When “No Show Jones” Showed Up at Church
I still remember the first time I heard “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” It was one of the saddest songs I’d ever heard. It’s the story of a heartbroken lover who can’t get over the woman he loves and is estranged from. He reads over letters from a bygone era of their relationship and notes all of the times she wrote “I love you.” The punchline of the song is powerful: It isn’t until he dies that he’s finally able to stop loving her....
Thomas Helwys, Roger Williams, and Pre-Enlightenment Arguments for Religious Liberty
In a fascinating chapter entitled “The Evangelical Encounter with the Enlightenment,” Catherine A. Brekus details early evangelicals’ relationship with Enlightenment principles. To be sure, evangelicals did not imbibe Enlightenment ideas and ideals wholesale. As Brekus explains: On the surface, the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on reason, and evangelicalism, with its heart-centered piety, seem to have stood in stark opposition to...
Sola Scriptura?
Sola Scriptura (“Scripture alone”) is one of what have become known as the “five solas” of the Protestant Reformation. The meaning of sola Scriptura is essentially that Scripture alone is our supreme guide for Christian faith and practice. Put another way, the church’s doctrine should be in accordance with Scripture and founded upon Scripture rather than on any mere human tradition. Now this is not to say that tradition has no bearing...
What I’ve Learned from Practical Church Planting Books
While I was in college, I began to think that God was calling me to the ministry of church planting. I considered opportunities in southern California and the Midwest. Ultimately, God opened the door for me to plant a church in Gallatin, Tennessee. When I began considering all that planting a church would involve, I quickly noticed two common approaches in church planting books. The first approach was more theoretical in nature,...
The Beginnings of Baptist Ecclesiology: A Review
When people think of Thomas Helwys, they often think of religious liberty, and rightfully so. Yet Helwys’s writings address far more than religious liberty. Marvin Jones seeks to demonstrate this in his recent monograph The Beginnings of Baptist Ecclesiology: The Foundational Contributions of Thomas Helwys.[1] Jones contends that while many scholars have considered Helwys’s Mystery of Iniquity to be a work focused primarily on...
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