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Defining Conservatism

The term “conservative” gets thrown around a lot, but do people really know what it means?

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Recovering Intentional Worship by David de Bruyn

Some Things to Consider Including In Your Church Service

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Missions and Music Contextualizing the Gospel

A blog series from Religious Affections Ministries.

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Scott Aniol speaks on the subject of music and worship around the country. Schedule him to speak in your church, plan and lead your worship service, or lead a hymn service.

Currently viewing the tag: "meaning"

Form and Meaning

On October 7, 2011 By
This entry is part 28 of 32 in the series Toward Conservative Christian Churches

Christians’ affections are greatly shaped by the moral imagination. The moral imagination is largely shaped by the meaning of the various media it encounters. This meaning is largely contained in the form of such things. If a pastor is serious about meaning, then he must be serious about form.

Form, in its simplest [...]

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Encouraging Reflectiveness

On September 30, 2011 By
This entry is part 26 of 32 in the series Toward Conservative Christian Churches

Ours is not a particularly reflective age. When a pastor begins speaking of the meaning of the media, devices and technologies that surround us, he may receive something of a puzzled, if not combative, reaction. Many today are oblivious to the meanings of the things they read, the music they listen to, the films [...]

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A World of Meaning

On September 23, 2011 By
This entry is part 25 of 32 in the series Toward Conservative Christian Churches

Once a pastor has it settled in his mind that sola Scriptura does not require him to ignore, dismiss or reject extra-biblical sources of knowledge, he may safely walk through God’s world and examine it, knowing that it is, indeed, his Father’s world.

A pastor should become personally fascinated with meaning. How [...]

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The Christian and Meaning

On September 9, 2011 By
This entry is part 23 of 32 in the series Toward Conservative Christian Churches

Two propositions summarize why a conservative Christian church is concerned with meaning: Christians are humans, and Christians live in the world. What is the world? The world Christians live in is a world that is the handiwork of an intelligent Being, filled with all His purposes and designs. What is a human? A human [...]

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Does “Slow Fade” really communicate God’s truth to His people?

On March 25, 2011 By

I recently listened to a message delivered by a music pastor at a pastor’s conference on the subject of song selection. He touched on issues related both to text and musical style, but it was an illustration given on the former that I found the most astonishing of the [...]

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Truth and the Moral Imagination

On February 9, 2011 By
This entry is part 2 of 8 in the series Preserving the Truth in our Worship

If, as I argued in the last post, truth is more than factual correspondence—if it has an aesthetic aspect to it—then both the apprehension and the presentation of truth involve more than just intellect; they involve the aesthetic part of man, in particular, his imagination.

Today we use the term “imagination” to mean something more similar to [...]

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Review: Elegy for Trains by Benjamin Myers

On October 26, 2010 By

Benjamin Myers
Elegy for Trains
Village Books Press
ISBN Number: 978-0-9818680-6-6

Over the last quarter century, poetry has done some rather public soul searching.  Poets and critics alike have spilled gallons of ink (both actual and virtual) on whether poetry does—or can—still matter and why.  Naysayers [...]

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