Addressing One Another in Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs December 22, 2007

Bob Kauflin has a great post on his blog Worship Matters about addressing one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. He shares about a message he gave entitled “Spirit-Filled Singing”:

My first point was “Spirit-filled singing is to each other,” and based on Eph. 5:19Ephesians 5:19 [19]addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, (ESV) where Paul says we’re “addressing one another.” You’d think in a passage about singing praise to God that Paul would begin with God. He doesn’t. The first focus of our singing Paul mentions is not God, but one another. Col. 3:16Colossians 3:16 [16]Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. (ESV) fills this idea out and says that we’re “teaching and admonishing one another.” This shows us that one of the primary aims of corporate worship is meant to be building each other up, not simply having our own personal encounter with God.

I know at my church where I’m heavily involved in the music, I tend to favor songs that have some substance to them in the lyrics. I’m not really against “simple” songs, however some (if not many) praise choruses just don’t say much of anything about God or what He has done for us, and, as a result, we don’t say very much to one another when we sing them as a congregation. Kauflin says

If the songs we’re singing are primarily subjective, and focused on how we feel, what we’re doing, or some other subjective element, we’re not going to have much to say to each other.

Read full post here.

Santa and the Tomato December 22, 2007

Tonight we watched The Polar Express with our 3-year old daughter. At the end of the movie where Santa is seen with his huge bag of presents on his sleigh, she says something along the lines of “they’re pulling Santa and the big tomato.” We told her that it was Santa’s big bag of presents. She says “I’d like it to be a tomato.” “Okay, honey.”

Getting Paid to Go to Church December 20, 2007

How would you feel if your church scored 100% (or even a low percentage) by a non-Christian?

From Times Online

December 19, 2007

Getting paid to go to church

Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent of The Times

Non-Christians are to be paid £30 a time to go to church under a new research programme to find out why more people do not practise the Christian faith.

The new “mystery worshipper” scheme will be modelled on the “mystery shopper” schemes used by researchers to guage the service offered by hotels, shops and other branches of the service industry.

The project could even result in a church “league table” where churches are ranked according to the percentage they score out of a possible total of 98 points.

While the intention is to keep this league table as a secret internal document, it would almost certainly be made public by someone who stood to benefit from the exposure, creating ecclesiastical parallels with schools and universities in the religious firmament.

The research organisation Christian Research has commissioned the company Retail Maxim to send mystery worshippers in unannounced to judge the sermon, welcome, atmosphere, warmth, comfort and appearance of churches around the country.

First to be assessed were churches in Telford, subject to a recent pilot. Early next year, mystery worshippers will visit churches in the West Midlands.

The scheme mirrors that run by the satirical Christian website ShipofFools, the main difference being that ShipofFools uses volunteers who are Christian.

Christian Research wants non-Christians to assess the churches because, in common with increasing numbers of church leaders, the organisation wishes to find out what does and does not work for the reluctant churchgoer. Christian Research is working with ShipofFools to promote the project.

According to the 2001 Census, more than seven in ten people in England consider themselves Christian. But a recent church census by Christian Research found that fewer than one in ten of the population actually go to church.

Benita Hewitt, executive director of Christian Research, who recently joined the organisation from a commercial research background, said: “I worked for many years with retailers and hotels where mystery shopping is quite natural. I am going to bring some of those research techniques into researching the Church.”

The non-church goers will be experienced mystery shoppers who are used to assessing the service offered by hotels, shops and restaurants.

The Telford pilot involved a range of denominations and styles of service from Anglo-Catholic to a service involving a “lot of people lying on the floor and being healed.”

The results had been “amazingly positive”, she said.

Mrs Hewitt, whose background is in commercial research, said it was essential that the churches gained an insight into how they were viewed from the “outside-in” by non-churchgoers.

She said: “We have had some of our mystery worshippers saying that they were really amazed by what they found – by the atmosphere and the welcome before the service, when they went in and after the service and the fellowship.

“It was all so far from their expectations that they had before they came in – often based on childhood when they saw the church as a boring experience where you were made to feel guilty.”

Stephen Goddard, co-editor of the Christian website Ship of Fools, and founder of the concept of Mystery Worshipper, said they were working with Christian Research on the initiative.

He said: “I think it is a terrific idea.” He said two of the Telford churches scored 100 per cent, which shocked him. “We did not send in soft, tame mystery worshippers, we sent in people possibly with an axe to grind against the church,” he said.

“What came out of it was their surprise at how much the church has moved forward from their experience as children.”

Ministering God’s Word to One Another December 16, 2007

This past week I went to a ladies meeting at a neighboring church. A husband and wife were speaking about a recent crisis they had been through involving a terrible accident in which the husband was severely injured. His wife spoke at some length about her experience through the whole ordeal and shared how the providence and grace of God had provided for them and carried them through the crisis. She recalled how at one point the only thing she could do was call out to God for help. She remembered at that time looking out the window at the beautiful snow-capped mountains of Utah. She said the verse that immediately came to her mind was in Psalm 121: “I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth.” It was so beautiful and moving to see an instance of the Holy Spirit ministering God’s Word to one of his children. But what also struck a chord with me is the fact that I had my daughter memorize that exact verse last week. That verse hadn’t had a profound effect on me until I heard this woman talk about how it ministered to her life in a real and concrete way.

I’ve had this same experience several times. It’s been through talking to other Christians, listening to sermons and reading books. A verse or passage that I may have read several times will at once speak to me through the experience of another person to whom the Holy Spirit has ministered that particular Word. I’m sure this has happened in reverse too! It makes me think about how important the body of Christ is in this particular area: the ministering of God’s Word to one another. God did not intend for there to be lone-ranger Christians. We need one another. As Paul says in Colossians 3:16:

“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.”