The singing of psalms has all but disappeared from many congregations, unless you count the “As the Deer” chorus as a singing of a psalm. (Lifting the first line from a psalm and adding words about your desire to eventually worship generally doesn’t count.) One cannot help feeling that many congregations treat their hymnal as… Continue Reading
In this series, I hope to highlight the benefits of certain worship practices that are sometimes missing from the free-worship traditions. I do not mean to patronize those already doing so; I hope to show how a wise use of these practices can only improve the worship we offer God. A Call to Worship is often… Continue Reading
The act of judging a foreign culture for meaning and moral value is attacked by post-modern critics as an example of bigotry. After all, what standard are we using to judge another culture? Does the Bible present a cultural norm to which all cultures must conform? If not, who are we to use the Christianity… Continue Reading
One of thorniest issues facing Christian missions is the propriety and possibility of judging other cultures. Since all cultures are affected by both human depravity and common grace, and since God’s redeeming grace and revealed truth have come to some cultures, it is possible to make judgments regarding cultures. We cannot judge the idea of… Continue Reading
In a recent interview, mission leader C. Douglas McConnell was asked to name the greatest challenge facing the global evangelical missions movement today. He responded, “There is a critical need for frontier mission types to develop an ecclesiology. We are church planters but in some cases we do not understand what a church is theologically… Continue Reading
South Africa has more official languages than any other country: English, Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele, Tswana, Sotho, Pedi, Venda, Tsonga and Swazi. These languages represent a slice of the various people-groups in South Africa, to say nothing of the Malay and Chinese populations, the various European groups, and the mixed populations that have developed their… Continue Reading
Millard Erickson, in his Christian Theology, speaks of two different approaches to contemporising the message of Christianity. One is to translate the message, and the other is to transform it. Translators try to keep the integrity of the Christian message intact, but seek to translate it as far as possible to the culture, separated from the… Continue Reading
Included in faulty ideas of what legalism is are the notions that it is interpreting Scripture literally, making applications for modern living, exhorting submission, and judging various cultural phenomena for their meaning. Now it is obvious that legalism cannot be all of these things. In fact, when examined closely, legalism is not any of these… Continue Reading
Christians often imbibe facile and unhelpful definitions of legalism. One of these is the idea that legalism is the act of judging the meaning cultural phenomena, or to put it another way, the act of judging the meaning of things in our world. Christians live in the world, and therefore Christianity is to be lived out… Continue Reading
Conservative Christians are often accused of legalism. To understand what legalism is, we must first understand what it is not. One common misconception is that legalism is teaching and requiring God’s people to submit to Him. People take to authority today like they take to a cold slap in the face. Anti-authoritarianism is preached in… Continue Reading
Avoiding legalism is firstly a matter of rightly understanding what it is. To begin with, we must reject incorrect definitions of legalism. One such error is the belief that interpreting Scripture literally and applying it to modern living is a form of legalism. For some people, legalism is another word for taking Scripture literally, and… Continue Reading
Conservative Christians are not strangers to the charge of legalism. Begin tinkering with the sacred cows of worship music and Christian culture, and you will attract the title legalist like running past a hive with honey on your head attracts a swarm. As a pastor, one of the most painful things that can be said… Continue Reading