Wisdom will be needed to encourage a congregation to be united over the music it uses. One result of the power of music is that people become deeply wedded to their personal preferences and find it difficult to recognize that the style of music is almost always a...
Sacred Choral Music in America Pristine colonial meetinghouses, frontier brush arbors, African-American churches, rural singing schools and ornate urban cathedrals have all been seedbeds for the potent partnership of fervent faith and choral singing. During the last...
The use of music as an expression of emotion linked to theological truth is common in all churches. In the evangelical traditions where personal religious experience is emphasized, emotional expression is one of music’s most important meanings; it is probably that...
As many philosophers and theologians have observed, music is close to “spirit”—a non-material medium of receiving and conveying a sense of the world. In our deepest attentiveness and encounters with certain forms of music, we are opened to a depth of awareness; a...
I am convinced that congregations learn more theology (good and bad) from the songs they sing than from the sermons they hear. Many sermons are doctrinally sound and contain a fair amount of biblical information, but they lack that necessary emotional content that...
Worship celebrates God’s saving deed in Jesus Christ. This kind of worship is not a goal-driven worship, but a Christ-driven worship. And when Christ is the center of worship, all the goals of worship are achieved: Christ-centered worship educates, evangelizes, heals,...
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...
There is but one God, “in whom we live and move and have our being,” and when we worship we stand before the mystery of that deep and eternal Reality to whom we give different names. From Jews, we learn of God’s faithfulness; from Muslims, of God’s sovereignty and...
What if [instead of just the “wow” moments in worship] we actively pursue the joy of the ordinary? What if in this season of Lent, when we verbalize our “ashes to ashes” condition , we give God glory for the profound nature of His handiwork without feeling that we...
Christian worship is our affirmative, transforming response to the self-revelation of God… We are not seeking to find or to know an obscure, frightening being who needs to be placated. God makes and continues to make the first move, showing himself in power and in...