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Ninety Percent Obscurity

Is faithful invisibility the antidote to church decline?

Nobody knows better than New England Baptists how ministry is changing in America. And that shouldn't surprise us. They've been at least a generation ahead of the rest of us for a couple hundred years. They practically invented evangelicalism in the 1740s. That was nearly a century before my home state (Arkansas) was admitted to the union. And while many of us west of the Mississippi fear the creeping influence of secularism, our New Englander brethren minister in the least religious states in America.

Fortunately, they are also a generation ahead of us in recovering the critical ministry value of faithfulness.

Earlier this year, I spent a long weekend with a group of Baptists from Vermont and New Hampshire. Before an evening session, one pastor reflected on the fact that the Bible only records three years of Jesus' life and ministry. If Jesus died at 33, then we only know about ten percent of his life. Or, as this pastor put it, that means Jesus' life and ministry was "ninety percent ...

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