Restoring a right view of the affections may take many years of teaching and instruction. Most Christians exist with very foggy notions of ‘the emotions’ and their relationship to Christianity. Many Christians have either been taught to ignore the affections as irrelevant by-products of a mental-volitional kind of Christianity, or they have been taught to… Continue Reading
Probably the greatest difference between a thoroughly conservative Christian church and more nominally conservative Christian churches will be found in differences over the religious affections. Conservative Christian churches want to conserve a Christian understanding of the religious affections. In the next few posts, I hope to suggest some ways that churches may recover a right view… Continue Reading
Beyond the matter of exposing Christians to past and present examples of Christian piety, a pastor or leader within the local church can seek to encourage Christian piety through his teaching ministry. What follows are some thoughts on how this plays out in a local church, along with some recommendations. First, as leaders, we ought… Continue Reading
How can we conserve and promote true piety within the lives of the Christians in our churches? Phrasing the question differently reveals the size of the task: how can we teach our people to love God rightly? This is the bulk of the task of ministry, so it is certain that a blog post can… Continue Reading
Conservative Christian churches wish to weather the winds of secularism and pass on authentic Christianity to the next generation. This means conserving the gospel itself, conserving a robust, consistent and thorough body of Christian theology, and conserving biblical worship. An offshoot of the conservation of biblical worship is the matter of Christian piety. In some… Continue Reading
Finishing worship well is as important as beginning it that way. Just as a call to worship consecrates the time for worship, so a benediction allows the last word to be God’s blessing and exhortation to His people to continue worshiping as they depart. There is biblical precedent for this. Almost all the epistles end… Continue Reading
Restoring biblical worship in churches within a culture given over to various forms of narcissism, sentimentalism, consumerism and amusement is an uphill struggle. If a man is more concerned about retaining or attracting a minimum level of tithers, he is at the mercy of parishioners’ tastes, preferences and stylized worship choices. However, if he is… Continue Reading
Biblical worship is the worship revealed in the Bible as pleasing to God. Since the Bible reveals God’s nature, will, and works, we should expect that God prescribes how He wants to be worshipped in Scripture. Both Old Testament principle and New Testament precept (1 Tim 3:15) combine to show us that God’s worship is… Continue Reading
Christianity is far more than salvation from sin and the knowledge of some Christian doctrine. Christianity claims to offer true worship to the only true God. Therefore, a Christianity worth conserving is a Christianity deeply concerned with the question of worship. To conserve the gospel and the whole counsel of God and abandon the battle… Continue Reading
Churches that wish to be doctrinally thorough and promote theological literacy ought to have a pulpit that systematically teaches through Scripture, and support it with other means of increasing theological knowledge and depth. This post considers a third and fourth way of achieving this. A conservative Christian church should engage in the systematic discipleship of believers.… Continue Reading
How do churches teach Christian doctrine thoroughly and cohesively? I suggest four ways, the first two of which I’ll deal with in this post. First, a conservative Christian church needs a pulpit ministry that systematically teaches through Scripture. I am very thankful for those who have written extensively on expository preaching, or modeled it with… Continue Reading
Google ‘Gospel-centered’ and you will find thousands of churches and Christians who have adopted this nick as descriptive of themselves. No one wants to be law-centered, I assume, or gospel-peripheral, and so we find that gospel-centered has become something of a new Shibboleth in evangelical circles. In previous posts, I’ve already expressed solidarity with the… Continue Reading
Churches that wish to conserve and propagate the gospel must be willing to defend it. The gospel is attacked in several ways, and therefore its defenders must be aware of where the conflict will be. A battle exists over the meaning and intention of the gospel. The enemies of the gospel are forever seeking to… Continue Reading
As important as understanding the gospel is, it is not sufficient. Churches must be committed to the gospel. That is, churches must be devoted to the application of the gospel throughout church life. We have already spoken of how the meaning of the gospel must be taught, and reiterated. Beyond this, the believer’s position in Christ,… Continue Reading
Since the gospel is the basis and boundary of Christianity, anyone interested in conserving Christianity ought to be interested in conserving the gospel. A cursory glance at church history shows that the gospel has at times gone into near-eclipse, and this while official Christendom remained prominent. Such historical phenomena show that self-identifying with Christianity does… Continue Reading
A few weeks ago, I posted my opinion that the form of Christianity which omits certain distinctives is a truncated and emaciated Christianity. Conservative Christianity, as much as it is accused of adding non-essentials, is simply trying to preserve a healthy, full-orbed Christianity that can weather the era it is in, and be passed on… Continue Reading
In the free worship tradition, almost nothing is as frowned upon as the idea of prayers that are read or planned. These are seen as the embodiment of vain repetitions, and a clear sign of dead formalism and mindless liturgicalism. For years, I thought that unrehearsed, spontaneous, off-the-cuff prayers demonstrated how very real our connection… Continue Reading
In 1880 J.S. Curwen wrote Studies in Worship Music, an attempt to study the psalms and hymns sung throughout English churches of the time. The final third of the book records Curwen’s eye-witness accounts of the churches he visited. The following are some excerpts from his visit to the Metropolitan Tabernacle. “Mr. Spurgeon evidently takes delight… Continue Reading
I can’t imagine that readers of this blog attend churches where the Scriptures are never read during corporate worship. However, we may find that many attend churches where the reading of Scripture is not practicedas an end in itself. In many churches, the Scriptures are read simply before the sermon, or to preface the sermon, as… Continue Reading
Our fathers had much to say about stillness, and by stillness they meant the absence of motion or the absence of noise or both. They felt that they must be still for at least a part of the day, or that day would be wasted. God can be known in the tumult of the world… Continue Reading