- Write newsletter for all my ministry partners
- Write article about this last weekends events
- Blog again someday
- Post Lone Strangers lyrics on our site.
- Finish theborseths.com
- Learn the following songs (before friday)
- I give you my heart (Shane and Shane)
- Joyful Joyful (From the Hymns: Ancient and Modern CD)
- Kindness (Chris Tomlin)
- Forever (Chris Tomlin)
- Create set list for Deeper tonight
- Finalize Set list for Sunday
- Write song about Brad’s message last Sunday
This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 21st, 2004 at 9:55 amand is filed under Matt's External Brain.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Hey, wait - I didn’t give you permission to post my lyrics. I’m calling the RIAA, ASCAP, BMI, NAMBLA, and anyone else that will listen!
Hi Matt,
Check out this interesting article on the “Worship Wars” — http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/8457641.htm?1c
A song about Brad’s sermon… please don’t use any amputation imagery, okay?
I have a little chorus that I wrote a hundred years ago:
We are Your hands
We are Your feet
We are the hearts where Your love beats
And with our lips, Your Word speaks
Those with ears
Let them hear:
The Kingdom’s nearer than we think.
those are great lyrics kathy.
matt: yay chris tomlin! ;)
Kathy - Can I use that as a chorus? Its cool :)
Angie M - I would probably do all Chris Tomlin Songs if that weren’t annoying (Chris Tomlin doesn’t even do all Chris Tomlin songs)
Dan - that link requires that one registers on the site :(
Matt, about that Deeper set last night. I am holding you and Pat (and the Youth Group accomplices) totally responsible for getting me so wound up and pumped that I couldn’t sleep last night. It felt like I had done aerobics for an hour before bedtime (oops, maybe that’s the problem)! I must tell you that it was incredible and the only other place I’ve ever heard worship songs done so well was on the Main Stage at Cornerstone Fest.
Hmm, maybe you guys should skip LT and go to Cornerstone!
Can you use this chorus? Duh. I’d prefer that it sit in my little unfinished song binder for another hundred years, but maybe you could twist my arm really hard. But don’t amputate it.
Me being a good Philly guy, already registered for the site that Dan put up..and this might be illegal, but hey, it’s not my website!
I have a slight agreement with some of this arice…but, personally Michael Horton can drive me nuts…also, have any of these people read the Psalms? Pretty “me” (i.e. David) centered there…but they weren’t songs…oh wait…they were…
also, i don’t think the early church sang hymns and i am not too sure they had a doxology…heck, did they have church buildings? All of our worship services are “infected” (not necessarily in a bad way) with culture…postmodern and modern (by the way, last i checked, Modern/Reformation worship is not the pinnacle of the church’s existance)
sorry for my rant…here is the article…
Here is the article:
Urging a return to ‘God-centered’ worship
By Jim Remsen
Inquirer Faith Life Editor
You love the Lord. You go to church weekly and pour out your heart to him in worship. He is pleased, right?
Maybe and maybe not, John Calvin would caution.
“God disapproves of all modes of worship not expressly sanctioned by His word,” the 16th-century pillar of the Protestant Reformation once wrote.
Calvin is one of many Christian luminaries quoted in Give Praise to God: A Vision for Reforming Worship, a book of essays recently released by the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. But the ultimate authority the book cites for its worship model is the Bible itself.
The Philadelphia-based national alliance is a guardian of the historic mores of Reformed Protestantism, chief among them what is called the regulative principle of worship. According to Give Praise to God, the regulative principle holds that “God specifically commanded the elements he desired in worship (reading the word, preaching the word, singing, prayer, administration of the sacraments, oaths and vows, etc.). To and from these, we may neither add nor take away.”
People have been adding and subtracting, though - and not only in Pentecostal and nondenominational churches, but even in the alliance’s core Presbyterian, Reformed and Baptist following. In recent decades, the alliance has watched in alarm as strict regulative worship has given way to up-tempo music, free-form sermons, use of icons and other liturgical arts, and the absence of creeds and oaths.
At a conference here next week, the alliance will promote regulative worship, which it says is drawn from scriptural instructions and warnings in Exodus, Deuteronomy, Matthew and several of Paul’s letters.
The alliance extols the approach of the late Rev. James Montgomery Boice, who led Tenth Presbyterian Church in Center City - and the alliance - until his death from cancer in 2000. Steady as a metronome, Boice took his worshipers through: call to worship; doxology; psalm reading and responsive song; creedal confession; (lengthy) pastoral prayer; Scripture reading with pastoral explanation; offertory; singing of “the great hymns of the faith” (often derived from psalms); long sermon of “systematic expository preaching” through the books of the Bible; hymn; benediction.
In the feud often called “the worship wars,” critics have called regulative worship outdated, puritanical and chilly as the northern European climes that nurtured it. Michael Horton, an alliance leader, counters that it is “logocentric and theocentric,” whereas much current worship bespeaks consumerism, marketing and “a modern therapeutic orientation in its preaching, liturgy and music.”
Horton, a professor of apologetics and historical theology at Westminster Seminary near San Diego, will head a seminar here Friday promoting “God-centered worship.”
In a phone interview Monday, Horton said such worship echoes the example in the book of Nehemiah in which the Torah was read from a platform and listeners “wept in confession of sins as a people and as individuals.” A declaration of forgiveness followed as a “covenant renewal.”
Nowadays, Horton said, many churches believe that “instead of being sinners who need to be saved, we are dysfunctional people who need recovery.”
The danger of modern worship, with its long stretches of praise music, is not that one will be smitten by an angry God or lose salvation, Horton said, but that one might not know God properly.
“Paul says in Colossians that music is to teach and admonish one another with melody in our hearts, so the word of God will dwell in us richly… . Is our music doing that? Typically, [modern] praise choruses don’t focus on what God has done for us in Christ but on my response to all of that. I praise you. I serve you. I, I, I. The music has shifted from rehearsing Christ’s work in the history of redemption. It happens with organs in some churches and guitars in others.”
As head of the Institute for Worship Studies, Northern Baptist Theological Seminary professor Robert Webber is a longtime observer of the worship wars. He said regulative-principle exponents like the alliance have limited influence because they reject the use of worship arts such as icons and praise dance that most Christians, even Reformed evangelicals, are embracing.
At the same time, Webber, a nondenominational Christian, seconded the alliance’s critique of “the shallowness of evangelical worship.”
Too much praise music, he said, “is about ‘my personal experience with God’ and not reflective of what worship ought to be, which is God’s mission to the world, to save and restore the whole creative order. It’s an epistemological shift from the objective work of God to my subjective experience.”