Hymnophobia

hymnophobia \ hɪm-noʊ-‘foʊb-iə \ – (adj) – having or possessing the fear of hymns or (n) the fear of hymns

I think many contemporary churches suffer from Hymnophobia.

By hymns, I don’t mean the classic hymns that have been adapted by contemporary songwriters, sometimes with the addition of a bridge. That works sometimes.

By hymns, I don’t mean some of the ‘gospel’ hymns that came in the period of around 1940 and following. That’s the period that the present period is a reaction to, and it’s okay to set those aside. It’s many of those pieces which drove us to a more modern church in the first place.

I’m talking about the real, absolute classic hymns: All Hail the Power and A Might Fortress and other songs of that ilk.

Hymnophobia is really a fear of doing something that’s outside the only homogeneous, modern style that’s the trademark of today’s churches, especially megachurches.

There’s no variety.

I’d have no problem with a church doing a classic like Our Great Savior if they did it in the style in which it was originally presented.

In other words, not with “an organ” but with a high-church pipe organ sound, played in the manner that an organist would have played a pipe organ. Something that mentally transports you to one of the great 19th century cathedrals.

And let’s not forget that today’s modern keyboards have that sound built in.

Or for that matter:

• a song sung in an authentic bluegrass style by people who really know that style of music
• a song presented in a barber shop quartet style by people who really understand that genre
• a song performed in a genuine operatic style by someone trained in that form

Not every Sunday, not every month, just not being afraid to try something different every once in awhile.

With the condition that it’s done so well, nobody considers it a caricature or a mockery of those forms, but actually finds the form works to communicate a particular set of lyrics.

Honestly, what are we afraid of?

Furthermore, why do we exclude people whose rest-of-the-week involves participation in a musical forms that are so removed from what we do at church on the weekend?

Why does every church service now have to 100% resemble what we hear on the local Christian radio station?

I rest my case.

 

Church Life: Special Music

In a majority of the middle part of the last century, a feature of Evangelical church services was “the special musical number” or “special music” or if the church didn’t print a bulletin for the entire audience, what the platform party often logged as simply “the special.”

While this wasn’t to imply that the remaining musical elements of the service were not special, it denoted a featured musical selection — often occurring just before the message — that would be sung by

• a female soloist
• a male soloist
• a women’s duet
• a men’s duet
• a mixed duet
• a mixed trio
• a ladies trio
• an instrumental number without vocals

etc., though usually it was a female soloist, who, in what would now be seen as an interruption to the flow of the service, would often be introduced by name. “And now Mrs. Faffolfink, the wife our beloved organist Henry, will come to favor us with a special musical number.” This was followed by silence, with the men on the platform party standing as the female soloist made her way to the microphone. (We’ll have to discuss ‘platform party’ another time.)

While the song in question might be anything out of the hymnbook, these were usually taken from a range of suitable songs from the genre called “Sacred Music” designed chiefly for this use, compositions often not possible for the congregation to sing because of (a) vocal range, (b) vocal complexity such as key changes, and (c) interpretive pauses and rhythm breaks. These often required greater skill on the part of the accompanist as well.

A well known example of this might be “The Holy City” which is often sung at Easter, though two out of its three sections seem to owe more to the book of Revelation. “The Stranger of Galilee” and “Master the Tempest is Raging” are two other well-known examples of the type of piece. Sometimes the church choir would join in further into the piece. (The quality of the performance varied depending on the capability of soloists in your congregation.)

By the mid-1970s commercial Christian radio stations were well-established all over the US, and broad exposure to a range of songs gave birth to the Christian music soundtrack industry. More popular songs were often available on cassette from as many as ten different companies. Some were based on the actual recording studio tracks of the original; some were quickly-recorded copies; and some of both kinds were offered in different key signatures (vocal ranges.) Either way, they afforded the singer the possibility of having an entire orchestra at his or her disposal, and later gave way to CDs and even accompaniment DVDs with the soundtrack synchronized to a projected visual background.

Today in the modern Evangelical church, this part of the service has vanished along with the scripture reading and the pastoral prayer. If a megachurch has a featured music item, it’s entirely likely to be borrowed from the Billboard charts of secular hits, performed with the full worship band.

This means there is an entire genre of Christian music which is vanishing with it. This isn’t a loss musically — some of those soloists were simply showing off their skills — as it is lyrically. The three songs named above were narrative, which means they were instructional. They taught us, every bit as much as the sermon did; and were equally rooted in scripture texts. The audience was in a listening mode, more prepared to be receptive. Early church historians will still despair over the passive nature of listening to a solo, but I believe the teaching that was imparted through the songs was worth the 3-4 minutes needed.

My personal belief is that this worship service element will return, albeit in a slightly different form, as congregations grow tired of standing to do little more than listen to pieces they can’t sing anyway because of vocal range or unfamiliarity. This may be taking place already in some churches.

We’ll be better served when that happens.

 

How Evangelicals Lose the Plot on Good Friday

If, by someone coming here via a search engine, I can help even one church make their Good Friday service more meaningful, this will have been worth the effort.

Maybe you heard the phrase, “At that point, they lost the plot.” Or, “That’s where it went off the rails.”

…I’ve always found it interesting that no matter how contemporary or how alternative some churches are, many of them often begin their communion service with the “words of institution” from I Corinthians 11. It’s like a little, tiny slice of liturgy in an unexpected place.

Today, I want to propose we add another little slice of formality, namely the construction of the Good Friday service, if indeed your church or community has one. If this were a song by Jamie Grace the line would be, “We need to get our Anglican on.”

I wrote about this three years ago:

Evangelicals don’t know how to do Good Friday…

Good Friday is a big deal here. All the churches come together… Right there, I think the thing has become somewhat unmanageable. Each church’s pastor has a role to play, one introduces the service, another prays, another takes the offering, yet another reads the scripture, one preaches the sermon and so on. It’s all rather random and uncoordinated. They really need a producer…

In Evangelicalism, nothing is really planned. I love extemporaneous prayers, as long as some thought went into them, but the tendency is to just “wing it.” Like the pastor a few years ago who opened the Good Friday service by talking at length about what a beautiful spring day it was; “…And I think I saw a robin.”

Fail.

This is Good Friday, the day we remember Christ’s suffering, bleeding, dying. Evangelicals don’t understand lament. We don’t know how to do it, we don’t know what to say.

My wife says we tend to ‘skip ahead” to Easter Sunday. We give away the plot and lose the plot all at the same time. We place the giant spoiler in the middle of the part of the story to which we haven’t yet arrived; diminishing the part where we are supposed to be contemplating the full impact of what Jesus did for us. We rush to the resurrection like a bad writer who doesn’t take the time to develop his story, and then wonders why the impact of the ending is not as great.

I learned this year that in a number of traditions, once the season of Lent begins, you are not supposed to say or sing ‘Hallelujah.’ Then, on that day that recalls that triumphant day, the Hallelujahs can gush force with tremendous energy. But we Evangelicals spoil that by missing the moment of Good Friday entirely. Can’t have church making us feel sad, can we?

My concern now as then is that we are rushing toward Easter, rushing toward celebration, wanting to scream out at the top of our lungs, “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming.”

But the disciples didn’t know from Sunday. Their memory, etched so clearly, was of the life draining out of Jesus’ broken and bloodied body. At worst, rejected Messiah’s were supposed to fade into obscurity, not die a criminal’s death at the hand of the Romans. One by one they disappeared…

We need to feel that.

We need to feel what it meant for him to (a) enter into the human condition, (b) always give preference to others, (c) experience physical death, and (d) have that death be the most excruciating ever devised.

In another essay here I talked about the equally concerning practice of losing the plot on Easter Sunday.

My own thoughts that day included a study of songs churches in the U.S. had used:

[I]t’s amazing to see the difference between the worship leaders who really focused on the death and resurrection of Christ, and those who simply did the songs that are currently popular, or the songs they were going to do anyway before Easter “got in the way.”

…there seems little room for critical evaluation here.

The one that really got me was the church that went ahead with a sermon series acknowledging that it had nothing to do with Easter.

So returning to Good Friday, here is my manifesto:

1. We need to set a tone at the very beginning of the service; allow a ‘holy hush’ to come over the crowd.
2. We should then incorporate other silences throughout the service.
3. As far as possible, every word spoken should be planned. We need to borrow from our Episcopalian friends for this service.
4. We need agreement from participants on what we will not do. No, “It’s good to see everyone;” no “It’s finally warming up outside;” no “We do this in anticipation of Sunday;” or the worst, “I hope you all found a place to park.”
   
5. If your service is interdenominational or has many participants, do not introduce people at all, i.e. “And now Delores Jones from Central Methodist will favor us with a solo accompanied by her husband Derek.” Don’t waste words.
6. We need to skip the final verses of some hymns or modern worship songs if they resolve with resurrection. We need to immerse ourselves in the moment.
7. If your church uses a printed program, consider the idea of the congregation whose Good Friday bulletin cover was simply a folded piece of black construction paper. In other words, use other media to reinforce what is taking place at the front, and remove things hanging in the sanctuary that might be a distraction.
8. No matter how big the crowd, and how tempting this makes it, don’t use Good Friday as a fundraiser for a church or community project.
   
9. Preaching needs to be Christological. This would seem obvious, but sometimes it’s not. It’s not about us, except insofar as he suffered and died for us.
10. That said, we also need to be Evangelical. What a wonderful day for someone to stand at the level ground of the cross and look into the eyes of a loving Savior who says, ‘I do this for you;’ and then have an opportunity to respond to the finished work on the cross.

Finally, if your church doesn’t do Good Friday, consider starting it. I worship between two small towns which both have an annual interdenominational morning service, but several years ago, my wife’s worship ministry did a Good Friday evening service and over a hundred people attended. She assembled worship songs, solos, video clips, readings and had a local pastor do a ten minute homily. It will forever be one of my favorite, most cross-focused Good Friday events, even though I was busied with the planning and running of it.

 

 

Wednesday Link List

The cartoon is from ASBO Jesus, which sadly isn’t being updated. The lower one appeared here about five years ago, and was from Pundit Kitchen.

They call it Labor Day because on Tuesday we all had to work twice as hard to catch up. Take a few minutes to pause and do some clicking:

• Churches need to stop taking attendance. Immediately. This means you.
• The marketing of the new MEV Bible translation may leave many feeling it’s something other than what it is.
• Shane Claiborne has a quick debrief on his trip to Ferguson, Missouri…
• …While in a much longer piece, Jamie Wright debriefs her night undercover in Southeast Asia following investigators trying to get freedom for girls being trafficked in the sex trade.
• Essay of the Week: People dress “sloppy” for church. “It’s like some people decided to stop mowing the lawn and then decided to come to church.”
• A look at Britain as a “Global Exporter of Terrorism.” Sample: “…the British elites don’t care so much about their own civilization …radical Muslims have been allowed and even encouraged to build a parallel society within this officially Christian nation.”
• Lots of buzz on Twitter this week about David Platt being elected as the new president of the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention.
• While small churches still begin the hiring process with paper resumés, increasingly the job may never be posted, and the candidate may not even be looking to move.
• So normally for guys, the hot girls in the pew ahead can be a bit of a distraction. Not this time, though.
• Essay of the Month: A thoughtful response to “Christianity is not a religion it’s a relationship.”
• Since this is the time of year that things get hectic, it’s a good time to read an interview with the author of Addicted to Busy.
• Meanwhile, in the land of academic scholarship, this story would be the equivalent of a sports franchise losing a key player to another team and deciding to simply shut down.
• Are pastors now truly afraid to weigh in on social issues?
• Focus on the Family’s Plugged In website tracks media including things like Taylor Swift’s next album, or the TV series Doctor Who.
• Yes, some of the stuff in Christian bookstores is shallow and profit driven, but doing a remake of Jesus clearing money changers in the temple still carries criminal charges…
• …Mind you, there may be limits to holding your peace, such as this loopy theology.
• There’s no separation of state and church in Germany when it comes to funding houses of worship and their staff. Some changes in that system are touching off a church exodus.
• Justin Davis: “At least 2-3 times per month Trish or I will get a text message, email or phone call asking our advice from a pastor or pastor’s wife on how to navigate an affair.”
• No you’re not having a flashback; the new All Sons and Daughters album truly is available as a limited edition white vinyl record.
• Reporting on reporting: A Midwest newspaper still gives lots of ink to coverage of religious stories.
• Two years later, Mark David Chapman, the killer of John Lennon is still saying yes to God and the prison board is still saying no to parole.
• Retro-Linking: From 2012, if your church is online, does this change the target audience of what you’re doing at the weekend service? (Probably more relevant now than then.)
• The president of one of the largest Christian universities is currently going through a divorce, but is also keeping his job.
• If some of the ministers people in your church read, watch, listen to, or download are a little off track, somebody probably needs to say something.
• I know sometimes you have to put the cookies on a lower shelf, but have we dumbed down church to the point it’s now just too easy?
• An outdoor refrigerator with food for the needy seemed like a good idea for this church, until they were bombarded with health regulations.
• Without thinking, Hallmark shipped some same-sex wedding cards to the bookstore at Brigham Young University. Without thinking, bookstore staff displayed them. Question: Why doesn’t the “Christian” university bookstore carry Hallmark’s Dayspring line instead?
• One in six Christian radio stations now carries the one minute feature, 60 Second Re-Charge from the ministry Revival Over The Walls.
• Stormie Omartian moves beyond her Power of a Praying series to look at other topics, including the role of the Holy Spirit, and a recent title on the love of God…
• …In other book news, here’s a Snakes on a Plane title that spells out the plot: The Mainliner’s Survival Guide in a Post Denominational World. Just released from Chalice Press…
• …And a final book item, Made in the USA: The Sex Trafficking of America’s Children is a story of commercial exploitation that didn’t take place in a land far away, but much closer to home, as told by five survivors, four women and one man. Watch the video trailer.
• The same thing that attracts people to the music industry in general may reflect itself in the passions of church musicians…
• …That is, worship musicians who should remember to pronounce the words correctly.
• In the Christian rap music genre, the name to know is Shai Linne. He’s also an associate pastor at Del Ray Baptist Church in greater DC, where his August 17 sermon ran one hour…
• …And I’m guessing that at one time, Shai was on Brad Lomenick’s monthly roundup of up-and-coming leaders. Here’s the latest list.
• Continuing Education Department: ChurchNext.tv lets individuals or churches have unlimited access to a variety of topical courses for as little as $15/month.
• Finally… and the Ice Bucket Challenge begat the…

Link sleuth Paul Wilkinson is also available for private investigations if there’s a link in your life that’s gone missing.  Or, for free, you can read his blog, Thinking Out Loud.

Creation Calls: How Can I Say There is No God?

^{Psalm 19:1} Heaven is declaring God’s glory;
    the sky is proclaiming his handiwork.
²  One day gushes the news to the next,
    and one night informs another what needs to be known.
³  Of course, there’s no speech, no words—
        their voices can’t be heard—
⁴     but their sound extends throughout the world;
        their words reach the ends of the earth.

Common English Bible (CEB)

Last month my wife was leading worship at a local church and after the service, we had three requests for a copy of the lyrics for the song Creation Calls by Brian Doerksen. She has done this song at least six times there, but something about it this particular time struck a variety of people in that congregation.

So I thought I’d share it here.

I have felt the wind blow,
Whispering Your name
I have seen Your tears fall
When I watch the rain

How could I say there is no God
When all around creation calls
A singing bird, a mighty tree
The vast expanse of open sea

Gazing at a bird in flight,
Soaring through the air
Lying down beneath the stars,
I feel Your presence there

I love to stand at ocean’s shore
And feel the thundering breakers roar
To walk through golden fields of grain
‘Neath endless blue horizon’s frame

Listening to a river run, watering the earth
Fragrance of a rose in bloom, a newborn’s cry at birth

I believe, I believe, I believe

---

Learn more about Brian in this 2009 review of his book.

There’s a similar theme in a classic song from an earlier generation, One More Reason by Tom Howard.  

Keep up with Brian’s new band, The Shiyr Poets.

We used Brian’s song Today in a devotional post at C201, but you might know him better for Refiner’s Fire. 

How Evangelicals Miss Good Friday

If, by someone coming here via a search engine, I can help even one church make their Good Friday service more meaningful, this will have been worth the effort.

I’ve always found it interesting that no matter how contemporary or how alternative some churches are, many of them often begin their communion service with the “words of institution” from I Corinthians 11. It’s like a little, tiny slice of liturgy in an unexpected place.

Today, I want to propose we add another little slice of formality, namely the construction of the Good Friday service, if indeed your church or community has one. If this were a song by Jamie Grace* the line would be, “We need to get our Anglican on.”

I wrote about this two years ago:

Evangelicals don’t know how to do Good Friday…

Good Friday is a big deal here. All the churches come together… Right there, I think the thing has become somewhat unmanageable.  Each church’s pastor has a role to play, one introduces the service, another prays, another takes the offering, yet another reads the scripture, one preaches the sermon and so on. It’s all rather random and uncoordinated. They really need a producer…

In Evangelicalism, nothing is really planned. I love extemporaneous prayers, as long as some thought went into them, but the tendency is to just “wing it.”  Like the pastor a few years ago who opened the Good Friday service by talking at length about what a beautiful spring day it was; “…And I think I saw a robin.”

Fail.

This is Good Friday, the day we remember Christ’s suffering, bleeding, dying.  Evangelicals don’t understand lament. We don’t know how to do it, we don’t know what to say.

My wife says we tend to ‘skip ahead” to Easter Sunday. We give away the plot and lose the plot all at the same time. We place the giant spoiler in the middle of the part of the story to which we haven’t yet arrived; diminishing the part where we are supposed to be contemplating the full impact of what Jesus did for us.  We rush to the resurrection like a bad writer who doesn’t take the time to develop his story, and then wonders why the impact of the ending is not as great.

I learned this year that in a number of traditions, once the season of Lent begins, you are not supposed to say or sing ‘Hallelujah.’ Then, on that day that recalls that triumphant day, the Hallelujahs can gush force with tremendous energy. But we Evangelicals spoil that by missing the moment of Good Friday entirely. Can’t have church making us feel sad, can we?

My concern now as then is that we are rushing toward Easter, rushing toward celebration, wanting to scream out at the top of our lungs, “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming.”

But the disciples didn’t know from Sunday. Their memory, etched so clearly, was of the life draining out of Jesus’ broken and bloodied body. At worst, rejected Messiah’s were supposed to fade into obscurity, not die a criminal’s death at the hand of the Romans. One by one they disappeared…

We need to feel that.

We need to feel what it meant for him to (a) enter into the human condition, (b) always give preference to others, (c) experience physical death, and (d) have that death be the most excruciating ever devised.

Music plays a big part. In another essay here that referred more directly to Easter Sunday, I quoted:

“Every Christmas Christians whine and complain about secular and atheistic efforts designed to take Christ out of Christmas yet more and more Christian pastors have committed an even worse offense and have removed Jesus Christ and His victorious resurrection from the grave from their Easter sermons,” said Chris Rosebrough. “Far too many pastors have played the role of Judas and have betrayed Jesus. Rather than being paid 30 pieces of silver, these pastors have sold Jesus out for the fame and adulation that accompany having a ‘growing, relevant ‘man-centered’ church’.”

My own thoughts that day included a study of songs churches in the U.S. had used:

[I]t’s amazing to see the difference between the worship leaders who really focused on the death and resurrection of Christ, and those who simply did the songs that are currently popular, or the songs they were going to do anyway before Easter “got in the way.”

…there seems little room for critical evaluation here.

The one that really got me was the church that went ahead with a sermon series acknowledging that it had nothing to do with Easter.

 

So returning to Good Friday, here is my manifesto:

1. We need to set a tone at the very beginning of the service; allow a ‘holy hush’ to come over the crowd.
2. We should then incorporate other silences throughout the service.
3. As far as possible, every word spoken should be planned. We need to borrow from our Episcopalian friends for this service.
4. We need agreement from participants on what we will not do. No, “It’s good to see everyone;” no “It’s finally warming up outside;” no “We do this in anticipation of Sunday;” or the worst, “I hope you all found a place to park.”
   
5. If your service is interdenominational or has many participants, do not introduce people at all, i.e. “And now Delores Jones from Central Methodist will favor us with a solo accompanied by her husband Derek.” Don’t waste words.
6. We need to skip the final verses of some hymns or modern worship songs if they resolve with resurrection. We need to immerse ourselves in the moment.
7. If your church uses a printed program, consider the idea of the congregation whose Good Friday bulletin cover was simply a folded piece of black construction paper. In other words, use other media to reinforce what is taking place at the front, and remove things hanging in the sanctuary that might be a distraction.
8. No matter how big the crowd, and how tempting this makes it, don’t use Good Friday as a fundraiser for a church or community project.
   
9. Preaching needs to be Christological. This would seem obvious, but sometimes it’s not. It’s not about us, except insofar as he suffered and died for us.
10. That said, we also need to be Evangelical. What a wonderful day for someone to stand at the level ground of the cross and look into the eyes of a loving Savior who says, ‘I do this for you;’ and then have an opportunity to respond to the finished work on the cross.

Finally, if your church doesn’t do Good Friday, consider starting it. I worship between two small towns which both have an annual interdenominational morning service, but several years ago, my wife’s worship ministry did a Good Friday evening service and over a hundred people attended. She assembled worship songs, solos, video clips, readings and had a local pastor do a ten minute homily. It will forever be one of my favorite, most cross-focused Good Friday events, even though I was busied with the planning and running of it.

 

 

*see comments

Fall Ministry Season Focus

Full disclosure: This is the THIRD time I’ve reblogged this piece, which is actually a pre-Easter article that Pete Wilson wrote which I’ve adapted into a non-seasonal piece. Timing is everything with this, Pete’s own kids are already back to school this week. It seems fitting to remind ourselves of these priorities as the heat of summer gives way to regrouping our forces with a fresh intensity…

Like many of you I’m up to my eyeballs in the details and logistics … I’m distracted, maybe a little stressed and certainly carrying all kind of concerns. But I just want to issue this challenge to all of us…

Pastors, I pray you’ll preach the hope of Jesus Christ like never before. Preach as if you were there the day it happened and is if this were the last message you are ever going to give!

Worship Leaders, I pray you’ll lead worship with the same awe and amazement as if you just watched the stone roll away. Whether you have lights or no lights, production or no production, may they see the wonder and awe in your eyes and voice that you actually believe what it is you’re singing.

Kids’ Teachers, I pray you look your kids in the eyes and use every bit of passion, energy, and excitement you have to tell them a story that can and will impact their life forever.

Volunteers, I pray you’ll serve, sing, hand out programs, park cars, turn knobs, and make coffee as if eternities were on the line, because they are!

Worshipers, I pray you’ll open your heart and raise your voice and pour out all you have and all you are in honor of a God who has defeated death so you may have life.

I pray [each] weekend we’ll all drop our cynicism, egos, and agendas and will stand amazed and marvel at the wonder of a God who has set us free from the penalty and the power of sin

Pete Wilson; senior pastor of Cross Point; Nashville, TN

Wednesday Link List

Wednesday List Lynx

And now here’s a Wednesday Link List that needs no introduction…

• The other members of the band America (“A Horse With No Name”) pay tribute to Dan Peek who later had a career in Christian music, who passed away on the weekend.
• Jay Grelen joins the cast at GetReligion.org, a blog that looks at how the media handles religious stories.  His own story was interesting.
• Josh McDowell believes that the internet is the greatest threat to Christian belief: “The Internet has given atheists, agnostics, skeptics, the people who like to destroy everything that you and I believe, the almost equal access to your kids as your youth pastor and you have… whether you like it or not,” said McDowell.  Read more at Faith and The Law.
• Pressured by his elders’ board to apologize, Mark Driscoll makes a half-hearted effort following his remarks on Facebook about “effeminate worship leaders.”  Rachel Held Evans calls him a bully.
• Just in case you’re wondering, here’s the website for Hope Unlimited Church in Australia, the church Mark and Darlene Zschech call home since leaving the Hillsong mother-ship; though they’ll still be part of music events.
  
• Tim Challies looks at the ‘Christian’ label being applied to the man who brought about the carnage in Oslo, Norway.
  
• Paul Clark reads Brother Lawrence’s Practice of the Presence of God and notes that the greatest books — starting with the Bible — have already been written.
  
• Paul also has a great article on creating a “culture of generosity” within your church in this article about stewardship.
  
• C. Michael Patton knows how to kick off a discussion and he’s got enough readers that he gets a response.  Be sure to read all the comments on this discussion about praying over and over and over and over again.
  
• Michelle VanLoon at Her.meneutics tells about growing up in the 1960s and ’70s with her father’s porn magazines openly displayed on the coffee table and how it affected her.
  
• While it wasn’t a Christian story per se, Eugune Cho posted this story about the latest “Susan Boyle” type of story on Korea’s Got Talent.   Read about Sung-Bong Choi.  (No relation to Song Sung Blue.)
• While this one isn’t a link at all, I wanted to post something rather unique: My church is doing a VBS during the last week before school starts and they’re doing it as an evening program from 6:30 – 8:30 PM.  Different, huh?
  
• For our Canadian readers: Yes, it’s true, McMaster Divinity School is giving Christian broadcaster David Mainse an honorary doctorate degree.  (My favorite Mainse quote: “My wife and I were virgins on our wedding night and we’ve been virgins ever since.”  …They have four children.)
  
• Nick Costello’s book, Kiss What? is another book to examine the music scene and might be a resource for the teen in your home who is OD-ing on popular music culture.  Here’s a video preview.
  
• Here’s a Vimeo vid on the release of the full (OT & NT) edition of the Common English Bible.  (Note: This HD clip takes awhile to load.)
  
• New Blog of the Week: Housewife Theologian by Amiee Byrd — Articles of interest to women and a penchant for reviewing books in the Reformed tradition.
  
• He calls his blog The Ugley Vicar and recently posted this hymn verse that was sung while attending a “Junior Clergy” conference; a verse that should be the prayer of all of us:

Facing a task unfinished,
That drives us to our knees,
A need that, undiminished,
Rebukes our slothful ease:
We, who rejoice to know Thee,
Renew before Thy throne
The solemn pledge we owe Thee
To go and make Thee known.

Wednesday Link List

Wednesday link kangaroo

A kangaroo walks into a bar.

“Wow!” the bartender says; “We don’t get many kangaroos in here.”

“Yeah,” says the Kangaroo, “And at these prices, you’re not going to get many more.”

…I know it’s pathetic, but that’s always been one of my favorite jokes, and the link list seemed the best place for it.

• Our lead link this week: David Santisteven on How To Fail as a Worship Leader In Ten Easy Steps. (Step 5: Leave theology to the preachers.)
  
• And here’s a bonus ten for people interested in worship: Ten Ideas to Incorporate the Scriptures into a Worship Service.
  
• They won’t respond to communication from outsiders, but a surprising number of Amish Teens are now on Facebook, getting online through their cellphones.
• Sarah Pulliam Bailey brings an 7-page look at the reshaping of Focus on the Family; and a 2-page sidebar as to what James Dobson is up to.
  
• Dana at Upwrite asks all the hard questions about the TOMS shoes fad.  (If I’d known you could get that word length writing about shoes, I would have done it long ago!)
  
• Let’s go two in a row from Upwrite: Can you be a hybrid Christian? Can you combine ideas from other faiths with Christian belief?
  

Click the image above to see 226 more pictures from North Carolina's Wild Goose Festival in June by photographer Courtney Perry

• If you missed the Wild Goose Festival, photographer Courtney Perry has 227 pictures; you can even purchase copies.
  
• John Starke nails it on How to Write a Great Book Review (Or How Not to Write a Bad One).
  
• Speaking of which, Benji Zimmerman does a great review of Francis Chan and Preston Sprinkle’s Erasing Hell the response to Rob Bell’s Love Wins. (Easier to read with a Javascript Black/White swap app.)
  
• And Chan himself sits down with Mark Galli at CT for what appears to be an interview but is really more of a dialog.
  
• Stephen Brewster was one of many syncrobloggers who joined together in June to talk about blocks to creativity.  He links to some of the other writers, too.
  
• Frank Turk digs into the can of worms being opened by New York’s new marriage law.
  
• Craig Groeshel, the guy with the .tv web domains, is now suggesting individuals and families take a few nights off each week to unplug.
  
• A few days late for the 4th, but for our American friends, Louis Giglio reflects on the Declaration of Independence with Chris Tomlin on camera and some cheap shots at England’s Matt Redman.  (HT: Worship Blog)
  
• Matt Rawlings brings his twice yearly top five books list, and his top 62 “geek” books list.
  
• Also on books, Jon, our academic book-watcher on the left coast wants you to know about Christians at the Border: Immigration, The Church and the Bible.  Basically this is a Guatemalan professor of Old Testament studies discussing social policy.  Here’s the publisher’s 411, and a 9-pg .pdf preview.
  
• Adam Young, aka Owl City, has a new video, packed with footage from the Back to the Future movies.  Check out Deer in the Headlights.
  
• But we can take the animal video linking thing further with this Charlie the Hamster audio file. (HT: Stuff Fundies Like.)
  
• Anne Jackson, transparent as ever, has reactivated her blog which has been dormant since March.  You can read her posts from June 17th and June 24th.
• No link here, but my son Chris put this on his Facebook page:
  .
  The Parable of the Dry Stick
  .
  I was out for a hike a while ago and there was a stick on the path.  I gave it a kick, and all the bark broke off and scattered, leaving only the bare, white wood.
  .
  God then said:  “The world is full of people who will completely change, who are just waiting to be prompted, quietly hoping someone will disrupt their daily ennui.”
  .
   If you know one of those people, give them a proverbial kick.  Tell them their life can amount to something.  Invite them to join the adventure of discovering God.

Separated at Birth (and by a few generations) — Lyn Cryderman, author of Glory Land, republished as No Swimming on Sunday and Colton Burpo of Heaven is for Real fame.  The Cryderman book is a bit of a hard-to-find collector’s item but an excellent document capturing growing up in America in the Free Methodist denomination.  “I gotta home in Glory land that outshines the sun…Way beyond the blue”

Wednesday Link List

The linkology lecture resumes; with this week’s being more diversionary than anything else…

• Pete Wilson has now posted the full 20-minute interview he did with Heaven is For Real authors Todd and Colton Burpo.  The full interview was played in all services on Sunday as part one of the church’s 3-week Glimpse series.
  
• The Christian Post reports that rapture prophet Harold Camping was heading home from hospital on Monday after suffering a mild stroke.  (HT: Bene)
  
• Christianity Today returns, a year later, to talk with Adam Young, aka Owl City, but the musician’s excessive shyness forces an email interview.
• Michael Krahn looks at the “me, myself and I” individualism in modern worship music, but also cautions about over-correcting.
• Southern Baptists are facing declining numbers, especially in an area near and dear to their faith: Baptisms are at lowest numbers since the 1950s.
  
• Ron Edmondson offers seven ways to get the most out of your overall experience of church life.
• There were a couple of pieces at Christianity 201 this week that I was quite pleased with, though they’re too long to run here.  One was a Christian counselor discussing what it means to put something “on the altar.”   The other was a piece by Rooms author James Rubart remixing the story of the Prodigal Son.
• J. Lee Grady looks at baby Storm, the Toronto child whose parents want to raise him/her as an individual without specific gender; and the resulting confusion that creates.
  
• James MacDonald says that the congregational form of church government is from Satan.  Yes, he really said that last week.  The firestorm resulted in this response on Monday.  Is it tongue in cheek?  (In tomorrow’s Our Journey devotional, readers will discover that MacDonald believes that we should pray to God and not to Jesus.  I read the paragraph three times to make sure, and that after getting a phone call on it.)
  
• An unusual request for a minister to receive:  We want you to marry us, but just don’t mention God.  Should he do the wedding?
  
• Her-meneutics writer Karen Swallow Prior thinks that when congressman Anthony Weiner says that texting isn’t adultery, he’s actually illustrating the mind-body dualism known as Gnosticism.
  
• Yes, heaven is for real, but didn’t we already know that?  Greg Thornbury is worried about the weight being placed on an extra-Biblical account.
  
• Time for a couple of video links.  This one is from 2007 and was filmed using all the latest technology.  (HT: J-Walk)
  
• Unless you have pre-schoolers at home, or have no sense of musical integrity, you’ll need a strong stomach for this one, but Darrell at Stuff Fundies Like has uncovered The Potato Chip Song, a bus ministry song on YouTube.  Maybe you should read the article first.
  
• And this fits right in:  If your church sends out postcards or notes when you miss Sunday worship, perhaps there’s more to those notes than what you see.
• Our cartoon this week is from Mick Mooney at the blog Searching For Grace; a new comic with only eleven strips so far.