Episode 52: What's in a Name?

Rural Church Podcast 2.0

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Welcome to the Ruled Church Podcast. This is my beloved son, with whom

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I am well pleased. He is honored, and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better, because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas?

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You see that one in Pechote, Mexico? Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres, down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it.

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The church is not a democracy. It's a monarchy. Christ is king. You can't be

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Christian without a local church. You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the

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Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible -believing church, and spend your life serving

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Jesus in a local, visible congregation. Welcome to the

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Ruled Church Podcast. I'm not here with my good friend, Eddie Ragsdale.

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I'm here today with my co -elder here at Providence Baptist Church, Pastor Jacob Robinson.

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Say hello, Jacob. Hey, guys. Anytime we get to be on the Ruled Church Podcast, it's a good day, so I'm excited to be here.

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It's a Thursday, and we just got out of men's Bible study, going through Isaiah. That was pretty good.

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Yeah, it's been a good time this summer. I'm a teacher, so during the summer

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I've got a lot of time off, so it's been good to be a part of men's Bible study every

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Thursday morning. Except this morning it was hot. We meet at 530. I tried to run.

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Well, I did run before Bible study, but it was humid, hot August in Arkansas.

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Yeah, I think today, I think heat index is going to be over 110, so looking forward to fall.

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Amen. Well, on last week's episode, which was recorded yesterday, so I've got to keep all my time in my mind, but on last week's episode you heard me mention

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Providence Baptist Church, and Eddie and I talked about, Jacob and I are going to talk about this topic, and that is our church has gone through a name change.

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So what we want to do in this episode is we kind of just want to walk through the why we decided to do a name change, and then we want to walk through the how.

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I'm going to tell a story. Actually, I'm telling this as we're recording, so I don't even know if Jacob knows this for sure.

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I think I've shared this with him before, but a couple things I want to say to pastors.

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The first is when I came on the church long before Jacob was here, it was in 2016, so I've been here just over seven years now, and when

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I came in 2016, I believe I was the church's 10th pastor. So Perryville Second Baptist Church was founded in 1996.

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I don't know the extent or the reasons. I know there was some disagreements, and so a group came out of First Baptist Church of Perryville and started

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Second Baptist Church of Perryville. From 1996 to 2016, the church had had nine pastors.

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One of the pastors, the pastor right before me, had been here for about almost, not quite, but almost five years.

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And so you take away that, take away five years, and so now they had eight pastors in 15 years.

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And then, of course, you add up all the time in between pastors, and I think one time they had an interim pastor for maybe a year and a half or two years.

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All that to say, from 1996 to 2016, the church was really averaging probably the average tender of a pastor being, what, two years?

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Not even two years. And then once I made five years, that was 2021.

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That was the longest any pastor had ever been here. In August of 2021, which was two years ago now,

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I caught COVID, and I actually, with some of the leadership here, kind of came into a conflict over that.

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Some people were kind of upset that I didn't do the vaccine, and others didn't really want me back in the pulpit yet, because after I missed two

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Sundays with COVID, on that third Sunday they didn't want me back. And at that point, this is what

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I don't know if I've shared with you before or not yet, Jacob. At that point, I was so low and so discouraged.

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I actually sent my resume to churches. I actually emailed my resume even to some pastor friends and just said,

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Look, I don't think it's going to work out here. I was just so deflated.

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Had I told you that? No. First time I'm here. So that was two years ago.

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You fast forward two years later, and this is my encouragement to pastors. Go somewhere and stay.

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There are places that, obviously, you do have to leave. You can't get out. I understand all that.

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But I do think a longer -term vision is helpful. I'm grateful for God's grace, and I'm grateful for fast -forwarding two years later, and this is where we're at.

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So, Jacob, I'm going to let you talk a little bit about what our church voted to do this summer in regards to our name.

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So let's talk about what we did, and then we'll talk about the whys and the how in just a minute. Yeah, so over the course of,

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I would say, a couple of months, really, that we talked about and we prayed about it, we brought it up just at the end of a business meeting.

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I would think April, May, sometime in there, brought it up, and immediately everybody in the church thought it was a good idea.

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I don't think we had anybody in that business meeting that didn't want to proceed forward.

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I think everybody thought the name. It had been talked about for a while. Yeah, well, yeah. Informally.

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Informally, yeah. So formally talking about it, like in a business meeting, I thought everybody was like, okay, yeah, that sounds great.

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Let's go forward with this. And so we went through the process of sending out a

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Google form and having people fill out, choose between a few names that had been mentioned or adding their own name.

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And over the course of a month, we looked at that. The next business meeting brought that up, and I think had two clear favorites.

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So we chose between those two at the following business meeting. So that was a two -month process there within itself.

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And I think we were all pretty much in agreement of changing the name, and it was almost unanimous for what name we went with.

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And that name being Providence Baptist Church. And I would certainly caution,

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I mean, ours kind of went fast, but everything that has happened here in the last year has kind of moved faster.

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We kind of hit that six -year mark that I'd been here, and from that point on, changes and stuff have moved fairly quickly.

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And there's reasons for that that maybe not getting into in this episode, but maybe one day.

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But things have moved pretty fast. But there was unity and cohesion around this process of wanting to change the name.

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And I would say that the way that we're doing it, so we're actually going to keep our legal name.

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Perryville Second Baptist Church is going to be our legal name. And the way we're doing it, just because I think the paperwork and stuff is cheaper and easier, is we're just actually changing our out front name.

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It's a doing business as name. And I'm not sure how hard that is where you live, but in Arkansas, pretty easy.

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So we're going through that process. At the time of this recording, we're still going through that process.

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Hopefully by the time this podcast airs, that will have been completed in something in the past.

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But let's talk about for a minute, Jacob, what is it about this name Providence?

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And why change our name from Perryville Second Baptist to Providence Baptist? So why do you like the name

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Providence Baptist Church? Okay, so there's multiple reasons why

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I like the name Providence. One, just for Providence, God sovereignly putting his will or his plan into action is what

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I would think. That may not be the best definition of Providence, but just the first one

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I came up with, that could come up with right here. So there's a lot to like. There's really two things that I want to point out specifically for our church and Providence.

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One is we've seen God's Providence, not that you haven't at your church, but we've seen so many things that you're just like, wow.

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The fact that so many of our people have just came from just out of nowhere places.

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We have a family here. I think Alex has actually been on a podcast or two from Canada that just emailed the church.

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And then I think a month or so later, showed up down here, stayed with you in your house for a while, came to church, moved down here.

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You just don't see that happening in a lot of places. And then even in my own life, how myself, my wife and my boys came to be here.

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We were searching for a church that believed doctrines of grace that took ecclesiology very seriously.

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A church that desired not to be popular, but desired to be biblical.

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And so we were searching. We searched for several months, had no luck in visiting various churches.

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Had no luck. Had no luck. It was by God's grace and by His will we didn't find a church.

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But we just could not find what we thought was a church that we thought was healthy or that we thought was in agreement with us on our beliefs.

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And so I was at a basketball game. I had inquired at Grace Bible Theological Seminary.

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I had inquired there about auditing a couple of classes. And Pastor Danny Thursby, who's pastor at Grace Bible Church in Conway, calls me back.

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At that time he was also working for the college. He calls me back and we get to talking about the college.

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We talked for probably 20 minutes about that. And then I said, hey, well, I've got you on the phone. Is there a church near me?

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I told him where I was at. I live just outside of Quesa, a small town in Arkansas.

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You probably don't know where it's at, so I'm not going to try to explain that to you. But I said, do you know a church near me?

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And I explained the things that we were looking for in a church. And he goes, well, how far are you from Perryville?

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I said, well, we're about 25 minutes. He's like, okay, well, Quatro Nelson.

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That was what he said. He said, I need to put you in touch with Quatro Nelson, Perryville Second Baptist. And you need to try them out.

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You need to go check them out. Well, that night, Quatro texted me. I think that was a

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Tuesday night. The next Wednesday, we were here. And just by God's providence, here we are, many of us.

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And so I think that really relates to our church. I think our church can relate to the word providence and just how so many of our members came to be here.

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And also, as we were searching for a church, we were on the

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Internet. We were on Facebook. We were looking at websites, trying to find a church that was a doctrines of grace church.

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And we never thought about Perryville Second Baptist because there was just nothing that stood out in the name to us.

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Well, that's just going to be, you know, just your normal, probably Southern Baptist church.

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They're not going to be doctrines of grace. It honestly never even came up as a church that we searched.

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But we feel like the word providence for those who are searching for a healthy church, a reformed

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Baptist church, that when they see the name providence, it's at least going to pique their interest.

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And they may say, hey, we're looking for a reformed Baptist church. Let's go check it out.

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And then they go to our website and it can be confirmed that we are a reformed Baptist church.

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We decided not to put the word reformed in our church only because of our context. Like, ultimately,

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I'm not trying to reach people in Illinois or whatever who are trying to get on our website and listen to sermons.

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Our focus is right here in Perryville and Perry County in Central Arkansas. And so we thought through, do the people in this area understand that word reformed?

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And we came to the conclusion and also with the advice of and counsel of other pastors that ultimately it might just be confusing.

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What are you talking about reform? So Providence Baptist Church and our tagline is Christ is

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King. And we thought that that was sufficient in communicating who we are. We're not ashamed of who we are, but we thought that, you know, that was good.

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Anything else about that? I did want to read from the confession. Yeah, go ahead. So chapter five of the 1689 is a beautiful chapter on the providence of God.

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But paragraph seven just says, as the providence of God doth in general reach to all creatures.

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So after a most special manner, it taketh care of his church and disposed of all things to the good thereof.

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So Christ is building his church and Christ is worthy of a healthy church in every area.

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He's worthy of a healthy church in Perryville and in here right here in Central Arkansas. And his providence has been so kind and favorable and good to us.

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All the different people that we have met over this only just one year of really this work.

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I mean, I know I've been here over seven years now, but really it's intensified. Now, a lot of groundwork had to be laid in those first six years, but it's really intensified and just seeing the fruit.

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And this is not because I'm some sort of warrior or reformer. It's all been of God's grace and just his kindness, his timing.

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He acts when he is ready. And so we're just overwhelmed. And so we thought providence would be a good name.

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The other aspect is being simultaneously appreciative of our roots and also moving on from a name like Perryville Second Baptist.

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I mean, you've kind of hit on that already, but I mean, what do you what do you think that that name Perryville Second Baptist conveys?

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Well, it conveys I was actually speaking with a gentleman about our name change and he really wanted me to kind of talk a little bit more.

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OK, so why did you decide to change your name? And I gave him the same reasons that I've talked to you,

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I've discussed with you. And the first thing he said, you know, when I mentioned

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Perryville Second Baptist and he was like, well, it's obvious you were formed from a split. Like he knew nothing about Perryville, knew nothing about our church, nothing.

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He was like. And so when I posed the question to him, why did they name it that in the first place?

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He goes, well, it's obvious you were formed from a split. And so there was already a first Baptist.

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So you just went with Second Baptist. And so it just kind of it does it conveys that to people who don't even know the situation.

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They don't they've never been really associated with Perryville. When you see Perryville Second Baptist, that's what you you think of.

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Yeah. And it doesn't really tell much about us. Yeah. You know, what what what what do they mean?

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You know. And so we decided that we wanted to kind of leave that baggage, but also to identify a little bit better about who we are.

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We want to be up front with people. In fact, you don't have to be a Reformed Baptist to visit our church.

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You don't really even have to technically be a Reformed Baptist to be a member of our church. I mean, as long as you can, we can disagree about certain aspects of Reformed theology, just as long as there's unity and there's charitable discussion.

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But we want to put out on the front like this is who we are and we're not ashamed.

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And we we believe not just not just the doctrines of grace.

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We believe that the doctrines of grace and Reformed theology leads to a robust and healthy and beautiful ecclesiology.

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And what we're missing in our churches today, I think, is that. That's why you have summer movie series and all the outlandish things you have going on today is because our ecclesiology stinks.

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And we're serious here at Providence Baptist Church about ecclesiology.

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The other thing I want to mention, Jacob, is we chose to keep the word Baptist in our name.

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You want to talk about that any? Yeah. And I do want to mention we could have a whole podcast on ecclesiology. But as I was coming to men's

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Bible study this morning, I was thinking about we would probably do this podcast today. That kept coming into my mind about we want to be a church that has a healthy view of what the church is supposed to be.

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And we want to be a true church, a true church, because I've been in one. And it's not the church. I pastored a church that had a,

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I would say, an OK view of the church ecclesiology.

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It was Baptist. There were areas that could be,

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I think, could have been better, could have been more formed a scripture. But then

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I have taught for a short time in a church that had no, you know, at the time didn't know it, but had a really poor view of ecclesiology.

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So it matters. It's huge. Let me say that one time before we get on this word

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Baptist. But you said didn't know it. And I think so that's where I want to be really charitable.

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I think there are a lot of genuine believers who may not feel right about certain things, may not fully understand certain things.

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But they're in a situation and they just don't even understand. Like they just don't know it.

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They love Christ and they do love the church, but they just don't know. I'll give you an example.

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Yesterday, we had a request for a letter from a church and the person that they requested a letter for, they had not been here since I've been pastor here.

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And of course, they had been removed from the role. And it's just like that kind of mentality of, well,

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I'm just going to go around for over seven years. And oh, yeah, my letter's over here.

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Like, we really have poor ecclesiology. So I hijacked that a little bit, but go on. No, I think that's just important.

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Something that we, you know, with this name change, as we've been, I guess you could say, reforming our church to Scripture, is that we want to have a healthy view of things like church membership, things like church discipline.

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And seeing a church that I have in my past, seeing a church that those things were not, they didn't practice biblical church membership or church discipline at all.

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That might be the only thing that would get you ran out of that church is if you started pushing church discipline.

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The only way to get discipline is to bring up discipline. Bring up discipline. And so it's so important to have a healthy view.

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And so we can have a few minutes here to talk about Baptist. Yeah, yeah. So one of the things like we brought early on, like one of the, maybe

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I could have been persuaded out of this, but like I wanted to make sure that Baptist was in our name.

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So you agree. Why do you think you like to have

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Baptist in the name? I think Baptist is important, one, because it conveys that we here at Providence Baptist Church, we believe in believer's baptism.

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That to be a member of our church, you know, biblical church membership is you are a baptized believer.

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Baptized as a believer. As a believer, as instructed in scripture. And so I think that's important to convey that that's who we are, is we are

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Baptist. And we're not ashamed of that ecclesiology. We maintain at this point our affiliation with the

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Southern Baptist Convention and the Arkansas Baptist State Convention. But when we put Baptist in our name, it's not about being

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Southern Baptist per se. It's about our historical roots in Baptist ecclesiology that obviously we equate with biblical ecclesiology.

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But we're not trying to sneak people in the door as though we're not a

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Baptist church, and then it's like, surprise, we are. And we have friends who are pastoring in places and churches, and we respect men like John MacArthur.

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We're churches that don't have the name Baptist. And we're not saying that means you're not faithful.

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By no means do we try to communicate that. We're just saying for us, it was important for us to keep the word

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Baptist in the name because we're trying to communicate this is who we are, this is what we believe about the church, and we're not ashamed of our

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Baptist identity. Yeah, it gives people just a quick snapshot of what we're about.

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Providence Baptist Church, Christ is King. Amen. It gives a snapshot, trying the best we could in as few words as we can to give people an idea of who we are and what we believe.

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Yeah, amen. I think historically Baptist churches have used location as a name more than theology.

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So you think about the Metropolitan Tabernacle or Broken Wharf, those sorts of things.

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But for us, we just didn't. So the one funny thing is we're located on Foosh Avenue.

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Well, that's spelled F -O -U -R -C -H -E. Fooshay. Fooshay, Forch, or whatever.

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It's hard for people to pronounce. I thought about Foosh Avenue Baptist Church, but I just don't think that would be pronounced well.

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Plus, it doesn't really communicate much. So this is where we came. These are matters,

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I think, that are worthy of your consideration and thinking through, and we hope that this is helpful. Now, it's hard for us to speak.

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Maybe we'll have to do another one of these in like a year because there is a lot of growing pains. Changing website, changing logo, changing bulletin, all this kind of stuff.

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But in all honesty, it's like a labor of love. It's kind of frustrating, but it's like, praise

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God that we're doing this. And so it's exciting as well. Amen. And there are things that, like you said, in a year from now, we'll know a lot more about changing the sign.

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Things like that, we're going to have to figure out as we go. And there's not a lot of expense in the changing of the name itself.

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No. But all this other stuff, it starts to add up. So if you think about us, pray for us.

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If there's a way that we could offer counsel or tell you where we've been or positives or negatives along the way, we're all more than happy to help.

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But above all, I think what I really want to communicate in this episode is that God has been so, so good.

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He has done above what we could ask or think. His grace has been sufficient and then some, it feels like.

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And he's used weak, fallible men. We do seek to bring honor and glory to his name, but we're not perfect.

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We fail. But God has been so gracious to us, to Jacob and I. And it's not just us.

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It's the members of the church. This isn't just like a leading from the front, like, come on, guys, everybody, let's do this.

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It's really been a group effort. There's been so many individuals and families. If I begin to name names,

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I would leave someone out. But it's just, it's been really a work of the spirit of God. I really feel as though we've experienced reformation in a beautiful way.

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And all I can say to that is Soledad Gloria. Amen. You got anything to add to that?

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No, you said it very well. Just we're in awe of what God has done here and all glory be to God.

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The last thing we want to do is have a work of man here. And I don't think man could do what man couldn't do.

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I don't think what God has done here. And so we're just in awe of him. Amen. Thank you guys for listening to this episode of the

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World Church Podcast. If you think about us, pray for us. Pray for God's work to continue here.

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Christ is worthy of a healthy church in our area, in Perryville, Perry County, Central Arkansas.

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And he's worthy of a healthy church right where you are as well. You want to say goodbye, Jacob? Yeah, it's been good to be on the

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World Church Podcast. We'll see you guys next week. If you really believe the church is the building, the church is the house, the church is what

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God's doing. This is his work. If we really believe what Ephesians says, we are the hohemos, the masterpiece of God.