But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear:
I Peter 3:15
This is my first attempt to capture my thoughts and activities in my spiritual walk. I’m currently involved in some ways at TBC Bible Church in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania. I lead the music for the services, and organize the live stream. I also occasionally teach, and although we are a small church and currently don’t have many teenagers, I’m on standby to teach the youth should they come. There is currently one teen boy who comes occasionally.
If there is a theme over the past number of years that captures my ministry related activities, it might be apologetics. Although I haven’t been practicing apologetics “in the field”, it has become more and more of a desire of mine to be ready with answers. If we are going to fulfill I Peter 3:15, it is important that we prepare. That theme is the basis of this blog post and hopefully more to come.
TBC Streaming Ministry
One of the biggest ways that I currently serve at TBC Bible Church is in the streaming ministry. We had a desire to stream our services for a while, but at the start of the pandemic in early 2020, it became more than just a casual idea.
We currently stream Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night services to YouTube and Twitch, with uploads to Rumble. When Rumble enables live streaming to the public later this year, we will start streaming there too. All of our content is available at the church website: tbcbiblechurch.org.
There are currently 5 people that work in the studio at TBC. Phil and I have put most of the work into the development and running of the stream. Ryan is in college for computer science and does a phenomenal job running the stream when he is in town. Randy runs the sound for most of our Sunday morning services, and Dale and Ron are slowly working their way into the streaming and lighting aspects of the studio respectively.
Building the studio involved audio, video, lighting, software, and programming, and each of these areas have continued improvement that we work toward. As mentioned in my project updates a couple of weeks ago, I’m currently working on writing a program that will handle some of the more time consuming work that we do before and after each stream.
Are you ready?
One of the tools I find most lacking in the majority of Christian circles today is an effective program for apologetics training. We have Bible study, preaching, prayer, singing, fellowship, and the occasional outreach program. Those are all good things, very good things, but what part of the modern church is addressing I Peter 3:15?
There are several kinds of activities that could solve this. Guided curriculum, workbooks, and videos do exist to help you learn how to talk to people and how to handle some of the core concepts around sharing your faith. I’ve experimented a number of times with drills, where a scenario is presented and the participants have to find Bible references that address the scenario. I think there is so much more that needs to be developed around this topic, and my hope is one day to produce some of this content myself.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve started looking at some of the Christian related threads on Reddit to see what I could learn. The AskAChristian subreddit is really a great place to see a wide variety of questions around Christian apologetics. People ask all kinds of random questions about Christianity, and there are a wide variety of answers, some of them very good, and some of them really not so good. I’ve responded to a couple of questions, and the exercise has been great. Pushing myself to explain my faith and the reasons for it is a refreshing experience.
Pete
One day last week, I was out on a photo walk in the area, and a man called to me from his front porch. He saw me walking barefoot with an expensive camera and was really curious what I was up to. I explained that I was a photographer and I was just out taking some pictures. We struck up a conversation and I learned that he’s under house arrest for a DUI, works at an airport, and spent time in Iraq as a Marine.
He mentioned that he didn’t get out and see people much because of his situation, so I asked if they would let him go to church if he wanted to. His response was interesting: he said, “who would want to help me?” I didn’t have the right words to react with on the spot, but there were a couple of things his question made me realize. His view of the church is that it is there to help people. His view of himself is low enough that he doesn’t think anyone would want to help him. Yet there’s this little glimmer in his question, he thinks that maybe he could use some help.
People like Pete are all around Elizabethtown, and frankly, all around the world. If we’re not ready, and if we’re not out in the community talking to people, how are we supposed to be the light and salt of the earth? It’s time we take that step, put on the shodding of the preparation of the gospel of peace, and go reach people. It’s not just the call of missionaries, it’s the call of the Christian.