The 2017 Statement of Belief has received a variety of responses since its birth 5 years ago. For some, the Statement of Belief has been welcomed into the life of the church with open arms. The 12 affirmations contained within the document expresses the doctrinal convictions of many baptist churches. For others, however, this new…
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Last week, the Baptist Union National Leadership Council (NLC) took an significant step in a particular direction. It reported that “the 2017 purported Statement of Faith is not inconsistent with the 1924 Statement of Faith. In future, therefore the NLC will accept the purported 2017 Statement of Faith should a church or other entity adopt…
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On Monday 26 July 2021, Gavin Johnston, Pastor of Randburg Baptist Church and Michael du Toit, the BTC Registrar, dug into the Baptist Union archives. They found some very interesting minutes and a crucial decision that came to the Baptist Union Assembly of 1990. Stranger still, though, the decisions that were made then, were never…
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It has always been a concern to have the 2017 Statement of Belief translated into as many languages as we have languages represented in our churches. One of the original mandates of the Theological Forum back in 2016 was that the final statement should have no ‘heavy’ theological terms in order that it should be…
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It seems that the person of God the Father has eclipsed in our thinking in the 21st century in comparison to the persons of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. But how should we think of God? Is God the Father? And how should we think of the Trinity? Recently, Pastor Ian Stuart and I discussed…
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One of the big issues among South African Baptists in the recent months and indeed over many years has been our stand on Scripture. Recently, however, the inclusion of the phrase “without error” in the 2017 Statement of Belief as an attempt to clarify where we had always stood on Scripture has thrown the cat…
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Monday night, 20 May 2019, was the BNA’s AGM and it was a BIG event because there was a particularly big item on the agenda – are we going to adopt the 2017 Statement of Belief as our own or not? This was the first time the 2017 was coming to any formal gathering of…
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With the recent debate stemming from Andy Stanley’s recent contentious sermon, and the counterpoint questions regarding why do we need a new Baptist Union Statement of Faith, I’m asking the question “Are we seeing the rise of a new anti-theology theology?” This new theology seems to sing out that classic song, “All we need is…
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I cannot be struck by the significance of D.A. Carson’s “Recent Developments in the Doctrine of Scripture” (1986) to both our present evangelical and our Baptist climate. Listen, as only D.A. can verbalise it; “The resurgence of interest in the doctrine of Scripture can be traced to many factors; but four deserve brief mention. The…
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