Confession Our Father and God, You have established Your Church as a royal priesthood in this world, and so we intercede for the nations of men now, confessing on their behalf so that the grace of Your forgiveness will soon be extended to them all. Father, we come before You to confess the pride of …
A Set of Secret Handshakes
My apologies to Lane, who gently nudged me into a response. I had for some reason missed his two earlier posts and was politely waiting around for him to get back to business. But alas, it was me who needed to get back to business, and I have nothing exculpatory to say. This post should …
Making the Cut
As Christians, we hold to the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, creation from nothing. God spoke and it was. But we are not Deists; we do not believe that God created a static thing, capable of ongoing existence by itself. God did not create the heavens and the earth, and then walk away. In His …
Faith Needs to Believe
We partake of this Supper every week. But we do not do this because we have some superstitious attachment to it. We do not believe that God wants us to shuffle along, looking down, our sight rising no higher than the lip of the Table. No, we are Christians, and we are called to set …
True Liberty
Our Father and God, You have established Your Church as a royal priesthood in this world, and so we intercede for the nations of men now, confessing on their behalf so that the grace of Your forgiveness will soon be extended to them all. Father, we humble ourselves before you, as citizens of a nation …
Orc Music
I can see that I need to add a few extra comments to my last musical exhortation. To cut right to the chase, the answer is that yes, as “pure music,” Schonberg and all his ilk are out. Attempts to create music that fly in the face of how God (clearly) intended for music to …
Two Kinds of Inappropriate Music
As we seek to cultivate our understanding of the kind of music we should be offering to God—and the corollary of what we as a congregation should be learning how to perform—we find that we come up against another challenge. Church musicians come up against a greater challenge than other artists do. Some of this …
Consumption and the Covenant
Our nation’s public economists usually refer to you in your capacity as consumer. This is in contrast to previous and wiser eras, when citizens were thought of as producers, and as savers. But we have departed from the way, and when disaster strikes, one of the things we think to do, is spend our way …
Confessing Conspiracies
Our Father and God, You have established Your Church as a royal priesthood in this world, and so we intercede for the nations of men now, confessing on their behalf so that the grace of Your forgiveness will soon be extended to them all. Father, we bow before You as the one who knows the …
Words and Music
In the modern world, we have come to think of music as one thing and “the words” as quite another thing. They may complement one another, like ham and eggs, but they are also separable and distinct. We therefore have instrumental music only, and we have poetry, or lofty speech. If the poetry is high, …