New to the Forum

[Steven Rasberry]

Hello,
I am a member of the church in Columbia, TN. I found the site online and thought I would see what you have going on.

I am 38, married to a wonderful Godly woman, a great 9 year old son and a new baby girl due any day now.

I am a teacher on http://forum.preachersfiles.com/index.php site as well as http://steven.preachersfiles.com

I look forward to learning more about all of you.

Steven

[broSonnie]

Hi brother Steven and welcome to the forum!

We are kindly small and "few", but we are here none the less. Actually we thought we might be the only forum on the net devoted solely to the Lord's church, but I see you beat us to the task. Excellent!

Congrats on the expectations of the baby girl.

45, married and one daughter at 17... all members of the church and worshiping with the congregation in Luverne, Alabama.

[John832]

Steven, we welcome you to the forum!

Jason Hilburn

[Steven Rasberry]

Thank you for the welcome. The other forum had about 1500 members but because of various issues they restructured the forum and the old members need to re-sign up to be part of the new one. You can see the archived forum at www.preachersfiles.com

Yes, it seems you are not alone. The preachersfiles is made up of sound teachers, ministers and elders and is under the oversight of the Pelham church of Christ in Pelham, AL.

As it seems in you are trying to do in this site, they are very serious about teaching the Truth.

How did this forum get started?

Is there a website for the congregation that oversees it?

Thank you for your thoughts about our baby. Please keep my wife and baby in your prayers. Thanks to God, things look great and there have been no issues.

Thanks,
Steven

[broSonnie]

This was just an idea that kept running through my mind... where are the "real" Christian forums at? I was a user at a few of the bigger superficial Christian forums, but there is so much non-sense in all of those that it was hardly worth my time to even go there. Those are typically run by people wanting to monetize the site, so they'll allow whatever to go on there. False teaching means absolutely nothing to them... as they encourage it for the most part. If you were to call anyone there a false teacher you would be reprimanded and told that it's not loving to do such.

I got to looking for a good forum that was teaching nothing but the truth straight from the Bible and could not find one. I found lots of good church sites... several places that listed all the congregations of the church ... as well as several brethren sites, but no links to solid Christian forums. All I found allowed some sort of false teaching to go on with no correction. I figured why not start one myself... and did. Brother Jason, our preacher at the Luverne, Alabama church of Christ congregation, did help me come up with the name and several of the forum titles. He and I have pretty much done the most posting, but we do have a few other brothers scattered about in various places who help us out all along.

We really haven't advertised it or pushed it heavily because of time constraints and not wanting to get it flooded with lots of non-sense like the others. After all, we can only answer so much in a certain amount of time. So membership is heavily moderated.

The goal here is to mainly try and get the forum where there is enough content to get it ranked high in the search engines for appropriate search terms. We hope to be able to attract people who are really searching for the truth. Instead of them finding the wrong site, maybe they will happen across us and actually be led to the truth versus some crazy false teachings that are so abundantly present on the Internet. We don't expect to draw a big crowd, but if we can be there for a few all along, we will hopefully have accomplished our mission.

Of course the site can be used for anything worthwhile that our brethren might see a need to use it for. We have recently set up a private area for students at Memphis School of Preaching. If a brother wanted a place to communicate with a non-believer to keep the conversation documented and maybe have others comment... they could use the forum for such. I think the possibilities are endless really.

[Steven Rasberry]

This is exactly what the preachersfiles site is. We have a bad reputation with those as you said that say it is unloving to love someone enough to tell what God has said about something.

When I first found PF, I went in as a regular member and tested them, discussed very controversial issues and tested the waters and spirits of the teachers there. I was rebuked by none of the teachers and was supported. The PF is highly monitored as you said and we have volumes of content, growing daily.

I would like you to get to know brother Eddie Watkins and Kevin Cauley. As they get to know you over time, there may be opportunity to do some things together. We have a lecture. Next year will be our third . Each of our teachers is carefully studied and are proven in various areas of knowledge of the scriptures. If any of us have need of help, we can call on some of the others to assist us in a study.

I saw you became a member of the PF so I look forward to your input on some of our studies. Try us out, study with us, do not hold anything back. It will be a chance to see who we are and get to know you too.

Did you read my lesson about clapping? I posted it in your site.

Are you non-institutional?

God Bless,
Steven

[broSonnie]

Yes... I have joined over at PF... and so far what I have read appears to be solid, but I'm hardly a Bible scholar by any means. I'm still a very young Christian in the very early learning stages.

I also read your study on VBS, clapping, etc... it appears to be very good!

If you mean "autonomous" when you say "non-institutional", then yes.

It would be nice to somehow work together with our sites. I'm not crazy about a PHP board, being they are hard to optimize for search engines and rarely do well in rankings. I noticed the forum has no Google PR at this time... while we do have a PR2 here. I looked at the old one and it is a PR2, which with it's content and age... should be doing much better. I guess that's why I couldn't ever find any church forums on Google. I big into SEO, but have been taking it slow here at BTF so that we don't flood it too early without proper help.

Maybe one day we can look at merging the boards and maybe I can help with setting it up on vBulletin. It may be that we could use this license for the preacherfiles forum.

How old is the new forum and what kind of issues were there in the old one? You can PM me if needed on the last part of that question.

[Steven Rasberry]

It is interesting you could not find us since we do have yahoo and Google bots always in the site and all of our content is being indexed. Our site owner, Eddie Watkins is very ambitious about this and has had good results but you two guys need to be the ones that discuss this stuff since my understanding of it only goes so far.

Non-institutional does not mean autonomous but that is fine, it does not make a difference. Usually, NI means they do not believe in a certain set of beliefs such as they think it is wrong to eat a common meal in the building or support homes that care for orphans.

Kevin Cauley and Eddie Watkins, as I have said are the guys you should introduce yourself to. It would be good if some of you could come to our lecture so you can get to know us better. With the present large movement of many away from soundness, we all need to know each other and communicate closely.

How old are you? How long have you been a Christian? Do you take care of the site for the minister and he does the lessons for the site?

God Bless,
Steven

[John832]

Steven, I know that some call themselves "non-institutional" because of beliefs they hold regarding those subjects you mentioned, but we are not "non-institutional."

You are a welcome addition to the forum.

Jason Hilburn

[Steven Rasberry]

Good. We are not either. Some of the best teaching in the brotherhood comes from them but I do not agree with those of their group that draw lines of fellowship because of a few differences that cannot be proven at all from the scriptures.

Glad to have found you and your group too. How many are in your group offering lessons? Maybe you can begin to go to our PF site and as you see lessons, you can post them and add content to your site. With both sites pumping content into the web, it should be effective.

I know you need to check things more closely before you may begin to do this but I think, based up upon what I know of you guys so far, we are of the same foundation.

Do you deal with the universities, such as Harding, Lipcomb, Pepperdine, Abeline etc?

[John832]

Steven, I guess you could say that we are "Scriptural" -- not binding where God has not bound, and not loosing where God has not loosed. It is sad that many universities have gone off the deep end into liberalism, and we would never condone any of that, nor extend fellowship to anyone outside of God's fellowship.

Jason Hilburn

[broSonnie]

Originally Posted by Steven

How old are you? How long have you been a Christian? Do you take care of the site for the minister and he does the lessons for the site?


Glad to have found you and your group too. How many are in your group offering lessons? Maybe you can begin to go to our PF site and as you see lessons, you can post them and add content to your site. With both sites pumping content into the web, it should be effective.

Do you deal with the universities, such as Harding, Lipcomb, Pepperdine, Abeline etc?

I'm 45 and have only been a Christian for a little over 3 years. I administer this forum and help with our congregational site. We all supply lessons, articles, etc, so to speak. Whoever posted the lesson or article is generally the author of it, unless noted otherwise.

At this point we only have a private section for MSOP. I'm not all that familiar with any others, but if they needed space and are sound schools, we would be happy to oblige.

I'll talk with those guys at PF and see if we can work together in some way.

How did you find us?

[Steven Rasberry]

I looked on Wikipedia and found the link on the links about the church of Christ. I am glad you are interested in populating your site with more content. We can use whatever you have also.

I am with a small but talented group that is looking into publishing hymns, psalms and spiritual songs in a brotherhood publication. We write poetry and have a couple of talented brothers that are accomplished in arranging and music composition. Please let me know if any of you are interested.