By Randy Willis I got the idea for my headline from Dr. Roy Fish's wonderful book When Heaven Touched Earth: The Awakening of 1858 and Its Effects on Baptists.  Dr. Fish and I were both members of the Board of Trustees of the Joseph Willis Institute for Great Awakening Studies.  He was in declining health and was never able to attend a meeting. I only met him once and that was while he was having breakfast in the same hotel I was staying.  Dr. Rod Masteller introduced us.  Not long before his death I contacted him concerning how I could obtain a copy of his book. A few years ago someone asked me,  "Why did the 1858 revival skip Louisiana?" This was my answer.... In 1857, sixty years after my 4th great-grandfather Joseph Willis first preached Jesus, in the Louisiana Territory, and just three years after his death, materialism pervaded America.  The fact that the young were growing up without God, caused many Christians to begin to pray that God would break the love of money over people's lives and send another revival to the nation.  "Concerts of Prayer" began to spring up throughout the United States and Canada.  Materialism was broken in many lives by the Bank Panic of October 1857. Due to the long, hard winter of 1856-1857, … [Read more...]

By Randy Adams, Executive Director of Northwest Baptist Convention Thirty years ago this April I began my first pastorate. It was a dying church – dead really. Today we would call it a “legacy church plant.” There were ten people who attended our first Sunday, all but one retired, with the one being a teenage boy. I’m not sure why the boy was there, except that he lived on the other side of the cemetery. The cemetery, church, and a small school building, long since closed, bordered each other. The Thurmond family gave the property for these three entities in the 1890s, each deemed important for a community in those days. My wife and I served that church for 3 ½ formative years, formative for us and for that church and community. I soon learned that the former pastor recommended that the church disband and give the building to the local Baptist association. He had reasoned this was their best option since they hadn’t baptized anyone in four years, only had a Sunday morning worship service with few attenders, and little prospect of seeing things turn around. The few attenders, most of whom had lived there all their lives, considered his suggestion, but decided to give it “one more try,” which meant giving one more seminary … [Read more...]

By Ron F Hale The United States Declaration of Independence gushes with life liberating language supporting the sanctity of human life for all U.S. citizens. The second paragraph begins with these remarkable words: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. We can’t understand what it feels like to be born in a time when America was divided up between freeman and slave. Frederick Douglass was born into slavery around 1818, and escaped human bondage becoming a famous orator in the American antislavery movement. After serious study of the text of the Declaration of Independence, Douglass grew hopeful while other abolitionists assailed the document as bygone dribble. Douglass held high the precepts and promises of the Declaration of Independence and spoke truth to power. Like a Jonas Salk holding up his miracle vaccine against poliomyelitis (polio) before the American people on March 26, 1953, with all its curative promise, years before, Douglass held up the Declaration of Independence to all America and spoke so eloquently of its benefits and blessings (for … [Read more...]

By John Yeats, Executive Director of the Missouri Baptist Convention JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (BP) -- This happens more often than you think: Members of a Sunday School class decide to circumvent their offerings that would normally go through the church's systematic giving budget in order to give to a worthy cause or need. Maybe there has been an appeal for some particular project or independent missionary or humanitarian need -- all good things. Church leaders would say, "Ouch! It's okay to pass the plate a second time around to meet a specific need but the tithe [systematic giving] ought to be given to the local church 'storehouse.' It is how we work together to do our church's collective ministries." Calls come to our state convention office on a regular basis from pastors and church leaders. They say, "We receive repeated requests for direct support from meaningful, high impact ministries. What do we do?" Great question and big problem. While para-church ministries may have an up-close high impact, there are a whole series of questions to ask, like "Who is on the board of directors? Who reviews the audit of their books? What percentage of expenses is spent on operations and administration?" The same kind of questions … [Read more...]

By Dr. David Hankins, Executive director for Louisiana Baptists In Luke 6 Jesus makes it clear that it’s not “if” the storms come, but “when” the storms come. For us who call Louisiana home, the storms have come – again. Like many of you, I watched the radars that showed storm, after storm, after storm streaming from south to north. The colors on the radar screen were yellow, orange and dark green indicating heavy rains falling again and again over the same water-soaked areas. Flood watches and flash flood warnings scrolled across the bottom of our screens and lit up our smart phones. Schools began to close as rising waters made many rural roads, and even main highways, impassable. The recent storms did not generate the national media coverage of a Katrina, Rita or Ike, but they’ve affected a much wider area. Across the entire I-20 corridor in north Louisiana, down the western side of the state and stretching through central Louisiana to the north shore, the rain event of 2016 dumped over 20 inches of rain in some places causing rivers, streams and bayous to rise to historic levels. According to recent Baptist Message reports, in excess of 7,000 homes have been affected across 28 parishes. In addition to our … [Read more...]

By Waylon Bailey, Pastor First Baptist Covington This last week has been a bad week in Louisiana. First, the northern part of our state suffered catastrophic flooding. Then, the Southeast portion of our state (where I live and serve) has been hit with what has been called an “historic flood.” Saint Joseph’s Abby, a monastery built in the 1800s, has never flooded. But it did this week. That’s how historic it has been. It’s also been a hard week. While I can’t talk specifically about the hurts and needs in North Louisiana, I have seen firsthand the hurt, pain, and loss in southeast Louisiana. The flood came because the area to our north received in excess of 15 inches of rain overnight. Therefore, we had “flash flooding,” a term I’m not sure I understood until I saw it firsthand. I live three-fourths of a mile from a scenic little river called by the Indian name Bogue Falaya. The Bogue Falaya runs through my town of Covington and joins with the Tchefuncte River before it empties into Lake Pontchartrain. (those of you who are reading across the country and around the world can pronounce these names the best you can :). I watched this little river (about 30 feet wide) inundate houses in just a few hours time (my … [Read more...]

By Ron Hale If Islam’s testimony is one of peace, then please explain why cartoonists in the 21st century are petrified of dying brutal deaths if their published caricature crosses some forbidden line? Just over a year ago, Islamic extremists killed 12 people after violently assaulting the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical newspaper in Paris. Is this violence a modern phenomenon or is there a trail of blood stretching back to antiquity? Crusade historian Thomas F. Madden enlightens us to the ancient reality that Islam has always possessed a brooding and bloody side. In fact, he declares that the Crusades were in every way a defensive war -- the West’s belated response to the Muslim conquest of fully two-thirds of the Christian world. Madden is the former Chair of the History Department at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri, and Director of Saint Louis University's Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. He believes the Crusades are quite possibly the most misunderstood event in European history. The history of the world shows that Europe was busy defending itself against Arab invaders beginning in the seventh century and through the tenth, a 300-plus year siege of the West. The Turkish … [Read more...]