Believing exceptional spiritual gifts compensate for emotional immaturity in Christian leaders, promoting those leaders to high profile positions, results in deep disappointment and injury to the body of Christ when the spotlight burns through the facade. We gotta...
A woman in my church, Rachel, lost her twenty-three-year-old daughter in a tragic accident; she lost her legs and then took several weeks to die. Rachel said, “I can’t pray. People think I’m terrible because I can’t pray.” Lay off her! I thought of those who would...
If your church is going to really reflect the diversity of the body of Christ then everybody needs to sing songs they don’t like.
Many Christians are formed to think of their own private prayer life as primary and to consider Sunday worship as effective to the extent that it ignites or deepens their personal piety. In this way of thinking, the question “what did worship do for me?” is completely...
I firmly believe that when Paul called the church the body of Christ he meant it. I don’t think that he meant we constitute the body of Christ when we gather 10 high school boys for a small group. The practice of worship and the celebration of the sacraments requires...
Christian worship is alive because, in its essence, it is a conversation between two living realities—the one true, eternal God and the body of Christ, the church. Because worship is a conversation and not a mere review of the past, it is dynamic, unpredictable, and...
It is sometimes forgotten that hymns are the offering of the entire congregation, not merely of the clergy and choir. In the worship of almost all Christian groups (even those with a pre-scribed liturgy) hymns are pre-eminently the part of corporate worship in which...