Monthly Archives: April 2021
What to Expect: Topton and the Five Stages of Development of a Church Plant
When I was newly pregnant with my first child, I was overjoyed yet overwhelmed with the unknown. I wanted to understand each stage of pregnancy. The classic “What to Expect When You Are Expecting” had a permanent place on my bedside table. The weekly drawings of each stage of development helped me envision my baby. I found...
137th BFC Conference: A Most Unusual Meeting
There’s no doubt about it: 2020 will be remembered as a very strange year, indeed – in just about every way possible, including BFC Conference. In a normal calendar year, pastors and delegates from all the Bible Fellowship Churches and ministries gather at Pinebrook Bible Conference in late April for three days...
Why the Bible Fellowship Church Today?
Pastor Kirkwood delivered this message to Annual Conference, Oct. 18, 1962, at its meeting in Hatfield, PA. The version here is considerably edited for space. Still it demonstrates our brother’s gift for boldly addressing the issues of his time. You can find the full address on line at bfchistory.org/whybfc.htm. Why print it now, nearly 60 years after...
Easter’s Real Birthday…And Yours
Happy Birthday! ...well, sort of. Being born – is there anything more wonderful, more hopeful, more satisfying to witness? But you might say “Yes, but today is not really my birthday ... my actual birthday is in October, not April”. Others – for a variety of reasons – may not even know...
The Other Pandemic
The 1918 Influenza in the BFC
Have you heard about COVID, the novel coronavirus that has spread to every corner of the world? Of course you have. Given the constant dismal coverage, the daily reminders by way of masks and social distancing, and the eternal queue of Zoom meetings...
“Normal” May Not Be Best
Before we realized that COVID was going to become a way of life, we were all just hoping to make it through a few weeks of shutdown and then get back to normal as quickly as possible. Several months later it began to dawn on us: that was not what was going...
Wait for It
It’s starting to get old, this constant barrage of bad news. It is of course the nature of the news business to look for and magnify bad news. Hard to say when it started or why. Perhaps it started, at least this time around, with the Pandemic and the required lockdown which...