Episode 52: What's in a Name?

Through the Ruled Church podcast.

This is my beloved son, with whom 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? 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.

Christ the King and the Necessity of the Local Church

The church is not a democracy, it's a monarchy. Christ is king.

You can't be 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 Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible-believing church, and spend your life serving Jesus in a local, visible congregation.

Welcome to the Ruled Church podcast. I'm not here with my good friend, Eddie Ragsdale, rather today with my co-elder here Providence Baptist Church, Pastor Jacob Robinson. 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.

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

Yeah, it's been a good time this summer. I'm a teacher, so during the summer, I've got a lot of time off, so it's been good to be a part of men's Bible study every Thursday morning.

Except this morning, it was hot. We meet at 5 .30. I tried to run, well, I did run before Bible study, but it was humid, hot August in Arkansas.

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

Amen.

Why the Church Changed Its Name

Well, on last week's episode, which was recorded yesterday, so I've gotta keep all my time in my mind, but on last week's episode, you heard me mention Providence Baptist Church, and Eddie and I talked about, Jacob and I are gonna talk about this topic, and that is our church has gone through a name change, so what we wanna do in this episode is we kinda just wanna walk through the why we decided to do a name change, and then we wanna walk through the how.

I'm gonna tell a story. Actually, I'm telling this as we're recording, so I don't even know if Jacob knows this for sure. I think I've shared this with him before, but a couple things I wanna say to pastors.

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

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

One of the pastors, the pastor right before me, had been here for about almost, not quite, but almost five years, and so you take away that, take away five years, and so now they had eight pastors in 15 years, 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.

All that to say, from 1996 to 2016, the church was really averaging probably the average tender of a pastor being, what, two years, not even two years, and then once I made five years, that was 2021, that was the longest any pastor had ever been here.

In August of 2021, which was two years ago now, I caught COVID, and I actually, with some of the leadership here, kind of came into a conflict over that. 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 Sundays with COVID, on that third Sunday, they didn't want me back, and at that point, this is what 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, I actually sent my resume to churches. I actually emailed my resume even to some pastor friends and just said, look, I don't think it's gonna work out here.

I was just so deflated. Had I told you that?

No, first time I'm here.

So that was two years ago. You fast forward two years later, and this is my encouragement to pastors, like go somewhere and stay. There are places that obviously you do have to leave, you can't get out, I understand all that, 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. So Jacob, I'm gonna let you talk a little bit about what our church voted to do this summer in regards to our name.

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

Providence, Church Identity, and the Meaning of the New Name

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

I don't think we had anybody in that business meeting that didn't wanna proceed forward. I think everybody thought

It had been talked about for a while.

Yeah, well, yeah.

Informally.

Informally, yeah. So formally talking about it, like in a business meeting, I thought everybody was like, "'Okay, yeah, that sounds great. "'Let's go forward with this.'". And so we went through the process of sending out a Google form and having people fill out, choose between a few names that had been mentioned or adding their own name.

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

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.

And that name being Providence Baptist Church. And I would certainly caution. I mean, ours kind of went fast, but everything that has happened here in the last year has kind of moved faster. 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.

And there's reasons for that that maybe not getting into in this episode, but maybe one day. But things have moved pretty fast. But there was unity and cohesion around this process of wanting to change the name.

And I would say that the way that we're doing it, so we're actually gonna keep our legal name. Perryville Second Baptist Church is gonna 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.

It's a doing business as name. And I'm not sure how hard that is where you live, but in Arkansas, pretty easy. So we're going through that process. At the time of this recording, we're still going through that process.

Hopefully, by the time this podcast airs, that will have been completed in something in the past. But let's talk about for a minute, Jacob, like what is it about this name Providence? And why change our name from Perryville Second Baptist to Providence Baptist?

So why do you like the name Providence Baptist Church?

Okay, so there's multiple reasons why I like the name Providence. One, just for Providence, is God sovereignly putting his will or his plan into action, is what I would think. That's may not be the best definition of Providence, but just the first one I came up with, it could come up with right here, but so there's a lot to like.

There's really two things that I wanna point out specifically for our church and Providence. 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 just like, wow.

Amen.

The fact that so many of our people have just came from just out of nowhere places. We have a family here, I think Alex has actually been on a podcast or two that from Canada that just emailed the church 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.

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

Something, a church that desired not to be popular, but desired to be biblical. And so we were searching, we searched for several months, had no luck in visiting various churches. Had no luck. Yeah, had no luck.

It was by God's grace and by His will, we didn't find a church, 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, in agreements, I just made up a word, was in agreement with us on our beliefs.

And so I was at a basketball game. I had inquired at Grace, at the college, at the seminary.

Yeah, Grace Bible Theological Seminary.

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

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

You probably don't know where it's at, so I'm not gonna try to explain that to you. But I said, do you know a church near me that, and I explained the things that we were looking for in a church. And he goes, well, how far are you from Perryville?

I said, well, we're about 25 minutes. He's like, okay, well, Quatro Nelson. That was what he said. He said, need to put you in touch with Quatro Nelson, Perryville Second Baptist. And you need to try them out.

You need to go check them out. Well, that night, Quatro texts me. I think that was a Tuesday night. The next Wednesday, we were here and just by God's providence, here we are, many of us. 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. And also as we were searching for a church, we were on the internet, we were on Facebook, we were looking at websites, trying to find a church that was a doctrines of grace church.

And we never thought about Perryville Second Baptist because there was just nothing that stood out in the name to us. Well, that's just gonna be just your normal, probably Southern Baptist church. They're not gonna be doctrines of grace.

It honestly never even came up as a church that we searched, but we feel like the word providence for those who are searching for

A healthy church.

A healthy church.

A reformed Baptist church.

A reformed Baptist church, that when they see the name providence, it's at least gonna pique their interest. And they may say, okay, we're looking for a reformed Baptist church. Let's go check it out.

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

We decided not to put the word reformed in our church only because of our context. Ultimately, I'm not trying to reach people in Illinois or whatever, who are trying to get on our website and listen to sermons.

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

What are you talking about, reform? So Providence Baptist Church, and our tagline is Christ is 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 that was good.

Anything else about that? I did wanna read from the confession.

Yeah, go ahead.

So chapter five of the 1689 is a beautiful chapter on the providence of God. But paragraph seven just says, as the providence of God doth in general reach to all creatures, so after a most special manner, it taketh care of his church and disposeth all of all things to the good thereof.

So Christ is building his church, and Christ is worthy of a healthy church in every area. He's worthy of a healthy church in Perryville and right here in Central Arkansas. And his providence has been so kind and favorable and good to us.

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

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, he acts when he is ready. And so we're just overwhelmed. And so we thought providence would be a good name. The other aspect is being simultaneously appreciative of our roots and also moving on from a name like Perryville Second Baptist.

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

Well, it conveys, so I was actually speaking with a gentleman about our name change and he really wanted me to kind of talk a little bit more. Okay, so why did y 'all decide to change your name? And I gave him the same reasons that I've talked to you, I've discussed with you.

And the first thing he said when I mentioned 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.

He was like, and so when I posed the question to him, well, why did they name it that in the first place? He goes, well, it's obvious you were formed from a split. And so there was already a first Baptist.

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

Yeah, and it doesn't really tell much about us.

Yeah.

You know, what do they mean? 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. We want to be upfront with people. In fact, you don't have to be a reformed Baptist to visit our church.

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

But we want to put out on the front, like this is who we are and we're not ashamed. And we believe, not just the doctrines of grace, we believe that the doctrines of grace and reformed theology leads to a robust and healthy and beautiful ecclesiology.

Amen.

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

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

Yeah, we want to be a true church.

A true church. Because I've been in one and it's not the church, you know, I pastored a church that had a, I would say an okay view of the church, ecclesiology. It wasn't.

It was Baptist.

There were areas. It was Baptist. There were areas that could be, I think, could have been better, could have been more formed a scripture. But then I have, I 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.

So it matters. It's huge.

Let me say that one time before we get on to the podcast. I don't know if you were on this Word Baptist, but you said didn't know it. And I think, so that's where I want to be really charitable. I think there are a lot of genuine believers who may not feel right about certain things, may not fully understand certain things, but they're in a situation and they just don't even, like they just don't know it.

Yeah.

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

And of course they had been removed from the role. And it's just like that kind of mentality of, well, I'm just going to go around for over seven years and oh yeah, my letter's over here. Like we really have poor ecclesiology.

So I hijacked that a little bit, but go on.

No, I think that's just something that we, 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 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.

That might be the only thing that would get you ran out of that church is if you started pushing church discipline. The only way to get discipline is to bring up discipline. And so it's so important to have a healthy view.

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 I could have been persuaded out of this, but like I wanted to make sure that Baptist was in our name. So you agree. What, why do you think you like to have 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, that to be a member of our church, you know, biblical church membership is you are a baptized believer as we are.

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 Baptist.

And we're not ashamed of that ecclesiology. We maintain at this point our affiliation with the Southern Baptist Convention and the Arkansas Baptist State Convention. But when we put Baptist in our name, it's not about being Southern Baptist per se.

It's about our historical roots in Baptist ecclesiology that obviously we equate with biblical ecclesiology. But we're not trying to sneak people in the door as though we're not a 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. We're churches that don't have the name Baptist. We're not saying that means you're not faithful. By no means do we try to communicate that.

We're just saying for us, it was important for us to keep the word 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 Baptist identity.

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

Yeah, amen. I think historically, Baptist churches have used location as a name more than theology. So you think about the Metropolitan Tabernacle or Broken Wharf, those sorts of things. But for us, we just didn't.

So the one funny thing is we're located on Fusch Avenue. Well, that's spelled F-O-U-R-C-H-E.

Forche.

Forche, Forch, or whatever. It's hard for people to pronounce, and I thought about Fusch Avenue Baptist Church, but I just don't think that would be pronounced well. Plus, it doesn't really communicate much.

So this is where we came. These are matters, 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. Maybe we'll have to do another one of these in like a year, because there is a lot of growing pains, you know, changing website, changing logo, changing bulletin, like all this kind of stuff.

But in all honesty, it's like a labor of love. It's kind of frustrating, but it's like, praise God that we're doing this. And so it's exciting as well.

Amen, amen. And there are things that, like you said, in a year from now, we'll know a lot more about, you know, sign, changing the sign.

Oh, yeah.

Things like that that we're gonna have to, we'll figure out as we go.

And there's not a lot of expense in the changing of the name itself.

No.

But all this other stuff, you know, it starts to add up. So if you think about us, pray for us. 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.

But above all, I think what I really wanna communicate in this episode is that God has been so, so good. He has done above what we could ask or think. His grace has been sufficient, and then some, it feels like.

And he's used weak, fallible men. We do seek to bring honor and glory to his name, but we're not perfect. We fail, but God has been so gracious to us, to Jacob and I, and it's not just us. 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. It's really been a group effort. There's been so many individuals and families. If I begin to name names, 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, and all I can say to that is solely Dale Gloria.

Amen.

You got anything to add to that?

No, you said it very well. Just, we're in awe of what God has done here, and all glory be to God. It's, the last thing we wanna do is have a work of man here, and I don't think man could do what man couldn't do.

I don't, 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 Rural Church Podcast. If you think about us, pray for us, pray for God's work to continue here. Christ is worthy of a healthy church in our area, in Perryville, Perry County, Central Arkansas, and he's worthy of a healthy church right where you are as well.

You wanna say goodbye, Jacob?

Yeah, it's been good to be on the Rural Church Podcast.

We'll see you guys next week.

Ecclesiology, the Church as God's Work, and a Final Appeal

If you really believe the church is the building, the church is the house, the church is what God's doing. This is his work. If we really believe what Ephesians says, we are the hoemos, the masterpiece of God.

How you gonna respond?