To the Foreign Missionary Association of the Hamilton Literary and Theological Institution, N. Y.

DEAR BRETHREN: Yours of November last, from the pen of your Corresponding Secretary, Mr. William Dean, is before me. It is one of the few letters that I feel called upon to answer, for you ask my advice on several important points. There is, also, in the sentiments you express, something so congenial to my own, that I feel my heart knit to the members of your association, and instead of commonplace reply, am desirous of setting down a few items which may be profitable to you in your future course. Brief items they must be, for want of time forbids my expatiating.

In commencing my remarks, I take you as you are. You are contemplating a missionary life.

First, then, let it be a missionary life; that is, come out for life, and not for a limited term. Do not fancy that you have a true missionary spirit, while you are intending all along to leave the heathen soon after acquiring their language. Leave them! for what? To spend the rest of your days in enjoying the ease and plenty of your native land?

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Tags: Adoniram Judson

We are living in a confused and confusing time for confessional Christians (Christians who are anchored by a public and corporate theological commitment to be faithful to the Bible’s teaching on faith and practice as expounded by the great confessions of the Protestant Reformation). We are witnessing the final demise of theological liberalism, the rise of Pentecostalism, the beginnings of the so-called emerging church movement, the breakdown of evangelicalism, and an utter discombobulation about how the church is to conduct its life and ministry in an increasing “post-Christian” culture. All around us, in the name of reaching the culture with the Gospel, we see evangelical churches compromising (usually without intending to) in both message and methods.

It is not uncommon today to hear certain buzz-words and catch phrases that are meant to capture and articulate new (and presumably more culturally-attuned) approaches to ministry: “Purpose-driven,” “missional,” “contextualization,” “word and deed,” “ancient-future,” “emerging/emergent,” “peace and justice.” Now, to be sure, there are points, diagnoses, and emphases entailed in each of these terms and concepts that are helpful, true, and timely. Sadly, however, the philosophies of ministry often associated with this glossary are also often self-contrasted with the historic Christian view of how the church lives and ministers. That view is often called “the ordinary means of grace” view of ministry.

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Tags: Ligon Duncan

“O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?”—Matthew 14:31.

It seems as if doubt were doomed to be the perpetual companion of faith. As dust attends the chariot wheels so do doubts naturally becloud faith. Some men of little faith are perpetually enshrouded with fears; their faith seems only strong enough to enable them to doubt. If they had no faith at all, then they would not doubt, but having that little, and but so little, they are perpetually involved in distressing surmises, suspicions, and fears. Others, who have attained to great strength and stability of faith, are nevertheless, at times, subjects of doubt. He who has a colossal faith will sometimes find that the clouds of fear float over the brow of his confidence. It is not possible, I suppose, so long as man is in this world, that he should be perfect in anything; and surely it seems to be quite impossible that he should be perfect in faith. Sometimes, indeed, the Lord purposely leaves his children, withdraws the divine inflowings of his grace, and permits them to begin to sink, in order that they may understand that faith is not their own work, but is at first the gift of God, and must always be maintained and kept alive in the heart by the fresh influence of the Holy Spirit. I take it that Peter was a man of great faith. When others doubted, Peter believed. He boldly avowed that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the living God, for which faith he received the Master’s commendation, “Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.” He was of faith so strong, that at Christ’s command he could tread the billow and find it like glass beneath his feet, yet even he was permitted in this thing to fall. Faith forsook him, he looked at the winds and the waves, and began to sink, and the Lord said to him, “O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?” As much as to say, “O Peter, thy great faith is my gift, and the greatness of it is my work. Think not that thou art the author of thine own faith; I will leave thee, and this great faith of thine shall speedily disappear, and like another who hath no faith, thou shalt believe the winds, and regard the waves, but shalt distrust thy Master’s power, and therefore shalt thou sink.”

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Tags: C.H. Spurgeon, Charles Spurgeon, Spurgeon

(In the late 1600s Benjamin Keach wrote an allegory entitled The Travels of True Godliness, which is similar in style to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. In this article Keach portrays the Christian faith as a male character named True Godliness.)

True Godliness being a great stranger to most men and indeed known but by few, I shall in the first place, before treating of his travels and of the entertainment[1] he meets with, give you a description of him. Many persons are subject to so great an error as to take Morality for him; some have mistaken Counterfeit Godliness for him; and others, either through ignorance or malice, rail and ignominiously[2] call him Singularity[3] , stubbornness, Pride, or Rebellion. These last declare him not fit to live, being a seditious[4] disturber of peace and order, wherever he comes. Yea, such a factious[5] and quarrelsome companion, that he is indeed the cause of all those unhappy differences, divisions, troubles, and miseries with which the world abounds. I conclude, therefore, that nothing is more necessary than to take off that mask which his implacable[6] enemies have put upon him and clear him of all the slanders and reproaches of the sons of Belial[7]. When he is thus made to appear in his own original and spotless innocency, it will be seen that none need be afraid of him, or be unwilling to entertain him, or ashamed to own him and make him their bosom companion.

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Tags: Benjamin Keach, Keach

English Baptist missionary to India. Born in England in 1761. Pastor before going to the mission field, he spent an active forty-one years serving the Lord in India, including translating the Scriptures.

“Shoemaker by trade, but scholar, linguist and missionary by God’s training,”William Carey was one of God’s giants in the history of evangelism! One of his biographers, F. Dealville Walker, wrote of Carey: “He, with a few contemporaries, was almost singlehanded in conquering the prevailing indifference and hostility to missionary effort; Carey developed a plan for missions, and printed his amazingEnquiry; he influenced timid and hesitating men to take steps to the evangelizing of the world.” Another wrote of him, “Taking his life as a whole, it is not too much to say that he was the greatest and most versatile Christian missionary sent out in modern times.”

Carey was born in a small thatched cottage in Paulerspury, a typical Northamptonshire village in England, August 17, 1761, of a weaver’s family. When about eighteen he left the Church of England to “follow Christ” and to “…go forth unto Him without the camp, bearing His reproach.” At first he joined the Congregational church at Hackleton where he was an apprentice shoemaker. It was there he married in 1781. And it was in Hackleton he began making five-mile walks to Olney in his quest for more spiritual truth. Olney was a stronghold of the Particular Baptists, the group that Carey cast his lot with after his baptism, October 5, 1783. Two years later he moved to Moulton to become a schoolmaster — and a year later he became pastor of the small Baptist congregation there.

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Tags: William Carey

Why the Evangelical Notion of Unity Stifles the Christian Mind

Many of our contemporaries, it seems, have grown increasingly sensitive about the whole enterprise of doctrinal debate. In many quarters, debate over doctrine is seen as spiritually incorrect.” The fear that unity – or at least the appearance of unity – might be somehow compromised has become a form of paranoia in many evangelical circles. A kind of vague and ill-defined veil of unity covers an evangelical movement that has no creed and no unifying doctrine, except perhaps the increasingly distant memory of Protestant orthodoxy and the doctrinal system that claims to be no doctrinal system, dispensational premillennialism.

But as in Hans Christian Andersen’s delightful fable, it seems as though everyone knows the evangelical emperor wears no doctrinal clothes, except the emperor himself, and few are willing to point out the obvious. When differences of opinion arise because men and women of conviction occasionally step forward and dare to proclaim that a particular doctrinal position is biblical, to the exclusion of all other points of view, it is often somehow taken as a kind of personal affront by the evangelical, an outright attack upon his very character and most sensitive feelings. Difference of opinion is seen as something much deeper, almost sinister, something intensely personal, and the resulting “hurt feelings” that occur because the two parties cannot agree is seen as the worst possible calamity. But as long as this veil of unity cloaks the theological nakedness of the evangelical movement, the appearance of unity is maintained. Everyone is kept happy and the boat is not rocked. The enterprise continues on its merry way. Because there is no ultimate basis for doctrinal unity in this movement, the appearance of unity is maintained by silencing any dissent or questioning, thereby permitting the pretense of unity to continue.

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Tags: Kim Riddlebarger, Riddlebarger