Christmas has been hard around here for the last two years. This is because our Christmas angel, pictured above, died suddenly Jan. 11th 2011. This Christmas will be different as well, as we go to Jacksonville, to be with my Mom and sister— in the heat of Florida. I’ve never experienced Christmas like that. What happens when you have a child who suddenly and unexpectedly dies, especially a child who so loved Christmas, and was always the distributor of the... Read more

In this post we need to talk about ‘worship in truth’. Worship in Spirit, or Spirit-filled worship can be quiet or loud, long or short, liturgical or free form, involve a lot of silence or a lot of speaking a singing, it can involve using the charismatic gifts but it need not do so. It can be more spontaneous, or less. There is no single pattern prescribed by the NT. What is necessary is worship that is prompted by God’s... Read more

I would be willing to bet that the most attended Christmas services are candlelight services. There is something special about services that involve both darkness and light. In terms of theological imagery, this works well with lots of passages in the Gospel of John. “The people who dwell in darkness have seen a great light.” Especially in winter, ‘when the winter wind moans’ (well at least in most places), vesper services including candlelight services are in order, and if properly... Read more

Christmas is of course about children, and one child in particular. It is something of a marvel that God came to us in the form of a child, vulnerable, needy, innocent, and yes beautiful. We all have our visions of what that incarnation moment must have been like. Here is a beautiful song by my home boy— James Taylor, which reflects on that moment…. where we are called to worship the infant king. And this brings me to the subject... Read more

It’s about time we talked about the angels, and I’ve got one below singing for you (aka known as Allison Kraus, with the help of no less than Yo Yo Ma on cello). Angels are involved in worship (see Rev. 4-5). Indeed, 1 Cor. 11 suggests they are the guardians of the creation order which is supposed to be celebrated in worship, as is the order of redemption. In fact, one could say that worship is the time when creation... Read more

One of the things that has happened to worship in my lifetime is that it has gone from being more theocentric to being more anthropocentric, gone from being more liturgical and formal to being liturgy-less and casual in many many contexts. Indeed, it has mostly been those sorts of services that have seen any growth and development over the last twenty years. Unfortunately, along with an admirable greater focus on praising God with exuberance with the aide of a whole... Read more

I went to see the Hobbit Part Two with some fear and trepidation. I was pretty disappointed with the first installment last year, which involved too much running and fighting and fighting and running underground etc. I had reconciled myself to the fact that Jackson having done the LOTR trilogy first was going to retroject some of that back into this story to create a seamless whole. A children’s tale it would not be. I was even o.k. with using... Read more

Advent and Christmas are the perfect times to think about the very nature of Christian worship. Oddly, strangely you seldom hear a pastor talk about the theology of worship, the character of worship, the nature of worship at any time of year. I was doing this very thing once in Austin Texas in a Presbyterian Church, and the universal response was– “Why has no one told us this before?” It seems a common lament. So in this series we are... Read more

Here is a small part of an article about the conversation Ted Turner recently had with Wolf Blitzer…. see what you think… —- Turner’s rocky relationship with his supreme being, assuming there is one, stems back to childhood. When he was very young, he dreamed of being a missionary. Then his little sister, Mary Jean, got sick at age 12. He watched as she suffered terribly from a rare form of lupus and complications that left her with brain damage... Read more