God didn’t intend for our peace to be based upon our commonalities or our common affinities for certain things. God never planned our peace to be based upon our preferences, dining habits, or style of dress. Jesus is our peace! And if we don’t have enough Jesus to...
Good religion, however, is always about seeing rightly: "The lamp of the body is the eye; if your eye is sound, your whole body will be filled with light," as Jesus says in Matthew 6:22. How you see is what you see. And to see rightly is to be able to be fully...
Having spent time around "sinners" and also around purported saints, I have a hunch why Jesus spent so much time with the former group: I think he preferred their company. Because the sinners were honest about themselves and had no pretense, Jesus could deal with...
If it pleases Jesus to distribute his voice among a wide range of singers and musical dialects, it would profit us to accommodate our preferences and principles to his. from With One Voice: Discovering Christ’s Song in Our Worship
Is your preferred style of corporate worship quiet and contemplative? Loud and raucous? Centered on preaching? Centered on communion? Prayer focused? Service focused? Other? Wonderful. Don't let anyone shame you for how God made you to worship Jesus through the...
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...
Fed by cries of “This is what we like” or “This is what people want,” the church has seen a rise in popularity of its own kind of musical junk food. As a result, a growing repertoire of the musical equivalent of Twinkies is contributing to the serious musical...
When Paul tells his churches to “let the word of Christ dwell…richly” among them by means of “psalms, hymns and spiritual songs” (Col. 3:16 NIV), he’s inviting them to do more than use music as a “warm-up” to the sermon. The song is not ornamentation; it is...
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...
I fear that attempting to satisfy personal preferences may honor selfishness while further destroying the unity of the church. Further, I fear that gearing the “worship service” toward unbelievers who may be present will perpetuate the revivalistic confusion between...