This isn’t an easy time for small churches. In today’s culture, small often means inadequate, unsuccessful, non-visionary, and unexciting. By today’s cultural standards those descriptions may be right. Our culture sees bigness and excitement as marks of success. By God’s standards, however, any size church may be successful or unsuccessful and may seem boring or […]
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Author: Rick Shrader
Worship and Culture
In the twenty years that I have been writing Aletheia articles, perhaps nothing has been written about more than worship and culture. Worship has become the description of how we “do church,” and culture has become what we are, not what we should strive to become. Ravi Zacharias wrote, “Culture has become like a dress […]
ABM–20 Years of Leadership
In the December issue I gave some of the history of Aletheia Baptist Ministries but I did not tell it all. From the beginning in 1997, when Dr. Peter Slobodian started the original mission board called Baptist Global Mission, this ministry has been blessed to have been led by godly and qualified men who have […]
What Happened To Christmas?
Now that it is January and Christmas is over until next year, I can risk sounding like Scrooge or maybe even the Grinch. I have to confess that I labored through the Christmas season moaning and groaning at Christmas store commercials, Christmas television movies (the new ones anyway), Christmas network specials, Christmas online ads, Christmas […]
Twenty Years of Aletheia
My parents were school teachers so reading and writing was a given in the Shrader household. Participation was also expected in the often protracted, sometimes volatile, but usually hilarious, dinner discussions. My siblings are far more gifted in these things than I which caused me to have to work at school a lot […]
The Virgin Birth of Christ
There is no more precious doctrine in the Scripture than the virgin birth of Christ. The truth that the God of all creation, the Holy One of all eternity, the One Who loved us and became a man in order to redeem us from our sin, is the greatest thought of the human mind. […]
Pilgrims and Strangers
As believers in a country that is fast becoming ungodly, we are at that point where we are wondering what freedom will actually look like in the near future. It is difficult to follow all the details in the news about how the government works and what the issues are that affect us. What seems […]
Our Bible Is The Word Of God (Part 2)
This is the second part of a two part article. We have a preserved Bible The doctrine of the preservation of Scripture has become controversial within Christianity especially among many conservatives. While it is abundantly true that God has preserved His Word and that God’s people, in hundreds of languages, have the Word of God […]
Our Bible Is The Word Of God (part 1)
This world is no friend of grace and it is no friend of the Book that brings us grace. As the centuries have come and gone it seems that all controversies over the Christian belief in God, in Christ, in salvation, eventually come back to the reliability of our Bible. Surely such will be the […]
The Second Coming of Christ
As a sixteen year old boy, the thing that drew me back into church more than anything else was the study of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Jesus plainly said to His disciples these words before He died, “Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in […]