Archives for January 2016

In Defense of Hymns (And Praise Songs)

It’s maybe a little foolish to seek to intervene between warring parties. Especially when you are trying to mediate the conflict by arguing that both sides are a little bit right but mostly wrong. But if we all shied away from quixotic endeavors, there would be no Quixote. In the last couple posts, we’ve considered […]

Mormonism and Evangelism

I received this question from one of our members via email. I sent  the response which follows. As these are common questions and the answer is of more general use, I also share them here. (Used with permission and change of name) Hi Pastor, I hope you are having a good day and like the […]

Worship Wars and the Bible

To what source can we turn to shine light on how to navigate (or, more preferably, avoid) the worship wars? Do we just go with our gut? What we like? What we think? What we feel? If we really want to know what’s right when it comes to worship, we’d better seek the answers in […]

Worship Wars: Having it Your Way Might Be Exactly What you Don’t Need

I have a friend who pastored the same church for nearly twenty years. It almost did him in. He tried to keep everyone happy (always a losing proposition, of course), but they were un-keep-happible. Highly conflicted. Especially around worship style. “We need contemporary music to reach younger people,” some folks reasonably recognized. OK, so we’ll […]

Books that Didn’t Make the Cut: 1 Enoch

It’s a difficult thing to write a blog post on a book of the Pseudepigrapha.  One’s head hurts trying to think through the complexities of it: there is what the Old Testament says, then there is the pseudepigraphal work that interprets said OT text, then there is the New Testament interaction with the OT text, […]