Barnabas File

On Sunday morning, we sang the hymn “Heaven Came Down and Glory Filled My Soul” in worship. My wife Rita and I glanced at each other and exchanged smiles.  When I was a student pastor in Texas, the church where we worshipped on weekends loved this song.  We were not familiar with it when we first went there and Rita, who was the pianist (of course), had to get the hang of it.  Once she did, they wanted to sing it every Sunday. Sunday afternoon Rita asked, “I wonder if that church is still there?” I went to the Baptist General Convention of Texas website and did a search, but the name of the church did not come up.  I began to speculate about what might have happened. Perhaps the church just closed its doors.  They were small 50 years ago and only had a few families.  Maybe they could no longer support the church. Another possibility is that they had gone independent or joined a more conservative Baptist group and no longer identified with...

A couple of weeks ago, we received a mailer from a new church start in our community.  Actually, the pastor has been working on this for about four years, but evidently they are moving toward more visibility in the community, thus the mailing. When I went to the church’s web site, I found this paragraph: “We are the first Theologically SBC church in Rutherford County, TN to start with out [sic] “Baptist” in the name and take an interdenominational approach to people.  Every church has core theology that ties them to a denomination.  This directs all the teaching and doctrine of a church, but we refuse to focus on the dogmas [sic] of a denomination!  Jesus is so much bigger than a denomination.” So what’s this all about?  After reading this, I have to ask questions like, “Is this a Baptist congregation or not?” “Did you feel that you had to put this on your web site because you are receiving funds from the state Baptist convention to get started?”...