“Narrow” on Wednesday Night in Beaumont

Lord willing, this Wednesday night - May 7, 2008 - I’ll be speaking at “Narrow,” which meets at Westgate Memorial Baptist Church in Beaumont, TX (6220 Westgate Dr, Beaumont, TX, 77706). The event is a weekly Bible Study aimed at college students, and it begins at 9pm. If you’re in the area, it would be great to see you there.

9Marks eJournal on Corporate Prayer

The latest 9Marks eJournal is out, PDF here.

Jonathan Leeman and I teamed up and wrote A Biblical Theology of Corporate Prayer.

Andrew Peterson’s Behold the Lamb of God: Salvation History in Song

Have you ever wondered if there’s a Christmas album that presents salvation history in song?

If that’s what you’re looking for, look no further. Last Christmas a friend gave us Andrew Peterson’s album, Behold the Lamb of God. This CD is practically a biblical theology in verse. The contents of the album are as follows:

“Behold the Lamb of God” (2004)

 

1. “Gather ‘Round, Ye Children, Come” lyrics

 

This tune echoes the biblical call to parents to pass the mighty deeds of the Lord on to the coming generations. You can see a video of it being done live here.

 

2. “Passover Us” lyrics

 

This song recounts the conflict between Moses and Pharaoh and celebrate’s the Lord’s deliverance of Israel from Egypt.

 

3. “So Long, Moses” lyrics

 

This psalm walks the listener through the story if Israel taking the land and looking for a king. Joshua, Judges, Saul, David, and then the longing for another David.

 

4. “Deliver Us ” lyrics

 

Derek Webb sings this mournful lament of the bondage of sin from the perspective of a member of the old covenant remnant, longing for the coming of the Messiah. Watch a live performance here.

 

5. “O Come, O Come Emmanuel”

 

Watch a live performance of this one here.

 

6. “Matthew’s Begats ” lyrics

 

This is one of the most clever songs I’ve ever heard. The lyrics are, no kidding, Matthew’s genealogy! This one has an upbeat, lively sound, so much so that when we were first listening to it, our 3 year old son referred to it as “the fun song,” and he wanted to hear it over and over again. You can see it live here.

 

7. “It Came to Pass” lyrics

 

At long last, the king came. And in such an unexpected way! This one sings the birth of the babe in Bethlehem. Watch a live performance here.

 

8. “Labor of Love” lyrics

 

This was no sanitized birth, and this song captures both the agony of the curse on childbirth and the joy of the deliverer come at last. You can here it here.

 

9. “The Holly and the Ivy”

 

10. “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks” lyrics

 

11. “Behold the Lamb of God” lyrics

 

12. “The Theme Of My Song/Reprise”

You can check out Andrew Peterson’s blog, where he has many of these videos linked. Enjoy!

The Ross King House Show

The other night we had the privilege and joy of going to a friend’s home for a house show done by Ross King. It was a great night with friends and good music.

You can check out some of the action here, here, and here.

We’ve been enjoying Ross’s new CD, and I particularly appreciate the song called “Happy,” the lyrics to which go like this:

Fourteen thousand members and me,

Watch the preacher up on the screen,

I have never shaken his hand,

My two-dimensional pastor-man,

Welcome to America.

 

Doesn’t matter if I am here,

In this crowd I could disappear,

Pastor-man is all that we need,

Preachin via satellite feed.

 

I can watch it all from my pew,

Til the presentation is through.

You will have to pardon me,

But this cannot be all there is,

I can’t imagine God would be,

Happy about this.

 

Smiling people up on the stage,

Everyone prefers it that way.

Smiling people out in the crowd,

No questioning or doubting allowed,

This is our America.

 

Where everyone is pretty and clean;

Where everything’s rehearsed and routine.

You will have to pardon me,

But this cannot be all there is.

I can’t imagine God would be

Happy about this.

 

What if Jesus disagrees

With how you measure your success?

Would you find a way to still believe

He’s happy about this?

What if he’s not happy about this?

 

The church is now the body of Christ,

And every part is equally prized.

The eye can never say to the hand:

All we need is this preacher-man.

 

Would you notice if I was gone?

How easy would it be to move on?

You will have to pardon me,

But this cannot be all there is.

I can’t imagine God would be

Happy about this.

 

Cause crowds don’t necessarily

Mean that God is truly blessed.

I think there is a chance that he’s

Not happy about this.

What if he’s not happy about this?

What if he’s not happy about this?

 

Denny Burk to Preach at Redeemer this Sunday!

The illustrious Denny Burk will, Lord willing, preach on “The Gospel as the Power of God for Perseverance” from 1 Corinthians 15:1-8 this Sunday at Baptist Church of the Redeemer.

If you’re in the Houston area, we would love to have you join us for worship. Due to some complications with our normal meeting location, our worship service will take place at 2:10pm. Sunday School begins at 1:00pm. Location details on the website.

Hope to see you!

Why Pursue a More Liturgical Form of Worship?

Justin Taylor linked to two articles that have, each in their own way, vindicated my preference for a return to a more liturgical form of worship.

As I wrote a couple years ago (how time flies!):

Let us pursue a contemporary—stylish but not faddish, historical—orthodox but not dank, theological—deepening but not boring, and, most importantly, God-centered, Christ-exalting, Bible-saturated way of doing worship. . . . if we are successful it won’t be because we’re brilliant or because of our celebrity persona. Rather, the moving worship will come because we tapped into something bigger than ourselves—centuries of truth about Almighty God—and he visited us in power, inhabiting the praises of his people and honoring the exposition of his word.

So the first article that I read today that made me feel vindicated is by Sally Morgenthaler. Though I don’t agree with everything in the article (for instance, I think she makes a false dichotomy between gathering for worship at church and pursuing Christian life as worship–this is a “both/and” not an “either/or”), here are some quotes that, as I read them, defend my view:

“The upshot? For all the money, time, and effort we’ve spent on cultural relevance—and that includes culturally relevant worship—it seems we came through the last 15 years with a significant net loss in churchgoers, proliferation of megachurches and all.”

“The question is, should cultural and missional realities have anything to do with worship? Perhaps not. It would appear that we’re more than capable of creating our own view of the world, and we tend to promote and perpetuate that view in our sanctuaries and worship centers.”

“I began challenging leaders to give up their mythologies about how they were reaching the unchurched on Sunday morning.”

“The 100-year-old congregation that’s down to 43 members and having a hard time paying the light bill doesn’t want to be told that the “answer” is living life with the people in their neighborhoods. Relationships take time, and they need an attendance infusion now.

“I understood their dilemma, and secretly, I wished I had a magic bullet. But I didn’t. And I wasn’t going to give them false hope. Some newfangled worship service wasn’t going to save their church, and it wasn’t going to build God’s kingdom. It wasn’t going to attract the strange neighbors who had moved into their communities or the generations they had managed to ignore for the last 39 years.”

“the primary meeting place with our unchurched friends is now outside the church building.”

“May you, as leader of your congregation, have the courage to leave the ‘if we build it, they will come’ world of the last two decades behind.”

And then the second essay is by Donald Williams in Touchstone magazine on what evangelicals can learn from Flannery O’Connor. Again, here are some statements that, as I read them, validate my desire for a more liturgical worship service:

My fellow Evangelicals publish reams upon reams of prose. What we have not tended to write is anything recognized as having literary value by the literary world. What makes this failure remarkable is that our Protestant forebears include a number of people who did: Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, George Herbert, John Milton, and John Bunyan, to mention a few.

Equally remarkable is the host of near contemporary conservative Christians—sometimes quite evangelical and even evangelistic, though not “Evangelicals”—who were also important writers. G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor are all recognized as important literary figures even by people who do not share their Christian commitment.

Where is the contemporary American Evangelical who can make such a claim?

No Ranking Names

The modern Christians who are important writers are all from liturgical churches: Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox. The closest thing Evangelicalism has to a name that could rank with these is probably Walter Wangerin, Jr., who is not really a mainstream Evangelical but a Lutheran—again, from a liturgical tradition.

Try to think of a conservative Baptist, a Free or Wesleyan Methodist or a Nazarene, a conservative Presbyterian, a Plymouth Brother, a member of the Evangelical Free Church or the Christian and Missionary Alliance, a Pentecostal, or a member of an independent Bible church who belongs in that company. (Some have mentioned writers who used to be in those churches—but the phrase “used to” in the observation is telling.)

The third form of nourishment O’Connor acknowledged as a gift from the Catholic Church was a sense of mystery. Good fiction ultimately probes the mysteries of life: Why are we here? Why do we suffer? What is the Good?

“It is the business of fiction to embody mystery through manners,” she wrote. Therefore, “the type of mind that can understand good fiction is . . . the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.”

In Catholic worship with its sacramental focus, O’Connor found her sense of mystery nourished, and saw such nourishment as a key to the writer’s ability to “penetrate concrete reality”: “The more sacramental his theology, the more encouragement he will get from it to do just that.”

Does their theology of the sacraments preclude Evangelicals from nurturing their writers in this way? Not necessarily. Metaphor and symbolism are central to the creative process for writers, and they are an important way in which we evoke and assimilate mystery.

One need not believe in transubstantiation to make the Lord’s Supper more central in worship, nor does a symbolic or metaphorical view of the sacrament render it irrelevant to the lives of artists. But Evangelicals have too quickly and too often reacted to what they perceive as the abuses of the biblical sacrament in the Mass by relegating the Eucharist to a marginal role in their worship.

Our services, like our fiction, are justified by their efficiency in achieving pragmatic goals. Our sermons are full of practical, easy steps to spiritual victory, a better marriage, or financial success; our music is designed to express comfortable emotions; everything is aimed at maximizing the body count at the altar call.

Some of these goals are worth pursuing, but perhaps if abasement before a transcendent deity, felt as such, were one of them, we would produce better Christians and better writers.

Having recently been pushed to reconsider these things, I still agree with what I said here, and as I said here, I still think it’s relevant in our day.

Interview on Book Reviews

For those interested, the SWBTS Bloggers have interviewed yours truly on the writing of book reviews.

If You Like It Funky

I love Sovereign Grace worship music. We sing these songs all the time at our church.

If you’d like to move to this music, you’ll be interested in the remixed versions of many of their worship songs (you can hear samples here):

Delighting in God is the Work of My Life

Some people miss the point of life altogether. Not only do they miss the point of life, they miss the point of ministry. For instance, one pastor, asked what advice he would give to seminarians, “stressed the importance of learning practical pastoral matters, such as working with committees, mobilizing leaders, time management, strategic planning, managing a budget and managing disciples.”

Managing disciples? I did not make that up. A pastor really said that.

A healthy contrast to this is found in the latest issue of Southwestern News, which profiles Dr. Matthew McKellar, pastor of Sylvania Church in Tyler, TX. Dr. McKellar has preached in our chapel in Houston, and it was one of the best sermons I have heard in our chapel. He simply opened the Bible and explained it to us, helping us to know God through God’s own revelation of himself, pointing to the tremendous majesty of God, marveling in the mercy that the Lord has been pleased to show to us. The main point of the text he was preaching was the main point of his sermon. McKellar understands the point of life and ministry. He knows that life and ministry are about God. At the conclusion of the piece on him in Southwestern News, he is quoted saying:

“I am a man to whom God has been abundantly gracious and faithful . . . I want people to know that my prayer is like the Puritans used to say, ‘Delighting in God is the work of my life.’ I want my existence to be totally focused on making a big deal about who God is and what He has done through His son, Jesus Christ.”

Amen! May his tribe increase! McKellar has been at Sylvania Church for 20 years, modeling faithful pastoral ministry. Commenting on ministry, McKellar points to God’s faithfulness, to prayer, and the Bible.

May the Lord so ravish the souls of the manager-ministers that they cannot help but be consumed with the greatness of God, all taken up with the study of his word, and ever pointing seminarians to Christ, not the skills they need.

We are not the point. Our capacities are not the point. The point is that God is pleased to glorify himself through the things that are not, through the weak, through the low and despised, and all so that the glory will be all his.

The Smith Band: Wonderworld

At a conference last month I had the privilege of hearing The Smith Band. Stephen Smith now serves as the Worship Pastor at First Baptist Church, Irving, TX, and they blessed me with a copy of their CD Wonderworld. You can hear tracks from the album on either their website or the Independant Bands site. I encourage you to check it out. The Smiths are super-nice folks, and they sound great—-both live and on CD.

The CD was produced by Nathan Nockels, and the songs express God-centered wonder at the stunning mercies of our great God.

My favorite track is titled “According to Mercy,” and its chorus goes:

“It was your love/That caused these blinded eyes to see/It was your love/That broke these chains and set me free/You came to save this life that was lost/According to mercy, that you’ve poured out on us”

Amen!