Good church musicians constantly ask whether the “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” of the church’s worship are sung “so that the Word of God may dwell in us richly” (the forgotten purpose clause of Col. 3:16). Good liturgical musicians worry about the link between...
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...
Worship is not a mindless exercise. First and foremost, worship is a rational activity. It arises from careful reflection on who God is (in the infinite glory of His being) and what He has done… Worship without theology is bound to degenerate into idolatry; hence, the...
The effectiveness of a liturgy lies in its humility, in the absence of self-proclamation—”I am the liturgy, notice me.” The Word of God is the gathering point for all the content and all the action. If there is a high point or seasonal emphasis in a liturgy, this is...
We may take the task of reading the Scriptures and attending to the reading of Scriptures in worship lightly, failing to discern what God is up to with us in that effort. A faithful, that is, a full-of-faith rendering of the Scriptural word in terms of both denotation...
How will we teach Christianity’s specialness if the music in our worship services imitates the superficiality and meaninglessness of the general world and our sermons talk about subjects that those in the pew can learn from psychologists, sociologists, and the local...
So, by faith let us put on both lenses [worshiping in Spirit and in Truth]. We should look at each passage of scripture and examine each service or song or ceremony with both lenses on. To get a true stereo image, an in-depth, full-dimensioned image, of how we...
Christian worship is alive because, in its essence, it is a conversation between two living realities—the one true, eternal God and the body of Christ, the church. Because worship is a conversation and not a mere review of the past, it is dynamic, unpredictable, and...
It is Christ himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to him. We must not use the Bible as a sort of encyclopedia out of which texts can be taken for use as weapons.
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...