Posts with the tag “worship-service”

If anyone qualifies as the godfather, or better, the midwife of contemporary Christian music, it would be Chuck Fromm. From 1975 to 2000 Fromm was the head of Maranatha Music in Costa Mesa, California, the birthplace and source of the contemporary genre in the early 1970’s. He was in the middle of organizing and promoting the hugely popular Friday and Saturday night Christian concerts that were at...  Read More

For many years I have sensed that our Sundays feel rushed. When years ago the evening service was at 6:30 PM, the time between services was more restful. The extra hour turn-around time made a significant difference. During the pandemic we experienced a few Sundays with a 10:00 AM service (to avoid the on-line congestion at 11:00 AM, you may recall). Many of our members loved it. They thought it w...  Read More

Let’s return to having worship services each morning, Tuesday to Thursday…They can be held from 8:30-9:30 or thereabouts…. Each evening General Assembly could host a concert. Choirs, soloists, and musicians all across the sacred music spectrum could perform. These concerts could be held from 7:00-8:00 or thereabouts. I might dare to hope that this two-pronged approach would make everyone happy. An...  Read More

It can be argued that John Calvin is among the most important liturgists in the history of the Christian church. Indeed, I have attempted to make the case that his Genevan Psalter of 1542 and its Form of Church Prayers established a norm for worship.The Form’s stress on the ordinary means of grace (word, prayer, sacraments), its emphasis on preaching and congregational singing, its elimination of ...  Read More

Which is more likely today, liturgical sameness or liturgical strangeness? Which is more damaging to the integrity of Protestant denominations? Are we suffocating from liturgical uniformity--encountering the same old predictable things in the Reformed churches we attend? Or, are we unsettled by the unusual liturgical activity that we encounter in our sister churches and regional assemblies? Have w...  Read More

After the 2017 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America, a 30-something church-planter asked me if I attended the worship services. I said I did. He asked, “Why?” Why do you torment yourself?” “Didn’t you attend?” I responded. “No, I never do.” Well, I thought, after hearing this same admission at the Assembly multiple times, this is a trend, isn’t it?When I joined the PCA nearly 40 ...  Read More

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Since the publication of Jay Adam’s Competent to Counsel in the 1970’s, a revolution in counseling has occurred among American evangelicals. So has a revolution in worship.Do counseling and what we have come to call one’s “style” of worship have anything to do with each other? Are there ways of worship that are more congenial to the aims of biblical counseling than others? “Of course,” experienced...  Read More

During the Reformation era, debates raged over what things must be considered crucial to Christian faith and practice, and what could be considered adiaphora (Latin for “things indifferent”). All sides agreed that the doctrines of the Trinity, the atonement, and justification were central. But what about worship issues? What about the elements of worship, sacramental theology, church architecture,...  Read More

The dust that can be seen swirling in the distance is the aftereffects of Richard A. Muller's scholarly avalanche. He has marshaled mountains of historical evidence to bury the various twentieth century agenda-driven "Calvin against the Calvinist" schemes devised to drive a wedge between the great Reformer and the period known as "orthodoxy" or "Protestant scholasticism" (roughly 1560-1725). Somet...  Read More

What is worship that is not centered on God? Worship that is centered on something other than God is not worship, we answer simply. It may be a religious gathering, it may be exciting, it may be informative, but it is not, by definition, worship. Among the primary virtues of traditional Reformed worship is its God-centeredness. Its structure and content leave no ambiguity about what the people of ...  Read More

This is a classic worship service in the tradition of Reformed (or Presbyterian) Protestantism and has been used at the historic Independent Presbyterian Church of Savannah, GA. Given the diversity of styles of worship today, what we do is unfamiliar to many of our visitors. We offer the following booklet as an aid in understanding the meaning of each part of the service....  Read More

What was it like to be a member of the OT church? What did they believe? What was their experience of God, personally and corporately? Did their religion make them happy or was it a burden? Were they aliens in another age or our brothers and sisters of long ago? As we look through the window of the Psalms we discover that here indeed is the same God, now disclosed to us in Christ, and here are peo...  Read More

Might it possibly be the case that some ministers fail to read Scripture in public worship because they feel inadequately acquainted with the text? Might it also be the case that the effectiveness of the public reading of Scripture might be enhanced by succinct introductions to the chapters to be read? Behind the following work is the hunch that both of these questions ought to be answered in the ...  Read More