Many American churchgoers seem to expect to use the MIND in worship, but only during the sermon. It’s at that point that typical pew-occupiers open their textbook (the Bible), get their pencils ready (to take notes), and put their brains in gear. You can almost sense...
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...
Pentecost is Babel turned right side up: all speech is unified because it is God, no longer people, who is building toward the heavens. The story of Pentecost goes further than its historical reality. It is also a parable that urges us into the knowledge that the...
The contemporary obsession with spirituality, among Christians and pagans alike, surely betokens something worthy of the church’s attention. I am not convinced, however, that the current vogue for spirituality should be embraced without making important historical and...
The gospel ought never to be entirely at home in any culture. If gospel and culture fit together as easily as hand-in-glove, then the likelihood is that the gospel has capitulated to the values of the culture… There must always be some tension between gospel and...
The dedicated will must bit by bit take up, transform, and unify the dedicated body and mind, welding them into a single instrument devoted to the purposes of God.
In all its elements,…Christian worship is the action of God, of Jesus, and of the community itself for the community, and therefore the upbuilding of the community. From this center, it can and should spread out into the wider circle of the everyday life of Christians...
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...
So there is a powerful personal meaning to Good Friday and Easter. The followers of Jesus are invited into the journey that leads through death to new life. Personal transformation is utterly important. Without it, we remain within the world of our socialization, a...
Keeping silence is work indeed. It goes against our obsessive need to communicate, socialize, produce, achieve. It is a confrontation with our emptiness, self-deceptions, even self-image—those things we try so hard to hide under blankets of activity and sound. Silence...