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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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On December 7, 2015 By In Worship

Getting the best from the Lectionary

During advent at Emmanuel we’re following the readings in the Revised Common Lectionary. This can provoke a range of reactions from Reformed and evangelical Christians, and I thought it might therefore be worth recording some of my own reflections on the strengths (and weaknesses) of this approach.

I should start by conceding that there are some obvious problems with following the lectionary – at least, there would be if we did it all the time. For example:

  1. The readings are frequently very short – too short to get any sense of the context.
  2. The first problem is exacerbated by the fact that the readings often miss off significant portions at the beginning and end (or even sometimes, in some lectionaries, the middle) of the passages being read, which are necessary to make sense of them.
  3. Many parts of the Bible are not included at all (at least in the readings for Sundays), with the result that they disappear entirely from the corporate church’s worship. This really would be a serious problem if (as many lectionary fans wish) the whole church throughout the world adopted the same lectionary.
  4. The logic and coherence of sequential exposition of sequential passages in a single book is lost. (For what it’s worth, I think that many preachers tend to overestimate the value of sequential exposition in this respect. If you’re a preacher,  try asking a member of the congregation next Sunday what you preached on last week, and you’ll soon discover why, yet I think there is still something to be said for the point.)
  5. The familiar passages that (understandably) dominate lectionaries tend to become over-familiar, leading to a stereotyped picture of the Christian faith which loses the surprise-factor of the unfamiliar parts of the Bible. (I mean, how many lectionaries devote substantial attention to large portions of the book of Judges?)
  6. Related to the previous point, I’m afraid I wonder how many of the choices of readings in some lectionaries are dictated by theological prejudice against unpopular or controversial aspects of the Christian faith. Imprecatory Psalms are either ignored entirely or heavily edited; large portions of Leviticus, Joshua, Judges and the prophets fail to make an appearance; you get the picture.
  7. The choice of readings for particular seasons of the church year may at times reflect exegetical misunderstandings about the texts being read. Even if these misunderstandings were not present in the minds of the editors, they could easily be reinforced in the minds of congregations. For example, if the season of Advent is broadly about the anticipation of Jesus’ final return in glory, then the inclusion of Lk 21:25-36 is likely to reinforce the widely-held but (to my mind) mistaken reading of the Olivet Discourse as a prediction of this great event, rather than a prediction of the destruction of the Temple in AD70.

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On October 20, 2015 By In Theology, Worship

How to Become a Church Planting Church

autumn moments

I recently attended a Church conference sponsored by the Acts 29 Network and Origin Church of Roseville called, “Simple Effective Church.”

Origin Church RosevilleOrigin Church hosted the conference at their Roseville campus and described the event as, “uncomplicated systems for thriving disciple making.” A majority of the church leaders in attendance fell into the reformed or evangelical brand of independent churches, although I met a few from baptist and presbyterian denominations. Our collared priest outed our group as from a more liturgical background.

Brian Howard Acts 29 NetworkThe event had three sessions led by Pastor Brian Howard. Pastor Brian co-founded Sojourn Network, a national church planting network, currently leads Church Multiplication for Pacific Church Network, and serves as Network Director of Acts 29 US West.

His three sessions were entitled, “How to Become a Church Planting Church,” “No One Even Knows Your Church Exists: What you can do about it,” and  “Avoiding Elder Blowup: How to do leadership development from day one.”

Become a Church planting Church

Howard emphasized that we need to view missions as a three-pronged category that includes “local, domestic, and international” missionary efforts. Noting that while many churches focus on setting aside a percentage for international missions, perhaps we ought to consider adding a local church planting line to our  budgets and plans for giving. It is also worth considering his suggestion to “adopt and support an existing church planter” and to, “partner with other churches in supporting a church planter.”

No One Even Knows Your Church Exists

If your church closed today, would anyone in your community notice? For those of us in liturgical churches, it is much easier to focus inwardly on the beauty of our own services. So where do we start? Howard suggests that the basic goal of church outreach is to develop a long term presence in your community. “Church is more than a crowd,” he said. “We all know that numerical growth is not the same thing as spiritual success.”

According to Howard, that long term presence begins with identifying your target area and researching the ways you can serve the community around your church. “We mapped out the neighborhood around my church and my home, and then we pulled up the census data for this region.” This “research” plan is to help church leaders navigate their own culture and what they hope to create. Age, ethnicity, language, religious preference, and income were all considered as relevant data points to help church planters understand what kinds of outreach they might explore. For example, a historically Roman Catholic demographic like latinos might be more primed for a liturgically grounded service, while outreach to an economically challenged community might take the form of a church-based medical clinic or food closet.

“Whatever you do, be seen as a community of love,” said Howard. He then challenged the group of pastors and leaders to each brainstorm twenty new ideas for outreach.

Avoiding an Elder Blow-Up

His third talk was important in a post-denomination church planting context. Many are familiar with the rise and fall of Mark Driscoll and a number of other “non-denominational” network-style planters. As I listened to the talk, I considered how much of Howard’s advice was embedded in the historical polity of both the presbyterian and episcopal models. I couldn’t imagine attempting to plant a church on my own and perhaps this is why Acts 29 Network has become so popular.

Brian Howard suggests plants create an “outside advisory team,” where pastors can, “communicate their plans from day one.” While encouraging churches to develop leaders as a priority, he also advised against installing men, “who were formerly elders in other churches.” While I disagree with this sentiment, I can understand where Howard is coming from with elders who move from church to church to gain control.

He concluding remarks suggested plants implement a more involved leadership development structure in the elder process. I’ve been working through Dr. Tony Baron’s work called, “The Cross and the Towel: Leading to a Higher Calling” (amazon) and would highly recommended anything by Dr. Baron on the subject.

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