On the Missional Use of Psalmody
When “contemporary” music hit the church scene starting in the 1960s, really picking up and winning out by the late 1990s, one of the arguments for the change in style is that it would be more familiar and appealing both…
On the Maestros of Church Growth
Why have so many evangelicals openly embraced such compromises? The answer is very simple. It’s the next logical step for a church that is completely ensnared in efforts to please the culture. For decades the popular notion has been that if the church was going to reach the culture it first needed to connect with the style and methods of secular pop culture or academic fads. To that end, the church surrendered its historic forms of worship. In many cases, everything that once constituted a traditional worship service disappeared altogether, giving way to rock-concert formats and everything else the church could borrow from the entertainment industry. Craving acceptance in the broader culture, the church carelessly copied the world’s style preferences and fleeting fads…
On Giving the Old Testament CPR
As a followup to my recent post on the death of the Old Testament, I want to provide two direct solutions to breathing life back into the church’s use of it. The problem is not just that the Old Testament is often absent from the the life of the church, but in its presence it is not used well.
The simplest, most immediate solution is to starting singing the Psalms in worship. Not worship songs loosely based on a psalm, such as Matt Redman’s “10,000 Reasons (Bless the Lord)” inspired by Psalm 103, but singing actual psalms…
On the Death of the Old Testament
Andrew Bunt of ThinkTheology has shared an overview and some thoughts on Brent Strawn’s book The Old Testament is Dying.
Strawn’s basic thesis is that knowledge, understanding and good use of the Old Testament are waning; in short, the Old Testament is dying. He uses a helpful analogy to explore this by likening the Old Testament to a language. Languages help us make sense of reality, and the Old Testament has the potential to do the same. But languages can die, and so the analogy provides a useful way for Strawn to explore the possibility that the Old Testament is dying…
Strawn then explores how this demise can be seen more broadly, and it is here that he makes particular use of the language analogy. The process of a language dying is called repidginization because as the original language dies out the simplified version that is left is like a pidgin language. When languages repidiginize sometimes the pidgin version then develops into a new, but different, language called a creole. Creoles are completely regular – they remove all the complexities of the original language…
Roman Catholics Should Join the Reformed
The horror coming out of Pennsylvania is absolutely sickening. The attitude of “it’s not that big a deal” from the Roman Catholic episcopate communicates that the possibility of this kind of coverup happening again is very likely. Coming on the heels of the revelation that Cardinal McCarrick was a rapist and that the Catholic Church covered for him, the events in Pennsylvania should jolt the Catholic laity into the realization that this was not an abnormality: the hierarchy of the Catholic Church has no interest in or willpower to do what it takes to protect their people. And often the Roman Catholic Church itself is the source of this danger.
The Roman Catholic Church continues to teach that it is the only true church. Now, Protestant churches are not immune from sin or from covering that sin up, even sin as heinous as the abuses of the Roman Catholics. The difference lies in Rome’s claim to be the true church, and to be subsequently assaulting their own people and covering up that assault.
