Our Calvinist-Particular Baptist service meets in the historical manner (either as a “house church” or as a “Sermon Under the Stars”) at “six bells” (7:00 p.m.) on Saturday;¹ our non-denominational service meets at “six bells”² (11:00 a.m.) on Sunday in Grove City in the more contemporary venue of a “church building.” All are invited to attend one or both.
It is our practice to celebrate the Lord’s Supper every time that the Word of God is preached; we celebrate in a closed communion in our (Saturday evening) Calvinist-Particular Baptist service and in an open communion in our (Sunday morning) non-denominational service.³
Service is followed by food and fellowship on our twelve Particular Days of Christian Fellowship and on our three Particular Days of Civil Religion (see below).
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Sermons delivered at the Saturday evening service are given in the Puritan tradition of the house-church conventicle.² These sermons are not the typical 8-minute “church fluff.” Of considerable length and measured by the turn of the hourglass,³ lasting between 90 minutes and 2 hours, they are given to instruct and give application to the Word of God. Often foreboding, they are, above all, meant to effect a change in outward behavior by bringing the sinner to conviction and repentance.
Sermons given at the Sunday morning service are of a length more appropriate to a non-denominational service.
Additional lessons are broadcast on WTOH radio (_____) each weekday, Monday through Friday, from 8:30-9:00 a.m.
All lessons, given in whatever manner and venue, will be posted on this website, limking to downloadable audio and pdf print files (with footnotes and supplementary material).
Please visit our Sermon Archive for the complete list of sermons delivered.
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Looking ahead, in order to provide a firm foundation upon which to build our study of the Word of God, the plan is to work through five series before beginning of the new year: “Setting Sail under the Banner of Sola scriptura,” “Keel and Compass, Thou Art Our Guide,” “What’s Going On in What’s Going On?” “Against the History and Heresy of Rome, Which Is the Antichrist,” “Faith Lost in the Wilderness,” and “The Four-Panel Christmas Card: A Coming of Subterfuge, Myth, Invention, and Absurdity.” In order, these will address the (1) separation of the Anglicans from the Catholic Church, the separation of the Non-Separatist Anglicans from the Separatist Anglicans, how the Separatists were influenced by the Genevan Reformation, and how “the Puritans” came to the New World; (2) the organization of Word of God; (3) the evolution and translation of the Word of God; (4) efforts, justifications, and errors offered by Rome to keep the Word of God from falling into the hands of the masses; and (5) facts and fictions in our Christmas story.
Beginning in the new year or as soon as possible thereafter, the Elders have asked Dr. Sovík to preach “lectio continua” (verse by verse) through the first eleven chapters of Genesis, “The Book of Beginnings”—crucial to our understanding of everything that follows.
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¹ We Puritan-Calvinists at First Puritan are Sabbatarians, observing the entire Sabbath—from sundown on Saturday until sundown on Sunday.
² In the time of the English Puritan, a “conventicle” was an unlawful and secret gathering of the larger Assembly. It often met in the form of a “house church,” thought to be subversive to “order in the realm” and prohibited by an English government that sought to force everyone to worship either as a Catholic or as an Anglican (depending on which group held the throne). Emphasizing prayer and the reading and unfolding of Scripture with its application to the lives of those present, it was the “small-enough” vehicle by which the Puritan matured in Christian faith and fellowship. In short, a “conventicle” is a church at the polar end of the impersonal mega-church or even the typical brick-and-mortar church.
³ For no good or particular theological reason, our Elders used “six bells” to fix the times of Sabbath worship and other events at First Puritan. For more on the ship’s bell, see the “Ask! Archive.”
³ “It is recorded of Rev. Urian Oakes that often the hour-glass was turned four times during one of his sermons [preaching into a 5th hour]. The warning legend, “Be Short,” which Cotton Mather inscribed over his study door was not written over his pulpit; for he wrote in his diary that at his own ordination he prayed for an hour and a quarter, and preached for an hour and three quarters. . . . Nathaniel Ward deplored at that time, “Wee have a strong weakness in New England that when wee are speaking, wee know not how to conclude: we make many ends before we make an end.’ . . . . The members of the early churches did not dislike these long preachings and prophesyings; they would have regarded a short sermon as irreligious, and lacking in reverence, and besides, would have felt that they had not received in it their full due, their full money’s worth. . . . Indeed, when Rev. Samuel Torrey, of Weymouth, Massachusetts, prayed for two hours without stopping, upon a public Fast Day in 1696, it is recorded that his audience only wished that the prayer had been much longer.”
Taken from Alice Morse Earle (1851-1911), “The Length of the Service” in The Sabbath in Puritan New England (1891). Earle was a New England antiquarian and social historian of the Puritans who authored an extensive series of books on such wide-ranging topics as China Collecting in America (1892), Home Life in Colonial Days (1893), Curious Punishments of Bygone Days (1896), Stagecoach and Tavern Days (1900), and Old Time Gardens (1901): her works provide a window to the former era by recording small pieces of “unessential” information that would otherwise be lost to history.
³ Despite slight differences in the understand of the term, in an open communion, everyone is welcome to share in the Lord’s Supper; in a close communion, those invited to participate are generally members of denominations and churches holding similar beliefs as the host church; in a closed communion, participation is generally limited to members in good standing of that particular denomination or assembly.
Despite ecumenical ravings to the contrary, one of the earliest traditions of the Christian Church, as early as the first century, was that the worship service was divided into two: the first, with everyone welcomed; the second, restricted to believers. Just before the Assembly would recite the creed of faith, the priest would—and still does in some of the denominations—call out “The doors, the doors!” as a signal for the catechumens—those converted to Christianity but still under instruction and not yet committed by Baptism—to depart into another room for further instruction while the professing Christians remained for the Creed and the mystery of the Lord’s Supper. Then, unlike today, unbelievers and the unknowns and public sinners were simply not permitted the privilege of simply strutting down the aisle to participate in the Lord’s Supper.
³ Our “Fellowship Calendar” follows the Creation of the world until its coming rebirth: Michaelmas (“The Day of Good and Evil,” 29 September), Creation Eve (“The Day of Dirt and Apple,” 22 October), Reformation Day (31 October), Mayflower Day (11 September), Advent Sunday (the 4th Sunday before Christmas Day), Shepherds’ Eve (with the burning of our transgressors, 24 December), Three Kings’ Day (with the chalking of doors, 6 January), the Day of Ashes (40 days before Resurrection Sunday), Wurstessen (to remember the “Affair of the Sausages,” 9 March), Maundy Thursday and Resurrection Eve (calendar dependent) and, finally, the midsummer Bonfires’ Eve (on approx. the summer solstice and longest day of the year, and on the half-year before Christmas, on approx. the winter solstice and shortest day of the year, with lake baptisms according to ancient tradition, 23 June). We also remember (with food and fellowship) three Particular Days of Civil Religion: Commencement Sunday, Training Sunday, and Election Sunday—the Sundays before the New Year, Independence Day, and the day of general elections.
³ “Lunch” was unknown to the New England Puritans. “Dinner” was the day’s more formal, main meal; “supper” was the lighter meal, more frugal and often consisting of leftovers and eaten in the evening. The distinction is one of quality and quantity rather than of clock hour; it wasn’t until the 1950s, after the industrial revolution and its ramifications, that the large “dinner” meal moved to the “supper” time.
³ Common in Medieval Europe, a triptych is a three-panel painted or carved artwork that tells a story; a sermonic (or literary) triptych is a series of three sermons (or stories) related to the same subject.
Our contemporary method of identifying the floor levels of a commercial or residential building is related to the triptych. In a terrible and imprecise explanation: In Medieval castles and other buildings, the various levels were used to “store” stuff, hence their designation as “storeys.” Wooden shutters, closed during inclement weather, preceded the use of glass windows; these shutters were often painted to depict a particular scene from a (Biblical) tale, with the consecutive windows on that floor—or “storey”—illustrating that tale from start to finish. A “three-story” building would have the ground floor with two “storeys” above, resulting in three levels of windows with two painted “stories.”
(Let is assume that the ground-level windows were not painted as “stories” for the same reason that they might not be painted today: “graffiti artists.”)
“Two” stories for a “three”-story building? Even today, what Americans call the first floor is, in Europe, “floor zero”; the first “storey” (originally the upper floor, for storage), in a European office building or hotel, is what Americans would call the “second” story. If in Europe and directed to the “fourth” floor, go to the “fifth” floor . . . the ground floor plus four “storeys.”