Topic Archives: Worship

IS WORSHIP BORING? I believe God’s people will find worship nourishing, and rarely boring In December 2000 I was asked by a writer of “Word and Way” (the newspaper of the Missouri Baptist Convention) to contribute to a multi-page, special section on the subject of “Is Church Boring?” My input was requested because in my […]

‘THOU’ SHOULD BE PRESERVED IN HYMNS If some hymn-writers today are more at peace and more conscious of God’s glory using the pronoun ‘you’ in hymns then we have few objections to their doing so and can sincerely sing good modern hymns and metrical versions of the psalms and paraphrases referring to God as ‘you’, […]

An elder preceded the minister into the pulpit and then came to the front and addressed the congregation. ‘Last week…a child was bored in the service.’ A gasp went through the congregation. Men looked at their feet, women cried quietly, and children went white. ‘The church officers are meeting with the minister during the week […]

The Willow Creek Church is in a suburb of Chicago, one of the ten most wealthy and powerful cities in the world. It is a booming educational, medical, cultural, legal and economic centre with a hinterland of 6 million people. It is the ‘Bible button’ of the Mid-West, the city of Moody Bible College, Wheaton […]

One of the off-the-shelf suggestions for church growth is to ‘open the front door and close the back door’ meaning that welcoming and retaining new people will fill the pews. The subheads under that strategy include meeting people’s needs, providing the music they like, activities for children, etc. But Dr Mark Dever, a pastor and […]

There is in the heart of man a longing for the holy. The psalmist declares, ‘Deep calls to deep’ (Psalm 42:7). There is an abiding dissatisfaction with the sense of cosmic lostness that has gripped the human race ever since our first parents lost their intimate communion with God and were expelled from the garden […]

The local pastor often wonders what is happening in the other churches of his community. David Marshall is the pastor of Hamilton Reformed Baptist Church in New Zealand. Recently he needed to take a break from the rigours of pastoral ministry and so was granted a month’s leave. It was not convenient to go away […]

The Reformed churches in Liverpool have a monthly officers meeting on Fridays in the winter, and I was invited in February, at the last minute withdrawal of Peter Masters of the Metropolitan Tabernacle, London, to speak to them on the subject of worship for 35 minutes to be followed by discussion. There were about 25-30 […]

The modern evangelical church does everything to music — even the sermon ends with soft chords and melodies from the organ. Music taps into an emotion a congregation is already feeling, and then manipulates it powerfully. City stores know the power of music to loosen the purse strings and open credit card wallets. Psychologists are […]

We are asking the question today ‘How do we assess hymns, and how do we assess hymn-books?’ I hope to do three things. Firstly I want to make a general observation about singing in the New Testament. Then I want us to look at Paul’s instructions in Ephesians and Colossians. Then I want us think […]