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March 2018 New Horizons

A New Sprout in Waco

 

Contents

A New Sprout in Waco

Outwardopc.com: A New Tool for Evangelism

Hate Has No Home Here

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A New Sprout in Waco

In the bustling college town of Waco, Texas, there’s a new sprout of God’s kingdom. On any given Sunday morning, you can meander down into the foyer of Valor Academy in south Waco and there find the congregation of Trinity OPC. It’s a small crowd, but once you experience the warm greeting of the faithful members and see the way God has already been working here, it’s easy to imagine how quickly it may grow. The Need for an OP Church in Waco In fall 2015, a group of families gathered in Waco. Many of them had been driving over an hour every Sunday to Pflugerville or the Fort Worth area for worship, in search of a church that faithfully preached from Scripture, encouraged spiritual growth, and reached out to the lost. At this meeting, Mark Sumpter, regional home missionary for the Presbytery of the Southwest, presented to the families the basics of what it means to be a part of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. The group knew they were seriously interested. By early 2016, they presented ... Read more

Outwardopc.com: A New Tool for Evangelism

Evangelizing is a learned skill. That’s what John Shaw discovered back in 2006 when he moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, to plant a church. “My experience was similar to a lot of OP pastors and church planters,” he said. “I had a desire to reach the lost, and a zeal for that work, but a lack of experience.” So, on the ground, he began researching. “I started looking for tools, conferences, audio and video presentations, and examples of pastors who evangelized well.” At the same time, Brad Hertzog was serving as a church planter for the OPC in Queens, New York, and hunting for the same helps. Hertzog and Shaw began exchanging resources and holding conversations about how to evangelize from a Reformed perspective. When Shaw became general secretary of Home Missions in 2013, those conversations continued and, in time, they merged with a daydream of Eric Watkins, yet another church planter, who was working in St. Augustine, Florida. Watkins envisioned some type of online library with one ... Read more

Hate Has No Home Here

On lawns in my neighborhood, quite a number of those “Hate has no home here” signs have appeared over the last twelve months. My immediate reaction is to see them as somewhat superfluous: I live in a Philadelphia suburb which, while hardly affluent, is nonetheless comfortable and safe, with a community that is peaceful, friendly, and well-integrated. As far as I can tell, hate has not been much of a problem during the sixteen years I have lived here. And yet these signs do capture something of the national mood—at least the mood of a certain section of the population—and are emblematic of political divisions which now seem deeper and more intractable than at any time since the late 1960s. Critics might decry the signs as nothing more than “virtue signaling,” but even such a dismissive response raises the fascinating questions of what virtues are being signaled and why. All such actions rest upon values formed over time. They have a history, a genealogy. And understanding those can help us ... Read more

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