Celebrity preaching as one of the roots of Evangelical Christianity

Interesting blurb from largehearted boy:

"LiveDaily interviews singer-songwriter Josh Ritter.

What’s the last book you read?

I just read The Most Famous Man in America which is the biography of Henry Ward Beecher (a 19th century preacher). It just won the Pulitzer Prize and it’s about one of America’s great entertainment industries, which are preachers (laughs). And it's basically about the roots of Evangelical Christianity and the real, kind of, rock 'n' roll preachers from (Beecher) all the way down the line to Billy Graham and some of those new guys who are coming. It's kind of the melding of the Bible and the dollar. It's pretty interesting. He was a major force in the abolition of slavery. Really interesting guy."

Great little forgotten hymn by John Kent

Check out this little hymn I found. I love his use of the word "precepts"--especially considering the way that word typically gets used in Bible church circles.
(from A New Selection of Seven Hundred Evangelical Hymns: For Private, Family, and ... By John Dobell, Isaac Watts)

Good news for corporate worship music

Kevin Twit says they have started the next Indelible Grace project. Indelible Grace really opened my eyes to what substantial worship music looks like back when the second CD came out like eight years ago, and the projects have been pretty consistently good since. The sound has gotten better with each record.

Speaking of Indelible Grace, I finally bought some tracks off of Matthew Smith's new disc, All I Owe, and I recommend the song None Among. I had marked that one in my Spurgeon hymnal to write a new tune to, but Matthew beat me to the punch.

30

So today I'm 30. Maggie was asking Melissa last night if she thought I would wake up with lots more gray hair.

How did I spend my last night in my twenties? In our IBUC elders meeting with a bunch of dudes in their 60s. Pretty much awesome.

listen to Sky Blue Sky for free

My favorite band is continuing their tradition of letting fans stream their new record on their website for free before it comes out. Check it out here. Totally different from either of their last two records, but I'm loving it.

If you listen to it, let me know what tracks you're digging the most.

Bob Kauflin on plannings songs for the long haul

I know I have several times on this blog linked to Bob Kauflin's Worship Matters blog, but it has been a while. Yesterday he posted a draft of part of a chapter of the book he's working on, and it's absolutely brilliant. He's talking about viewing your song selection over a long period of time and essentially asking yourself if with the content of the songs you are faithfully shepherding your people towards a biblical, well-rounded view of God. This question won't even make sense to worship leaders who view their role primarily as performers instead of pastors. Sadly, that's all many churches expect out of the guy who chooses their diet of corporate worship music. Also sad is that many churches make style and/or instrumentation the highest priority, so that, for example, the worship leader is forced to choose only from songs that have orchestra arrangements available on the market.


Read Bob's post here.

Highlights:

"...a meal isn’t the same thing as a diet. God doesn’t want us only to be concerned about this Sunday. He wants us to keep the big picture in view."

"Reviewing your songs can answer some important questions.

• Are any themes missing or lacking?
• Are we falling into a rut musically or thematically?
• Are God’s Word, worthiness, and works being proclaimed in our songs?
• Are we worshiping a triune God in song?
• Are we conscious of the Gospel each time we sing?
• Do we need more songs of celebration or reverence?
• Are we doing any songs too frequently or not often enough?
• Do we have a healthy blend of deep and simpler songs?
• Are there any songs we don’t do any more that we should start doing again?"
  

"A good measure of how we’re doing in this area is what I call the “twenty year rule.” If someone was born in our church and grew up singing these songs, how well would they know God? Would they see that he is holy, wise, omnipotent, and sovereign? Would they know him as Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer? Would these songs give them a comprehensive and broad view of God, or would they only be exposed to certain aspects of his nature and works?"

Good post by Brian Moss

Brian Moss is a worship leader and recording artist in Seattle. He has written some new tunes for old hymns and has a cool project out setting some of the Psalms to music (with presumably more to come). You can listen to some of that here, but today I'd like to call your attention to a post on his blog in which he raises some concerns about people approaching corporate worship with consumerist attitudes (though he doesn't use those exact words to describe it). For example, he mentions the classic case of an evangelical family going "church shopping", which I think pretty much says it all.

He makes a good point in his article when he says that "worship can be uncomfortable". I don't think any pastor would explicitly state that their chief goal is to make their people comfortable in corporate worship, but I think in reality that is the motivation behind our wanting people to leave the service feeling blessed, not wanting visitors to feel awkward, and not wanting outsiders to think we are fanatics. I think even when we express things in terms of wanting congregants to "feel like they have met with God", we often really mean that we want them to have an encounter with God and come away with a positive feeling. Sure, perhaps the encounter with God will make us want to sin less, be a better father, and give more to the church; but in general pastors tend to want people to leave feeling affirmed and self-fulfilled. The truth is that, unless we avoid mentioning God's character as seen in Christ's life/death/resurrection, the state of the world, and our own remaining sin, we should be made uncomfortable in corporate worship.

After ranting a little bit more, Moss says,

I write this because worship is eternal. I write this because worship matters. When worship is reduced to a top 20 countdown we lose. When worship is reduced to what we get out of a worship service we lose. When worship is reduced to only what we like in worship we lose.

Amen.

Pronouns and God-centered worship music

Here is a rant post.

Remember like 15 years ago, when a big deal in worship music was people complaining about songs that were so vague they could either be about God or your girlfriend? There were people running around saying that a song had to specifically mention a Member of the Trinity or it wasn't pleasing to God. Even as a kid I thought that was a pretty ridiculous thing to say, even though I did agree that it's pretty weak sauce to sing songs that were so vague. The problem is that a stupid grammatical rule is not going to fix our corporate worship, because the grammar is not the heart of the problem. A songwriter can put a name of God in the song, and it can still say nothing substantial.

If you have ever talked to me about worship singing before, you know that I'm all about the content. I am more convinced every day that the songs we use in corporate worship should be substantial (meaning they should say something coherent) and God-centered (meaning they should be focused on glorifying God). Recently, however, I have been hearing alot of nonsensical talk about the God-centeredness issue. It seems everyone thinks that the key problem with songs today is that there are too many first person pronouns. I have even heard it argued that in the good old days of hymnody all the pronouns were in the second person (you, your, thou, thy), whereas in contemporary worship music it all "I, me, my, mine". Now, another thing you'll know about me if you have ever heard me talk about worship music is that I love hymns, and, furthermore, I completely agree that worship music these days tends to be "me-centered". But let's not miss the point by making it a grammatical issue. The point is that our culture is obsessively ego-centric, and that is reflected in the music our culture's Church produces. Also, I think the self-obsession reflects our theological vacancy. Our songs tend to default to our feelings, impressions, promises, intentions and desires simply because we have an extremely difficult time thinking coherently for a sustained period of time about God and the gospel. We think it's boring and irrelevant.

Kevin Twit defines hymns as "mini-meditations on the paradoxes of the gospel that drive us to worship". While that definition may be a little too limited, since there are good hymns that don't fit within that conception, I think it's worth considering whether that definition can be applied to anything being produced today in corporate worship music. Are any songs being written today mini-meditations on anything that drive us to worship? No, they all just express our feelings or try to manipulate us with hype (an unfair blanket statement, I'll admit, but generally true).

Last year Jono (an excellent worship leader who highly values substantial, God-centered worship music) forwarded me an email he had gotten from someone in the congregation complaining that the songs didn't use the same kind of language in which we typically talk to God. I get the impression that most folks think along those lines, but my idea of the purpose of corporate worship music is that it should be formative. It should shape the way we think about God. It should paint for our forgetful minds a vivid picture of God's greatness--vivid as in sharp, specific, and detailed--and it should call us to increase our trust in and submission to him. At least that's, in part, how I understand the biblical injunction to "teach and admonish one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs".

Another problem with defining the problem in terms of the first person pronoun count is that, if we in any way see the Psalms as prescriptive of our worship music (which I think we should), we have to recognize that the Psalms are by no means lacking first person. And this of course accords also with Piper's whole "God is most glorified in me when I am most satisfied in him" thing. God reveals himself to us in the Bible in terms of "all that he is for us in Christ Jesus now and forever", so we'd better not try to define God-centeredness in stricter terms than God himself!

So let's not try to put a band-aid on these deeper issues by making it into a grammatical issue. I'm afraid this problem is a little bit beyond the pronoun police. It's going to require some careful and courageous shepherding, and it's going to require that we recognize and repent of our self-centeredness. May God do a work in our congregations to ween us off our self-obsession and give us a taste for truth about him--in other words, a taste for him, as he has revealed himself to us.

Resources

Several weeks back we were driving through Austin, and Stew and his family graciously allowed my family of six to invade their two bedroom apartment for the night. We stayed up wicked late talking, and Stew has no idea how much the conversation we had that night has changed my perspective on several issues.

One comment in particular that Stew made in passing has been ringing in my ears ever since. He was talking about his disgust at hearing someone lament the fact that the Church in such-and-such third world country didn't have much in the way resources, as if that was a major barrier to the health/success of the Church there. Then Stew said something like, "since when is God dependent on resources?" or something to that effect.

I have consciously let this idea inform many conversations that I've had with people about different things since that day. I remember a few years ago reading a great little book that Zac Allen gave me by J. Scott Horrell called From the Ground Up, in which he talks about doing a study with a bunch of pastors in Brasil in which they determined that the majority of activities in the churches there revolve around four central images (1) the building, (2) the full-time minister, (3) the Sunday service, and (4) Sunday, the "Christian Sabbath." Horrell goes on to show that the controlling concepts that would more accurately express the biblical essence of the Church are (1) worship, (2) learning, (3) fellowship, and (4) evangelism/mission. I have found Horrell's simple conception of the purpose of the church really compelling and helpful over the last couple of years.

But Stew's comment really helped drive the point home to me that we in the west assume that where there are no resources, the Church is all but paralyzed. We also assume the inverse of that--that where there are an abundance of resources in and for the Church it is a sign of much success.

This was on my mind this morning as some representatives from Luis Palau's ministry came to our church to talk to us about how our church can participate in the huge Luis Palau evangelistic campaign coming up in a few weeks here in Monterrey. They showed a promotional video, and the whole selling point was what a big production it would be--they're gonna have all these big name Christian musicians in and high-profile converts and whatnot. Luis Palau himself said in the video, that he wants to show the world that Christian artists are first-class.

Now I'll keep my opinions about this kind of thing to myself for now. I don't make the decisions in our church about whether or not we'll participate in stuff like this--if we do participate I'll do it wholeheartedly. But this morning in my own mind I resolved to do what I can to make sure the church doesn't buy into the idea that we need these kind of resources to be faithful in our mission.