Pastor Erik's Sometimes Dangerous Blog
Erik DiVietro
Teaching Pastor,
Bedford Road Baptist Church, 2004
Master of Divinity,
Liberty University, 2016
PhD in Bible Exposition,
Liberty University, 2022
Oddball Contrarian,
Since Birth (according to his parents)
My friends, it is too easy to become dependent on something other than the Word of God for your sufficiency in life and ministry. It is simply too easy to become consumed with some idea or some egocentric goal and forsake the divine authority. Anyone can quote the Bible and convincingly show that it supports
Before we can talk about The Sermon, you need to hear it. Don’t just read it in your head, like an intellectual exercise. This kind of reading is entirely a Western thing, and I’m not sure it is an entirely good thing. Remember that Jesus spoke this, and it burned into the memory of the
Before the Protestant Reformation, the word pulpit was used for the platform on which the altar stood. It comes from the Latin word pulpitum, which means exactly that – a raised platform. The Protestant Reformation brought a much more preaching-centric worship style, and since the speakers would often preach for extensive amounts of time, a
If you aren’t a premillennial, pretribulational, dispensational, separated, King James Only, 7-Day-Creationist, Bible-believing, evangelistic, NRA-card carrying, Republican, fundamentalist Baptist who has Sunday School at 9:30am, morning worship at 11:00am, an evening service at 6:00pm and Wednesday prayer meeting – then you’re going to hell. (And if you don’t sing hymns during those services, you might
Preaching is a very nuanced style of speech. Typically, sermons are structured around a standardized set of themes, components and conclusions. It has always amazed me how people gauge a sermon’s quality based on a sort of oral tradition standard that we pick up by osmosis from years of church-going. Originally, Christian worship had very
(You can read the full biblical account in 2 Kings 21-25) In about the year 609 BCE, a generally very wise king of Judah named Josiah (Heb. Y’oshi-yah) made a very bad decision. Against the advice of his counselors, he led an army against an Egyptian army under the Pharaoh Necho II. At the time,
Have you ever noticed that there is a lot of standing up in Christian church services? That’s because in the Medieval Age, church buildings did not have pews or seats of any kind. The congregants stood throughout the observance. The priest occasionally would kneel at the altar, but he had his back to the congregation
This is the first post in my series “That’s Why We Do That?” Growing up, Sunday lunch was a big deal in my family. We would all head to my grandparents house where my grandmother would prepare an absolutely enormous meal for our close family – the five of us, my Aunt Laurie and her
What a year 2010 was! Church Stuff Our church went through a very successful merger and became Bedford Road Baptist Church. We saw two similar but different bodies come together with very minimal issues compared to some mergers I have read about. It is true that we did lose a couple families, which was unfortunate
