When you take the Way of Jesus seriously, you encounter resistance. Jesus calls us to love our enemies, but society kills our enemies. Jesus calls us to Jubilee, but ours is a nation of debt. Jesus calls us to befriend the ostracized, but ours is a society of...
Sometimes it bothers me, the number of people who can quote my songs, or they can quote the songs of several different people, but they can't quote the Scriptures, as if anything a musician might have to say would be worth listening to. Really, I mean, what musicians...
If we go to worship for entertainment, we ought to admit it's not much of a show. If we go for self-improvement, therapy could be more useful. If we go to feel better, breakfast in bed with the newspaper might be smarter. The only good reason to go to worship is to...
Popular music is engineered by people in the entertainment industry, and sales are the arbiter of success (hence the enormous sums earned by the writers of often-played commercials)… At the other end of the power spectrum is great religious music. Here the texts deal...
I hope we do not come to the liturgy as spectators, nor for entertainment or even refreshment, though on occasion it will no doubt provide us amply with both. Rather liturgy should be the simple and powerful effort of people in the midst of life to keep festival in...
Is there no real difference between worship and entertainment? I believe there is a world of difference, even though I have some inkling as to why today’s culture has confused the two… ENTERTAINMENT typically results from the WORK OF OTHERS, for my interest, pleasure,...
The focus of worship is not human experience, not a lecture, not entertainment, but Jesus Christ: His life, death, and resurrection. Worship is a verb. It is not something done to us or for us, but by us. from Worship is a Verb
Don’t trade authentic preaching for the kazoo of being contemporary, for the tin whistle of entertainment, for the turkey call of trying to get as many people as you can under one roof.
Worship dare not be glib or superficial, ought not to dispense false assurances or manipulate emotions. Instead, genuine worship always offers the true hope of the Gospel—neither entertainment nor escapism, neither diversion nor another sort of consumerism, but the...
There is even a growing tendency in the church to turn Jesus into a consumer item; from bumper stickers to Christian entertainment, we are finding ways to market our Lord. Our entire culture is oriented to hype, and unfortunately the church is becoming increasingly...