Welcome to the Baptist Muse! We're thrilled to have you join us, and we hope you're excited to be a member of one of the most energetic Baptist communities on the web. As we continue to grow our site, we are constantly looking for ways to attract new users and to get our current users more involved. To support that effort, we have launched a campaign where you can earn points and rewards for your involvement in our community.

Starting on April 1st and continuing through the duration of the month April, your participation at the Baptist Muse can earn you points towards cash and prizes! Points are added automatically to your account upon completion of each task. Be sure to check back periodically as we will be adding more and more items to this list.

If you are a winner at the end of the month, be sure to contact us immediately with your mailing address and your choice of preferred gift card! (e.g. Wal-mart, Amazon, Target, etc.)

This competition will end at midnight April 31, 2009. At that time, the users with the most points will be rewarded with the following prizes:

The Baptist Muse is a community website. It is a place where Baptists can come together through the forums, through the site directories and resources, and even through the blog. This site does not belong to me. It belongs to us. You and I and everyone else who wants to stop by and contribute. Together we make a team whose goal is to work together to develop this site and its content and articles into something that pleases God, encourages believers, and challenges the lost to come to Christ. Join our team and write an article for the Baptist Muse. You'll be glad you did.

I proposed the idea of having guest bloggers for the first time quite a while ago. Initially, I had a great response. Several people volunteered to write articles here and every article received was an excellent piece of literature. In fact, we have one author who sends us an article every week all the way from Portugal.  We have another author who writes devotionals for our Daily Bread section at least six days each week.   

I would love to have a whole bunch of people who would be willing to write an article at certain intervals. Maybe you could write once or twice a month. Great! Maybe you could write an article every week...even better! 

After a whole year of waiting, 2008 has come to an end and a new year is upon us. Where did the year go? 

Many of us enjoyed great successes for Christ, and also suffered tremendous personal failures, and even felt terrible heart-aches. We've all experienced our ups and downs this past year but every day is a new day.  And today, or rather yesterday, is a new year.  A new opportunity to serve our amazing, loving God is upon us.  We have a fresh start to push forward and do more than we've ever done before.  Let's reach out and take advantage of this year with everything we've got!

If you haven't already done so, be sure to stop by the 'Daily Bread' section of the site and enjoy the daily devotionals authored by Bro. Dale Hart.  His devotionals are absolutely amazing and unless your ticker is broken, I guarantee they will touch your heart.  

We have a lot of exciting things planned at the Baptist Muse and we can wait to start rolling out some of the new features that we will be releasing in the near future.  You won't want to miss out.  

Bread from the Ancient Landmark Oven will be filled with challenging and heart-warming devotionals, bits of history from our rich Baptist heritage, and  current events and news that relates to Christians.  You won't want to miss a day of this exciting new ministry!

On this coming Saturday Nov. 22, I will be leaving for military training exercises in Fort Polk, LA.  I will be gone for just over three weeks.  During this time, I will have little or no contact with the internet or the outside world!  Even though I am going to be gone, I want to continue the growth of the Baptist Muse especially in terms of the Blog and Forums.

In an effort to continue the production of enjoyable, doctrinally sound articles, I am asking that all authors at the Baptist Muse try to submit an article before the end of this week.  This will allow my wife and I to schedule articles for every even day from now until the time that I return. 

You are walking in the park and you see a mother and father pushing a stroller with their child in it. You go to the store and you see children in the cart. You call a friend or a family member and you can hear their children in the background. No matter where you go in this world kids are everywhere.

I can remember playing house as a young child and dreaming about the time when I would be a mother. As you get older you wonder things like will I be a good parent? Oh no! is my child going to act the way I did as a child? All sorts of things go through a parents mind.

Each week, we work hard to grow and expand the content and design here at the Baptist Muse.  If we're not growing, we're dying so we're just gonna keep growing.  We're excited to keep moving forward in every area of our site.  

I'd like to kick this second issue off by inviting you to take a look at our newest additions to the Baptist Muse. There are many things that are new.  Take a look.

At the top of this page you will notice a banner advertisement.  It is in the shape of a rectangle that measures 468 pixels wide by 60 pixels tall.    To the left of the page in the sidebar, you will see a large square advertisement that measures 250 pixels wide by 250 pixels tall.  Each time you refresh the page you should see a different banner.  I have about ten in the rotation right now and with your help I am hoping to add some more.

If you will write an article for the Blog at the Baptist Muse, I will put a banner for your website in both of those locations for one month.  In other words, if you will write one article per month, you can advertise here for free in our banner rotation forever.  Or if you just want to contribute one article and that's it.  Then you get one free month of advertising.