November 25, 2016 Show with Joshua Guthman on “How a Jewish History Professor From L.A. Was Captivated by the A Cappella Worship of Primitive Baptists”

Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions. Now here's our host, Chris. Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest.

Of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming. This is Chris Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Friday on this 25th day of November 2016, the day after Thanksgiving, and I am hoping that all of you who are listening had a blessed time of not only eating delicious food, but more importantly, fellowshipping with those who love giving thanks to God for all of the blessings that he has bestowed upon you, and I'm sure you would, if you were going to be honest with yourself, that those blessings would be more than you could possibly number or even remember.

So I hope that that was indeed a blessed time for you, and perhaps it's still going on. Perhaps you still have relatives lingering around your house. Maybe you're actually now praying that they leave, but I hope that wherever you are, and whoever your loved ones are, that they arrive safely home when they journey, or when you journey from wherever you may be.

Today, we are having a guest return to this program, but this is actually the very first time he's being interviewed on this program, and that may seem like an oxymoron to you, but the first time we had Dr. Joshua Guthman on our program, we had technical difficulties that demanded that we cut the program short, unfortunately, but now that those technical issues have been rectified, we are, God willing, going to be having a full two-hour interview with Dr. Joshua Guthman.

Now, this interview is a bit out of my wheelhouse, as those of you who listen to Iron Sharpens Iron know. I most often have as my guests people who are in theological agreement with me, or who at least share my Christian faith, but today we have a Jewish guest on Iron Sharpens Iron, because I found his love for a particular type of Christian music quite fascinating, especially since he has been captivated so much by this music, that he has written a book titled Strangers Below Primitive Baptists and American Culture, and today we are discussing how a Jewish history professor from L .A. was captivated by the acapella worship of Primitive Baptists, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you to Iron Sharpens Iron,.

Dr. Joshua Guthman. Hi Chris, thank you so much, and thank you so much for having me back a second time. I feel really optimistic it's going to go perfectly. And by the way, I forgot to ask you before we went on the air, but is it Guthman or Goothman?

No, Guthman, you got it right,.

Guthman, just phonetically. And you are associate professor of history at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. Why don't you tell our listeners something about Berea College? Oh, Berea College.

Is an amazing place. It's a special place. It was founded as an interracial co-educational college in slave-holding-era Kentucky in 1855, and it remains dedicated to that heritage of equality and an ethic of Christian impartial love.

It is our poor, so it's a tuition-free college, so you need to economically qualify. And so our mission here is to serve students who are in need from the greater Appalachia region. So we have about 80 of our health care in the U .S. and then.

10%. Now, what is your particular upbringing, the roots of your family? I know that you're Jewish, but were you raised in an Orthodox Jewish home, or was it a conservative? I was raised home,.

So that's like, if you have three, if you think about Judaism and having sort of three major denominations, I'm fudging things a little bit. There are really more than three. Three main ones, Orthodox being, let's say, the most strict.

Now, how did someone of that background wind up at a.

College, Berea College, that identifies itself as Christian?

Well, there's so many... It's all comers, okay? So there is no... Berea, the college understands itself as very understanding of Christianity, but there is no faith test or anything to be a faculty member here.

The college has a Christian identity, but it's not a Bible college. Mm-hmm. And then I wound up here because my scholarship and my interest, you know, really brought me here. I was working on a permanent evangelicalism.

It was just a great match. So here I am in small-town Kentucky, and I'm loving life. That's good. And I have to remind.

Our listeners that your host, Chris Arnzen, has not fallen away from his strict conservative Calvinistic ideology. I'm not a modern ecumenist or anything like that, but I do find this story fascinating.

And I sometimes do like to have interviews with people who are on the outside of my background, outside of Christianity, who are looking in to get an idea of how they are viewing what they are seeing.

I have done this with representatives of other groups before, and I'm looking forward to this interview. One of the things I wanted to start with right away, before we even go into a discussion of Strangers Below, Primitive Baptists in American Culture, which is the title of your book, and also before we go into a verbal description of this music and how you discovered it and what it has come to mean to you, I wanted to play a little bit of this music first so our audience has an idea of what I'm talking about.

This first song happens to be one of my favorite songs that I have ever heard sung by Primitive Baptists. The Cades Cove Primitive Baptist Church, actually, is the group that is singing this song, and Oh Jesus My Savior is the title of the hymn.

And this is the kind of music that I happen to absolutely love. I fell in love with it the first time I heard it. There are people who absolutely hate it. There are people who are just indifferent about it.

But I just love it. I can't imagine how people can disagree with me on this. I think it's beautiful music. In fact, even our Jewish guest obviously does, which drew him into studying Primitive Baptists in a deeper way.

And also I want to make a disclaimer about Primitive Baptists as well. I happen to be a Calvinist Baptist, theologically Reformed Baptist, but I do have some very serious disagreements theologically with the Primitive Baptists, and I also have to be clear that I am not attempting to broad brush Primitive Baptists either and create a monolith out of them.

There are different theological perspectives even within the Primitive Baptist movement, and so I just want to make sure that I made that clear, that I understand that. Because at times it may sound like I am broad brushing when I describe them, or even when my guest perhaps is describing them.

But here is Elder Walter Evans and his version, or his congregation's version, of Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah. I hope that you enjoy this, and may the Lord bless you with it.

Well, I don't know what you thought of that, but I think that that is absolutely beautiful music.

The Music That First Drew Him to Primitive Baptists

And tell us about when you, Dr. Guthman, when you first heard this music, tell us how that came about, and what was it about the music that drew you to it?

Well, what happened, the whole...but a beautiful access. A graduate student, I was working in Folklife Arc, and I was doing rather boring data entry work. The key perk for somebody like me, whose music was that I could listen to anything in the collection, and the collection is vast, it's enormous, it's one of the...it's really probably the preeminent collection of American folk music.

I would do my data entry, and I'd play, you know, I'd take something off the shelf, an LP, or a cassette, or a cassette on the shelf in the Primitive Baptist, and I didn't know what. I'd never heard anything like it in my life.

It was very much like what we just heard, people singing loudly, very slowly, often in minor keys. They were singing...they didn't really have conventional harmonies. The voices would kind of go in and out of phase.

They were together, but not quite. It sounded like great crashing waves of sound. It sounded mysterious to me. It sounded luminous. It sounded funereal. It reminded me of a kind of singing I'd heard in synagogue growing up listening, and after that, I just wanted to know more.

Who were these people? Why did they sing that way? Tell me more, you know? And so I just kept reading and listening.

Yeah, and I have nicknamed this music Appalachian Gregorian Chant. I don't know if any...

That is absolutely apt, absolutely. Yes, there's Just seems to, you know, come off of the music, and it has quality to it, like Gregorian Chant, even though,.

You know, theologically it's quite different. Yes. In fact, I'm going to play another song right now by the Cades Cove Primitive Baptist Church. It's not the one that I was trying to play in the beginning.

Maybe I'll be able to play that one a little later because that is one of my favorites, if not my favorite song, but this is Oh Tell Me No More. It's subtitled as Sweet Harmony. Oh Tell Me No More by the Cades Cove Primitive Baptist Church.

I hope you enjoy this as well. Oh Tell Me No More. By Cades Cove Primitive Baptist Church,.

Another one of my favorite songs by the Primitive Baptists, and I'm going to read the description of the book that Jonathan Guthman has written, or Guthman, I'm sorry, has written, published by the University of North Carolina Press.

I'm going to read the publisher's description. Before the Bible Belt fastened itself across the South, competing factions of evangelicals fought over their faith's future, and a contrarian sect, self-named the Primitive Baptists, made its stand.

Joshua Guthman here tells the story of how a band of anti-missionary and anti-revivalistic Baptists defended Calvinism, America's oldest Protestant creed, from what they feared were the unbridled forces of evangelical greed and power.

In their harrowing confessions of faith, and in the quavering uncertainty of their singing, Guthman finds the emotional catalyst of the Primitives' early 19th century movement, a searing experience of doubt that motivated believers rather than paralyzed them.

But Primitives' old orthodoxies proved startlingly flexible. After the Civil War, African-American Primitives elevated a renewed Calvinism, coursing with freedom's energies. Tracing the faith into the 20th century, Guthman demonstrates how a Primitive Baptist spirit unmoored from its original theological underpinnings, seeped into the music of renowned Southern artists such as Roscoe Holcomb and Ralph Stanley, whose high, lonesome sound appealed to popular audiences searching for meaning in the drift of post-war American life.

In an account that weaves together religious, emotional, and musical histories, Strangers Below demonstrates the unlikely but enduring influence of Primitive Baptists on American religious and cultural life.

And that is the description of the book that we are discussing, Strangers Below, Primitive Baptists and American Culture. And so, Dr. Guthman, from falling in love with this music, as you initially did, how did that eventually lead to you writing a book about a denomination that identifies itself as Christian, and yet you are.

Self-admittedly a Jewish historian? What happened was, it picked up where I left off, and I wanted to know who was making these sounds and why they were singing that way. And I listened a lot, and then I researched, and what I found out about them...

Are you there, to the early 19th century, and a fight between Baptists, and then really a fight between evangelical culture more widely, and societies, Bible-track societies, theological seminaries, and revivals.

And this was so strange to me, so odd, so unexpected. This is unlike any kind of evangelical church in the South that I'd ever heard of. And I wanted to know more about them, again. So I kept learning more and more, and they just fascinated me.

So the music fascinated me, the early history fascinated me, and on and on it went. And, you know, eventually you find.

Yourself writing a whole book. And by the way, I'm going to give our email address out now, if anybody would like to join us on the air. Our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com.

I also want to give a little summary of what the distinctives would be from what I, as a Reformed Baptist, also a thoroughgoing Five-Point Calvinist, but unlike the Primitive Baptists, the historically Reformed denominations, going even back to John Calvin himself, many of the Presbyterian Dutch Reformed and Reformed Baptists, which were known by different names in centuries past, such as Particular Baptists and so on, they strongly, although believing that God is the author and finisher of our faith as Christians, God is sovereign and in control over all things, but he uses means, and he uses evangelism and the preaching of the gospel as his means by which he regenerates dead sinners, sinners who are spiritually dead, lifeless individuals, whereas the Primitive Baptists do not believe that God uses means to awaken lost souls.

God does this, according to Primitive Baptists, completely apart from evangelism, apart from preaching, and apart from handing out tracts and so on, and they believe that those things comfort the sheep.

They instill truth in the minds and hearts of those who God chooses to give new birth, but they are not instruments that bring about new birth. Would that be a fairly correct summary, according to your understanding, Dr. Guthman?

That is not only evangelical groups. Yeah, within the Reformed, they're sort of out.

Yes, and they would receive the nickname from many Calvinists, hyper-Calvinists, they would call many within the Primitive Baptist movement, and not even exclusively Primitive Baptists, but those of other denominations like the Netherlands Reformed and some others, they have been called hyper-Calvinistic.

But again, I have to revert back to my caveat at the beginning that Primitive Baptists are not a monolith. Some have broken away from that strict idea that God does not use means and have become very evangelistic.

In fact, my friend Dr. James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries, who's a Reformed Baptist, he was invited to speak at a progressive Primitive Baptist church, and they were nearly identical in their theology and so on to Dr. White, if not completely identical.

But we are going to go to a station break now. If you would like to join us, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com, and we ask of you to please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA.

And this is the song I'm going to now that I mentioned in the beginning of the program.

Cades Cove Primitive Baptist Church, Oh Jesus my Savior, and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours is Dr. Jonathan, I'm sorry, Joshua Guthman, and he is associate professor of history at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. We are discussing his book, Strangers Below Primitive Baptists in American Culture.

And we're also discussing the hauntingly beautiful music of the primitive Baptists that I have nicknamed Appalachian Gregorian Chant. I don't know if anybody else has ever called it that. Have you ever heard anybody describe it that way before me?

No, but I love it. It's perfect.

And if you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com. And we do have quite a number of listeners who have written questions for our guest today, and I'm looking forward to getting Dr. Guthman's responses to these questions.

But if you'd like to join us with your own question, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, c-h-r-i-s-a-r-n-z-e-n at gmail .com. And please give us at least your first name, city and state, and country of residence if you live outside of the USA.

A Cappella Worship Among Other Christian Traditions

First, we have Susan in Massapequa Park, Long Island, New York. The Primitive Baptist worship is unadorned and centers around acapella singing. Has this approach to the worship of God been used by other.

Denominations? It comes to mind immediately to me in the America of Christ, and they split the disciples of Christ, or Christians, by the early 20th century. And a key issue animating that split, the use of musical instruments in church during worship.

And folks belonging to, you know, they said they couldn't find any sort of script, whereas Christian churches or disciples of Christ, you know, or they would, because they could not find anything scripted on the use of instruments in church worship, then it was an issue that they could weigh.

So it comes immediately to.

Me. Yeah, that would be from what is known as the Restorationist Movement of the 19th century, led by Alexander Campbell, and some other figures are known to be a part of that movement. And the three branches that you have today are the Church of Christ Acapella, you have the Churches of Christ and Christian Churches, which is a conservative group that uses music, and then you have the Disciples of Christ denomination, which has become, for the most part, a very liberal denomination, and would have very little in common now with the other two groups that are conservative.

But I can tell you that there are a number of reformed denominations that exclusively sing acapella, but they are typically also exclusive psalm singers. Who do not read out of, or do not sing out of a hymnal during a worship service.

They might, during a time of fellowship, an informal gathering of some kind, sing hymns, but during their worship services they exclusively sing psalms, and that would be the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America denomination, also known as the Covenanters.

You have another Reformed Presbyterian denomination that is connected with them that is a global denomination, and you have some other Reformed groups that believe in exclusive psalmody and yet also believe in exclusive acapella singing.

There's also a Reformed Baptist Church in Rochester, New York, that is pastored by John Price, who believes in exclusive acapella singing, and he is a hymn singer as well as a psalm singer. He does not have an exclusive psalm singing congregation, and John Price has written a really fascinating book with compelling argumentation called Old Light on New Worship.

That's Old Light on New Worship, and it's a defensive, exclusive acapella singing in Christian worship, and he is not a primitive Baptist. He is a Reformed Baptist, a Calvinist, but not a primitive Baptist.

I'm sure I'm missing some others, but thank you, Susan, in Mesa Pico Park, Long Island, and you are getting a free copy of the book by our guest today, Dr. Joshua Guthman, and we need your full mailing address to get that out to you, and thank you for contributing your question to the program.

We also have CJ in Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York, who says that, I know that Orthodox Jewish synagogues are exclusively acapella in their worship. Was that a factor in the primitive Baptist worship songs.

That drew you to investigate this group in further depth? Dr. Guthman? Well, I did say earlier, and it's true, that in the music, it just, it reminded me of certain sort of twisting cantorial song leader called a cantor, and there would be congregational singing, too, but the cantor would often take his turn leading, and sometimes he would sing solo, and it's very elaborate singing with lots of twists and turns and slides and ornaments, and often in minor keys, and there was some, there's some kind of connection that I heard in some of the primitive Baptist singing to that kind of music that I'd heard growing up, but that is a connection, you know, I don't think that that's personal to me.

I don't, I think we'd be really stretching things to find a kind of deep historical. It's undeniable. Yeah, you know, and going back to.

Pastor John Price's book that I mentioned, Old Light on New Worship, one of the strongest elements of argumentation in his book is regarding history, and in his book, he actually traces a cappella worship in Christianity all the way back to the synagogue, the Jewish synagogue of the first century, after the destruction of the temple in AD 70, when the Jews stopped using musical instruments because they were tied in with the sacrificial system, and Pastor John Price really opened my eyes about some startling historical facts.

According to his research, the very first Presbyterian church in the United States that used an organ was not until the 19th century, and I was shocked by that. Oh yeah. And historically, all of the Protestant groups were in harmony and using exclusive a cappella music except for the Lutherans.

The Lutherans agreed with the Catholics, which actually the Catholics originally didn't use musical instruments either, where that's why you get the Gregorian chant, but later in history, they used the instruments in the Lutheran church, apparently, never forbid using them, but I just thought that was a fascinating bit of church history, and we, by the way, CJ, you're also getting a free copy of the book, Strangers Below, by our guest, Dr. Joshua Guthman, and if you could, before I go on to any more of the questions from our.

Listeners, how did you come up with that title, Strangers Below? You sort of just enter the hymn and give the hymn a name, and so this hymn, you know, I am a stranger here below, and what I am is hard to know, and that couplet seemed to just sum up so much of what I was reading when I was studying Permanent Baptist, their letters, and that they felt in some ways alien to the world.

They were, or would sense God's grace, and then they would feel that it might have been them, or that they were fooled at first. They had fooled themselves, and that they, there's a constant kind of questioning, a constant internal watching.

That line, those two lines, just seemed to sum them up for me, and that's where I got the title of the book.

And we do have Harrison in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, who writes,. From my own investigation of the Primitive Baptists, they appear to be a very tiny sect, isolated primarily in very rural areas in the Deep South, with some exceptions.

Does your guest know if there is a resurgence of growth among them, or are they dwindling in number to the.

Point of near extinction? Small, but even in parts of the early 19th century, in the early South, in regions of those states, they held their own, and numerically they were fine, and in some places quite strong, and you can read, you know, testimony from early mid -19th century, essentially hold sway in, let's say, Tennessee, and at the cause of missions, very worried.

But ultimately, of course, we know the story, and you know, carry the day, and the Primitive Baptist numbers, at last I checked, oh, maybe around 70 ,000 Primitive Baptists in the U .S., and I don't know, you know, I'm a historian, it's tragic to me.

I wouldn't say they're isolated, though. You know, communities, like anybody else, and so you'll find them wherever, and they might be your mechanic, they could be your attorney, anything like that, so I wouldn't say they're isolated.

And the progressive Primitive Baptists eventually began incorporating musical.

Instruments in their worship services. Absolutely, and there's even a very universal foundation that's, of course, we haven't even seen the different kind of theological trajectory of the war. Well, tell us about that.

So what happens is, you know, white and black Primitive Baptists worshipped in the same churches before the war, because black Primitive Baptists were slaves, so they eventually go there mostly at a group in Alabama and Florida, who eventually form a national Primitive Baptist.

They count themselves, oh, maybe, the numbers for them are hard to pin down, but anywhere from really 600 ,000 to 2 million, so quite large, and in the last part of the 19th century and early 20th century, they're pretty theologically conservative, even though they're innovating on the kind of structural or organizational level, they're having conventions and things like that.

You know, something that you said just struck me as being very ironic, how the Civil War brought about segregation in a previously integrated church when it comes to the Primitive.

Baptists. Yeah, so we sort of, it's a thing to keep in mind, of course, is that, you know, you know, they were strangely integrated, because they were compelled to be there, and they were, you know, they were catechized by white ministers who would tell them things like, you know, it was good that they were slaves, you know, and so when they had a chance, of course, to be free from that, they, I think, quite understandably, just said, you know, enough.

I don't want to worship with these people who had enslaved me. But that process of separation doesn't happen immediately, and it's very fascinating. There are white and black Primitive Baptists, but also, you know, that are worshiping with each other in churches for 10, 15, 20, 30 years.

It's a slow separation. And, you know, I think, like, to imagine that there could be not only serious, deep, painful scarring, okay, but that there might have been also moments of deep fellowship there, too,.

Between black and white Primitive Baptists. And, Harrison, you are also receiving a free copy of the book that we are discussing by Dr. Joshua Guthman, Strangers Below, so please make sure you get us your full mailing address so we can have that shipped out to you.

And that's Strangers Below, Primitive Baptists in American Culture. We have Pastor Jason Wallace. I usually don't give out our listeners full names, but since this is a pastor, Pastor Jason Wallace, I'm sure, isn't going to mind that I give his full name, and he is the pastor of Christ Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Magna, Utah.

And he says, both sides of my family were historically Primitive Baptists. What does Dr. Guthman think of shape note singing for encouraging more congregational.

Participation? Shape note singing absolutely encourages participation, and that's why those shape notes came into being, because it became so simple for people to read notes and to participate. And to the point where now, right, you have so many people sort of participate in shape note singing or sacred harp singing almost as a pastime.

Irrespective, historically speaking, shape note singing was just a way to teach harmonies to the great mass of Christians who couldn't read musical notation. And it worked. Primitives, that kind of movement for a long time, but shape notes slowly but steadily made their way into Primitive Baptist singing, and you can find plenty of Primitive Baptist churches who use shape note singing now.

Well, the thing that's interesting is when we had a questioner earlier, I believe it was Susan in Massapequa Park, New York, who was asking about different denominations using acapella singing. I have heard a lot of different acapella singing amongst Christian denominations, but there is something very unusual to me about Primitive Baptist's style of it.

It seems to be.

Very unique. Am I right on that? There's a couple things I'd say. There's the older style which we heard you play to this lined-out pat. And then there's, yeah, they often use pentatonic scales, and there's a way in which pentatonic scales don't quite as easily lend themselves to conflict and resolution the way that minor and major pentatonic scales do, so like seven-note ones.

And what musicologists will say is that in the pentatonic scale, there's less of the inborn ambiguity in the sound, and that's something that you might be hearing. It's something that I hear, and that might account for at least some of the difference that we hear, that we feel when we listen to different types of Primitive Baptist singing.

We're going to our next station break right now. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com. And please give us at least your first name, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside of the USA.

And by the way, Pastor Jason Wallace, you have won our last copy that the University of North Carolina Press has given us to give away of Strangers Below, Primitive Baptists in American Culture. So Pastor Jason, if you could give us your full mailing address so we can have that shipped out to you.

And by the way, that will be shipped out to you by our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, one of our sponsors, cvbbs .com, cv for Cumberland Valley, bbs for Bible Book Service .com. So look for a package with the label cvbbs .com on it.

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So please do not go away. We have more to say with Dr. Joshua Guthman, and I'm looking forward to our continued conversation. So.

Don't go away. Chris Arnzin here, and I can't wait to head down to Atlanta, Georgia. And here's my.

Friend, Dr. James White, to tell you why. Hi, I'm James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries. I hope you join me at the G3 Conference hosted by Pastor Josh Bice and Praise Mill Baptist Church at the Georgia International Convention Center in Atlanta, January 19th through the 21st in celebration of the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation.

I'll be joined by Paul Washer, Steve Lawson, D .A. Carson, Votie Balcombe, Conrad M. Bayway, Phil Johnson, Rosaria Butterfield, Todd Friel, and a host of other speakers who are dedicated to the pillars of what G3 stands for, gospel, grace, and glory.

For more details, go to g3conference .com. That's g3conference .com. Thanks, James. Make sure.

You greet me at the Iron, Sharp, and Zion exhibit booth while you're there. Paul wrote to the church.

At Galatia, for am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. Hi, I'm Mark Lukens, Pastor of Providence Baptist Church.

We are a Reformed Baptist Church and we hold to the London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689. We are in Norfolk, Massachusetts. We strive to reflect Paul's mindset to be much more concerned with how God views what we say and what we do than how men view these things.

That's not the best recipe for popularity, but since that wasn't the Apostle's priority, it must not be ours either. We believe, by God's grace, that we are called to demonstrate love and compassion to our fellow man, and to be vessels of Christ's mercy to a lost and hurting community around us, and to build up the body of Christ in truth and love.

If you live near Norfolk, Massachusetts, or plan to visit our area, please come and join us for worship and fellowship. You can call us at 508 -528 -5750, that's 508 -528 -5750, or go to our website to email us, listen to past sermons, worship songs, or watch our TV program entitled, Resting in Grace.

You can find us at providencebaptistchurchma .org, that's providencebaptistchurchma .org, or even on sermonaudio .com. Providence Baptist Church is delighted to sponsor Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.