Fair Oaks, CA

Interactive Teaching, part 3: Challenges of Interactive Teaching

This article was originally posted at Exploring the Faith. We’ve looked at some of the benefits of interactive teaching. So let’s consider some of the challenges of teaching this way: “It takes a lot more time.”This is true. If you’re studying a passage of Scripture, and you have people respond to you and invite them to raise their hands and ask questions,…

Interactive Teaching, part 2: Why Teach Interactively?

This article was originally posted at Exploring the Faith. In the last post, we saw that Scripture doesn’t call pastors to preach, in the familiar sense of delivering sermons, but there is a repeated call for pastors to teach the church. I noted that—contrasted with preaching—teaching has different priorities, a different focus, and different expectations. So we should want to see this kind…

Interactive Teaching, part 1: Preaching or Teaching?

This article was originally posted at Exploring the Faith. The preaching of the Word has traditionally held a preeminent place in most evangelical churches. This is no accident. Young pastors and leaders have been taught how vital sound preaching is for keeping a church faithful and healthy. Quotes from noted leaders reinforce to us the crucial nature of preaching to the life…

New Addition to Our Pastoral Team: Jack Foster

We’re excited to announce that yesterday we publicly appointed a new addition to our pastoral team — Jack Foster. Jack and his wife, Damaris, live in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico with their two grandsons, Ivan and Jetxiel. Jack is especially passionate about diligent and thorough study of the Scriptures, theological reflection, and faithfully applying biblical truth to the church and to our…

Different Views on the Nature of Hell

Updated May 15, 2022 There’s an old saying that the church should be “reformed and always reforming.” This means that we’re “reformed” in the sense of holding to the authority of God’s Word above all else, and we’re “always reforming” by not assuming any doctrine is true simply because it’s traditional for us. Instead, we seek to be good Bereans (Acts 17:11) by searching the Scriptures to see…

Forum Discussion and Church Meeting – June 12

Our Forum study and discussion group now meets bimonthly. Our next meeting is June 12 at 10 am (Pacific). We’ll be discussing whether The Orchard should allow differing views on the nature of hell, or whether we should insist on only the Eternal Conscious Torment view. Since this will also be a church meeting, we encourage all of our church family to…