As you have often heard me say, if you do not transform your pain, you will most assuredly transmit it. Healthy religion on the practical level tells us what to do with our pain—because we will have pain. We can’t avoid it; it’s part of life. If we’re not...
Hymnody needs to be popular. It is more closely related to folk song than to art song… It is because hymnody is, in its very essence, a kind of folk song that we must never close the door to new hymns written in the idiom of our day… Time has a way of selecting the...
To sing worship music from more than one generation is, in part, to communicate our larger identity as the people of God. We hail from many backgrounds, families, races, and tastes, but now we are joined together through the blood of Jesus Christ, who has reconciled...
One man does not make a wave. We are all carried by the flood of heroism in the human spirit. A symphony orchestra is no different. If we are fortunate in our times, we achieve a few moments of that heroism. But this is only the beginning, only the drawings on the...
When someone insists that we should only use the best music in worship, I scratch my head. Is the best music simple or complex? Written or spontaneous? Short or long? Do they mean the best aesthetically, pragmatically, emotionally, or historically? We usually have in...
Where the Spirit of God is, there is also singing. The early church was characterized by its singing; so also in every generation where there is renewal by the Spirit a new hymnody breaks forth. If most such songs do not have staying power, some of them do, and these...
We must become relevant and reverent. Worship must become the meeting place between the eternal and the contemporary. We tend to love the altar so much that we refuse to set it on fire. Yet God comes in the flames. Our God is a consuming fire. Each generation must...
For generations the church has been polarized between those who see the main task being the saving of souls for heaven and the nurturing of those souls through the valley of this dark world, on the one hand, and on the other hand those who see the task of improving...
God is creative and likes to be worshiped in creative ways—and he calls us to grow in our worship. He did not stop being creative when Handel or Bach or Fanny Crosby died. He continues to shape how music expresses our worship differently in each generation. This is a...
This then is our dilemma: how to transmit faith from one generation to the next without falsifying it as a mere cultural appendage, the icing on the cake of Americanism, a family idiosyncrasy like a preference for crunchy or smooth peanut butter. For the fact that...