A Voice From the Wilderness
Lone Trumpet is a small, independent publication written for ordinary Christians who still believe the gospel is true and that it has something to say to every corner of life — the church, the home, and the public square.
The voice here is one of invitation, not condemnation. The Christian faith is not a club for the worthy; it is a hospital for the unworthy, of whom the writer counts himself first. But the gospel is not improved by being softened. The cross is hard, and grace is free, and both of those things are true at the same time.
Articles that read today’s news through the light of Scripture — the events, the controversies, the moral questions the moment is asking. A Christian response, written plainly, without slogans, and without anger. Slow to speak, kind in tone, and uncompromising on the matters Christ Himself was uncompromising on.
Free, stand-alone software for prayer, study, and the small practical work of church life. No subscriptions, no accounts, no advertising. They are simply gifts.
Lone Trumpet is the work of one man: Pastor Lyvers, ordained in 1995, holder of a Doctor of Divinity, with credentials in pastoral ministry and Christian counseling. There is no staff, no editorial board, no public-relations desk. There is one pastor at one keyboard, trying to say one thing plainly.
The byline on the articles is “A Voice From the Wilderness” — the phrase John the Baptist used of himself, quoting Isaiah 40:3. The name “Lone Trumpet” is the same idea: a single horn, sounded clearly, in a noisy age. Pastor Lyvers founded the publication to offer one steady voice from the wilderness — for readers who still believe the gospel is true, has something to say to the public square, and is best said plainly.
For a long time I was reluctant to wear the title Pastor. Part of it was a verse I could never quite get out from under. When Jesus came back to the place He grew up, the people who had watched Him grow stumbled over Him, and He said, “A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house” (Mark 6:4). I am no prophet, and I would never set myself beside the Lord. But I understood the principle in my own small way. I am not embarrassed by my friends or my family; I love them. Yet they know my sins. They remember the jokes we told as boys that would not age well, the foolishness, the years before any of this. Knowing that they know, I will admit, gave me pause about letting anyone call me Pastor.
There was a smaller stumbling block, too. The classes that started my journey were taken online, and there used to be a real stigma about that, however ordinary it has become since. So I carried both things quietly: friends who knew too much, and a road that did not look like the usual one.
But what am I here, in this space, speaking to whoever will listen? The question kept circling back, until at some point it stopped being a question. Here I am. I am doing it. Not because I want a title, or standing, or anything at all beyond the one thing worth wanting, which is to help other people get to heaven.
I think often of Mother Antonia Brenner, born Mary Clarke. She was a twice-divorced mother from Beverly Hills, not the woman anyone would have drawn up for the work, and at first she was not accepted into any existing religious order. So she simply went and did the work. She began a prison ministry at La Mesa Prison in Tijuana, Mexico, and in time she moved into a small cell inside that prison and lived among the inmates. They called her La Mama; the world came to call her the Prison Angel. Later she founded the Eudist Servants of the Eleventh Hour, a Catholic community for older women called to serve late in life, and in 2003 the Bishop of Tijuana formally accepted it. She did not wait to be qualified in everyone’s eyes. She just did it, and the world recognized it afterward.
I am no Mother Antonia. But she was a sinner like me, saved by the same grace, and she did not wait until she felt worthy; she simply did the work. Neither will I wait. That, such as it is, is the whole of my credential, and the rest I leave to God.
“He must increase, but I must decrease.” — John 3:30