Andrew Owen

One of the most practical things I picked up at Simeon's Trust was one of the simplest sermon frameworks. SPA. Story - retell the story Point - what's the point of the story Apply - apply the point to us Its simplicity has been freedom for me in narrative texts.

Baptists always direct me to the Didache on baptism but completely ignore the fasting part.

"This book has offered a close examination of the religious self identity of mid-seventeenth-century 'Baptists,' and, more specifically, those commonly known as 'Particular Baptists.' I have argued that these men and women are most helpfully understood, not by any of these labels, but rather as congregationalists who, as it happened, reached novel conclusions regarding the legitimacy of infant baptism. This repudiation of paedobaptism did not instantaneously alter either their basic theological orientation or their relational networks; nor did it automatically confer upon them a new 'Baptist' identity, a supposition strongly supported by their basic inability to settle upon a consistent term of self-identification. A coherent, overarching pan-'Baptist' identity may well have developed over subsequent decades, but it is problematic to project this back on to the English Revolution and Interregnum. Moreover, even the rejection of paedobaptism was itself made possible and plausible by a more basic congregational ecclesiological paradigm, a conclusion substantiated by the intense conceptual pull which believer's baptism would exert throughout congregational circles on both sides of the Atlantic. Thus, I have suggested that the mid-seventeenth-century dissenters ubiquitously referred to as 'Particular Baptists' would be better described as 'baptistic congregationalists,' a label which more accurately describes their mid-seventeenth-century self identity, and does not insert them retroactively into an imagined pan-'Baptist' denomination which, at that time, clearly did not exist. This leaves open, of course, the question of what term might best describe the so-called General Baptists. I am inclined toward something like 'baptistic separatists,' a term that highlights their distinctive sacramentology without also implying that they exhibited relational and theological continuities with mainstream congregationalists. To properly locate them, however, will require sensitivity to the unique relational and theological matrix out of which they emerged, a task only possible when one jettisons unhelpful and anachronistic denominational categories." ~Matthew Bingham, "Orthodox Radicals," 152-53.

Let's have fun here What Christian denomination are you right now? Under what Christian denomination were you raised? Curious to see the results

The nought-ness of idols is a verdict rendered off I AM’s plenitude of essence, absolute independence, and self-existence.