Scott Aniol

Scott Aniol is the founder and Executive Director of Religious Affections Ministries. He is Chair of the Worship Ministry Department at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he teaches courses in ministry, worship, hymnology, aesthetics, culture, and philosophy. He is the author of Worship in Song: A Biblical Approach to Music and Worship, Sound Worship: A Guide to Making Musical Choices in a Noisy World, and By the Waters of Babylon: Worship in a Post-Christian Culture, and speaks around the country in churches and conferences. He is an elder in his church in Fort Worth, TX where he resides with his wife and four children.

Author Archives: Scott Aniol

InTune for July 2009

InTune for July 2009

Click here for a FREE subscription to InTune. InTune is a newsletter for church music directors, church musicians, and pastors (especially those without qualified music directors). Each issue includes reviews of church music, including carefully selected choral music, instrumental selections, etc. for the local church as well as practical articles, CD recommendations, church music tips,… Continue Reading

Train Your Child's Heart Before His Head

Train Your Child's Heart Before His Head

Children learn to worship God primarily through participating in rightly ordered worship. Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it. Any concerned, Christian parent is committed to training his or her child to be obedient to the Lord and His Word. From… Continue Reading

Join Our Interactive Facebook Community

Join Our Interactive Facebook Community

Are you on Facebook?  Do you enjoy the posts that you read here at Religious Affections Ministries’ web site?Did you know Religious Affections Ministries is syndicated through Facebook? Simply become a “fan” of ours on Facebook by clicking here!  There’s no cost and it takes less than three seconds.  By becoming a “fan” you’ll be… Continue Reading

How Can We Teach Our Children To Worship?

How Can We Teach Our Children To Worship?

The only way children learn to worship God rightly is by observing right worship. Could it be that worship is such a mess today because previous generations did not expect their children to worship with their parents? I plan to consider this topic more in the coming days. Continue Reading

Weddings: Opportunities to Proclaim the Gospel

Weddings: Opportunities to Proclaim the Gospel

For many Christians, wedding are unfortunately an opportunity for sentimentalism, extravagant pageantry, and smarmy music. It is my burden however, that a Christian wedding be an opportunity to magnify Christ and proclaim his gospel. Tomorrow I will be participating in the wedding ceremony of my sister-in-law, both as a minister and as a musician. My… Continue Reading

Introducing ChurchMusicFiles.com!

Introducing ChurchMusicFiles.com!

I am thrilled to announce a new web site that we have been developing that seeks to help pastors, church music directors, and other church music directors as they choose music. If you have spent any time at all choosing music for your church, you know how much time, effort, sweat, and (sometimes) tears (!)… 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 Plea for Serious, Thoughtful Song Leading

A Plea for Serious, Thoughtful Song Leading

Let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire. My fellow song leaders and pastors, If we find value in having song leaders (and I am not certain they are always needed), must we make a mockery of the worship of our Lord by insisting upon… Continue Reading

On Taxonomies of Music/Worship Philosophies

On Taxonomies of Music/Worship Philosophies

There have been several interesting taxonomies of music/worship philosophies developed recently that have spurred me to think through classifying various positions. They intrigued me mostly because I found them unhelpful and missing key nuances, but each has merit that I think should be considered. The first was a recently published counterpoint book published by Broadman… 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

Two Modern Novel Recommendations

Two Modern Novel Recommendations

Fiction is good for the soul. Good fictional literature grips the imagination and shapes the affections, both important for the life of faith. For that reason, I regularly make it a practice to read fiction amidst all of the other theological, musicological, cultural, philosophical, and historical reading I do. I also make it a practice… Continue Reading

Excellent Book on Christians and Alcohol

Besides the issue of music, there is perhaps no more controversial topic for Christians today than whether believers should partake of alcoholic beverages. Two potential errors exist in this discussion. First, some Christians argue that Christians in the first century (i.e. during and after Jesus’ ministry on earth) did not drink beverages with any alcoholic… Continue Reading

Shall We Dance?

Shall We Dance?

When discussing what are or are not acceptable elements for worship, some will raise the issue of dancing. “David danced before the Lord, didn’t he?” Here are just some sketches of thoughts about this issue: 1. Whatever “dancing” is in the Old Testament, it is nowhere found in the New Testament, so a strict observance… Continue Reading

Correcting Categories, Part 10 – Conclusion

Correcting Categories, Part 10 – Conclusion

If the Church today is going to be able to rightly apply biblical principles to music and worship, it must recover important categories that are either assumed and implied or explicitly taught by biblical authors. Music communicates by means of emotional metaphor. buy viagra from india Spiritual response of the affections is fundamentally distinct from… Continue Reading

Correcting Categories, Part 9 – the Church Today

Correcting Categories, Part 9 – the Church Today

Today, the influences of Modernism, Revivalism, and Charismaticism in the Church’s understanding of the purpose and function of music in worship cannot be overestimated. First, because of Modernism, most Christian fail to understand the nature of emotion in human spirituality and worship. Most Christians see no fundamental distinction between a response of the affections and… Continue Reading

Correcting Categories, Part 8 – Music and Emotion in the Church

Correcting Categories, Part 8 – Music and Emotion in the Church

A Radical Change Protestants have historically been suspect of Dionysian forms of music, especially in sacred contexts, because they recognized that spiritual life resides in the affections and not in the physical feelings. They did not want to stimulate artificial experiences of the senses but rather nurture biblical affections through the mind and spirit. Presbyterians,… Continue Reading

Correcting Categories, Part 7 – The Nature of Pop

Correcting Categories, Part 7 – The Nature of Pop

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

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