Leadingchurch.com

Fors Clavigera

1. If we (the congregation) can’t hear ourselves, it’s not worship.
2. If we can’t sing along, it’s not worship
3. If the praise band is the center of attention it’s not worship.

Please consider these points carefully and recognize what I am not saying. This isn’t just some plea for “traditional” worship and a critique of “contemporary” worship. Don’t mistake this as a defense of pipe organs and a critique of guitars and drums (or banjos and mandolins). My concern isn’t with style, but with form: What are we trying to do when we “lead worship?” If we are intentional about worship as a communal, congregational practice that brings us into a dialogical encounter with the living God–that worship is not merely expressive but also formative–then we can do that with cellos or steel guitars, pipe organs or African drums.

And there’s a postscript

NYT Blog

Biologos

http://www.godtube.com/watch/?v=76KGNNNX

And what’s wrong with how the Bible is handled in church and by Christians

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2014/01/3-biggest-reasons-why-bible-reading-is-down/

http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/blog/2014/01/24/atheist-guilt

and more from the dish on Atheist guilt

his blog

JesusCreed

So when the enslaved Africans in America began to use deliverance rhetoric rooted in the Exodus they were carrying on a Protestant tradition and, at the same time, subverting those who had used the same rhetoric for their own conditions. Prior to the use of deliverance rhetoric to support abolition, some English and Americans were seeing a moral problem in the enslavement of whites — orphans and criminals especially — and the transportation of the same to colonial locations. The glaring contradiction of this very point, seen for instance in John Locke (who opposed [white] slavery but supported the African slave trade), took a century to realize. In the heart of the Enlightenment, some 3.26 million Africans were transported across the ocean to become slaves. Many turned to the Bible for supporting slavery, including the very typical insistence that liberation in the Bible is spiritual and not social or ethnic or racial (e.g., George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards owned slaves). Our next post will look at the scriptural imagination of the abolitionists and their uses of the Exodus narrative.

Jesus Creed