Telling the Story of Tennessee Baptists Since 1835
By Willie McLaurin
Special assistant to the executive director, TBMB
Decades ago, Martin Luther King Jr. called the 11 a.m. hour on Sunday morning “the most segregated hour in America.”
Statistics show that it still is. A vast majority of American churches have congregations that are primarily made up of one racial group, rather than the diverse ethnicity of the general population. People still worship in white churches, black churches, Asian churches and Latino churches. [Read more…]
By Lonnie Wilkey
Editor, Baptist and Reflector
lwilkey@tnbaptist.org
A church family can make the difference in someone’s life. If you don’t believe it, just read the story of Paul Chitwood, new president of the International Mission Board, Southern Baptists’ largest missions-sending institution.
Chitwood grew up in a single-parent home for much of his childhood. He readily admits that members of First Baptist Church in Jellico “helped raise” him.
He flat out says that he would not be the president of the International Mission Board had it not been for deacons from First Baptist Church in Jellico, near the Kentucky-Tennessee line, who knocked on his door and invited his father to church. [Read more…]
By Jerry Drace
Jerry Drace
FRIENDSHIP, Tenn. — I had just walked into my house. The tree cutters were splitting the last of the limbs from the hundred-year-old hickory tree which had to be taken down due to a virus.
Suddenly I heard someone banging on our door. Rushing to the door to open it, I looked into the anxious face of the foreman, Rusty, who blurted out, “Jose, one of my men has been cut and is bleeding real bad! He may have lost a finger. Can you drive him to the emergency room? My truck is full of wood and it will take several minutes to unload it.” [Read more…]
By Robert Tyson
Director of missions for Robertson County Baptist Association
On Dec. 12, Ross Douthat, an opinion writer for The New York Times, wrote an article entitled the “The Return of Paganism.” Douthat is Catholic and a theological conservative. He is concerned that the Christian church has lost its focus. He means church members, along with some ministers, are substituting the biblical gospel with other gospels. They substitute Christ’s suffering with Joel Osteen’s feel good gospel. They substitute Christ’s and the Apostles’ sacrifice of self with the prosperity gospel. They substitute God’s mandate to preach Jesus with a desire to turn the Bible into a self-help gospel. [Read more…]
By Randy C. Davis
TBMB President & Executive Director
It is a heavy blow when God determines to bring to light that which is hidden in the shadows. Sometimes the Body of Christ must bear the weight of His judgment when He does.
Such a blow was delivered yesterday morning in an article that appeared in the Houston Chronicle. The headline was, “Abuse of Faith.” The extremely thorough story reported 20 years of sexual abuse in Southern Baptist churches that affected at least 700 victims. Far and away the majority of the victims were children or youth; and far and away the perpetrators were ministers. Just in the past decade, at least 250 people who worked for or volunteered in a Southern Baptist church have been charged with sex crimes. [Read more…]
J. Travis Tyler
Pastor, Grace Baptist Church, Elizabethton
Victor and Dot Wallace
On Sunday morning, Jan. 13, Pastor Vic Wallace preached his last sermon as pastor of Oak Hill Baptist Church in Jonesborough. Beginning in the mid-1950s, Pastor Wallace began a ministry lasting over six decades of pastoral ministry including Flag Pond, Mosheim, Mountain City, Kingsport, and Fall Branch.
One of the longest pastorates was at First Baptist Church, Fall Branch, where I met him. His time at First Baptist which spanned 1975-1999 and 2003, 25 years in total, a rarity today. “Pastor Vic” led me to Christ at the age of 12 years old when he presented the gospel clearly to all the children at VBS in the summer of 1993. [Read more…]
By Lonnie Wilkey
Editor, Baptist and Reflector
A few years ago, I was flipping through the seemingly thousands of channels on our television set, not having any luck in finding something worth watching.
I finally settled on a program entitled “Homicide Hunter,” a television show detailing the criminal investigations of Joe Kenda, a retired detective with the Colorado Springs, Colo., police department. The real-life Joe Kenda narrates the program which has a younger actor investigating the cases. Kenda is known for his dry wit. I became “hooked” and now watch it regularly. [Read more…]
By Randy C. Davis
TBMB President & Executive Director
Here’s a riddle for you.
What do a banker, a contractor, an elementary teacher, a chemist, an engineering professor and a farmer all have in common?
Answer: They are all faithful pastors.
Unbelievably, approximately 60 percent of the pastors in Tennessee are bivocational. Let that sink in a moment. The majority of the churches connected to the Tennessee Baptist Convention have pastors who have a vocation apart from their ministries as a church’s pastor. And, if you include churches that have fulltime pastors but whose wives have secular jobs in order to make ends meet, the number jumps to probably 75 percent. [Read more…]
By Chris Turner
Director of Communications, TBMB
Lois Perkins
Lois Jodie Jamieson Perkins, “Mottie” as her family called her, closed her eyes and peacefully slipped into eternity last week at the age of 97.
For most of the world, she was a “nobody.” To my mother-in-law and the rest of her family, and the people who knew her, she was definitely somebody. In fact, she was everything. She was the matriarch of a family that included three children, eight grandchildren, 20 great-grandchildren and three great-great grandchildren with one on the way. Her influence while alive cast a lasting legacy across generations. [Read more…]
By Benjie Shaw
Collegiate ministry specialist, Tennessee Baptist Mission Board
I serve as the director of a campus-based ministry. Campus ministry is the only full-time ministry that I’ve ever known.
Working with college students and young adults is great because it affords an opportunity to influence a person in what is probably the most formative timeframe in their spiritual and personal development. [Read more…]
