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On December 2, 2016 By In Theology, Worship

10 Reasons to Celebrate the Church Calendar

Advent has begun in full force. The pro-calendar apologists have started to fight for their cause. The anti-calendar intoleristas are in full Puritan gear armed to fight for their white walls and the right to preach on Leviticus on Christmas morning.

I side with the pro-calendar party. We believe we can make America great again by incorporating a heavy dose of Jesus throughout the year. My claim is that many evangelical churches that share a slight Catholic-phobia towards the Church Calendar are already drinking much of the calendar. Most Baptist churches here in the South—who have always celebrated Christmas and Easter–are now adopting the Advent Wreath by prominently displaying it on Sunday morning. My modest proposal is to encourage these churches to take a few more steps.

I should say at the outset that I have no intention to take this to the “next level.” I am a happy ecumenical Protestant who has zero interest in jumping onto the Vatican bandwagon. I say this to stress that I am not advocating the officialization of the celebration of saints and their pets into the life of the Church. I think the Church does best and remains most faithful to the Holy Scriptures when she sticks to Jesus and his life and its effects in the world. Keep it simple students!

With that in mind, here are ten reasons I think evangelicals should celebrate the Church Calendar:

First, for those of us in the Reformed tradition, we should note that there is precedent for such observance. For instance, the Second Helvetic Confession of 1566 states (XXIV):

“Moreover, if the churches do religiously celebrate the memory of the Lord’s Nativity, Circumcision, Passion, Resurrection, and of his Ascension into heaven, and the sending of the    Holy Spirit upon his disciples, according to Christian liberty, we do very well approve of it.”

The continental Reformers differed with our Scottish brothers on these issues. Celebrating the Church Calendar can be unmistakably reformational.

Second, the Church Calendar helps us to see the world through the life of Messiah Jesus. We live in an era where political messiahs come and go. One way to de-emphasize the politics of man is to proclaim the politics of heaven. We do this most beautifully by following the Church Calendar and teaching our people and the nations about the only true Lord.

Third, the Church Calendar can serve to differentiate God’s time from the world’s time. Christians ought to give the question “What time is it?” a fundamentally different answer. It may be 9:22AM central time as I write these words, but the Christian knows that it’s 9:22AM in God’s world. God controls time, and he also orders time, and he has chosen Jesus (Hebrews 1) to speak. We redeem time most Christianly when Jesus is the center of it.

Fourth, some may ask: “Isn’t Jesus always proclaimed whether we celebrate Epiphany or not?” Of course He is. And I do not doubt the motives of many who do not follow the Church Calendar. My response, however, is that we can’t say everything about Jesus all the time, which is why we need to walk through his life and give emphasis to different portions of his life so that God’s people can know that Easter is not complete without an Ascension Sunday. Celebrating the Church Calendar helps us to understand the total Christ and his total life.

Fifth, celebrating the Church Calendar gives us parents beautiful ways to catechize our children with Jesus. Our children’s ABCs need to be Christocentric. They need to know that life only makes sense because Jesus has come for us. Numbers, letters, and playtime are taught best when Jesus rules supremely in the catechism of the home. Children love stories. Story-telling is fundamentally the role of the Calendar. The Calendar helps our kids to be formed by right chronological habits. It helps our children to know we are part of a larger story.

Sixth, celebrating the Church Calendar is useful for counseling. Calendar use is helpful to those who grieve. The Church Calendar most accurately reflects the eclectic nature of the Psalmist who laments, rejoices, and prays. Many who grieve may be a part of a community that is strict, abstract, and heavily theological. While good exegesis is good for the soul and while good systematic theology cheers the mind, a three-year series through I Corinthians can frustrate the broken-hearted. Walk the broken through the Calendar, and she will understand that Easter comes after Lent; that joy comes after sorrow. On the other hand, we can use the Calendar to teach the over-realized optimist that we need to set periods of time to focus on grieving and confessing our sins to the Lord of Calvary.

Seventh, celebrating the Church Calendar gives us an opportunity to add colors to the Church. The Christian faith is true and good, but it is also beautiful. This may seem like a minor point, but colors add to the brilliance of Church life. The Bible loves colors. It shows the favor of God (Gen. 37:3). The Church Calendar glorifies natural colors and gives them greater meaning.

Eighth, celebrating the Church Calendar gives us something to talk about. You can’t speak of the Advent Wreath without talking about hope, joy, love, and peace. The Church Calendar helps us to focus on those Christian virtues that form us as a community.

Ninth, celebrating the Church Calendar also encourages our children, friends, and unbelievers to ask questions about the faith. Why are there forty days in Lent? Why are there 12 days in Christmas? Why is purple the color of Lent? When questions arise, we draw people to the text where questions are answered and Jesus is revealed.

Finally, celebrating the Church Calendar gives us a big gospel. We are an expectant people. We no longer wait for a Messiah, but we expect the Messiah to come again and again into our lives to disperse the gloomy clouds of night and death’s dark shadows put to flight. We need the Calendar because we lose sight of what’s important. We need the Calendar because the Gospel is too big and our Lord too mighty. The Calendar focuses our attention carefully, chronologically, and conscientiously through the work of Jesus and what that work means for us and the world.

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On November 26, 2016 By In Worship

Fasting in Advent

This coming Sunday marks the beginning of Advent. This period of the church year has traditionally been viewed by Christians as a time of waiting, of looking forward, of expectation.

Most obviously, Advent is a time of looking forward to the celebration of our Lord’s birth at Christmas. Advent is also a time when Christians have traditionally looked forward to our Lord’s return in glory on the Last Day.

With these themes in mind, it’s surely no accident that Advent has also been associated in many church traditions with the practice of fasting. Just as Advent is a time of unfulfilled hope, when we’re longing for something that hasn’t yet come; so also fasting is a way of saying with our bodies that things in the world aren’t yet quite right.

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On November 22, 2016 By In Worship

Help the toddlers come

If you go to a church like the one at which I serve in London, England, where the children are welcomed into the main church service along with the adults, you’ll have the opportunity to train your (and indeed other people’s – see point 5 below) children in the rhythms and habits of worship as they grow up.

This raises some practical challenges, particularly as children grow through the various boundaries that they encounter between infancy and adulthood. One of the most significant boundaries is reached sometime between the ages of 1 and 2, when the children become toddlers, and are old enough to start doing things other than gurgle, feed, vomit, cry, or lie asleep in Mum’s or Dad’s arms.

At this point, children start being able to stand, sit on chairs, kneel, talk, raise their hands, and so on. However, at this tender age they can’t be expected to start participating fully in the service. They can stand, sit and kneel unaided, but they can’t do so unprompted; they can talk and sing, but they can’t read the words of the prayers and songs; and so on.

So then, how can we help children to increase their participation in the service as they grow through the toddler years?

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On October 31, 2016 By In Culture, Music, Worship

A Mighty Fortress: Then & Now

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A Mighty Fortress: Then & Now

Unless you grew up in a Lutheran church, chances are that you’re singing quite a bit different version of that great hymn of the Reformation, Ein feste burg ist unser Gott or A Mighty Fortress is Our God. This great hymn based on Psalm 46 has a story that the average evangelical Christian has not heard. Here’s an audio post with sound clips explaining how this hymn has changed over the years. There is more that could be said and those who could say it more eloquently, but my hope is that we can begin to better appreciate this hymn in ways we hadn’t before.

Here’s the direct link to the audio file: https://kuyperian.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/EinFesteBurg-ThroughHistory.mp3.

-Jarrod Richey

P.S. – Here’s a link to the PDF of the Lutheran version closest to what Martin Luther penned:

 https://kuyperian.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/AMightyFortress-Lutheran-LETTER-.pdf

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On October 17, 2016 By In Worship

Formality in the Lord’s Supper

How did the formal liturgical ritual of the Lord’s Supper develop in the early years of the church? More importantly, why did it do so, and should it have done so?

It is often noted at, in the very earliest days of the church, though the believers indeed gathered regularly to “break bread” together, this appears to have been a fairly informal occasion enjoyed as part of a larger meal, rather than a ritual associated with a more formal service of worship (see for example Acts 2:42-47, and possibly Luke 22 and 1 Corinthians 11). This has led some to argue against the practice now found in the vast majority of churches, where the Lord’s Supper is detached from the domestic mealtime context and located instead within a service of worship. This, they claim, represents an illegitimate development. If we want to be faithful to our Lord’s original intention, the argument runs, we should get rid of all those “churchy rituals” and instead simply have a meal together, perhaps “breaking bread” in that context.

For what it’s worth, I think it’s a great idea for the whole church to get together for meals. But the above argument doesn’t work, and it’s important to see why.

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On June 25, 2016 By In Culture, Family and Children, Worship

What do young people really need from church?

In the last two or three generations, so many new and different answers have been given to this question that you could be forgiven for failing to keep up.

What young people need from their church, the gurus tell us, is specialised youth ministry, and specialised youth workers, and contemporary music, and midweek sports clubs to keep kids out of trouble, and midweek social activities to keep teens off the streets, and accessible worship, and youth-centred sermons, and shorter sermons, and interactive sermons, and audio-visual sermons, and online resources, and social media engagement, and a thousand and one other things. If churches don’t provide these things, we are warned, young people will undoubtedly turn away from Christ, we will have failed the next generation, the church will wither and die, and it will all be our fault.

Well, I’m sceptical. It seems to me highly unlikely that any of these activities are essential for young people to keep following Christ, for at least two reasons: First, none of them have a particularly high profile in the Bible. Second, for around 2000 years, countless millions of Christian young people have managed to grow into well-adjusted Christian adults without any of them.

So whatever benefit there might be in some of them (and I’m a fan of some contemporary Christian worship music, for example), none of them can reasonably be regarded as essential.

So then, what do young people really need from church?

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On April 15, 2016 By In Culture, Politics, Theology, Worship

The doxological foundations of a Christian social order

Introduction

In recent years, various writers have given some thought to the shape of a distinctively Christian social order: What would the world look like if large numbers of people turned to Christ and sought to live out their faith in every sphere of life?

This is an important question for at least two reasons. The first is of particular concern to me, as a Minister in London England: this issue has been almost entirely neglected in contemporary British evangelicalism. While God has blessed us richly in the last century or so with a rediscovery of the priority of biblical preaching, personal faith, evangelism, church planting and so on, we have not given enough thought to the ways in which the gospel should impact the wider structures of society – the life of nations, our educational systems, the media, the law, politics, medicine, the arts, and so on. It’s about time that we did.

Second, these questions about the nature of a Christian social order are not merely peripheral or academic. In the contrary, the answers we give to them will profoundly shape the kinds of decisions we make in many different areas of our lives. They will help us decide how we should educate our children, what kind of political change we ought to work and pray for, how we should vote (and what to expect from even the best candidates if they win), what strategies we should employ as we engage in public life, what kinds of attitudes we ought to have towards our vocations, and a whole range of other questions.

Indeed, almost every major decision (and a good many minor ones) we make in our lives as individuals, families, and churches presupposes some kind of answer to this question, since at its heart it is about the shape of history (past, present and future), and our interpretation of the past and our expectations for the future will necessarily shape our decisions in the present. Life is eschatology.

A neglected question

There is one important issue, however, which has been rather neglected (so far) as we have sought to reformulate our vision of a distinctively Christian social order. The question concerns the role of the church in bringing about the change we seek for. At a superficial level, it appears that the church’s role is far from neglected. Everyone affirms that the church must pray; everyone affirms that it is through the church’s evangelism and witness that people are draw to faith in Christ and begin to display the transformed lives that lie at the heart of the social change we desire; everyone affirms that the church has a vital role as a place of teaching, fellowship, encouragement, and so on; and most importantly of all everyone affirms that it is in response to the church’s prayers that God acts graciously in the world to bring about the social change that we long for. At their best, these affirmations have been self-consciously corporate in focus – that is to say, “the church” has meant not just “That collection of individual Christians who worship at St Ethelwine’s and then head off to pray and evangelise and so on in the hope that that Spirit of God would draw other men and women to faith,” but rather, “That congregation at St Ethelwine’s in response to whose corporate prayer, evangelism and community life the Spirit of God is at work to change the world.”

But this answer, it seems to me, stops short of explicating the full extent of the church’s place in this aspect of the Spirit’s work. In particular, it fails to address explicitly the vital importance of the church’s worship on the Lord’s Day as the first step in God’s plan to renew and re-create the world.

The worst effects of this are seen when Lord’s Day worship is replaced (almost) entirely with evangelistic activities, on the well-intentioned but ultimately misguided assumption that this is the best use of our precious time together if we want to see our communities transformed by the gospel. Of course evangelism is vitally important, but worship is vitally important too, and the two activities are not to be seen as a trade-off, as though doing one would detract from the effectiveness of the other. On the contrary, both are necessary (at different times, in different contexts), and it is in response to both of them (and also, as it happens, in response to the renewal of our relationships within the corporate life of the church) that God works to change the unbelieving world around us.

So what exactly is this missing element? How exactly is the church’s worship related to the Spirit’s work to renew and transform the world? The answer could be put like this: It is as the church gathers in the presence of God, lifted up in the Spirit into the heavenly places in Christ Jesus to worship before the Father, that God is at work both to renew and reorder the relationships between the members of the church and to transform the unbelieving world outside the church by drawing people to faith in Christ and bringing about the broader social change we long for.

To put it most simply, everything begins with worship. A Christian social order has doxological foundations.

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On February 13, 2016 By In Worship

Why you don’t need to preach without notes

Guest post by Jake Belder

One of the things I hear every now and then from newer preachers is that they have an ambition and desire to be able to preach with simple notes, or even without notes. At our college Communion service at St John’s College the other week, the visiting preacher preached without notes, and many people said afterwards how amazed they were by this. And rightly so – she didn’t stumble at all, the words ‘uh’ and ‘um’ were pretty much absent from her vocabulary, and the sermon was clear and structured.

Does this mean that all preachers should aim to preach without notes? When people suggest to me that they should, there are a few things I usually say in response. That is not because I presume to be an expert on preaching, but having done it regularly over the past three years, I have a few thoughts borne out of experience.

In the first place, every preacher has different abilities. The preacher at our Communion service clearly had the sort of memory that could just absorb things as she prepared, which could then be distilled verbally without any written prompts. My brain doesn’t work that way, however. It’s not that the stuff I take in while I prepare to preach doesn’t stay there, but the way my memory works, were I to go into the pulpit without notes, I would have a lot of difficulty calling it all back to mind. Give me a pen and paper and I can probably write it all out again, but to share it all verbally without prompts would be difficult for me. As a result, I use a script when I preach, and I’m unapologetic about that fact. I’ve worked hard during the week to expound the text and to put the sermon together, and when I get into the pulpit I want to make sure that everything that needs to be said gets said clearly.

Secondly, in response to this, some new preachers are concerned that if they use a script it will sound like they are reading an essay. That will only be true if you write it like an essay. One of the things you learn when you preach is to find your own voice. For me, that means that when I write a few sentences or a paragraph for a sermon, I read them back to myself to make sure it sounds like something I would say. It means I don’t always use proper grammar, that I don’t worry too much about colloquialisms, and that I sometimes write in a sort of ‘stream of consciousness’ style. And because I try and write in the way I speak, when I get into the pulpit, I only need to glance at a line I’ve written to remember what’s there. That frees me up from having to focus too much on it to make sure I read it correctly.

Sometimes after I’ve made these points, those who advocate preaching without notes might make one final comment, and that is to suggest that to preach a scripted sermon is to stifle the work of the Holy Spirit. Honestly, I think that is nonsense. When I preach, I can think of at least four distinct ways I depend on the work of the Spirit: first, to sanctify me; second, to write the truths of the passage I’m preaching from on my own heart first; third, to guide me in my study and preparation; and fourth, to take my words and to use them to open up the truth of God’s Word so that his people will be built up in faith. If that’s not depending on the Spirit, I don’t know what is. And yes, that means that sometimes when I’m preaching I will feel prompted to say things other than what I’ve written. But more often than not, it means I stick to what’s on the page in front of me.

If you can preach with bullet points or without notes, that’s great. But I don’t think that is a goal that every preacher needs to aspire to. God uses you as you are, with your unique abilities and gifts. And if your desire is simply to proclaim his Word faithfully so that his people are transformed more and more into the likeness of Christ, and so that others come to know the risen Lord Jesus, then he will do that work by his Spirit whether or not you need to have notes in front of you.

(And yes, that’s a photo of me preaching from a couple of years ago. With notes.)

Originally published here.

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On January 4, 2016 By In Worship

Towards the Reformation of worship

Recently at Emmanuel we had a sermon and discussion on the subject of worship – in particular, how we should go about the continual process of trying to reform our worship in accordance with Scripture. For many people, this raises an uncomfortable tension.

On the one hand, obviously there must be something to be said for seeking to shape our worship in accordance with Scripture. It may not always be easy to figure out all the details, but in principle, since everything comes under the Lordship of Christ, it’s hard to regard the practical and liturgical details of our church services as unimportant.

But on the other hand, we want to avoid conveying the idea that the liturgical niceties are the be-all-and-end-all of the reformation of worship. Without retreating into gnostic pietism, there is surely something to be said for the idea that the LORD accepts those whose hearts are right before him, who seek him in faith with a repentant spirit.

2 Chronicles 30 sheds some helpful light on the subject. In this chapter, King Hezekiah is in the process of reorganizing the Passover festival after generations of neglect. Clearly, the King is concerned with making sure that everything is done in a certain way, as some of the details in the text make clear (e.g. vv. 14-16). We don’t know how (un-)comfortable the people found these arrangements, though we can be sure that they were unfamiliar with them, since the Passover hadn’t been celebrated for so long. But regardless of this, the liturgical details matter. (more…)

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On December 11, 2015 By In Music, Worship

Pipes Worth Playing: Four Lost Lessons from the Pipe Organ

PipesWorthPlaying-FeaturedImageI know what you’re thinking. Organ: funeral, ball game, grand dusty cathedral. Why should modern Christians of such a technological age revisit a thousand year-old instrument? Don’t worry, I will not be trying to punch another hole in my Weird Music Preferences and Opinions card here. The truth is, our Christian culture is missing out on one of the great blessings to the Christian church, an instrument with capabilities that lend both strength and maturity to how we worship. Only a caricature of what it once was, the pipe organ has endured a history that has left it unloved or at best uninteresting to most Evangelical Christians in America today. By remembering its origin and the theology connected to its design, we can push air once again through the pipes with joy!

First, the pipe organ was built for the Christian church.

It was installed into the actual walls and framework of protestant and catholic churches and cathedrals throughout western civilization. No other instrument is installed with such permanence. This is not an argument of who had it first, rather this is a call for Christians to revisit the value of this instrument not in the narrow light of its present-day uses, but in the broader light of history. The pipe organ’s design was intentional, purposeful in church worship, and ever pointing to God as no other instrument was made to do.

Second, the pipe organ highlights God’s diligent sovereignty in creation.

  All is lifeless without His hand as the organ does not spontaneously create music without a master’s hands. The hundreds of pipes and sound combinations require the fingers of a master musician on the keyboard manual and the subsequent inspiration of air through the bellows and pipes. The hollow tubes of metal and wood stand dormant until this inspiration gives way to sound. The pipes of various lengths and sizes remind us that through the multitude of layers in God’s created order, all come under submission to the composer and chief musician who gives them life and purpose. The pipe organ’s bellows moving air through flue and reed pipes much like the human lungs moving air through larynx and vocal reeds is a creational model of the Holy Spirit breathing life and transforming cacophony into a symphony of sound that proclaims his goodness and glory. (more…)

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