BaylyBlog: Out of our minds, too...

Musical worship must be manly...

How do you get men to sing in worship? And I mean really sing.

Sing of God's judgment. Of His justice triumphing over wicked men...

Men are the minority in Evangelical churches in Africa...

When did you last hear a church commended for her "manliness?" When did you last hear a missionary talk about the absence of men in Evangelical churches in Africa? Have you ever heard how a Christian "spearman" in Africa keeps the oodles of children in his church in order, or how he deals with the bones in his meat?

The author of the post, James Brinkerhoff, is the nephew of Scott Brinkerhoff. You and your church would do well to remove some of your missionaries who have long since turned away from Biblical doctrine and practice, and fill the holes that your due diligence opens up in your missions budget with Scott and James.

And what about the absence of men in African Evangelical churches? It may be the same reason men are absent or docile in American churches. Pastors run churches through the hard work of compliant women...

Joseph Maraachli and the state's usurpation of parental authority...

Joseph Maracchli was the subject of an intense right-to-life battle in Canada last spring. Sadly, a couple months ago he died at his parents’ home in Windsor, Ontario. He was 20 months old. Andrew Henry wrote about Joseph on Baylyblog back in March. You may review the details here.

The number of similar cases will explode in coming months and years and there are important lesssons Christian fathers and mothers should learn. God has given parents the natural affection and compassion for their own children that no doctor can truly have no matter how highly trained or respected he may be.

This is not to say that parents are incapable of being neglectful of their children, but it's the exception rather than the rule. God’s good gift to children is parents who are loving and tender toward them.

The ever-increasing power and authority of government in our lives can only produce bad fruit, and the belief that a well-paid and benevolent bureaucracy can make better decisions than parents is wicked...

RCJR on Sanctify of Human Life Sunday; with notes on Pharaoh, Herod, and Margaret Sanger...

Now here's an excellent post by our dear friend recently widowed, RCJR. He speaks of the celebration of Christmas, the church calendar, abortion, and the upcoming Sanctity of Human Life Sunday. He asks if it's Biblical and confessional to require this observance in our pulpits and answers with a resounding, "No." I agree; the pulpit is not to be bound.

He goes on to ask whether it may be observed and answers with a resounding, "Yes."

My own suggestion is that you exercise two liberties at the same time and turn Sanctity of Human Life Sunday into Holy Innocents Sunday. You could preach on those little ones who died as Joseph took Jesus and His mother down to Egypt. Study Exodus 1:7-10 noting how Pharaoh's genocide and God's rescue of Moses is the antitype to...

Ugh, it's Christianity Today, again--this time weighing in against spanking...

Knives are necessary to cut meat and bread. Every once in a while, knives are used to kill people. Can we all agree knives aren't the problem? Please? Pretty please?

The abuse of a thing does not invalidate its proper use.

This truth has eluded the editors of Christianity Today. In a recent editorial they use the death of several children at the hands of their fathers and mothers as the spectre to soften readers up to their dogma that "corporal punishment ...should be employed miles short of abuse, without anger, and as an absolute last resort." From their perch in Moses' seat, these scribes declare about spanking that "the Bible does not require it" (emphasis in the original).

Think about this. The magazine that purports to be the voice of Biblical inerrancy and Christian faith in these United States has run an editorial declaring that the rod of discipline God Himself requires God Himself does not require. And if that sentence confuses you, all I can say is I couldn't figure out how to put it more clearly.

And if you're one of the pigheaded ones who balks against progress, just be sure you only use the rod as "an absolute last resort." 

But the Bible commands us to use the rod. God requires it...

The living room was made for kids and not kids for the living room...

Good post on fatherhood by... Who else? 

"There was storm... and then a wolf."

A Christian confesses his faith, today, when he stays married to the same woman until death. When he continues to name his race "man" rather than "humans" or "human beings." When he chooses a church where he's sanctified rather than one where his wife is happy. A Christian confesses her faith, today, when she lets herself notice the beautiful diversity of manhood and womanhood, then calls attention to it.

We got a doll house with furniture off Craig's List a year ago...

What if this kind of man had walked in on Jerry Sandusky...

Imagine, for a moment, a real man walking in on Jerry Sandusky in the Penn State shower room....

Imagine, for a moment, this kind of man walking in there, and how things might have ended...

(Other accounts reveal that the robber shot twice at the feet of the clerk before the man in this video took action.)

(DB)

What about women in combat...

Here is the Majority Report of the Presbyterian Church in America General Assembly's Ad Interim Study Committee on Women in the Military whose recommendations were adopted by General Assembly in 2002. Being this report's principal author, naturally I commend this document to our readers. If biblical Christians today studied this report and by faith embraced its doctrine of Creation Order sexuality, it would be a significant step toward the restoration of the unity of the Church. Too, these United States would again have salty salt and lighty light in the public debate raging over the meaning and purpose of sexuality. (TB)

* * *

MAN’S DUTY TO PROTECT WOMAN

We, the undersigned, endorse the Consensus Report, while realizing that Report lacks unity on the crucial matter of whether the recommendations it contains constitute the church’s wise counsel or a Christian’s scriptural duty. Believing that this is a matter of scriptural duty, we have joined together in writing this report to the end that we might set forth with confidence and clarity the full counsel—both New and Old Testaments—of the Word of God concerning this matter. Our report attempts to summarize three areas of evidence, as follows:

First, God the Father wages war in defense of Israel, His Bride; Christ our Savior fights to the Death defending His Bride, the Church; the Holy Spirit calls men as officers to guard and protect His Bride; the duty to protect the Garden of Eden and the warning not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was given by God to Adam; husbands protect their wives, not wives their husbands. Thus we are taught the binding nature of man’s duty to guard and protect his home and wife.

Second, woman is the weaker sex and part of her weakness is the vulnerability attendant to her greatest privilege—that God has made her the “Mother of all the living.” Men are to guard and protect her as she carries in her womb, gives birth to, and nurses her children.

Third, we are to renounce every thought and action which tends towards a diminishment of sexual differentiation since God made it and called it “good.” [E.g. Scripture’s injunctions concerning women exercising authority over men (1 Timothy 2), women or men wearing clothing of the opposite sex (Deuteronomy 22:5), sodomy (Leviticus 20:15-16), etc.] Rather than a stingy attitude which minimizes sexuality’s implications, we ought to rejoice in this, His blessing.

It is our conviction that these areas, taken together, provide a clear and compelling scriptural rationale for declaring our church’s principled opposition to women serving in military combat positions.

When a man loves a woman, he will lay down his life to defend her, just as Christ loved His Bride and gave Himself up for Her. Men have proudly fulfilled this duty from time immemorial, demonstrating what A. A. Hodge in his commentary on the Westminster Confession of Faith referred to as the law of nature, common to all nations, that is “unchanged” to this present day. Dying for their wives, regenerate and unregenerate men have done “by nature (the) things required by the law.”[1]

Hodge divides the Old Testament law into four categories...

A sermon from a dying man to dying men...

Is Holiness Possible Today (With a Warning from Esau)

Along with a number of other dear brothers (Ron Scates, Gary LeTourneau, Jim DeCamp, Terry Schlossberg, Ben and John Sheldon), my friend Rev. Marty Radcliffe continues to languish in the heretical PC(USA). Pray for him. Marty was a godly encouragment to me in the work of the ministry back in the early eighties when we both were ordained and served within the PC(USA)'s John Knox Presbytery up in Wisconsin.

Marty just commented under the post, "Death of an eighteen-year-old brother...," that he'd recently listened again to my Dad's final sermon given from the pulpit of College Church in Wheaton a few weeks before he died. After Dad's death, I had three-hundred cassettes of this sermon duplicated and sent them out to many friends.

This is the sort of preaching almost completely absent from the PCA and other conservative Reformed circles today. And it's tragic. Out of fear of being labelled a "pietist" by godless hypocrites who persecute those pursuing the sanctification without which no man will see God...

Like a weaned child...

A Song of Ascents, of David. O LORD, my heart is not proud, nor my eyes haughty; Nor do I involve myself in great matters, Or in things too difficult for me. Surely I have composed and quieted my soul; Like a weaned child rests against his mother, My soul is like a weaned child within me.

O Israel, hope in the LORD From this time forth and forever. - Psalms 131

Last night in an elders meeting with a couple suffering a troubled marriage, we were reminding the couple that God's goodness calls us out of our romantic idolatry of our husband (or wife) by shoving our nose in the truth of his sin. And ours...

Seeing our husband's sin exposes our own sin, also, as the Holy Spirit leads us away from worshipping man to love and adore God Alone.

The discipline is difficult. And if we are tempted to reject it and continue to hold our idolatry precious, it is the love of our Heavenly Father to intensify it until we unstiffen our necks. In that context we told of the warning Thomas Watson gives in The Ten Commandments that God sometimes disiplines a father's idolatry of his child by taking that child's life. This is God's love.

So what about anonymous comments...

Again he sent them another slave, and they wounded him in the head, and treated him shamefully. (Mark 12:4)

A reader personally unknown to me and my brother, David, wrote of his appreciation for Baylyblog, and then asked this question:

(H)aving seen some of the comments you have made (on Baylyblog about anonymity), I wanted to ask if you believe it is wrong if I post a comment only using my first name? The reason I do so is that I am (an) engineering student and will (soon) be graduating ...and it would probably make it quite difficult for me to get a job since employers google names and mine is a rare one... Is that a bad reason?

To which I responded:

Dear John Doe,

I have mixed feelings about this, dear brother...

Sowing the wind, reaping the whirlwind...

(TB: this from David Wegener, our American-African correspondent on home assignment here in these United States for the coming year.)

Reading the recent article about Pat Summit, the head woman’s basketball coach at the University of Tennessee, has put me in a reflective mood. If you read the article and are a regular reader of this blog, you’ll feel pretty sad. Sorry that Pat Summit has early onset Alzheimer’s disease. Sorry that her marriage ended in divorce. Sorry that she’s given her life to basketball. Sorry for her son Tyler.

Sorry Pat is such a man--this last idea was the dominant impression I had after reading the piece by Sally Jenkins (who calls Pat her best friend).

When doctors at Mayo Clinic told her she had Alzheimer’s and urged her to retire, she responded, “Do you have any idea who you’re dealing with?” Jenkins describes her as “a marble pillar, ramrod straight, that seems to have stood for a thousand years, while everything around it falls.” She is characterized by “resolve.” Things like surrender and acceptance and vulnerability have never “come naturally to her.” If you watch the interview and see what it reveals about Tyler’s relationship with his mom, well, it makes you even sadder. Even sick.

She is the most successful coach in women’s sports today...

Francis Schaeffer's shame...

He who corrects a scoffer gets dishonor for himself, And he who reproves a wicked man gets insults for himself. Do not reprove a scoffer, or he will hate you, Reprove a wise man and he will love you. (Proverbs 9:7, 8)

In what world is it news when a man announces his Christian faith and leadership were only for the money and that he "faked it all the way?" In the Gray Lady's world where hypocrisy among pro-life Evangelicals is news fit to print because it somehow confirms their self-righteousness in promoting the slaughter of little ones and hating God.

My own father knew the elder Francis Schaeffer (they both attended Faith Seminary) and near the end of his life he became concerned about the anger and pride that characterized Franky's splenetic diatribes. So back in the early eighties, Dad wrote Franky a kind fatherly letter of admonishment. Franky never responded.

Years later, now, I'm in my late fifties and I realize how awful pride is and how very many nations, cities, churches, families, marriages, and men it destroys. It is the engine that drives that root of bitterness that corrupts many.

This is my way of saying that the real news about Franky is not that he's now confessing his whole life has been hypocrisy...

Church officers and fathers who cover up sexual crimes...

"Fathers need to know this: avoiding the potential shame by not providing justice for your daughter is a cowardly act that will be forever remembered..." - longtime PCA elder and father of little daughters just found to have been raped by a relative

Here's an e-mail we received responding to the post "With the souls of sodomites destroyed, children are next...". As you will see, the e-mail is filled with horrors--particularly the horror of Christians who refuse to recognize the horrors taking over our homes and churches and to respond to them Biblically.

Since posting this and the previous piece, it's become clear to me that readership of this post has been small. And I believe this means sexual sin and the rampant fornication and pornography that are its seedbed will live on in the church, gaining ground while church officers and household fathers abandon their flocks and talk exchange blog posts and comments about family-centered churches and post-millenialism.

The predators love this.

So please, look again at the pull-quote at the top and ask yourself if you and your church officers are beyond it? If you're such good fathers, pastors, elders, deacons, and Titus 2 women that you don't need to find out what it means or how to respond to this failure of fathers filling our churches with bitterness? I'm sure no one relishes reading such a rebuke, but then do we really think the Corinthians enjoyed the Apostle Paul's letters?

Note particulary the father's statement about the cowardice of fathers who try to cover up the crime rather than protecting their children. This is the reality of my pastoral experience, over and over again. Our session submits the criminal to the civil magistrate. Always. Immediately. And so must you.

Living in a university community, over many years, now, ClearNote Church has been blessed by God with a good number of opportunities to be servants of reconciliation in these tragic circumstances. We would be pleased to serve your church's officers by providing support and counsel when you need help with sexual abuse and crimes against our Lord's little ones. Please feel free to contact us.

Now, on to the account...

Government-gone-hog-wild: keep your eye on the bill...

The battle over money going on between President Obama and the House of Representatives is worth watching because, for years to come, it will be used as an example proving something. Just ask Newt Gingrich.

Exactly what it proves remains to be seen and is largely a function of the degree to which those of us who oppose government-gone-hog-wild make our voices heard in support of what the freshman class and Speaker Boehner are trying to do.

So, good citizens, speak up.

Last night in his plea for support of unlimited government, President Obama said:

Most Americans, regardless of political party, don't understand how we can ask a senior citizen to pay more for her Medicare before we ask corporate jet owners and oil companies to give up tax breaks that other companies don't get.

To understand such deceptions...

For one family, this was a very sad Father's Day...

Here's a letter written by father of three, Tom Ball, explaining why he planned to set fire to himself. The letter was received by the New Hampshire Sentinel this past Thursday morning, June 16th--one day after Mr. Ball burned himself to death in front of the Cheshire County Courthouse in Keene, New Hampshire.

Despair is evil and suicide more so, but it's worth reading Mr. Ball's very long letter to understand the policeman/judge/social worker troika feminists have so successfully employed to destroy millions of homes, robbing many more millions of children of their fathers. Likely every last one of us reading this apologia knows at least several fathers who have been arrested or had their children taken from their home without warrant. And Mr. Ball is right--it will only get worse.

Note particularly Mr. Ball's failed efforts to get official stats on domestic violence arrests; but also his stats on the percentage of domestic batteries and murders committed by men and women. Our good readers must be reminded again and again that domestic violence is an equal opportunity employer.

(TB)

More heresy from Baker's wolves...

I know that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves men will arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after them. (Acts 20:29-30)

Look what Baker Book House makes its living from today. Professor Alan G. Padgett has written a book blasphemously titled, As Christ Submits to the Church, claiming it's a "biblical understanding of leadership and mutual submission."

The marketers tell us the author is a "theologian" with the terminal degree from Oxford. Did you know how easy it is to get into Oxford for grad studies in theology? Every other applicant gets accepted.

The pic on the book's cover tells us the contents are simply the outworking of Jesus' Upper Room command to wash one another's feet. Very olde truths, don't you know?

Then this:

As Christ submits to the church, so all Christians must submit to, serve, and care for one another. Padgett articulates a creative approach to mutual submission and explores its practical outworking in the church today, providing biblical and ethical affirmation for equality in leadership. Professors and students in practical theology and gender courses, pastors, church leaders, and thoughtful lay readers will appreciate his new approach to a controversial topic.

Where to begin? "Christ submits to the church?"

No. Scripture says no such thing, but rather the opposite:

But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything. (Ephesians 5:24)

The Church submits to Christ--He doesn't submit to the Church!

These heretics turn everything upside down...

Faith of our fathers...

A Psalm on the Death of an Eighteen-Year-Old Son
 

What waste Lord
this ointment precious
here outpoured
is treasure great
beyond my mind to think.
For years
until this midnight
it was safe
contained
awaiting careful use
now broken
wasted
lost.

The world is poor
so poor it needs each drop
of such a store.
This treasure spent
might feed a multitude
for all their days
and then yield more.
This world is poor?
It’s poorer now
the treasure’s lost.
I breath its lingering fragrance
soon even that
will cease.

What purpose served?
The act is void of reason
sense
Lord
madmen do such deeds
not sane.
The sane man hoards his treasure
spends with care
if good
to feed the poor
or else to feed himself.

Let me alone Lord
You’ve taken from me
what I’d give Your world.
I cannot see such waste
that You should take
what poor men need.
You have a heaven
full of treasure
could You not wait
to exercise Your claim
on this?

O spare me Lord forgive
that I may see
beyond this world
beyond myself
Your sovereign plan
or seeing not
may trust You
Spoiler of my treasure.
Have mercy Lord
here is my quitclaim.

- Joe Bayly, on the death of his eldest son

May God bless you this Father's Day...

Toutou carin kamptw ta gonata mou prov ton patera ex ou pasa patria en ouranoiv kai epi ghv onomazetai. (Ephesians 3:14-15)

Behold, I am going to send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and terrible day of the LORD. He will restore the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, so that I will not come and smite the land with a curse. (Malachi 4:5-6)

Therefore Jesus answered and was saying to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something He sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, these things the Son also does in like manner." (John 5:19)

Abdicating fathers, working mothers, and children raised in litters...

Under this post appears the following comment from Drew, a PCA pastor. Click through to the second page for my responses. (I've made some significant additions since first posting it.)

(TB)

* * *

Drew writes: So I'm new to this blog and confused. What is the problem with positive job prospects for women? And competition for men? Is it unbiblical for women to work? For men to share in staying at home and raising children? Aren't jobs outside of the home the result of a post-industrial revolution economy? Does the Bible really address this topic directly? If it does, isn't the woman in Proverbs 31 at least sharing in shouldering the household's economic burden? Doesn't it look like she is working outside the home?

Bottom line, how do we know that YOU haven't just adopted the unbiblical attitude towards gender roles that developed during the course of the 1800s, and that what we are experiencing in the workplace today is actually one positive aspect of our contemporary culture? [not everything is doom and gloom after all...just a lot of things]

I'm not trying to poke your eyes, these are honest questions offered in the spirit of furthering the conversation...

The father of a family--the only true adventurer...

There is only one adventurer in the world, as can be seen very clearly in the modern world, the father of a family. Even the most desperate adventurers are nothing compared with him.... Everything is against him. Savagely organized against him. Everything turns and combines against him. Men, events, the events of society, the automatic play of economic laws. And, in short, everything else. Everything is against the father of a family, the pater familias; and consequently against the family. He alone is literally ‘engaged’ in the world, in the age. He alone is an adventurer. - Charles Peguy in Clio 1.

(TB)

Calvin on a father passing his kingdom to his son...

It is a matter of such great importance for noble and wise princes to be set over the world by God. ...But so that such an extraordinary blessing of God might not be lost through the death of one man, as usually often happens, the succession of his son was added to preserve the situation for a long time, for he would continue and establish the order admirably set up under the father’s auspices.

Sometimes it does indeed happen that sons are not only unlike their fathers, but that when they have gained power...they allow themselves just as much freedom to violate the father’s laws, as if they were eagerly attacking the greatest of enemies. But God has generously provided for the kingdom of Denmark in this respect, that you are a most outstanding king, with the heroic stamp of your father’s nature, educated in his most virtuous discipline, having embraced the way of life delivered by him from hand to hand, as the saying goes, and think of nothing else but following in his footsteps.

However you have not only been chosen to be his successor to assume the office left vacant by his death, but also both adopted by his living and distinguished judgment, and given by the providence of God as an aide, on whose shoulders part of the burden may lie.

And I do not doubt that among the principle gifts of God...

Godly fatherhood...

My Dear Bristol,

Before you were born I prayed for you. In my heart I knew that you would be a little angel. And so you were!

When you were born on my birthday, April 7, 1980, it was evident that you were a special gift from the Lord. But how profound a gift you turned out to be! More than the beautiful bundle of gurgles and rosy cheeks...more than the first-born of my flesh, a joy unspeakable...you showed me God's love more than anything else in creation. Bristol, you  taught me how to love.

I certainly loved you when you were cuddly and cute, when you rolled over and sat up and jabbered your first words. I loved you when the searing pain of realization took hold that something was wrong...that maybe you were not developing as quickly as your peers, and then when we understood it was more serious than that...

Ted Williams: "You were lucky to have such a dad"...

Any truths other than Ted’s own—especially the ones written by sportswriters and voiced by his critics—seemed to him designed to prove that he was only what he had been when he was a boy: a scared, unwanted, unloved kid from a miserable home, that he could not redo his life to better specifications.

The secret truth was that he needed to be great in order to escape from that terrible home. He had been raised by an alcoholic father and a religiously strident mother who was out on the streets all hours for the Salvation Army. The phrase for her in today’s vernacular would be that she was a woman in deep denial, very deep denial. She seemed to care more about the orphans of Tijuana than she did about her own two sons. Her home was a pigpen. …Ted was always fighting that shame about his background...

Ronald Reagan's fatherhood...

Much as he embraced domesticity, however, he relied on Nancy to relieve him of its petty nuisances, such as school and servant problems, and finding a home for his mentally ailing mother while he was out of town.  She made her own and Jane Wyman’s children understand that although Dad was available for certain carefully scheduled hours of face time, in the pool or on horseback, he was not to be burdened with emotional demands. He had more important things than mere fatherhood on his mind: the governorship of California, for a start.

- Morris, Edmund. "The Unknowable: Ronald Reagan’s amazing, mysterious life," The New Yorker, 28 June 2004, p. 48.

(TB)

"Daughters and dad's approval"...

"...a father is a girl's portal to the world of men... a girl's GPS—gender positioning system. It's how women begin to orient themselves in a confusing and (especially of late) fluid landscape of gender expectations. Absent that GPS, many women find themselves adrift..."

Men too.

(TB)

So this hip-hop star walks into our art gallery and he's like...

Behold, I am going to send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and terrible day of the LORD. He will restore the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, so that I will not come and smite the land with a curse. (Malachi 4:5, 6)

(NOTE: helpful obscenities ahead) Almost always, an absent father, father-hunger, and hatred define The New Yorker profiles of the purveyors of our Godless culture. Here we have a profile of the hip-hop group, Odd Future, and its best rapper, Thebe Neruda Kgositsile (alias Earl Sweatshirt) who at the time of the song's release was sixteen years old. From The New Yorker's profile, "Earl Sweatshirt begins one track by sneaking some autobiography into...

May God grant repentance and faith to us and our chilldren...

A brother sent along this link to an article on Billy Graham titled "The Fight over Billy Graham's Legacy." The author shows an obvious disdain for Billy's son Franklin, but there's this notable statement by Franklin explaining how he differs from his father:

"We preach the same Gospel,” Franklin Graham says, but “Daddy hates to say no. I can say no."

My friend comments, "That says a lot, doesn't it," and then adds this...

A brief on feminism, with a note on the deeper meaning of weddings...

If you think Luther and Calvin sinned in their rhetoric and you suspect parody does not edify, you may want to pass this one up. For the rest of us, here's an emetic for all the feminist toxins we're force-fed each day.

And if you're wondering, my dear wife Mary Lee liked it. But then this is a woman who pierced her own nose back in 1975 so let the reader undestand her opinion doesn't count for much.

(TB)

Home schoolers split over Ken Ham and Peter Enns...

(Tim) When I was younger, I used to say the homeschooling movement was one of the most encouraging signs in America, today.

Government has no business engaging in religious instruction, yet public schools do almost nothing else. Through the training and certification of government school teachers, education's oligarchs rule public schools with an iron fist and they are determined to wrest the minds and hearts of children away from their fathers.

My parents graduated from Wheaton College back in the forties and one of their friends went to Columbia University to get his doctorate. He reported Columbia's faculty and grad students were committed to using government schools to foment rebellion in the home, telling of a party in celebration of John Dewey's ninetieth birthday at which faculty and grad students discussed the utility of government schools for undermining parents' efforts to pass their religious commitments on to their sons and daughters. Their plan was simple: they would train public school teachers to serve as front-line missionaries for the godless paganism sold to the parents of government schoolchildren as "separation of church and state."

This and other things led to my parents working with several couples to start a new Christian school outside Philadelphia called Delaware Country Christian School. Mary Lee and I followed in their footsteps, joining with a few couples here in Bloomington to start Lighhouse Christian Academy. Before we finish educating our children we'll have used Christian schools, a Christian college, a public university, a secular college, public schools, home school, and a home school co-op.

What education do we think is best?

Three helps for fathers...

(Tim) Fathers, let us live by faith as we do the work of raising our sons and daughters. It's hard--very hard, particularly if you're going for the heart rather than external conformity. At times your dear wife will be an obstacle to your work. Let's be honest about that.

When I first put up this post, I considered it so boringly normal in its description of the father/mother/child disciplinary triad it didn't occur to me anyone might think the scenario was current in my home. But a dear friend wrote to warn me not to talk about my wife and son in public and I was grateful.

That said, this is not my current situation. Mary Lee is not leading a rebellion and our son Taylor is not sullen.

On the other hand, I'm always loathe to turn down the heat on instruction and exhortation by reassuring my congregation this or that wasn't meant to describe me or you or him or her. So let me reverse myself and say this post does apply to me, my wife, my son, you, your wife, and your daughter. In other words, no one is off the hook as we read this. Here are some of our sins and all of us need to take warning and encouragment from the Word of God. That said...

No novelties; just agreeing with our fathers...

(Tim) When ClearNote Church was founded and her officers were exploring extending a call to me to serve as her pastor, I asked for something quite large from them. What I wanted was the freedom to hold to, live, and preach and teach historic Christian, Protestant, Reformed doctrine. Nothing new--just the old stuff. Were they willing to grant me that inestimably precious liberty?

They said "Yes," and on such a very simple question and answer hang the destinies of men and women across the ages and around the world.

Today, churches would do well to know the historic Christian, Protestant, and Reformed (which is to say the Biblical) faith and doctrine, and to fire any pastor or elder who wants to go a different way. Oppositely, churches should love and protect any pastor or elder who has those commitments and teaches truth, rebukes sin and false doctrine, and lovingly calls the souls under His care back to the Word of God.

This thought came to mind reading this from an e-mail just received from a friend who described his teaching and writing ministry...

Differences between small and large families...

(Tim, w/thanks to Eric) Our Lord, the Apostle Paul, and economists are agreed that money matters quite a lot. For instance, check out the comments on this blog responding to the news that, in China, a law is being proposed that would make an adult child's failure to visit his parents actionable in court. If the law passes, parents could sue their child for failure to visit and the child could be fined and directed to submit to a visitation schedule. What wonderful visits that would produce! Beyond the question of banks, pensions, and Social Security, though, there's another set of numbers worth noting, here.

We have a fair number of international students who attend ClearNote Church, Bloomington (our new church name), and some are from China. Due to China's one-child policy, these students rarely have siblings or cousins. Picture it: one father and mother had one child--a son; another father and mother had one child--a daughter; that son and daughter married and had one son who married someone else's daughter--again, an only child. Now what do you have?

You have a married couple who themselves have one child who will grow up with two parents, four grandparents, and eight great-grandparents. It's entirely conceivable he'll have some of his great-grandparents live to the time of his marriage, at which time he'll take on through his wife another set of two parents, four grandparents, and eight great-grandparents. Let's assume only half of that couple's great grandparents survive to the time of their marriage; then that couple each has two parents, four grandparents, and four great-grandparents, which brings the total number of aging relatives on the shoulders of that young couple to twenty. And if all their great-grandparents are still alive, the total is twenty-eight.

Which is to say that, beyond the hundreds of millions of little babies slaughtered by the one-child policy and forced abortions of China in the past century, they now have a rapidly aging population. It's estimated one in four adults will be over the age of sixty-five by 2050.

Let's be practical about this. When my mother-in-law and mother want to move into someone's house...

"He started disciplining me like I was one of his sons..."

(Tim, w/thanks to Taylor) Read this wonderful story and ask yourself where the church turns boys--undisciplined angry ones, at that--into men? Youth groups? Home school co-ops? Christian school science labs? Crew? Membership classes? Men's retreats?

You say your church is not a parochial school filled with inner city kids and your own fathers are the ones training their own sons. I say, "Yeah, right."

Face it. Each of our churches has a bunch of young men every bit as much in need of the discipline of playing on Bob Hurley's basketball team as the kids at St. Anthony High in Jersey City. In the ministry today, we're surrounded by man-boys whose fathers have turned their backs on them. These young men crave discipline--which is to say they crave fatherly love...

Mothers, don't exasperate your children...

(Tim, w/thanks to Lucas and several others) After everyone's been discussing the article for quite a while and the Bayly children have finished their argument over which of them grew up during the American and which the Chinese years of our family administration, I thought I should clue the rest of you in on the fun of reading this article on Chinese childrearing (actually motherhood). Then, when youv'e finished that piece, read this one responding to the first. The animation was also inspired by Chua's article.

The modern and morbid habit of sacrificing the normal on the altar of the abnormal...

(Tim, w/thanks to DW) This just in from Fox News:

The words “mother” and “father” will be removed from U.S. passport applications and replaced with gender neutral terminology, the State Department says. “The words in the old form were ‘mother’ and ‘father,’” said Brenda Sprague, deputy assistant Secretary of State for Passport Services. "They are now ‘parent one’ and ‘parent two.’" Sprague said the decision to remove the traditional parenting names was not an act of political correctness.

A statement on the State Department website noted: “These improvements are being made to provide a gender neutral description of a child’s parents and in recognition of different types of families.” (Read more...)

I'll call you a a Christian if you'll call me a scholar...

(Tim) Our American-African correspondent, David Wegener, just sent in this review of John D’Elia's A Place at the Table: George Eldon Ladd and the Rehabilitation of Evangelical Scholarship in America (Oxford University Press, 2008).

This biography is a parable of the dangers of seeking the approval of the world. Didn’t our Lord say, “For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?” (Mk 8:36). Yet this is what Ladd sought, and along the way he lost his soul. He was one of the most respected evangelical Bible teachers of the mid-twentieth century. Nobody from my generation can teach on the kingdom of God and not quote George Ladd. Yet he craved the acceptance of the world and, when he did not attain it, his life fell apart. Didn’t the Apostle write, “The mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so” (Rom 8:7). The world will never accept us. It can’t.

Ladd became a Christian as a young man, sensed a call to the Christian ministry, trained at Gordon College and then entered the pastorate. Somewhere along the way, he changed direction and began to pursue further education so that he could do scholarly work on the Bible...

Wives and mothers working outside the home...

(Tim) Reading a discussion that's developed under an earlier post concerning the Biblical priority of the home and family in the lives of Christian women, it occurred to me to post these notes from a sermon I've preached several times over the course of my ministry. The issue is critically important, and yet not to be dealt with in a wooden way. Specifically, some work outside the home is always required of wives and mothers and is good and right--Biblical, even...

Leaders and their fathers...

(Tim, w/thanks to Michael) Leaders who love their fathers stand out. Long before you hear him say it, you know. Jim Dobson. Doug Wilson. George Bush. Each man's father loved him and they live for him. And if they're believers, for His Father. So what does your son show?

If you don't have time for the whole thing, start around 53:15. (And please understand this video is no political statement.)

Watch live streaming video from facebookguests at livestream.com

Death and life are in His mighty hands...

(Tim) The past two weeks the Bloomington Baylys have had sorrow and joy. Sorrow in the death of my dear cousin, John DeWalt, who succumbed to a long illness connected with diabetes. He died two weeks ago this coming Monday and some of us were able to travel to Pittsburgh for the funeral. There we grieved, and yet celebrated his homegoing with his mother, Inis (Mrs. Curtis) DeWalt, his sister Beth DeWalt, and his brother Paul DeWalt (along with Paul's wife, Patti, and their three children--Zachary, Sarah, and Jacob).

A week ago today, we had the joy of joining brother David's family in the celebration of the marriage of David's eldest son, Nathan, and his lovely bride, Aleaha (pron. a leah). It was a joyful day.

Then the past three days we've had the joy of gathering here in Bloomington for our family Thanksgiving celebration and being joined by my mother-in-law, Margaret (Mrs. Ken) Taylor. That's the pic you see above. For the record, we now have ten grandchildren. (I apologize to my dear wife, Mary Lee, for the mysterious white-out on her forehead, but otherwise it's the best pic.)

Names? Well, let's do it by families...

Eat a bagel, the civil magistrate kidnaps your baby...

(Tim, w/thanks to a brother) Over and over, I warn Christian fathers and mothers that each community's child protective services pose a terrible threat to our covenant children. Since twenty-five years ago when we lived in rural Wisconsin and a dear godly pastor and his wife had their son kidnapped by the state, to the past few years when our church and family have had the state threaten four of our families with the loss of their children, it's only becoming more clear each year that the state is not content to have our children in their schools to be indoctrinated from age five through eighteen. They will come after our children at home, also, and kidnap them from their father and mother after getting one anonymous phone call from a malicious neighbor, an officious nurse, a jealous lesbian, or a practicing witch who hates Christ and is delighted to torment his sons and daughters at the place of their greatest vulnerability.

We must do everything possible to oppose this growing threat to our precious children and grandchildren. Remember C. S. Lewis' warning that they'll tell us we can have our religion in private and then make sure we're never alone.

The suffering of children growing up in homes where they are the objects of physical and sexual and spiritual torment is horrible, crying out to God Almighty for His intervention. But to adress these problems in a way that undercuts the authority and love of the children's natural sovereigns given them by God...

Man vs. lust...

(Tim: Nathan Alberson writes) Dear Dad or Mom:

Your average teenage boy already knows about the birds and bees. But how on earth are you going to talk your darling child through all the issues that come along with it: from lust to porn... Wouldn't it be nice if there was some sort of book about sex written for young men...

PCA pastor calls for more state control over home...

(Tim) As I've mentioned before, one of the most important journals for elders, pastors, and Titus 2 women to read as we shepherd God's flock and our own families is the Howard Center's "Family in America." (Full disclosure: my longtime friend, Bob Patterson, edits the journal.)

In order to live and lead "wise as serpents and harmless as doves," we should spend time studying our culture. There's no issue pastors, elders, deacons, fathers, and mothers of covenant children should study more carefully than the interface between the church, her families, and the civil magistrate--an area of the public square commonly referred to as family policy.

Recently, a friend of mine who's stated clerk of Central Indiana Presbytery (PCA) wrote an oped piece for his local paper calling for more review and discipline of homeschoolers by state government:

What do we do with home schools?

Leave them alone? Regulate them? Ban them?

...So I ask: is it in the interests of the state, to keep an eye on this? I say yes....

Live by faith, vow a marriage, have babies, plant a church, start a school, college, and seminary...

(Tim) Back in 1993, I wrote an article on a conflict over the policy of Westminster School in Atlanta that required board members of this private Christian school to be confessing Christians. The New York Times had done an article on the controversy and I took the piece as a jumping-off point to say a few things about home, public, and Christian schools. Since then, Mary Lee and I have educated our five children (as well as several other children who lived with us through the years) in each of those ways--home, public, and Christian school. This is the final year we have a child at home and Taylor, our youngest, is finishing high school at the school my wife Mary Lee, with a couple others, founded and served as principal--Lighthouse Christian Academy.

It's been years since we've had a child at LCA. When it put up a building, we watched its former commitments decline. It seemed bent on becoming the sort of Christian school that, from the beginning, we'd worked hard to avoid. But this is the ho-hum way of all institutions, Christian or otherwise, and there have been some encouraging changes at LCA the past couple of years--hence Taylor's presence there this year.

But as I point out in the article below, the best antidote to school decline is the founding of a new school. It worked with Yale as a reform of Harvard, Princeton as a reform of Yale, and it's still working with schools like New St. Andrews being a reform of Wheaton, Westmont, Gordon, and Covenant.

Tired and timid souls always laugh at the upstarts...

Children are a heritage from the Lord...

(Tim, w/thanks to Jessica) Jessica Woods forwarded this pic labelling it "the CGS diaspora in Houston." From left to right: Erin, Elisabeth, Nathan, & Clara Polderman; Chantal Incandela; Ning (expecting December 15), Micah, and Dan Gelok; and Michael, Abigail, and Jessica (expecting January 11) Woods.

Bootiful, ain't they? Our Lord does all things well!

Lady Education...

(Tim) Over on ClearNote Ladies Blog, our daughter, Michal Louise Crum, did a post titled, Do Women Need Less Education Than Men? If Samuel Johnson was right in his observation that you know you've hit your mark when you get a response, Michal hit the bull's eye.

At the center of her post were three questions she recommended to her readers in connection with the decision whether or not to go to college:

1. What is the purpose? What is this education preparing me for?
2. What are my motives? Am I pursuing education for the sake of education itself, a profession, money, status, the glory of God?
3. How much will it cost? Is it a wise investment of time, money, and energy? If God leads me in a different direction two years down the road, will the debt incurred prevent me from obeying God’s call?

Pretty calm, huh? It's hard to imagine these questions eliciting screeches and howls--from women who claim the Name of Christ no less. But elicit they did. May I say how much I admire the women of our congregation? If you read the comments under Michal's post, you'll better understand why. For one thing, what grace under fire!

So what about ye olde college education?

I've read all the screeches and howls, and this is by far my favorite...

Sending women to fight our battles...

(Tim, w/thanks to Matt) At the very end, after the laughter, John denounces "nations that send their women to fight their battles." That's us, folks. Our wives and mothers and sisters and daughters are dying over in Iraq and Afghanistan protecting their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons.

What's wrong with this?

Spanking is naughty...

(Tim: Over on ClearNote Blog, son Joseph writes:) Just today I heard that Riley Children's Hospital here in Indianapolis has signs up stating that the entire hospital is a "No Hit Zone". They are big banner signs, small tripod signs, and everything in between. Apparently they have been up since at least November. Here is an example... Each time I hear people discussing discipline or talk to somebody about it, I feel the pressure build... (continue reading...)

Are you a Homeschooler or a homeschooler?

(Tim) As I've said any number of times, there are Homeschoolers and there are homeschoolers. I don't support the former, but I'm all for the latter. How to tell the difference?

The Homeschooler sees her home as a fortress rather than a center of ministry. Publicly, she speaks much of her husband's authority and how much she loves to submit to it, but privately...