Tag Archives: entertainment

Converted clog-dancers: Spurgeon on drawing a crowd

Converted clog-dancers: Spurgeon on drawing a crowd

Charles Haddon Spurgeon was known for being an ardent “soul winner.” He maintained that a gospel minister will see certain fruit. A lack of success could be caused by weak preaching, faulty doctrine, or unfaithfulness in prayer. In An All Around Ministry, he said, ‘He that never saved a sinner after years of work is… Continue Reading

Sincerely Amused

Sincerely Amused

This entry is part 18 of 63 in the series Ten Mangled Words You can read more posts from the series by using the Contents in the right sidebar.

It’s a supreme irony, or perhaps a sad blindness, that the present generation is supposedly in love with ‘authenticity’, ‘sincerity’, and ‘keeping it real’. After all, we’ve been doing everything but that for nearly a century. As Neil Postman pointed out in Amusing Ourselves to Death, we took a medium designed for amusing spectacle – theatre… Continue Reading

This Was Jack’s Life

This Was Jack’s Life

I encountered my first Chick comic at Pine Hill Hunting Camp near Alpena, Michigan. I was a boy, evenings were slow, and somebody had left the thing lying around. It was an amusing little booklet entitled “This Was Your Life.” It pictured the postmortem agonies of some unsaved “everyman” as his life was replayed on… Continue Reading

Intensely audience-conscious and market-driven

Intensely audience-conscious and market-driven

Many conservative evangelical and even fundamentalist churches today have transformed the Christian faith into a kind of pop-culture version of The Way. This change began to become most prominent in the early 20th century, right after the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. Joel Carpenter captures well the shift to pop religion in his important work on the history… Continue Reading

More thoughts the use of movie clips in services (and the RPW)

More thoughts the use of movie clips in services (and the RPW)

A few days ago, Pastor Aaron Menikoff had a piece posted from the most recent 9Marks eJournal on the 9Marks blog.1 In this piece, entitled “What About Movie Clips? Applying the Regulative Principle,” Menikoff advocates the regulative principle and gives a couple brief reasons (in application) to avoid movie clips in sermons. The piece is… Continue Reading

Relevance is Irrelevant (Part 5)

Relevance is Irrelevant (Part 5)

This entry is part 5 of 14 in the series Relevance is Irrelevant You can read more posts from the series by using the Contents in the right sidebar.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 This series is applying the words of Paul in the early chapters of 1 Corinthians to ministry in the 21st century. In part 1, we looked especially at Paul’s argument in 1 Cor 1:17, that when men rest on a particular manner of ministry other than the proclamation of… Continue Reading

Two Roads Diverged

This entry is part 12 of 14 in the series The Hymnody of the Christian Church You can read more posts from the series by using the Contents in the right sidebar.

The dethroning of the Church by Reason and the creation of pop culture left the Church in an awkward position. Its cultural influence was non-existent. As the culture around it plunged into sanitized paganism, the Church’s traditional forms became foreign. The Church was in Babylon, yet it was free to worship as it pleased. So… Continue Reading

The Enlightenment and Christian Hymnody

This entry is part 11 of 14 in the series The Hymnody of the Christian Church You can read more posts from the series by using the Contents in the right sidebar.

This far in our journey we have witnessed an almost unbroken stream of Judeo-Christian tradition. From King David to Lutheran composer Johann Crüger (1598-1662) we find a slow and steady cultivation of poetic and musical forms. There were certainly bumps in the road and many changes along the way, yet for around 1800 years the quality… Continue Reading

How Can We Conserve Biblical Worship? Part 5

How Can We Conserve Biblical Worship? Part 5

Conservative Christians will be committed to transmitting these worship forms to future generations. This leads to my final point of discussion. If our goal as conservative Christians is to conserve biblical worship and continue to cultivate worship forms that best foster ordinate affection for God, then we must be committed to transmitting these worship forms… Continue Reading

How Can We Conserve Biblical Worship? Part 3

How Can We Conserve Biblical Worship? Part 3

Conservative Christians will be committed to worship forms that foster ordinate affection toward God. Commitment to the Regulative Principles of Worship solves the question of what we will include in our corporate worship, but it doesn’t necessarily address how we will do it. Conservatives have always recognized that while the Bible clearly prescribes what elements… Continue Reading

Can Rap be Christian? Evaluating Hip Hop

This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series Can Rap Be Christian You can read more posts from the series by using the Contents in the right sidebar.

Today we finally arrive at a discussion of the nature of rap itself. This post will be beneficial for you, however, only if you accept the following assertions on made on Monday: Man is completely depraved and thus cannot trust his own preferences implicitly. Music is a medium of human communication and thus must be… Continue Reading

A Tale of Two Song Leaders

A Tale of Two Song Leaders

About a year ago I posted a piece on leading congregational singing; I compared two conferences, one in which I was privileged to plan and lead the services, and another I had recently attended. I made some somewhat controversial statements about what I observed in the leadership of that conference. My primary contention was that… Continue Reading

A Well-Known Calvinist Repudiates the Charismaticism and Worldly Worship of "New Calvinism."

A Well-Known Calvinist Repudiates the Charismaticism and Worldly Worship of "New Calvinism."

“The new Calvinists constantly extol the Puritans, but they do not want to worship or live as they did. One of the vaunted new conferences is called Resolved, after Jonathan Edwards’ famous youthful Resolutions (seventy searching undertakings). But the culture of this conference would unquestionably have met with the outright condemnation of that great theologian.”… Continue Reading

Correcting Categories, Part 6 – Dionysian vs. Apollonian

Correcting Categories, Part 6 – Dionysian vs. Apollonian

My goal in this series is to help believers apply the Bible to their musical choices in life and worship. My contention is, however, that believers today approach the issue of musical choices with certain errant foundational presuppositions that need to be corrected before they can rightly apply the Bible in this area. So my… Continue Reading

"The surprising face of Hillsong" by Tony Payne and Gordon Cheng

"The surprising face of Hillsong" by Tony Payne and Gordon Cheng

The following article is so interesting, I had to post the whole thing here. Please take time to read the whole thing. It will be worth your while as instruction about why things are the way they are in evangelical worship today. It was originally posted January 2007 here: http://matthiasmedia.com.au/briefing/library/3883/ I have to wonder how… Continue Reading