We should sing together…because singing brings us together. When you sing with other people, you are saying in effect, “I will not be a soloist; I will not be your competitor; I will blend my voice with yours.” That is, in a very simple and important way, saying that...
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...
The problem with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.
Whether rich or poor, male or female…our stories are all stories of searching. We search for a good self to be and for good work to do. We search to become human in a world that tempts us always to be less than human or looks to us to be more. We search to love and to...
At the end of life, what really matters is not what we bought but what we built; not what we got but what we shared; not our competence but our character; and not our success, but our significance. Live a life that matters. Live a life of love.
If you could get up the courage to begin, you have the courage to succeed.
At the heart of successful and dynamic worship, private or public, is the issue of being honest with God and ourselves. We must honestly evaluate our love for God, genuinely express love to God, and sincerely expect love from God. I am amazed that God still seeks...
All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for...
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...
[…recalling the time when he was young, and he and his brother made a disaster out of preparing Mother’s Day breakfast for their mother…] Even when Christian worship is at its best, it is much like that Mother’s Day breakfast. It is always the work of amateurs, people...