In most worship services, some form of music accompanies the passing of offering plates. Financial gifts are offered to God in a context of music. Unfortunately, a tendency exists to interpret the instrumental or choral offertory as background music or a nice cover-up...
God is creative and likes to be worshiped in creative ways—and he calls us to grow in our worship. He did not stop being creative when Handel or Bach or Fanny Crosby died. He continues to shape how music expresses our worship differently in each generation. This is a...
Almost everything about being a Christian can be faked. But there is one thing I’ve found that can’t be faked, and that’s laughter—free, childlike, infectious laughter. Going to church used to be such drudgery to me until I found out that drudgery was a sign that I...
Although taking the risk of openness to new experiences with God can be scary, we will find the resulting growth in faith rewarding and exhilarating. The commandment against worshiping idols includes more than physical statues. We create an idol when we become set in...
If the church is to survive as a place where head and heart are equal partners in faith, then we will need to commit ourselves…not to the worship of Christ, but to the imitation of Jesus. His invitation was not to believe, but to follow. Since it was once dangerous to...
I have a priest friend who points out that the opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty. I think God intended that—it is a way of making us creative instead of smug in our belief. God plants in us the seed to love and worship God, and the seed is enough to make us...
If the church is to survive as a place where head and heart are equal partners in faith, then we will need to commit ourselves once again not to the worship of Christ, but to the imitation of Jesus. His invitation was not to believe, but to follow. Since it was once...
If the bulletin makes it clear that Scripture is an important part of Christian worship, then we can be sure people will get the message that the Bible is crucial in shaping their lives as Christians. But when the role of Scripture in worship is negligible, when...
The temptations to misread the Bible on our own behalf and to domesticate it for our own purposes are many and dangerous, and in America, devoted as we are to the Bible, we have tried them all. Bibliolatry, the worship of the Bible and the making of it an object of...
Religious liberty is the nursing mother of all liberty. Without it all other forms of liberty must soon wither and die. The Baptists grasped this conception of liberty in its full-orbed glory, from the very beginning. Their contention has been, is now, and must ever...