Music is a demanding art. To achieve excellence in it requires hard discipline and unremitting work. Yet with all his devotion to it a Christian musician must keep his priorities clear. God is the source of all talent. When God gives talent, including musical talent,...
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 all need to apologize, and we all need to forgive, for humanity to have a sustainable future. Otherwise, we are controlled by the past, individually and corporately. History easily devolves into taking sides, bitterness, holding grudges, and the violence that...
The feeble gospel goes back to Jesus as our model, our example, and is much concerned with moral injunctions. It sees his teaching as a fine set of ideals at which to aim. It may not do much harm but it has no power to change your life: it is a faith built in sand...
Resurrection means God’s way prevails. When Jesus died, most thought his teachings died with him, overpowered and silenced by the might of “the system.” The power of entrenched interests seemed triumphant. We understand. Experience teaches us large systems and even...
Why should a church teach hymns? One basic reason is that hymns are a means of communicating the message of the church. Some hymns are paraphrases of Scripture and others are based on specific Scripture verses. Hymns also effectively convey the church’s theology....
Our sense of urgency is balanced by the requirement to wait—to wait on the timing of God, which we can neither predict nor force. And the poor of the world have much to teach us about waiting—waiting with hope, purpose, and active preparation for change; waiting...
The gospels remind us that Jesus, before he taught the people, felt compassion for the multitudes that followed after him. Sometimes he felt it even to the point of forgetting to eat. How did he put his compassion into practice? He multiplied the loaves of bread and...
I love the Bible. I have spent more than half of my life reading it, studying it, teaching and preaching it. While I do not find every word of it as inspiring (or inspired) as some of my fellow Christians do, I encounter God in it reliably enough to commit myself on a...
In short, our congregations are marked by a warped spirituality. We have been formed spiritually in ways that bracket the realities of violence and poverty and oppression, ignoring them (at worst) or confining them (at best) to the margins of our attention. We have...