Smoky Lake Baptist Home Page

Welcome To Our Website

As Senior Pastor and on behalf of the family of the First Baptist Church, I want to thank you for visiting our website. At the First Baptist Church, we believe God calls each of us to be engaged in a passionate pursuit of Jesus Christ. There is no higher calling than to seek the Lord with all your heart, and in so doing, to glorify Him. We welcome you to join us in this pursuit. The fact that Jesus died for our sins, was buried, and then rose from the grave is our fundamental belief. He lives today and stands ready to give abundant and eternal life to all those who repent of sin and place their faith in Him. We invite everyone to receive Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord.

What a joy it is to introduce you to our church! At the First Baptist Church, our doors are wide open to people from all backgrounds, regardless of where they are on their spiritual journey.

One of life’s most beautiful words is ‘family’. At the First Baptist Church, we take seriously the Bible’s teaching that Christians are the family of God and therefore brothers and sisters in Christ. As a “family of faith” we seek to worship and serve God, share the good news of the gospel message, and provide the spiritual environment necessary for the believer’s spiritual growth.

In short, you will find us to be a God centered, caring community of individuals who are excited about having the opportunity to extend to you the same love, hope and joy we have received from the Lord. We extend to you a cordial invitation to join us this coming Lord’s Day as the family meets to draw near to God through prayer, thoughtful contemporary songs, traditional hymns and inspiring relevant messages from God’s Word. After the worship service we linger over refreshments, so please take a moment to get to know us better. God bless you.

Sincerely yours in Christ,
Pastor Keith Axford

Announcements

The sermon from November 10, 2019 is posted. This and previous sermons can be played back from the Website. .

Today – Sunday School classes for ages 3-5, 6-8 and 9-13. The Nursery is available for children aged two and younger.
Today – Sunday School Teachers meeting after Worship Service.
Tuesday, 6:45 p.m. – Women’s Ministry Fellowship at the church. Please come and help plan upcoming events. Children are welcome.
Wednesday, 7:00 p.m. – Midweek Service: Praise and Worship, Bible Study and Prayer. Everyone is welcome.
Thursday, 6:30 p.m. – Alpha classes at the home of Ross and Val Whitelaw. Call 780 656 3532
Saturday, 9:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m. – Holy Spirit Day. The entire church family is invited to join the Alpha participants to learn about the Holy Spirit and deepen our relationship with the Lord. There will be time for praise, prayer and reflection.
Two meals will be provided @ $25.00 total per person (Alpha participants exempted). Please let Val or Ross know if you plan to attend.

Please Also Note

Thank you for silencing your cell phones.
Nursery: Today – Elena Next week – Lise.
Offering envelopes are available at the back of the sanctuary.
November 18-24 Collection Week for Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes. Boxes and literature are available downstairs,
You may also pack online at packabox.samaritanspurse.ca.

Operation Christmas Child

Started 26 years ago
168 million shoeboxes collected
Sent out over 150 countries
Follow-up program The Greatest Journey
Millions of decisions for Christ
Many churches planted or strengthened

Church Services:

Wednesday Evenings - 7:00PM
Sunday Mornings - 11:00AM

Children's Ministry - for ages 2-11 during service time. All children welcome to attend. The Nursery is available for children under two.

Quick Links

Of Note

On August 4th, our church celebrated two events of appreciable significance:

75th Anniversary of the church and 20th Anniversary of Pastor Keith's First Service

Click here to view a short PowerPoint presentation with pictures from 1944 (patience, takes a while to open)
Click here to see a gallery of pictures in the church from August 4th, 2019

News from Cheryl Hoople
Recovery Ministry

Click here to see her latest letter

Click here to donate to Cheryl's ministry

Our Policy on
Sexual Harassment

Click here to watch Sexual Misconduct in our Churches – Learn to Spot It. Learn to Stop It. Download time can be extensive

All leaders and all Sunday School Teachers must watch the above video and acquire a criminal check from the RCMP station. Also, it is advisable to visit the Anglican Diocese of Toronto's Webpage on Sexual Harassment where there is access to 4 short training videos.

Donate

You can give a one-time or a recurring gift to First Baptist Church from this website using the services of CanadaHelps.org or PayPal, just click on your choice of icon directly below:

Canada Helps:

PayPal:

Events

Other Events

Next Sunday – After the service there will be “Soup and a Bun” for lunch downstairs, at the price of $5.00 each. Proceeds will go to our “Eat to Heat” project for the new church.
Tuesday, November 19, 6:30 p.m. – Leadership Team meeting.
December 8 – Sunday School Christmas Program
December 15 – Church Family Christmas Dinner

Regularly Scheduled Worship Times:

Wednesday Evenings at 7:00 PM -

Sunday Morning at 11:00 AM, including Sunday School for the children

Church Family Notices

Watch for postings of importance in this space

Building Project

Click here for latest update

Quote of the week

Valleys are not dead-end streets. The disappointments, frustrations, discouragements and dilemmas of life, although they are valleys, shouldn’t be classified as disasters.
God will meet us in the valley, as long as we don’t decide for ourselves to take up residence there.
And believe or not, sometimes we can view the valley as a gift from God because anything that brings us to Him and to His ways is actually a gift.

from a sermon by Spencer Miller

Recent Discussion Points

Daring to question Darwin

September 03, 2019 - Barbara Kay

MercatorNet

Back when the world was young, I was taught that four visionaries’ theories shaped modernity: Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein.

Of them, only Einstein’s could be subjected to scientific scrutiny. The rest remained hypotheses, resistant to such standard scientific tests as falsifiability, replicability and predictability, but so beautiful in their comprehensiveness that the intelligentsia accepted them for what they were not: settled science.

Time has proven unkind to Freud’s and Marx’s theories, but very kind to Darwinism. Why? Shhh. If you dare to ask, you invite ridicule. Because the minute one expresses doubt about Darwin’s basic premise that all life-forms, including humans, descend from a common ancestor through the simple processes of random, heritable variation and natural selection, one admits the possibility of a counter-theory — Intelligent Design — that is considered anathema to the intelligentsia, since it implies, you know, the G-word.

David Gelernter, a conservative Yale professor of computer science, is suffering extreme ridicule and worse from colleagues for having just published an article in the Claremont Review, “Giving up Darwin.” The title is misleading, because Gelernter does not reject Darwin completely. He says there is no doubt that Darwin “successfully explained the small adjustments by which an organism adapts to local circumstances” through fur density or beak shape or wing style changes.

It’s the big thing Gelernter now believes Darwin got wrong: humans.

There are intractable problems with Darwin’s “beautiful” theory. The most obvious is the “Cambrian explosion” of about a billion years ago wherein, during 70-odd million years, a startling variety of new organisms, and for the first time actual animals, appear in the fossil record. Where were their pre-Cambrian closely related ancestors? Nobody knows, and it isn’t the fault of fossil science, which is sophisticated and objective.

Gelernter ascribes his conversion principally to the 2013 book, Darwin’s Doubt, by geophysicist Stephen Meyer, director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, which he describes as “one of the most important books in a generation.”

I haven’t read that book yet, but I have read, and warmly recommend, the late Tom Wolfe’s riveting 2016 book, The Kingdom of Speech. Here Wolfe disassembles the history of Darwinism in his characteristically madly entertaining fashion, but concentrates on what seems to me Darwinism’s even more puzzling Achilles’ heel, its utter failure to account for, alone amongst the species, humans’ large brains and capacity for both abstract thought and speech.

Speech isn’t merely “a” trait that separates us from primates, it is why humans rule the planet. It is why there are zoos with primates inside and us outside. Speech allows us to make “plans” (something no primate understands). It allows us to record and measure, to express ideas and act on them. Make your own long list. Speech is, in Darwinian lingo, the ultimate “artifact.”

The human brain and the power of speech put humans way beyond the boundaries of Darwin’s own three critical criteria for natural selection, which; (i) may expand an animal’s power only to a point where it has survival advantage — and no further; (ii) cannot produce changes that are “injurious” to the animal; and (iii) cannot produce a “specially developed organ” that is useless to an animal at the time it develops. If a Neanderthal brain three times the size of any primate’s and a unique capacity for speech do not constitute “specially developed organs,” what does?

Incidentally, regarding survival, Wolfe asks, why are human backs so hairless? Primates in the hottest countries have fur to ensure the rain slides off. Why are our alleged predecessors waterproof while we needed animal hides (which took brainpower to imagine and fashion)?

Prehistoric man did not need speech to survive. Darwin knew this himself, of course, and he struggled with it, but came up empty (just as he came up empty for that first handful of “cells” that set the evolutionary snowball rolling). To this day, no Darwinist can explain humans’ power of speech within the limitations imposed by the theory of evolution. As Max Muller, the most famous linguist of his era, said in 1861, two years after publication of The Origin of Species, “Language is our Rubicon and no brute will dare to cross it.” By 1872, the Philological Society of London had abandoned the origin of language as a subject for discussion or further papers. In 1866 the Linguistic Society of Paris banned the subject for the same reason (Darwinism never caught hold in France altogether, Wolfe says).

In 2016, eight prominent academics, including the world’s most famous linguist, Noam Chomsky, published an article admitting that 150 years after the Theory of Evolution was birthed, and following an “explosion of research” in the modern discipline of linguistics, they cannot explain where language comes from.

Intellectuals may stamp their feet and clutch their pearls all they want, but the debate, for so long taboo, is on again.

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