History:
Founded in 1787, this mission was destroyed by an earthquake in 1812 and moved four miles away to its present location. The old mission (in Lompoc) is still able to be visited, but the present site is a bit outside the city center.
Patron Saint:
The full name of this mission means, in Spanish, "The Immaculate Conception of the Most Holy Mary." Mary, of course,...
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Francis Schaeffer (1912-1984) has been gone for a quarter of a century now, and responsible evaluation of his impact on Christian culture is just getting underway. Two major biographies have been published recently: Barry Hankins' Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America (Eerdmans, 2009) and Colin Duriez's Francis Schaeffer: An Authentic Life (Crossway, 2008),...
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History:
Fr. Junipero Serra never got to see this mission, as it was the first founded after his death (two years earlier). Serra’s successor, Fr. Fermin Francisco de Lasuén, established Santa Barbara in 1786. (Lasuén began what came to be known as the “Golden Age of the Missions”). This stunning mission is nicknamed “The Queen of the Missions.” It was built t...
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This week in church we prayed Psalm 130 together: "If you, O Lord, kept a record of sin, O Lord, who would stand?" Well, actually, we prayed together through an extended paraphrase of it written by John Owen, the 17th-century Puritan theologian who wrote a great big book on that one little psalm that was important in his conversion.
And in between passages of the Owen-paraph...
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On January 29, 1336, Pope Benedict XII issued a letter which made official pronouncements on a controversy that had been raging for several decades. The letter was Benedictus Deus, and it sorted out the following problem:
When people die, their souls leave their bodies. That's their personal eschatology, their own endings. But the world goes on until Christ returns as jud...
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History:
Intended to be the third mission after San Diego and Carmel, it ended up being founded on 1782 as the ninth in California. In order to keep this mission sustainable, a 7-mile long aqueduct was built from the Ventura River to the mission itself. Captain George Vancouver, coastal explorer of the Pacific Northwest, called the San Buenaventura gardens the finest he ha...
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Islam has succeeded in much of the world partly because it is intellectually interesting, culturally potent, and has spiritual power. One can acknowledge this while also believing Islam to be fundamentally wrong and knowing the darker side of Islamic history.
President Obama was right to reach out to the Islamic world at his inauguration. Given his background, Obama has a un...
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R.A. Torrey was a big deal 80 years ago, and he still is. Though he was already world-famous when he came to us, he was the first academic dean of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, and once wrote that he had given this school "twelve of the best years of his life" (1912-1924). You can read all about Torrey's life and times elsewhere on this website.
We're so fond of Tor...
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History:
This mission was founded in 1777 as a sister mission to San Francisco de Asís (Mission Dolores) in San Francisco. Just as the San Francisco mission was meant to hold the North Bay, the Santa Clara mission served the South Bay. After secularization when the missions changed hands from Spain to Mexico, the mission became a college, which is now the oldest college i...
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"Da quod iubes, et iube quod vis!" prayed Augustine: "Give what you command, and command what you will!"
This line from Book 10 of Augustine's Confessions is a perfect crystallization of Augustine's recognition that he was desperately in need of God's grace: "My whole hope is in thy exceeding great mercy and that alone. Give what you command, and command what you will."
I...
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Q: When will the full change (begun in us by the change in heart) be completed? That is, when shall we be made like our Christ?
A: The moment that one is born again by the power of the Holy Ghost, he is made in a measure like Christ. In his standing before God, he is just like Christ, perfectly accepted, "justified from all things" (Acts 13:38, 39; Rom. 8:1).
Furthermore...
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History:
In 1776, Fr. Junipero Serra founded his seventh mission as a halfway point between San Diego and San Gabriel. San Juan Capistrano was built for the purpose of ministering to the Juaneño Indians who lived in this area. In the early twentieth century, Fr. John O’Sullivan was responsible for restoring this mission to its former glory and making it the spectacular...
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