News Time! RBAP Merges with Broken Wharfe, New Titles, New Podcasts, E-Books, US Shop and More...

In this latest episode, we share some exciting news. We talk about our work with Richard Barcellos and acquisition of RBAP, upcoming book titles, some new podcasting efforts, and our recently released US shop.

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Transcript

Well, hello and welcome to the Broken Wharf Podcast. My name is John Mark and I'm joined by my co host, Johnny Woodrow. Welcome to the war.

How are you today, Johnny? Oh, I'm all right. I'm ticking along. How are you? John mark.

Not too bad, not too bad. We've got Darren with us today, haven't we? Yes, we have. You're right.

Darren, how are you doing? Doing well, thanks, guys. We've got a question for you, Darren. Right, go on.

Last episode, Johnny and myself discussed what we got for Christmas and we realized this was something we hadn't talked about with the boss man. And so we were wondering, Darren, what did you get for Christmas? What did I get for Christmas? I can tell you what I didn't get for Christmas. Does that help the things on your list that nobody bought you? It's a very long one.

Go on, then. What's the top thing on your list that nobody got you for Christmas? I didn't get a raise, so that's one thing. No, just joking, just joking.

What did I get for Christmas? I got a dictionary of Tolkien. That was good. So you can look up what an ORC is.

Yeah. You can look up an ORC you can read about different wait a minute. Is this what you didn't get that you wanted or what you did actually get? No, sorry.

No, I went back to what I got. Yeah. You can look up what's the third age of Middle earth and what was the second age or what's los Lorian? Lots of different that sounds a bit Star Wars.

Well lost lorian I'd have to go and get my dictionary and tell you, but the point is that you can do that you now have I didn't do that. Didn't have before, and so you can go and look that up. Where'd you keep this dictionary? Just on the shelf.

Oh, I just wondered if it sounds like it could be one of those coffee table books or it's a little bit like that in their water closets. No, it's a little sort of yeah. You could put it on the coffee table if you want.

Will we be doing a Broken Wharf edition? I'm going to say no. Okay. But I can see the appeal.

A confessional Baptist edition of a Tolkien dictionary. I think that needs to go to the top of the production list. Have I review seen the I think it was a 1990s sitcoms called Seinfeld set in New York.

You've never seen Seinfeld? No. Apparently I'm big into comedies, but I haven't seen Seinfeld, so that means nobody would take me seriously. Commenting on I know.

It's the gold standard for many things, isn't it? It's quite good. And there's a character in Seinfeld in one episode who ingeniously makes a coffee table book about coffee tables and it has fold out flaps that open up and stand like a coffee table. So you've got your coffee table book on coffee tables.

That is a coffee table all in one. That could be the broken wharf edition. Just it's not about coffee tables, it's about Confessional Baptist theology.

Well, when I put that down as merch ideas, won't we, Darren? I was just going to say, would that go into a coffee house somewhere? Coffee house? Well, that that was a good shoehorn of our topic today, because do what I can today. We're discussing some news, we've got some announcements, we've got some new media to bring you. So I'll kick us off the coffee house sessions.

Maybe some of you haven't listened to any of them yet. Go on to Spotify or Apple podcasts or Google podcasts wherever you get them, and look up coffee house sessions. That's our relatively recent podcast.

I think it began November last year. We've got two episodes up already and we'll be bringing more it's longer form, more of an in depth discussion of issues. We've also got another new podcast coming very soon called Broken Wharf Sounds.

Do one of you guys want to give the audience a small flavor of what Broken Wolf Sounds is going to look like? We'll go on, Darren. Right? Broken wolf Sounds yeah. So I think the best way to explain broken wharf sounds is to say that anything that is readable really on the website plus some other things we wanted to put into audio form to make it more accessible to people who may be on the road or going for a run or whatever so that they could listen, for instance, to the blog rather than reading the blog.

But with Broken Wharf Sounds, there are also going to be multiple other sort of, I suppose you'd call them many episodes or mini series that we're going to be doing as part of Broken Wharf Sounds. So, for instance, the catechism coming. That's one of the ideas, isn't it, for Broken Wharf Sounds? So you could put on like a five minute, ten minute episode where a question from the Baptist catechism is asked and then the answer is given.

You could have it on over breakfast or something like that. You can work your family through the catechism, for instance. That kind of way of help getting us new ways of engaging with some of the core bits of literature from the confessional Baptist stable.

That's it. It will be a platform of audio material and that will begin with the Broken Wharf pamphlet, which is the blog being read out loud by some of our writers. And then, as you say, the catechism series.

That will be for people who maybe want a devotional quick walk through the Baptist catechism. Or maybe they want to teach it to their children. They can stick it on the car when they drive their children to school.

It will be the reading of a question and then the explaining, or maybe the giving of an illustration to bring out the doctrine discussed. And there will be more of these series as we grow and mature in providing this type of content and seeing what people really need. We just want to serve others and hopefully when people listen to it and find it helpful, they can feedback and we can really expand that resource.

We've got some other news too, some big announcements, emphasis on the big. The first of these is we have had some discussions with Richard Barcelos, haven't we, Darren and Arbat? We have, yeah. Take people into that.

Yeah. So for a number of years now, we started Broken Wharf to really meet a need where there was a lack of access to Confessional Baptist materials. And so many of those materials were from the publisher RBAP or Reform Baptist Academic Press.

Our friend Richard Barcelos is really behind RBAP from its inception and through Broken Wharf we've been able to make those books more readily available. Over time, really, it's turned into a closer relationship and eventually we began having discussions with Rich. And we have now acquired reformed Baptist Academic Press as part of Broken Wharf.

So we're going to be bringing and well, we already have, but more obviously we're going to be bringing RBAP under the umbrella of Broken Wharf. Many people, both here and other places as well, have been looking for more access to RBAP books. And so we've been thrilled to be able to kind of take on our Bap and in a sense, relieve Rich from some of the burden and having to run a publisher.

He's a very busy man with teaching and writing and pastoring and husbanding and fathering and all the different responsibilities he already has. So he will continue to work in a reduced role by helping with various different sort of parts of RBAP. But RBAP will also become and this is what's sort of being planned at the moment.

It will become sort of, you might say, the academic imprint of Broken Wharf. So those books which are of more of a more academic nature in depth. You think pastors, you think elders, seminary students, even well informed church members and whoever else Broken Wharf arbap will be the place to go to to find those books, where whereas Broken Wharf will remain the more sort of popular level publishing for for more for lack of better words, accessible material.

That includes the journal Gerbs. Does indeed, yeah. Which will continue.

It's an extraordinary moment. We feel very privileged to be able to take on the project again with Rich still part of it because it's quite an extraordinary stable of books. I remember when I was looking for Confessional Baptist materials to be introduced to the confession, to explore the doctrine of God, for instance, and impossibility to understand the covenantal heritage.

Volume was really important as a collection of papers on historical and then biblical theological perspectives on a Baptist view of covenants and comparing to Presbyterian not just who gets baptized debate, but the Covenantal Theology stuff and it was coming. Discovering who Richard Barcelos was, discovering his writings, discovering Arbap, that was certainly my gateway into understand being able to get hold of some resources. And at the time he was just very helpful in getting some printed in the UK because, of course, he's over in California.

It's very exciting that roster or stable of books that has already been produced, they go very well in the States and we get them more accessible here. You'll be able to get them through Broken Wharf easier in the UK. That's it.

We love RBAP and when we essentially launched as Broken Wharf, there was a sense in which the vast majority of our bookshop was Rbat books anyway, because we just wanted to bring our Bat books over to the UK. And so it's very much a privilege to be able to, in several ways, help Rich and take a lot of that burden off him and be able to incorporate what our Bap are doing into Broken Wharf and carry on that work. Yeah, a funny story on that, actually, just on the aside, is for years now, we've often had to contact the guys in the States and say, look, can you help us get some of these books? We're finding it difficult to find since we've been closely involved with our bag.

It's been interesting to get emails from people in the States saying to us, oh, we can't get these books, but from you guys. And sometimes I jokingly say to them, now, you know what we here in the UK have been feeling like for years, but we don't want to keep that. We currently have a distribution hub now in the US, which is sort of being established at the moment.

I thought that was a funnier side. Should we move on to the third section that we've got, which is publications? We've got a lot of publications coming up and we've got more time than we thought we might have. We thought we might struggle to say much about publications just because of time loops.

We've got a nice amount of time. Darren, do you want to tell us, just list off a few of the publications that we've got coming out as ebooks, or even that we've already launched as ebooks? Because I realized I just missed a pointer on our list. We've got some ebooks which have come out on Amazon Kindle.

Do you want to tell people about those, where they can get them what might be coming? Yeah. So as part of sort of the developments that's been happening with RBAP, we've also then been working with getting books made accessible via ebook, as well as physical books at the moment, the ebooks that are available. We've got a book called Baptism in the Early Church, which had been out of print for a number of years, but we managed to be able to take on as a publisher.

So Baptism in the Early Church is a very fascinating book in that it was written by Presbyterians in South Africa who essentially were classical scholars and essentially argued that baptism believers baptism was something that was from the early days of the church. Now you can imagine that made a lot of their Presbyterian brothers and sisters a bit grumpy with them. But they do the work, they do the hard work.

And it's in that book, they demonstrate in that book their argument in their case. So that's Baptism in the Early Church, very helpful book, used to be published with Evangelical Press, but is now with Broken Morse. The other books that we have available is Under God Over the People by Oliver Alman Smith, where he deals with the confessional perspective of the view of church and state, civil magistrate and the church and the relationship between the two.

But he takes a confessional perspective from that. So that's available now as an ebook. Both of these, all of these are available at the moment through Amazon.com

or Co UK, and some others as well. So depending on what country you're listening from at the moment. And then we also have two other books that are currently available on ebooks, but they're also in the process of being printed at the moment.

Well, one of them being printed, and that is the Confessing the Faith series by Dr. Jim Renahan, friend of ours. And we're very pleased to be able to make this more available over on this side of the pond.

Confessing the Faith is known in the States as Baptist symbolics or vindication of the truth as Volume One or to the Judicial impartial Reader, Volume Two. Over here in the UK. It's known as the Confessing.

The Faith Series volume one and two. And we've decided to publish physically Volume Two first in order because that is an exposition of the 1689 or the Second London Baptist Confession. And that book really will provide for Broken Wharf, a bit of a skeleton from which everything else that we do theologically really builds off of.

So we're really pleased to be able to put out a very nice quality edition of that. This whole series will be done in the same way. But that means that Confessing the Faith Volume One is actually going to come second.

So further down the road, it's an exposition of the First London Baptist Confession. But that will be coming later on. But they're both available as ebooks at the moment on Amazon.com.

And we've got those four ebooks, haven't we? Confessing the Faith, volume one two. Under God over the people and baptism and the early church. Baptism in the Early Church is coming into print soon.

It's not available yet, but in the next couple of months we think we'll have that in print, available on Amazon. Under God over the People is already in print. We published that back in the late summer of last year, confessing the Faith Volume Two is coming to print in a very high quality edition, isn't it? Do you want to tell us something about the quality, Darren? Maybe the fact that it'll be sewn, it will have a lovely ribbon.

Just some of the things regarding the quality of that book bound with a lovely ribbon. Yes, every single one of them. Sounded exceedingly English, didn't it? Did also.

Sorry, before I get to that, let me just mention as well, we also have our latest publication, Preaching as the Primary Means of Grace, available as an ebook. So preaching as a primary means of grace as the primary means of grace by Julius Santiago. That's also available as an ebook.

Yeah. Regarding the Confessing the Faith series, we have a very high standard at Broken Wharf in terms of our publication efforts. Now, whether that's physical publication books, whether that's audio, whatever it is, anything that we put out content wise, we have very high standards in terms of the format, the quality of form that the content takes.

Because we really believe that if these truths are as precious as they really are, we think that the form in which they take and go out ought to match the quality of the content, but without distracting from it. And we could have a whole episode where I talk about this because I can get really into all this. But basically, with the Confessing the Faith series, we wanted to make sure that everything was sort of top notch, really.

So, yes, it's going to be Smith zone, so you don't have to worry about the pages falling out because the glue is melted on the spine. It'll be headbands, there'll be a ribbon on it. Hardback.

Very nice material. The paper is paper that we've managed to source from Europe at certain paper mills that have very high quality ratings. And all the bells and whistles when it comes to publishing these books are going to be produced to that level.

The series, well, Volume Two particularly is going to be a flagship volume for us, isn't it, Jim's? Confessing the Faith, his exposition of the Second London because we're a Confessional Baptist resource producer and provider, having the key commentary which goes into the historical context. Jim's a theological historian, he's spent decades unearthing. Why did they use a particular word in the place that they did? What else was being written at the time? And you can get that information in a really accessible way from that volume.

I've had the privilege of having a PDF copy of it and we've been using it, as I teach, through the Confession of the Church. That's just been the go to textbook, actually. So I've been using it and so I'm quite excited about that.

But you mentioned it's a series, so there is Volume One, which is available by ebook, which goes through the First London Confession and again, the historical context of why they wrote what they did, where the sources came from and those sorts of things. But a series suggests more than two. So what else is coming down the line just to fill out? If people are saying series, that kind of sounds like more than two, what else is in that series? Eventually, I'm not sure I'm allowed to say.

All right, okay. Well, hey, there is there might be more to come. So we're teasing you with the word.

Yeah. No, honestly, honestly, let's leave people on a cliffhanger. There we are.

That's great. It's exciting to see what's coming out there. Yeah.

Well, I think we got a few moments just on production values that just sparked this Nehemiah Cox volume that's coming out, because the front cover I've seen produced by a great artist just looks wonderful. And I know you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but it does help, doesn't it? It does catch your eye on the shelf. But this Nehemiah Cox volume is also coming out at some point.

Yes. Vindicier Veritatis for the vindication of the truth, I'll hand over to you, Dan. You seem keen to take that one on.

Yeah, no. Well, yeah. So this is a work that Jim Renahan, again, has been very involved in.

It's a very important work that is made available. It's our first historical reproduction. So Jim has meticulously, edited, transcribed this book that was put out by Nehemiah Cox.

Now, for those who may not know, nehemiah Cox was very influential, instrumental, if not the architect, of the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith. When the men were sort of getting together to work through this, he was the one that was sort of doing a lot of the legwork amongst the association of Men and Churches. Now, Jim, we've done an episode, Story Time with Doc, if you remember, on one of the coffee house sessions, I believe it was.

No. We did. It's broken.

More podcast. Yeah. So I would say to listeners, maybe go back and listen to that, because he gives a little bit of detail about this work.

He mentions the fact that the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith is an indirect response to an issue that was going on in their day with a man named Thomas Collier. And the churches decided, we want to be clear about what we believe, and it's not what this guy is saying. But they did that indirectly by producing The Confession of Faith.

But there was also a direct response to Collier, and that was Nehemiah Cox's vindicier veritatus. And Jim discusses this in that episode at the Broken Morph podcast. And so this book really is you could say it's a Christology.

It deals with justification, it deals with the end times, the judgment, various different things. But he's more polemic in this book. It was fascinating doing some of the proofreading and editing for it because it was quite lively at times when you're reading it.

But it's really important because then you also one of the very fascinating things about this book is that you can see the interaction between the Second London, the theology of the Second London and the theology of Cox as he's dealing with Collier. And you could see how those two things were sort of mingled together historically. And we're dealing with the same issue, even though they were two different kinds of responses.

And so we're really excited to get this volume published and out there. Like you said, the production value, really thrilled about it. We commissioned an artist to do the COVID for this and she's done a brilliant job, to be honest.

So that's going to be coming out by the end of March. Excellent. We have a lot going on.

It's brilliant to hear about these upcoming publications. I'm just going to mention one more, maybe that can be our final talking point. We have a publication coming out called Christian Basics.

Now. Christian basics was written by John Hall, wasn't it, Darren? It was, yeah. And it's essentially a summary book of all the basic foundational truths of the Christian faith.

It's for young Christians, it's for people who aren't Christians, who want to find out about the faith. It's been used in the past for people who want to come into church membership. It's relatively comprehensive for what you might regard as a basic doctrine booklet.

It has issues surrounding the church which are often missed, issues surrounding the means of grace. And Broken Wharf has been very involved in building that work up, making it more confessional, making it more maybe reformed, if you'd use that language and trying to guide it towards being an even more useful tool for reformed Baptist churches. So we've actually got that book coming out very soon, too.

The broken wharf edition of Christian basics. Is there anything else you want to say about that, Darren? Maybe where it will be available? Yeah, so it will be available on the website. All of these books as well, ebooks as well, you'll be able to access on the website, as well as Amazon, some of them available on Amazon, but the links will be there on the website.

Christian Basics. Yes. What I would say is that John Hall, brother John Hall, who did a really good work on this book, is thoroughly a confessional man.

So I would say that it's not that the book is more reformed, I think, because when this was written, it was written in a particular time. So now what's happened is we've seen that actually, there's been a bit of a change of dynamic in the day that we live, and so there's just been a little bit more of an emphasis put on it that originally wasn't needed, really, at the time. And so there is that confessional aspect that is now more obvious than it was before, and that's really important when it comes to the church.

Because obviously this is useful as like a new Members booklet or a new Christians booklet. And it's a very small book and easy, it's a guide. It's a guide for discussion.

So it's not your typical book. It's not intended to be sort of a book that follows all the grammatical structures that you expect in a book. It's sort of almost a guide for discussion.

Yeah, so we've used it extensively. Here the earlier version. And it walks you through just lots of scripture, doesn't it? So it gives you a few key concepts, introduces you to them, and then sends you off looking at a whole ton of scripture.

So it also doesn't do like a lot of Bible study notes do, that kind of try to get you to look at a Bible text in a kind of English comprehension kind of exercise. It's not that kind of thing. It's what it is.

It's actually a short work of systematic theology for people who don't know that that's what they get. So we've used it here because in fact, we've used it evangelistically. We did one of one thing that we call Story Cafe.

We get folks together. Lots of non Christians who don't know haven't read the Bible, but we used that on one occasion and it went down really well. And what I'm excited about this new edition is we've been saying for folks, okay, we're teaching through the confession as a church if you're new to the church.

So I gave out a copy, an earlier copy just two weeks ago, actually. The Christian Basics is a great introduction to theology and therefore to confessional theology because it's ordered around the key topics that you find in any confession. Actually the Westminster beginning with Scripture, how do we know God? But then you get God and then it moves through to salvation issues and then church and baptism and the Lord Supper.

So you get that spread of things. I think, as I understand, the new edition just turns up the volume on and makes more explicit the connections to a confessional theology. Which is your point, isn't it, Darren? That when it was originally written, that wasn't necessarily something that needed to happen, but now it's actually quite helpful.

So if you're a church that has the 1689 confession, you're one of those churches that actually wants to teach the theology of it because sometimes it ends up on the shelf and it's pulled out when there's a controversy. But you're wanting to actually have the confession articulated and taught through, and you want a basics that gets somebody who's never come across the church at all, even, and they've become a Christian. They just don't know any theology whatsoever.

They know Jesus died for their sins and they've trusted in the Lord and you want to get them started. Christian Basics is a brilliant book and then you can kind of walk them through the bigger topics of the confession when the time's right. Yeah.

And I think it's also worth mentioning that for those in leadership, for instance, who are convinced confessionally but maybe their congregations aren't there yet, it's a good on ramp to the confession of faith. It's a good way of introducing people to what confessional Christianity is without being what might come across as in your face. Unfortunately.

Obviously we know this, there's a type of confessional Christianity which in my opinion is no confessional Christianity at all, but it's the kind of confessional Christianity that it wrongly emphasizes what confessing the faith means over and sometimes against the scriptures, or sometimes you get a kind of confessional Christianity that goes under the name of confessional. But really there are things that in the life of the church or in the theology of a church, things that have been made confessional that aren't really confessional, like this is important or that's important, but that's not actually something that as a church, we confess together. And so that has meant that a lot of people are sometimes a bit allergic to this idea of confessing confessional Christianity or confessing a common faith as a church.

This book, I think, is a helpful way of on ramping people to the right kind of confessional Christianity that the Bible teaches. We confess a common, whole council of God faith together as a people. And this, I think, is a helpful way of introducing that, which I think is a great need today as well.

That's good. Just one final announcement, too. We've had an awful lot in this podcast, but you can, if you want to support the Broken Wharf podcast or the Coffee house sessions, buy Johnny, myself or Darren a cup of coffee.

If you go to buymeacoffee.com Broken Wharf, you can go and make a small donation. Obviously, we don't make any money from this show.

Broken Wharf have always been very keen to be self sustaining. We're not interested in people giving big donations. We want to be able to support ourselves and in that sense just be a service.

But you can buy us a coffee for the podcast. And yeah, if you go on the website there, you can go to brokenwarf.com. Listen, you can see the links there under the Broken Wolf podcast or the Coffeehouse Sessions.

And you can buy one of us or all three of us a coffee, and it might even get a mention of where the money went into which coffees, if it happens to fall on a coffee house session that we drink them. Thank you to all of you tuned in today. You can find us on Brokenwarf.com

sending your questions to info@brokenwarf.com. We've got a few questions that we're hoping to answer in coming episodes, so do keep your eyes peeled for them and send them in. Thanks again and bye for now.

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