Tony

Dear friends of Poplar Springs Baptist Church you have blessed our hearts across this past year.  Janet and I have so enjoyed walking with you during this pastoral interim.  We have been thankful to see the ways God is at work in the church and through your lives as you scatter from 1106 Poplar Springs Church Road each week to share Jesus’ love and presence with our community.  You all have ministered to us, and you have been just what…

“World Changers is a hands-on mission experience, engaging students in meeting the needs of people in communities across North America. Students can put their faith into action by serving others and sharing the gospel.”  Our Poplar Springs Baptist Church youth ministry has partnered with World Changers many times across the years and this week we have forty members of our church serving together on another World Changers project in Little Rock, Arkansas. They left out early this past Saturday morning…

Summertime is a wonderful time for praising God for the gift of the earth upon which we live. Trips to the beach, the mountains, the great outdoors, all give rise to praise as we thank God for the beauty of the earth, our home. The Psalmist leads us to sing from our hearts, “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it; for he founded it on the seas and established it…

This brief sentence is from Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, and is inscribed upon the Robert Aitken statue in front of the National Archives in Washington, D.C., the home of the original document signed on this date in 1776, The Declaration of Independence.  If it is true that the past is prologue to the present and the future, i.e., that which has happened in the past sets us up for future success toward goals envisioned “way back when,” then I think…

Well, we surely have been “Into the Wilderness” this week at Poplar Springs because that has been our theme for Vacation Bible School at which 53+ children and 35+ adults/youth have gathered around God’s Word!  As we have so gathered, we have focused on God’s provision for the people of Israel wandering through the desert post-Exodus. We have watched God care for Elijah in his wilderness of discouragement and doubt. And we looked again at Jesus’ trip into the wilderness…

Working Together! As Paul writes to encourage the church at Corinth, not only does he describe the church as a body with members dependent on, and blessed by, one another, but he also refers to our life in the church with the designation, “workers together.”  It is one word in the text, a noun, a compound word combing “work” and “with” – that’s who we are in the church of Jesus Christ. We “work with” one another to share Jesus’s…

This week our Poplar Springs Youth are down at Camp Caswell, the North Carolina Baptist Assembly on Oak Island. Their focus for the week is the right focus for all of us as we look at the summer that is upon us and our opportunities to represent our Lord wherever we go and in whatever we do.  The Camp Caswell theme this year is based on Ephesians 6:10-18 and is the challenge to “be strong in the Lord and in…

“Go. Share. Repeat,” is the theme for this week’s Camp HoriSon at Poplar Springs Baptist Church! But it is also the theme of this past Sunday’s called church conference at which our congregation overwhelmingly affirmed the recommendation of our pastor search committee that Aaron Hinton should serve as our next Pastor! It is exciting to be part of this journey toward the future of ministry at Poplar Springs.  Janet and I have been richly blessed by this fellowship of believers…

Our prayers for high school graduates have us thinking about all that is “next” for our friends who wear the “green” and will receive their diplomas soon from Crest High School. I was thankful to hear all the plans they are making about the next season of study and preparation that is before them.  Across North Carolina and down to Florida and over to Alabama, our Poplar Springs graduates are already embracing the “next” steps of life’s journey.  We pray…

The Psalmist of old sang out to the Lord, “O SING to the LORD a new song, for he has done marvelous things” (Psalm 98:1). Our weekly gatherings for worship give us the chance to lift our voices together and sing of the Lord’s magnificent work in our lives. As we worship, we are also blessed by changing the one letter in the Psalmist’s lyric so that it reads this way: “O RING to the LORD a new song…”  Yes,…