary
by Emily Vickery There is a weariness that lies just this side of burnout—the kind that weighs down your soul and takes up residence in your bones. It is the companion of middle-of-the-night nursery trips, early morning wake-up calls, and long days with longer to-do lists. It sits up with you at night as you finish that one final task and greets you in the morning as you rush out the door with a rapidly cooling cup of coffee. It...
“God in the Form of a Slave”: Humility, Incarnation, and Feet Washing
At the beginning of his Gospel, John informs us of a major inflection point in human history when he writes that “the Word” who is God “became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn. 1:1, 14).[1] More appropriately, we might say that the incarnation was the major inflection point of human history. It was nothing less than an invasion of what Fernando F. Segovia terms the “world ‘above’” into the “world ‘below.’” The former refers to the...
Recommended Books (Autumn 2022)
Every generation undoubtedly feels a sense of dislocation, but the world seems to be growing increasingly strange. The old liberal order fashioned in the nineteenth century and bludgeoned horribly during the twentieth appears to be tottering in the early twenty-first—wars in Europe, spasmodic breakdown of social order in major cities in the West and East, COVID-19 and the ensuing social chaos and governmental overreach, and economic...
Textual Criticism and the Local Church
Textual criticism is nearly impossible to avoid in the local church context. Textual criticism involves the decisions scholars make concerning the most original form of a text based on the manuscript evidence for the Hebrew Old Testament or the Greek New Testament. Every pastor deals with text-critical decisions each week as he prepares his sermon. Even the average Christian encounters text-critical issues when he or she picks up a...
Eleven Baptist Ecclesiology Texts Every Baptist Should Read
by Jesse Owens and Jake Stone In the fall of 2021, I (Jesse) had the pleasure of teaching a master’s level seminar on Baptist ecclesiology at Welch College. The course consisted primarily of reading and discussing Baptist texts in ecclesiology, many of which were from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We read texts from General Baptists and Particular Baptists on issues such as the nature of the church, believer’s baptism,...
Revisiting the Sabbath
We need Sabbath. Peter Scazzero remarked, “Without the Sabbath, we easily find ourselves lost and unsure of the larger picture of God in our lives.”[1] Our human nature prioritizes tasks over relationships, activity over rest. It favors constant stimulation through electronics and an overall rejection of the rhythm God ordained for human flourishing. Scazzero continues his vivid description of the human need for Sabbath, saying,...
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