Announcement: I am a Sunday School Teacher Now!!!

Me @ RTS (Mclean, VA) on April 26, 2014 for an open house.

A couple of weeks ago my pastor asked me if I would be willing to teach the high schoolers and middle schoolers at our church in Sunday School. I gladly said I would consider it, and ultimately accepted the offer.

So I am pleased to announce I will be teaching The Westminster Confession of Faith and using "Confessing the Faith: A Reader's Guide to the Westminster Confession of Faith"  (2014) by Chad Van Dixhoorn of Reformed Theological Seminary starting on Sunday, September 19, 2021.

The topic was the pastor's choosing.

My copy I just received last Sunday!

What's interesting is that the year this book was published I visited, but ultimately did not apply to, Reformed Theological Seminary. I can't recall if I met the author. I did, however, meet some of his colleagues mentioned in the book, such as Peter Lee of RTS and Scott Redd.

I will be publishing my weekly Sunday School Notes here at The Goins Report. 

These will be references for my students but also general readers who want to follow along with both the Confession of Faith book by Dixhoorn and the actual Confession of Faith text itself.

While this series will not initially be recorded, it may be recorded in the future, or the next go around.

However, I plan to have a couple of video series (potentially on Youtube or Udemy at no cost, initially; or some free and some at low-cost) potentially on the following topics:

• The Evidence of Christianity and the Evidence of Prophecy
• Loving the Old Testament
• Biblical Theology
• Sermon on the Mount 

P.S. I am a huge, huge fan of Biblical Theology as my growing collection of BT books attests to. But my first introduction wasn't an explicitly BT book per se. It was this one. The introduction and the first chapter are gold. And then some people at my church also introduced me to the now-defunct Northwest Theology Seminary which has a BT Primer on their website. 

Christians responding in love to widespread suffering will grow the Church, history shows

In 165 AD, during the reign of Marcus Aureilus, a devastating epidemic swept through the Roman Empire. Some medical historians suspect that it was the first appearance of small pox in the West. During the 15-year duration of the epidemic, from a quarter to a third of the empire's population died from it, including Marcus Auraleius himself in 180 in Vienna. Nevertheless, Christianity grew during this time due to the loving response of Christians in the midst of widespread suffering.   

Vince Kluth of Trinity Reformed Presbyterian Church quoting Rodney Stark's The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History