Posts by: Ryan Martin
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Continue Reading →Prayer is a necessary practice of a sound church. The role of secret and corporate prayer in the life of a Christian congregation is sometimes overlooked. Mark Dever, whose insights we value, fails to list to prayer as one of his “marks” of “healthy churches.” (Dever concedes this point and briefly addresses it in his [...]
Continue Reading →As conservatives, it can be easy to grow discouraged. There are very few of us. It seems that all of American Christianity (sorry, David de Bruyn) is abandoning the way of worship that we understand to be reverent. The good, the true, and the beautiful rarely brings in an audience. Our churches are shrinking. Fundamentalism [...]
Continue Reading →Several days ago, I watched a posted video of a previously streamed chapel service at an independent Baptist school located in the deep woods of Wisconsin. (The video from this chapel seems to have since been removed.) The chapel opened with a word from the president of that school. After a few pleasantries, he proceeded [...]
Continue Reading →This entry is part 9 of 9 in the series”Relevance is Irrelevant”
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8
According to 1 Corinthians 1, Christian ministry centers on the declaration of the gospel of Christ. This is how Paul himself ministered, we learn from [...]
Continue Reading →This entry is part 8 of 9 in the series”Relevance is Irrelevant”
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7
In 1 Corinthians 1, Paul repeatedly points to the preaching of the deliberately unadorned gospel as the essence of Christian ministry. In the first five verses of 1 [...]
Continue Reading →This entry is part 7 of 9 in the series”Relevance is Irrelevant”
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6
Paul relentlessly insisted in 1 Corinthians 1 on the simple proclamation of the gospel of Christ in Christian ministry. And, as we discussed last week, as if that repeated [...]
Continue Reading →This entry is part 6 of 9 in the series”Relevance is Irrelevant”
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5
This series has been looking at the connection of Paul’s message in 1 Corinthians 1-3 and the contemporary church’s dependence on relevance for evangelism. In the last post, I argued from [...]
Continue Reading →This entry is part 5 of 9 in the series”Relevance is Irrelevant”
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
This series is applying the words of Paul in the early chapters of 1 Corinthians to ministry in the 21st century. In part 1, we looked especially at Paul’s argument in 1 Cor [...]
Continue Reading →This entry is part 4 of 9 in the series”Relevance is Irrelevant”
I believe that the first three chapters of 1 Corinthians ought to guide our thinking concerning the relationship of our efforts to minister the grace of Jesus Christ and so-called cultural relevance. This series has [...]
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