2015 Study Group with Dr. K. Erik Thoennes

June 11-13, 2015
New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary
(NOBTS)
3939 Gentilly Blvd
New Orleans, LA, 70126
800-662-8701
504-282-4455
www.nobts.edu

Click here to download the registration form!

K. Erik Thoennes

Dr. Thoennes is committed to teaching biblical and systematic theology so he and his students love God and people more fully. He strives to make the necessary connections between the study of theology, obedience to Jesus, and fulfilling the Great Commission. He has taught theology and evangelism at the college and seminary levels for several years. He is a frequent quest speaker at churches, conferences, and retreats, in addition to co-pastoring a local church. Dr. Thoennes has received the University award for faculty excellence and Professor of the Year, twice. His research interests include Godly jealousy, the atonement, the exclusivity of Christ, and theology of culture.

Music with Marty Goetz

Marty Goetz has been called a modern day psalmist. His songs are scriptures beautifully set to music, leaving listeners spiritually moved, inspired, and educated. With melodic and fresh acoustical/classic arrangements, Marty Goetz has the ability to lead you into a place of true intimacy with God.

In 1965, when thirteen year-old Marty stood at the bimah of Cleveland’s Temple on the Heights for his Bar-mitzvah and somnly sand the ancient words of the Torah, no one, leas of all Marty, could have envisioned that some twenty years later he would be singing to God, this time as a featured performer at Billy Graham’s Rally in Central Park.

As half of ‘Bert & Marty’, he sand at clubs and dinner theaters around Pittsburgh while studying English at Carnegie Mellon University. There was even a non-singing guest appearance on ‘Mister Rogers’ as Smokey Bear.

After graduation, he and Bert set out for New York City, determined, as Marty remembers, ‘to give it two weeks to become a star or I’d go back to Cleveland and the family furniture business.’ Just one week later, Marty and Bert found themselves performing at hotels in the Catskill Mountains. At the end of the summer they were named ‘Best New Act of 1974’.

Then Bert found Jesus. Horrified at his partner’s born again experience, Marty broke up the act and returned to New York City. He worked steadily as a songwriter and cabaret entertainer until 1978, when he shifted his ambitions from Broadway to Pop and moved to Los Angeles.

Provoked by the increasing numbers of born-agains in his life, he began reading the Bible, ‘looking for loopholes’. A few short weeks later, sitting alone one night on a friend’s balcony, looking down on the lights of Sunset Boulevard, he realized with certainty that ‘the Jesus of the New Testament was the Messiah my people have been longing for’.

Within a year, Marty began performing with Debby Boone and soon began to establish himself as a strong and passionate voice for Messianic believers within the church.

He has ministered before congregations as diverse as Jack Hayford’s Church on the Way, Greg Laurie’s Harvest Christian Fellowship and Harvest Crusades, Coral Gables Presbyterian, Chicago’s Moody Church, David Wilkerson’s Times Square Church. Ministries such as Focus on the Family, Insight For Living, TBN, Promise Keepers, Billy Graham Training Center/The Cove and CBN have invited Marty to come and share his musical gifts and talents.

Marty has been recording music steadily since 1985, and today lives outside of Nashville, Tennessee with his wife Jennifer and their daughter Danyel Misha.

Click here to download the registration form!

Remember the Prisoners

November 12,2014 By Good News By Peter J. Leithart-

“Nobody criticizes us. We have no enemies,” Warden Burl Cain tells me as the servers load our plates with Big Lou’s
brisket, ribs, chicken, grits-n-shrimp casserole, and baked beans. “I have the number for the head of the local ACLU on
my cell phone, and she has my number on hers.”
Warden Cain clearly doesn’t spend much time Googling his name. His many critics accuse him of being dictatorial,
vindictive, and cruel. His prison has been called “Abu Ghraib on the Mississippi,” where it’s said that prisoners are put
in overheated solitary cells because of their political views. Others charge that Cain forces Jesus down prisoners’
gullets, and makes life hell if they don’t convert. I get the impression that Cain isn’t much fazed by the criticism he
does hear. He doesn’t seem the fazable type.
Affably self-confident, stout, with a mane of white hair, the 68-year-old Cain has been warden of the notorious
Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola, since 1995. One of the largest maximum-security prisons in the world,
Angola is today, both warden and inmates boast, the “safest place in the country.” As the New York Times reported in
2013, prison violence has declined dramatically: “In 1990, inmates assaulted staff members 280 times and one another
1,107 times. In 2012, there were 55 assaults on staff and 316 among inmates.”
Touring the prison on a sweltering late-August day with several dozen others, I wondered what made Angola different.
It didn’t seem so different. Prison violence has been declining nationwide for several decades. Other prisons have reentry
programs, vocational training, and church services. Yet everyone said something made Angola unique. What is
that something?
Photo courtesy of Angolalite Prison Magazine.
Angola is unusual in part because of the New Orleans Baptist Seminary, which began offering four-year degrees soon
after Cain took over the prison. Of the two hundred-plus graduates, a number have become prisoner-pastors who
mentor and minister to other inmates. Private donors have given over $1 million to build the churches that dot the
sprawling 18,000-acre site. Hundreds of prisoners attend church every week, where inmates preach and lead worship.
Some graduates have been moved to other prisons in the Louisiana system to serve as mentors and pastors. Angola has
become a missionary-sending prison.
Other initiatives have grown out of the Seminary’s program. Several years ago, Hayward Jones joined other graduates
to establish Malachi Dads, which is overseen by the international children’s ministry, Awana. Taking their cue from
Malachi 4:6, Malachi Dads pledge to provide spiritual leadership for their kids. They hope to affect not only their own
children, but their children’s children, down through generations.
1
Prison guard Richard Peabody has been working at Angola for thirty-seven years. What’s changed since Warden Cain
took over? I ask him. Peabody says that prisoners are offered incentives to better themselves, and when they prove
trustworthy, they take positions of responsibility within the prison-in churches, in vocational training, in prisoner-led
re-entry programs, by writing for the prison magazine, or by initiating programs like Malachi Dads. Inmates described
their involvement in these programs as an effort to redress the crimes they have committed.
Others emphasize Angola’s commitment to honor the prisoners’ humanity. When Cain arrived at Angola, he
overhauled the way dying and dead inmates were treated. He started a hospice program in which prisoners care for
dying prisoners. When prisoners die, their bodies are carried to marked graves in a Victorian hearse, drawn by two
horses and driven by “Bones,” who is dressed in tux and top hat. Respecting inmates as human beings goes beyond
treating them with dignity. Angola’s programs are set up on the assumption that inmates have talents and hopes that can
be cultivated so they can contribute to life within the prison and even to society outside.
Other states have taken note and begun to imitate the Angola model. Texas started a seminary program at Darrington
Prison in 2011, run by the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. The day we toured Angola, a group was
visiting from West Virginia, where Appalachian Bible College is beginning to offer Bible courses to prisoners.
Does it work? Is there evidence that faith-based programs offer what Cain claims: lasting “moral rehabilitation”? In his
study of faith-based crime-prevention and prison reform, Byron Johnson, who directs Baylor’s Institute for Studies of
Religion (ISR), examined the recidivism rates for prisoners in Texas’s InnerChange Freedom Initiative, created by
Prison Fellowship. Inmates who graduated from the program were much less likely to be re-arrested and return to
prison than the matched group of non-graduates. The most successful ex-cons were those who received regular
mentoring after release. We’ll know more about Angola’s program in a few years. In 2012, ISR received a $1.3 million
grant for a five-year study of the effects of the programs at Darrington and Angola.
A no-nonsense Southerner like Cain doesn’t have to wait until the research is in. It’s all so simple. “You have to change
the person,” he told Acton’s Religion & Liberty several years ago. “If we can get them to become moral people, then
we can cure our prison problem.” But he’s a realist. In one of Cain’s recurrent refrains, he adds, “It’s like fish. You
can’t catch them all, so you’ve just got to catch what you can.”

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