That’s the question Karen Waddles tries to tackle over at True Woman.  Here’s how she opens:

A few weeks ago, I was asked to write a blog post for Black History Month. “Sure!” I replied. But when I sat down to write, the immensity of the task struck home. It’s such a huge topic to cover in a post . . . for sure, many would appreciate the information, but would there be those who would question why we even have black history month? The following is my heartfelt attempt to answer this question.

I grew up in Kansas in the late 50s and 60s. My sister and I were each the only African-American students in our elementary school classes. When we opened our textbooks, there was no mention of contributions of African-Americans to the advancement of this country. As we turned the pages of our history books, there were no pictures of people that looked like us, no scientists, no noteworthy doctors, no educators . . . So we began early on to internalize a sense of inferiority and “less than.” We had to make a concerted effort to rise above the expectations of our teachers and to excel.

A lot has changed since my sister and I were in elementary school. In my granddaughter’s sixth grade text books, much attention is given to the valuable contributions that African-Americans have made to this country. The newer textbooks record the election of the first black President of the United States, and many other firsts. It’s undeniable that much progress has been made.  So, all is well, right?

Check out the entire post.

My man Propaganda running down a little church history… poetry slam style:

Michael Haykin, in his book Rediscovering Our English Baptist Heritage: Kiffin, Knollys, and Keach, provides a valuable, crisp overview of the early years of Calvinistic Baptist development.  Anyone looking for a quick read of this history (97 pages) and an introduction to the major figures pioneering the movement would do well to read this well-written, succinct summary.

Of the many things I appreciated about Haykin’s summary was the frequent attention he gave to the major lessons we may appropriate from these forebears for our own day.  The concluding chapter draws our attention to three lessons in particular.

Confessional Heritage

These earliest Baptists were confessional.  The mid-1600s in England were terrible times for non-comformists and dissidents from the Church of England.  To be a Baptist required defending the faith on several fronts.  From within Calvinism, these early Baptists contended with the hyper-Calvinists who so stressed the sovereignty of God in election that they threatened the weakening of God’s call to evangelism, missions, and church planting.  Arising largely from Arminian quarters were General Baptists turned Quakers, with their emphasis on “inner light” and conscience.  They too posed a threat as they vested ultimate authority in subjective experiences and leadings of the Spirit over the Scripture, tending at times toward Universalism.  Then there were the political and theological errors of Anabaptists, whom the English Baptists openly distanced themselves from in favor of close kin to Puritanism.  And the early Baptists–often imprisoned and sometimes killed–faced the persecution of the state and the Church of England, which for decades limited religious freedom and toleration, causing many to make an exodus in search of religious liberty.

In this volatile climate of affliction and apostasy, the Calvinistic Baptists placed appropriate emphasis on the foundational doctrines of the faith.  They defined and settled their theological convictions into what is known as the First (1646) and Second London Baptist Confessions of Faith (1689).  In that way they contributed to all the generations of Baptists that followed a confessional theological heritage that still nourishes the faith of many.

Congregational Heritage

These men and their generation were churchmen.  Many of them came from Puritan stock.  Almost nursed into them was a concern for reforming the church according to the word of God.  This is what led them to Baptist convictions and an emphasis on the local church.  They were committed to congregational government under the Headship of Christ.  They rejected the idea of the state church.  I love the kind of folks who could write in their statement of faith, “the publick Worship of God ought to be preferred before the private.”  They did not marginalize private piety and devotion, but they placed the emphasis where, I believe, the Scripture does–on the gathered worship life of the congregation.

They recovered believer’s baptism, and with it regenerate church membership.  In all of this they risked the charge of anarchy and the wrath of the state.  But they took their stand with the Bible and they leave for us an example of highly valuing the ordinances that our Lord and Master himself established.  It’s to our shame that so often we neglect the call to baptism and the holy privilege of the Lord’s Supper when so many of our forebears literally risked life and property to honor these sacraments.

Reformed Heritage

Finally, Haykin does a great job of highlighting for us the ability of these men to hold to Baptist distinctives while at the same time giving great emphasis to what they had in common with other denominations and the broader Reformation movement.  They leave us a model of catholicity and cooperation.  For example, Haykin relays brief histories of the First and Second London Confessions, the doctrinal standards for the movement.  Those statements of faith happily built upon the earlier work of the Westminster Confession and the Savoy Declaration.  In doing this, they intentionally embraced the great unity of doctrine and belief shared between Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists.  They model for us the importance of laying stress on the great truths we have in common while lovingly holding fast to biblical convictions that distinguish us.

And though their policy made the local congregation central, that does not mean they were isolating themselves from other congregations or denominations.  They  joyfully formed associations and ministerial fraternals for cooperation with others, both Baptist and in some cases non-Baptists.  If the early Baptists were not under such persecution for most of this history, one wonders if they would not have had even wider associations despite some differences.  They owed much to their Puritan-separationists forerunners, and might have had more effective relationships with them.  Many came to Calvinist convictions from General Baptist backgrounds and maintained relationships across those lines.  In the best sense of the word, these men were “catholic” to the core.  They were ecumenical when it came to Protestant Reformed principles.

We could learn a lot from those who recognized their differences honestly but did not let two or three secondary matters overshadow the truths of first importance.  If you’re interested in a very readable and informative treatment of early English Baptist history, three of the key figures of the movement, and early Baptist theological thought, starting with Haykin’s Rediscovering Our English Baptist Heritage will repay the couple hours it takes to read its pages.

Can I Add One Additional Note of Appreciation?

Through these histories he demonstrates how the earliest Calvinistic Baptists were also ardent evangelists and church planters.  These men preached the gospel and planted churches (130 churches in the two decades of Cromwell’s reign).  They had a warm heart toward the lost and preached to see men converted.  Every Christian preacher can learn from their pleading with sinners.  Haykin cites one example typical of Benjamin Keach, quoted by Spurgeon, I believe:

Come, venture your souls on Christ’s righteousness; Christ is able to save you though you are ever so great sinners.  Come to him, throw yourselves at the feet of Jesus.  Look to Jesus, who came to seek and save them that were lost….  You may have the water of life freely.  Do not say, “I want qualifications or a meekness to come to Christ.”  Sinner, dost thou thirst?  Dost thou see a want of righteousness?  ’Tis not a righteousness; but ’tis a sense of the want of righteousness, which is rather the qualification thou shouldst look at.  Christ hath righteousness sufficient to clothe you, bread of life to feed you, grace to adorn you.  Whatever you want, it is to be had in him.  We tell you there is help in him, salvation in him.  ”Through the propitiation in his blood” you must be justified, and that by faith alone.

Now that’s preaching a Jesus people can come to!  I want to live, preach, serve, and contribute to the kingdom this way.  How about you?

This weekend we held our “Life Together” class.  It’s what we call our membership class–a shameless pilfering of Bonhoeffer’s great little book.  One of the subjects we cover is church history.  I enjoy this session because you can see lights coming on for people.  Most people enter the class asking themselves things like, “Why all the divisions and denominations?” or “Where this this belief or practice originate?”  A great many of those questions get answered in our church history discussion.

Usually I do a fair amount of sketching on the white board when tracing this history.  But tonight, looking around for some other information, I came across this wikipedia graphic.  It’s simple but it paints the picture:

Doesn’t that about demonstrate the criss-crossed nature of Christianity?  I suppose we could make this as complex as a plate of spaghetti, but this about does it.

That’s the theme of the talks given at the Heidelberg Conference on Reformed theology. The audio is available for:

Sebastian Heck, “Convocation Address”

Dr. Derek Thomas, “The Church, Reformed According to the Word of God”

Dr. Carl Trueman, “The Confessing and Confessional Church”

Jon Payne, “The Church and the Means of Grace”

Dr. Carl Trueman, “The Heidelberg Catechism”

Jon Payne, “The Reformed Pastor”

Dr. Derek Thomas, “The Worship of the Reformed Church”

Sebastian Heck, “Planting Confessional Reformed Churches”

Looks like they’re in the process of putting up videos as well.  (HT: Feeding on Christ)

The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals is making The Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology 2010 available for live stream.  This year’s conference theme is “These Last Days: A Christian View of History” and includes D.A. Carson, Sinclair Ferguson, Michael Horton, Richard Phillips, Phil Ryken, and Cornel Venema.  Should be a fabulous study of God’s word!  The conference webcast begins Friday April 30th at 9am and continues through the weekend.  Find the details and register here.

Kevin DeYoung has a great post on Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen, a little known Dutch Reformed pastor serving at the dawn of the great awakening.  I’ve only had the slightest taste of Frelinghuysen, but I’ve enjoyed what I’ve tasted.  This was a great introduction to the man and seven lessons from his ministry.  DeYoung writes:

Frelinghuysen, with his gifts and guffaws, has something to teach all of us, the conservative formalist, the liberal traditionalist, the passionless preacher, and the professional pugilist. Most of all, we ought to give thanks for this man used by God to light a spark that the Spirit fanned into the flames of the Great Awakening. As a pastor in the same denomination as Frelinghuysen, I am especially grateful for his commitment to Calvinist doctrine and evangelical proclamation. I encourage all Christians, especially those in the Dutch Reformed tradition, to listen to the forgotten voice of this neglected forerunner.

Here are the seven lessons:

1. Dead orthodoxy is deadly.

2. Tradition is a wonderful servant but a terrible master.

3. God blesses preaching that is scriptural, personal, and evangelical.

4. Do not neglect the third mark of the church.

5. Fear God, not people.

6. Doctrinal fidelity and evangelistic fervor do not have to be at odds.

7. Passion and courage are no excuses for a harsh spirit.

Read the entire article for the meat of these lessons and to get a sense of the man.

One of the unique opportunities created by being a crossroads city is the opportunity to host leaders and scholars passing through town. The good folks at CHBC do that pretty well, and part of the enduring fruit are the Carl F.H. Henry Forums. If you haven’t checked those out before, you’ll find a lot of soul-edifying stuff there. Some 34 forum lectures are available here.

How would you define “faith”? How would you know faith when you see it?

Though I think many people could give some general definition of faith, I think it remains a misty concept for many others. It’s an intangible. Most folks think you either have it or you don’t. Even though we may talk of little faith or great faith, do you feel that sometimes “little faith” is simply a nice pseudonym for “no faith in reality”?

Sometimes life is harder than steel. Sometimes life mangles and twists us like so many guard rails smashed by speeding, out-of-control vehicles. And in those times of hardship, we discover what faith is and whether we have it.

I’m convinced that perhaps the greatest example of genuine faith in American Christian history is the example left by African Americans who love the Lord. The situation most African-Americans live in now was the stuff of dreams just 50 years ago. Recede further into the history, past Jim Crow, past Reconstruction, past the abolitionist movement, on back to Jamestown and you find a people dragged into “history as terror” or “daemonic dread” as one author put it. He asked, “Who do you pray to in the bowels of a slave ship?”

It’s a good question.

In time, many Africans sold as chattel in the New World prayed to the One True God through Jesus Christ His Son and entered into eternal life. Howard Thurman, a famed theologically liberal African-American pastor and educator, had it right when he pointed out that the greatest irony of American history was that the slaves should pray to the master’s God.

But that irony is why the African-American church’s legacy of genuine, biblical, God-centered faith is so rich and necessary to recover and esteem. Read slave conversion testimonies in a work like Clifton Johnson’s God Struck Me Dead, or the poetry of Phillis Wheatly, and all you find is soul-deep, God-longing faith in the face of life as hard as steel, as stinging as the lash, as cruel as pregnant bellies ripped open, as horrendous as black bodies burned and swinging from trees, as tragic as young men hobbled and amputated, as wrenching families split and wives raped.

How do you survive such an existence? How do you survive such an existence without checking out of reality? How do you survive such an existence without checking out of reality while knowing that “trouble won’t last always”? How do you survive such an existence without checking out of reality while knowing that “trouble won’t last always” and simultaneously working for a better day? How do you endure such an existence without exploding in hate toward others? How do you endure such an existence and make any sense of “love your enemies”? How do you endure such an existence and sing and dance and love and create and laugh?

Only by believing that God is good, that He controls all events, that His justice will prevail, that vengeance belongs to Him, that He hears the cry of the oppressed, that social standing is no proxy for God’s love, that life in His image is infused with dignity even when others don’t think you’re human. Only by believing those things and trusting God himself do you survive such atrocities, and not only survive but thrive and contribute.

It was faith in God through Jesus that sustained the African-American church. I sometimes think we don’t know how to trust God deeply because we’ve not suffered deeply. In fact, God thinks that of us. That’s why suffering is such a central part of the Christian experience. It breeds trust in God and distinguishes genuine faith its superficial counterparts.

So where does a rich and largely suffering-free generation like ours look for instruction in persevering faith? We have to look to those who have suffered horrifically yet trusted God implicitly. Modern examples exist. But as the U.S. celebrates African-American history month, the domestic parable so glaring and glorious is that of the African-American church which by faith endured bombings, lynchings, cross burnings, sharecropping, Jim Crow, Bull Connor, the Ku Klux Klan, chattel slavery, disenfranchisement, Black Codes, auctions, marches, sit ins, ghettos in the north, plantations in the south with no visible means of support, only a sometimes quiet, sometimes singing, sometimes mourning, sometimes active, sometimes ridiculed, sometimes shut out, sometimes demonstrating, all the time preaching faith in God.

If Hebrews 11 were still being written today, the chapter would be twice as long for its inclusion of now forgotten black faces that would have to be included for their heroic faith in God. What did Moses have on Harriet Tuman, Abraham on Jupiter Hammond, Gideon on Nat Turner, Isaac on Denmark Vesey, or Sampson on George Liele? Nothing.

At her finest, the African-American church offers the most compelling example of centuries-long persecution-triumphing trust in God. May we learn from her and live like her.

Yesterday, February 1st, began African-American history month. The annual celebration of African-American history began at the initiative of esteemed scholar Dr. Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950). Woodson is regarded by many as the father of Black history, and a copious preserver of that historical heritage. He participated in the founding of the Society for the Study of African American Life and History and for years ran an influential publication called The Journal of Negro History.