First Baptist Church of Red Bud

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God has blessed First Baptist Church of Red Bud abundantly and we want to return thanks to Him by blessing you. To do this we need your help. We are hosting a dinner on Thanksgiving Day from 11:00 am 2:00 pm for anyone who needs it. If you are not sure who youre going to eat with yet, or if youre on a fixed income and worried about Thanksgiving dinner details, dont worry anymore. You and your family are welcome to eat with us. There will be plenty of ham, turkey, dressing, and all the trimmings down to the pumpkin pies! Please call the church office at 618-282-3562 by Monday, November 22 and let us know how many folks youre bringing. If you leave a message please state your name and a phone number where we can call you back. The meal will take place in our church fellowship hall at 1010 Locust St. in Red Bud. For those who are unable to do steps we will have some tables set up on the main level. We will also deliver to shut-ins. Walk-ins are also welcome. It wont cost you a thing, and you are more than welcome to come. Dinner always tastes better with a crowd of happy people with thankful hearts.

One way I reinforce my inveterate functional Pelagianism is by allowing remembrance of a past sin to bring me back into despondency and a renewed plea for forgiveness every time it comes to mind. The trouble is that (normally) Ive asked the Lord to forgive me in the wake of the sin, yet when it comes to mind again I find myself crumpling internally into yet another anguished prayer for forgiveness. The enemy loves it. He sees Im not letting a decisive placing of that sin under the blood of Christ settle the issue once and for all. Somehow I allow myself to feel that the more often I ask for forgiveness, and the greater the anguish, the more effectual the blood of Christ on my behalf. Which is itself works-righteousness. Its a denial that the blood of Christ is enough. Its thinking: I need to help out Christs work by a super intense, repeated, pleading for that blood. The very gospel application is a gospel denial. My mind pleads grace while my heart self-atones. Place it under the blood. Once. Then quit asking for forgiveness. Dane Ortlund
. . . and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. Isaiah 53:6

(Runs concurrent with school year)
“And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent.”

First Place is FBC-Red Buds newest ministry. It is designed for children K-6th grade. At First Place, your child will receive solid Biblical instruction in order that they may come to appreciate God and His Word. Our ultimate goal is to bring glory to God by sharing the Gospel of Christ with the children in the hopes that they will come to know Jesus as their Lord and Savior (that He may be first place in their lives). First Place is designed to share the Gospel through the world of sports. We understand that sports are an important part of our culture. At First Place, we want to foster positive sports traits such as teamwork and sportsmanship. In addition, we want to teach children the basic skills of a particular sport. It gives children, boys and girls, an opportunity to participate in a sport of their interest. Regardless of talent level, all children will receive equal time to develop their skills and to play in games. Even if your child has never shown an interest in sports before, we believe that they will enjoy First Place. Everyone plays, everyone is given positive encouragement, and everyone learns how to compete with a Christian attitude. Finally, we wish to reach out to the parents and families of the children participating in First Place in order to equip them to disciple their sons and daughters at home. First Place is a ministry for the entire family. Our initial sport will be basketball and will begin on Wednesday night October 6, 2010 and will meet each week from 6:30-8:00 p.m.

For those interested in the fate of our culture, New York Magazine is an indispensable barometer. This single magazine, perhaps more than any other periodical, offers feature articles that catch the cultural conversation. Granted, that cultural conversation is largely Manhattan-centric and geared to the highly educated and economically secure classes. But, since those are the very people who tend to direct the cultural conversation, what interests them will almost surely soon interest the rest of the nation.
This week, the issue is children and happiness. Not the happiness of children, but the debate over whether having children makes for parental happiness. Looking first to the sociological and psychological data, the picture looks bleak. According to the current scholarly consensus, parents are more likely to be depressed than non-parents, and parents report themselves as less happy as well.
In her article, All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting, writer Jennifer Senior wonders aloud why parents seem to be less happy than non-parents, but simultaneously claim that parenthood is such a great thing. What is the disconnect?

Russell Moore is dean of the School of Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. This column first appeared at www.russellmoore.com.

BILOXI, Miss. (BP)–I’ve left my hometown of Biloxi, Miss., lots of times. But never like this.
Sure, I’ve teared up as I’ve left family and friends for a while, knowing I’d see them again the next time around. And, yes, I cried every day for almost a year in the aftermath of a hurricane that almost wiped my hometown off the map. But I’ve never left like this, wondering if I’ll ever see it again, if my children’s children will ever know what Biloxi was.
As I pass that sign on Highway 90 telling me I’m leaving Biloxi, I can look out behind the water’s horizon and know there’s a Pale Horse there. A massive rupture in the ocean’s floor is gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, with plumes of petroleum great enough to threaten to destroy the sea life there for my lifetime, if not forever. Everything is endangered, from the seafood and tourism industries to the crabs and seagulls on the beach to the churches where I first heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
This is more than a threat to my hometown, and to our neighboring communities. It is a threat to national security greater than most Americans can even contemplate, because so few of them know how dependent they are on the ecosystems of the Gulf of Mexico. This is, as one magazine put it recently, Katrina meets Chernobyl.
I am leaving this morning, but I am leaving changed.
Someone once described Roe vs. Wade as the “Pearl Harbor” of the evangelical pro-life conscience. Pearl Harbor is an apt metaphor. Before that date of infamy, foreign policy isolationism seemed to be a legitimate American option. The “America First” committees and some of the most influential figures in the United States Congress argued that Hitler’s war was none of our concern. We should tend to ourselves, and we could deal with whoever won in Europe and the Pacific when all the dust had settled.
After Pearl Harbor, the shortsightedness, and indeed utopianism, of isolationism was seen for what it was. After Roe, what seemed to be a “Catholic issue” now pierced through the consciences of evangelical Protestants who realized they’d not only been naive; they’d also missed a key aspect of Christian thought and mission.
For too long, we evangelical Christians have maintained an uneasy ecological conscience. I include myself in this indictment.
We’ve had an inadequate view of human sin.
Because we believe in free markets, we’ve acted as though this means we should trust corporations to protect the natural resources and habitats. But a laissez-faire view of government regulation of corporations is akin to the youth minister who lets the teenage girl and boy sleep in the same sleeping bag at church camp because he “believes in young people.”
The Scripture gives us a vision of human sin that means there ought to be limits to every claim to sovereignty, whether from church, state, business or labor. A commitment to the free market doesn’t mean unfettered license any more than a commitment to free speech means hardcore pornography ought to be broadcast in primetime by your local network television affiliate.
Caesar’s sword is there, by God’s authority, to restrain those who would harm others (Romans 13). When government fails or refuses to protect its own people, whether from nuclear attack or from toxic waste spewing into our life-giving waters, the government has failed.
We’ve seen the issue of so-called “environmental protection” as someone else’s issue.
In our era, the abortion issue is the transcendent moral issue of the day (as segregation was in the last generation, and lynching and slavery before that). Too often, however, we’ve been willing not simply to vote for candidates who will protect unborn human life (as we ought to), but to also in the process adopt their worldviews on every other issue.
Moreover, we’ve seen some of the theological and ideological fringes in the environmentalist movement, fringes that enabled us to see them as not “with us,” and, frankly, to enable us to make fun of the entire question as a silly enterprise. But perhaps the void is being filled by leftists and liberals and wannabe liberal evangelicals simply because those who ought to know better are off doing something else. Working with our secular progressive neighbors on, for instance, saving the Gulf no more compromises the evangelical witness than our working with feminists to combat pornography or with Latter-day Saints to protect marriage.
We’ve had an inadequate view of human life and culture.
What is being threatened in the Gulf states isn’t just seafood or tourism or beach views. What’s being threatened is a culture. As social conservatives, we understand … or we ought to understand … that human communities are formed by traditions and by mores, by the bond between the generations. Culture is, as Russell Kirk said, a compact reaching back to the dead and forward to the unborn. Liberalism wants to dissolve those traditions, and make every generation create itself anew; not conservatism.
Every human culture is formed in a tie with the natural environment. In my hometown, that’s the father passing down his shrimping boat to his son or the community gathering for the Blessing of the Fleet at the harbor every year. In a Midwestern town, it might be the apple festival. In a New England town, it might be the traditions of whalers or oystermen. The West is defined by the frontier and the mountains. And so on.
When the natural environment is used up, unsustainable for future generations, cultures die. When Gulfs are dead, when mountaintops are removed, when forests are razed with nothing left in their place, when deer populations disappear, cultures die, too.
And what’s left in the place of these cultures and traditions is an individualism that is defined simply by the appetites for sex, violence, and piling up stuff. That’s not conservative, and it certainly isn’t Christian.
Finally, we’ve compromised our love.
A previous generation of evangelicals had to ask the question, “Is the fetus my neighbor?”
As I’ve seen the people I love, who led me to Christ, literally heaving in tears, I’ve wondered how many other communities have faced death like this, while I ignored even the chance to pray. The protection of the creation isn’t just about seagulls and turtles and dolphins. That would be enough to prompt us to action, since God’s glory is in seagulls and turtles and dolphins (Genesis 6-9; Isaiah 65).
Pollution kills people. Pollution dislocates families. Pollution defiles the icon of God’s Trinitarian joy, the creation of His theater (Psalm 19; Romans 1).
Will people believe us when we speak about the One who brings life and that abundantly, when they see that we don’t care about that which kills and destroys? Will they hear us when we quote John 3:16 to them when, in the face of the loss of their lives, we shrug our shoulders and say, “Who is my neighbor?”
I’m leaving Biloxi today, with tears in my eyes. But I’ll be back. I’ll be back whether the next time I see this place it’s a thriving seacoast community again or whether it’s an oil-drenched crime scene. But I pray I’ll never be the same.

I have a confession to make.. I have been doing a little bragging lately.. about you! I have had several opportunities in past weeks to share our testimony. It has been thrilling to go over again all that God has done for us. I have encouraged other pastors to not put limits on what God is able to do, and I have used you as an example of God doing more than we could ask or think.
It is so sweet to describe our Love Feasts to others, and they can hardly believe it. It is so much fun to describe a committee-less church looking for gospelly opportunities outside the gates. One of my favorite parts is to celebrate our deacons faithfully serving in specific ministries with the help of gifted members of the body. As I describe this to pastors they just scratch their heads and I just grin and think about how kind our God has been. I pray for them that God will do similar works in their fellowships as they submit to Him and lead obediently. We prayed that God would use us to be an encouragement to other churches and He is doing it.
And now a word of warning.. All the Glory for what is happening belongs to Christ alone, we must never presume upon the blessings of God, they are All of Grace. We must however be diligent to continue and renew our commitment to submit to the Spirit and to Submit to those God has given and is giving to lead us.
Paul has a similar word of exhortation in 2 Corinthians 8:24 So give proof before the churches of your love and of our boasting about you to these men.
I love that Paul doesnt apologize for bragging about them, rather he uses his boasting as a motivator for the church. Hey keep living up to what Im saying about you. Everybody loves when others speak well of them. I am so thankful that I have had so much cause to speak well of you. I am so prayerful that God in his mercy and kindness will continue to use us to bring hope and encouragement to other churches to center their attention on the Glory of Christ and His gospel.

What a wonderful day of worship with sweet brothers and sisters. Im so thankful to the Lord that He has given us a body to serve with like you all. Engaging God’s word together is a special privilege and that time of studying and praying is reaping many benefits in lives in our church. Ultimate Sunday nights have been great as well as our kids (big and little) have brought friends and had a great time sharing the gospel in a very visible place. Our gospel classes are going to start soon. We will be discussing outreach opportunities at the love feast. We want everyone to plan on coming and participating in our upcoming Love feast. It is a sweet thing to watch this church in action. We will have a light fellowship meal, followed by a significant time in prayer and seeking God’s face. We will then take communion and discuss reports from our deacons, elders and bldg. team. This is an important time for our church to come together and submit to God together. Its a busy full night that lasts a while, its also one of the most important things we do as we acknowledge Christ as Lord of this church.
I am in awe of what God is doing and rejoicing that we are becoming a downright gospelly fellowship of believers.

I want to post helpful resources on this site that will help us center our affections on Christ and our attention on the Glory of God. Matt Chandler is the pastor of the Village Church in Texas..I have listened to Him preach many times in my own personal renewal time. He is suffering from Cancer and is being careful to thank God for this opportunity to be used for His glory. Take the time to listen through this.

T4G 2010 — Special Session — Matt Chandler from Together for the Gospel (T4G) on Vimeo.

Ben Chapman BPNews cancer church Confession Encouragement facebook fbc FBC Red Bud first baptist church first baptist church of red bud Forgiveness illinois matt chandler media new red bud Repentance t4g together for the gospel twitter welcome

Introducing: First Place! « First Baptist Church of Red Bud: [...] First Place [...]
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Stop by the church between 5:30 - 8:30 AM and pray. Preferably on the half hour. at 5:30 am
Youth Bonfire StudyYouth Bonfire Study

Today is the last day that Christmas Box orders can be made. Please call or order online. at 6:30 am