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Baptist Message

"Helping Louisiana Baptists Impact the World For Christ"

LC’s Miller contributes to COVID-19 ebook by Toalston

Special to the Message NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Hope amid the COVID-19 crisis is the focus of a new ebook, “A Pandemic Proposal: Viral Vitality … Hope for the Human Soul” by former Baptist Press editor Art Toalston, with Norm Miller of Louisiana College among 42 individuals providing brief reflections. Even amid the horrors of a global pandemic, Toalston writes, “a distinct vitality” can be experienced “in our souls, in our circumstances, in our relationships, in the world within our sphere of influence, and in how we each move into the future beyond the sorrows of the present.” Such an assertion “may seem glib or audacious,” Toalston acknowledges but believes a vitality in Christ “can enhance our daily lives even in a time of social upheaval and widespread grief. A coronavirus pandemic cannot alter God’s creation of the human soul.” Miller, LC’s vice president for communications and integrative marketing, drew from Psalm 23 in his reflection, writing, “Few in history have lived in more triumph and tumult than King David, the one who wrote: ‘Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life’ as recorded in Psalm 23, verse 6 (NKJV). His life traversed the vast distance between holiness and accursedness. Yet, he … [Read more...]

STUDY: In the beginning, the Earth was a void, watery expanse

By Will Hall, Message Executive Editor AMES, Iowa (LBM)—A joint research team from the Iowa State University and the University of Colorado have helped dispel the long-held notion that the earth’s oceans resulted from water transferred to the planet via ice trapped in space objects and released upon impact of these meteorites with the earth. Instead, they say, in a newly released report in the journal, Nature Geoscience, that from the start the whole earth was covered in water, consistent with Genesis 1:1-2 which states that “In the beginning … the earth was without form, and void … and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” The research team had set out to measure the temperature of the early Earth. But they learned from measuring isotopes of ancient rocks that the chemical history of these rocks indicated the earth was covered by a continuous ocean, with no continents at that time. Basically, they found an unexpected universal presence of oxygen-18, an isotope typically absent in areas with large landmasses. Now the team plans to pursue the answer to the question: When exactly did the continents emerge, pushed out of the ocean by tectonic plates crashing together? In this next step of their … [Read more...]

Greear names Stetzer to chair resolutions

By Will Hall, Message Executive Editor NASHVILLE, Tenn. (LBM)—J.D. Greear, pastor of The Summit in Durham, North Carolina, and serving his second term as SBC president, has named Ed Stetzer as the chair of the 2020 Resolutions Committee. Stetzer likely will be considered a controversial choice by many Southern Baptists. He is the interim teaching pastor for the Moody Church in Chicago, Illinois, a non-SBC congregation that ordains women as deaconesses and is elder-led. He is not the first controversial choice put forth by Greear. Despite promising to nominate candidates that looked like the rest of the Southern Baptist Convention, in 2019 Greear named his Committee on Committees, the group that shapes all trustee boards and the various SBC committees, with 31 percent identified as Calvinists by their beliefs and practices, compared to 10 percent of all Southern Baptists. One of the pastors on the list identified himself to his local newspaper as a non-denominational church with “Baptist” as its middle name. Greear also favored mega-churches over the small congregations that typify the Southern Baptist Convention. The average attendance among the committee members’ churches was 597. Meanwhile, just five percent … [Read more...]