In the 1970s and 80s, Church Planting, Wasn’t Always “Churches”

In 1987, I wrote an 8-page document entitled, “Proposal for a New Kind of Church in Metro Toronto;” went to a copy store and had 200 copies printed to younger Evangelical leaders. The particular church itself didn’t happen — perhaps it was ahead of its time or perhaps God knew that I just wasn’t ready to lead something that significant — but it’s with some regrets I consider that I could have been known today as the founder of _______ Church. I’d like to think that because the recipients of that document were especially hand-picked that its distribution had some impact.

By 2007, I was part of a cohort of people from different cities who met monthly to discuss what had become a boom in church planting. People who didn’t quite know how to spell ecclesiology were talking about it. Lay people. Not clergy. The term was well-traveled.

This was reflected on the blogs, and I started one myself on a now-defunct religion forum at USAToday, and it was also the subject of many, many books that were published, many of which I carried at a small chain of Christian bookstores I owned. Our small group met every six weeks in a city chosen because it was somewhere in the middle. We continued to have some contact when the group disbanded. The phrase “a different kind of church” was on everyone’s lips and alternative churches were becoming mainstream.

I’ve had a lot of opinions on this subject, but a key word search this morning showed that not all of them have landed here at Thinking Out Loud. I would have thought they had, because this subject is something close to me.

Someone once put it this way,

“Church planting is the extreme sport of ministry.”

In 2004, I started a church of my own. Transformation Church was located in downtown Cobourg, a small town about 70 minutes east of Toronto, Canada. Our first series was 17 weeks entitled, “Ground Zero: Where Everything Ends and Everything Begins.” Just four years out from the World Trade Towers falling in New York City, the series name had more resonance then than it does now. That church ran until March of 2006. (It’s a long story.)

I was reminded then that while it’s probably a good idea to be theologically trained to administer a church, you don’t need a degree to start a church. Of two significant ones in our town, one was founded by a woman they simply refer to as Grandma Caffin. Another came out of a meeting of five families at a picnic table in the park. Most of the people attending those churches — Baptist and Alliance respectively — probably have no idea as to their inauspicious beginnings.

But today, in June 2020, I want to return to the title of today’s piece, but to do so involves one more time travel.

Back in 2008, I wrote an article about a weekly Saturday night event in Toronto called Reach Out.

The setting:  The first Reach Out took place in a Lutheran (I think) church that was built overlooking a large river valley parkland. The front of the church was all glass, so when you looked towards the front, you looked out on a beautiful view. (A later incarnation of Reach Out took place in a downtown church. I only attended that once, and it was so packed I had to sit on the stairs.)

The motto:  “Everyone Gives, Everyone Receives.”  Reach Out was based in I Cor. 14:26 which says, “When you gather together everyone has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. All of these must be done for the strengthening of the church.”  (NIVMOL – stands for NIV more or less) So people would jump up — sometimes suddenly — and say, “I have a Psalm;” and then read it; and other would jump up and say, “I have a teaching;” and would give a 60-second teaching; etc. They always said at the outset what it was they were going to say. That way nobody could jump up and say, “I have a cute story about my dog!”

The format:  People gathering talking, mostly in their teens, 20s and 30s; then they would sit down; and then — I don’t know how else to say this — a holy hush would fall over everyone.  What a moment! There would be silence for a minute or two, and then someone would start playing their guitar.   There was blended worship.  This is where I first learned “Oh, The Deep, Deep Love of Jesus” and I had never heard younger people sing classical hymns with such passion. Then there was an extended prayer time. I can’t remember if we broke up into groups of 3 or 4 — I’ve got this part confused with another group I belonged to — but there was plenty of opportunity for people to share requests. Then a teaching.  Then some worship.

I don’t know if we considered it church or not. The test would be to go back in time and ask the people attending if they also had a connection on Sunday mornings. It was just an event that happened and we didn’t try to over analyze. The problem with dissecting a cat is that once you’ve got it all figured out how it works, the cat is dead. Today, Twitter provides us with far too much dissection.

There were other similar things in Toronto. A Christian Church on A Hill, Catacombs, Shekinah. Sadly, I never made it those. I did frequent Christian coffee houses — there were so many in Toronto that several people undertook to publish directories — and a monthly camp reunion (for a camp I’d never attended) called Power and Praise.

Part of what got me thinking about this was watching a YouTube documentary this week about Love Inn, a ministry in Ithica, New York founded in the 1970s by Christian radio personality Scott Ross and part of the Jesus People revolution which was taking place at the time. Watching the 8mm film footage reminded me of the whole vibe.

I know what you’re thinking. When are you going to get to the title of today’s article?

The point I want to make is that on reflection, those early events were created in lieu of church planting. The people who today might be scouting for community centers and high schools to hold weekend service were back then content to put together Tuesday night or Friday night events. They were interdenominational which means the people who attended, often under 30, were part of other fellowships on the weekend, including some who were mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic.

These days, the energy that might go into promoting something like this at a local level is often put toward conferences. They have the advantage of reminding everyone that ‘it’s a big tent’ and that we’re part of a larger family, as well as being able to bring top name speakers and musicians, but they do get expensive and unwieldy.

What about where you live? Is there a weekly Christian event that’s not church your city is known for? Or do people simply attend the megachurch for one service and then go to their own smaller church for connection to family and longtime friends?

I think that gatherings like the ones I described are still needed and hopefully — after the pandemic — we might see new expressions of what it means to be part of the body of Christ.

 

 

 

 

 

One Album: A Half Century Later

…He lost his life out on the street
He hadn’t noticed that the times had changed…

It was a very hastily written update of the song A Day in the Life written to be performed at our church coffee house in the wake of John Lennon’s death. Somehow I often landed the performance slot on the Friday night following some major events. The explosion of the Challenger space shuttle was another. I wish I could go back and redo those nights. I was a musician first and a youth pastor second, and it should have been the other way around. I think our friend Craig actually came up with the lines remembered above.

But all that came later. I’m getting ahead of myself…

Even though many other things that happened at that age are a bit of blur, I remember this one with great clarity. We had been to Sunday School and Church in the morning and drove directly to my Aunt Stella and Uncle Dave’s house for the afternoon. I was still in my little boy suit with the white shirt and clip-on tie. Arriving at their home, my four cousins were all in t-shirts and jeans. I had no clothes to change into.

They were older and had been to the record store to get the album. “We got the album;” people would say the next week, and you knew they meant that album. There was no other album.

When I was older and got my own copy I would listen to it through headphones with the volume turned up high. One time I didn’t realize my parents had gone out, and I sat in the basement in complete darkness and one of my friends dropped in; saw that the house was unlocked but noted the glow of the rather large VU meters on my oversize stereo system. He called my name from the door of the basement, but I didn’t hear. So he put his hands on my shoulder. I screamed like a girl. He said I jumped about a foot in the air.

But all that came later. I’m getting ahead of myself…

So there I was with my cousins, and without the benefit of headphones or anything close to what I would have considered ideal volume, the album was on continuous play all afternoon, with the exception of course of changing it from Side 1 to Side 2.  “We’re Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; we hope you will enjoy the show.”

Before I got married, I did a camp show; traveling to Christian summer camps and doing a mix of bad comedy and music.

What would do if your cow would not moo?
And your turkey refuses to gobble?
Where do you go when your rooster won’t crow?
And you can’t get your duck to waddle?

Oh, I get by with a little help from my hens.

Ah, Beatles songs. Parodied endlessly, I’m sure. The highest form of flattery, as they say.

But all that came later, I’m getting ahead of myself…

So I’m at my cousins’ house and I’m just a kid, so I’m not thinking that Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds is about drugs, but I do have a sense that somebody might have been taking something when they wrote it. I’m Fixing a Hole. When I’m Sixty-Four. Lovely Rita… I had to ask questions about the job of a “meter maid” and what is “a hogshead of real fire” and as a kid try to figure out the logic of, “It really doesn’t matter if I’m wrong I’m right.”

Later Joe Cocker would sing A Little Help from my Friends and it would be used as the introduction to The Wonder Years and we’d all be a bit older and look back and realize those really were the wonder years, but not anywhere like we’re looking back now and typing this with a tear in one eye.

But all that came later, I’m getting ahead of myself…

So I sat uncomfortably in my grey wool pants and tweed jacket and white shirt buttoned to the neck with my clip-on tie partially falling off, and the music was a soundtrack to the afternoon, to the snacks, to my Aunt Stella’s glasses of ginger ale, to my Uncle Dave stretched out on the entire sofa watching a football game with the sound turned off, while cats and dogs came and left the room and the album just playing over and over. It was the music of our times, with Wikipedia noting that one critic called She’s Leaving Home “equal to any song that Schubert ever wrote.” 

And my cousins never left the room. Taking turns holding the 12″ record’s jacket and liner and reading every word as though it imparted some supernatural or spiritual message. They passed the album cover to me and I looked at it and though my record collection at that point was more children’s music, novelty albums and hymn collections; I knew I wanted a copy. In my mind I was saying, ‘I will own you someday.’

…Music changed significantly with that album. Pop music’s unit of currency became the album, not the single. Production values increased geometrically. Songwriting for all bands of that era moved from “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah” to more complex themes with both historic and pop culture references. It matured and held out the promise of even better music tomorrow.

A splendid time was guaranteed for all.

 

“I Regret Sexting”

Finding a graphic image that matched today’s title proved inadvisable, so we went with something informative instead, even though it’s not entirely on the subject.

On Friday I was half-listening to a Christian radio station when something said made me grab a piece of scrap paper and write down a reminder to search online for the phrase “regret sexting” and other similar phrases. (No, I did not do an image search, but thanks for asking.) The results were plentiful and if you have teenagers kids over the age of nine (yes I’m serious) you can share this with them.

• “I wish I could go back and listen to that voice in my head saying ‘no'”
• …looking back on it, teens seem to have more negative feelings about sexting compared to the way they felt right after they sent the messages
• “Our friendship died because of it. Now we act as if we hardly know each other. I hate losing people I care about. Wish we didn’t do it in the beginning because maybe we would have still been friends“
• When teen relationships fall apart, one or both teens will try to hurt their ex. One way that many teens will get back at each other is to use these sexts that were sent when things are good
• “Okay I know what you’re thinking and I’m really ashamed and disgusted of myself right now, too”
• High school students who send and receive sexually suggestive or explicit images are more likely to have symptoms of depression
• “My sext was forwarded”
• Over 25 percent indicated that they had forwarded it to others (2012 US survey)
• 11 percent of all British people have sent a sext to the wrong person (2012 UK survey)
• “I deleted everything I had… but still…I am fearing every single consequences regarding to my education, my record, and so on… I regret every single bit of it…”
• In the US, even if everyone involved is over 18, “any type of sexual message that both parties have not consented to can constitute sexual harassment”
• “I messed up … but I’d be a fool not to own up to it.” ~former teen TV star
• 61% of all sexters who have sent nude images admit that they were pressured to do it at least once

So why cover this topic today?

7 Things Parents of Kids with Phones Need to Consider

1. This is happening. The term sexting is not new but the number of participants keeps growing. Big time. What was once fringe has become mainstream. Age is no barrier. That your kids attend a Christian school doesn’t always preclude this. The easiest thing for a parent is to look the other way, or sweep this subject under the rug. For me, the easiest thing would be to choose a different topic for today.
   
2. The attitude kids have toward this is shocking. It’s what you do. It’s viewed as almost necessary; a rite of passage. Parents (and grandparents) need to realize that even kids raised with good Christian ethics (in other areas) may be living within a completely different value system than existed when we were young.
3. The popularity of this activity is a major paradigm shift in how today’s kids view their bodies, intimacy, privacy, sexuality, fidelity, etc., and we won’t know the full ripple effects of this shift in behavior for kids raised in this paradigm for at least another decade.
4. Prevention is a worthy goal, but for many parents reading this, the genie is already out of the bottle. Your goal now may consist of damage control or perhaps even further damage control. Yes, Superman turned back time once, but that was a movie.
5. The internet brings with it the potential of greater fallout days, weeks, months or even years down the road. You never know. Someone in our extended family experienced this over the summer with rather massive consequences.
6. Preoccupation with their physical bodies and all the various social aspects of their sexuality (such as today’s topic, which we could file under media, but also what goes on after school, or at weekend parties) is consuming tremendous amounts of time and mental energy. Just as porn diminishes productivity in the workplace, sexting and all its related angst diminishes academic productivity at school. 
7. A teen or preteen who has grown up in church or Sunday School or youth group may through their own shame suddenly feel unworthy to approach God. Just as Adam and Eve hid from God in the garden, some kids feel they no longer fit in at church, or no longer want to pretend to be ‘a good church kid.’ They may no longer wish to attend weekend services or youth events. For some this can go further: Their behavior somehow becomes a trigger which leads them down the road of theological and doctrinal doubts or rebellion.
   

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Sourced from a variety of internet sites

Parents Possibly Clueless to Kids’ Online Account Activity

In the 1960s a generation of parents, concerned for their teenagers told the kids to stay away from alcohol. It was turbulent time with seismic shifts taking place in culture which pitted adults against their children, but certainly some of the kids listened.

Instead they turned to drugs.

In the 2010s another generation of parents, concerned for their children told their youngest ones that they didn’t want their time or mental energies consumed with Facebook. This was also a turbulent time with technology in general and social media in particular changing communication and community. Certainly some of the kids obeyed.

Instead they opened Twitter accounts. And Instagram. And Tumblr.

As a researcher and writer who spends several hours each day online, I thrive on rabbit trails. I love seeing where they lead. In an earlier stage of life, when internet addiction consumed me, I referred to myself in terms of “catch and release.” I wanted to feel the thrill of the catch, but had no interest in eating the fish. The statement did not correspond 100% to what I was experiencing, but the sentiment was fairly accurate.

So last week when a series of rabbit trails led me to a handful of rather surprising Twitter accounts, I was rather shocked at the ages — both stated and masked — of the users. A UK survey published in The Guardian a year ago confirmed that “83% of the 11 to 15 year olds whose internet usage was monitored registered on a social media site with a false age…with one even claiming to be 88.”

Meanwhile, in a more recent article, published last week in Atlantic Monthly titled Why Kids Sext, it was reveal how rampant sexting is among both high school and middle school (junior high) youth.

Within an hour, the deputies realized just how common the sharing of nude pictures was at the school. “The boys kept telling us, ‘It’s nothing unusual. It happens all the time,’ ” Lowe recalls. Every time someone they were interviewing mentioned another kid who might have naked pictures on his or her phone, they had to call that kid in for an interview. After just a couple of days, the deputies had filled multiple evidence bins with phones, and they couldn’t see an end to it. Fears of a cabal got replaced by a more mundane concern: what to do with “hundreds of damned phones. I told the deputies, ‘We got to draw the line somewhere or we’re going to end up talking to every teenager in the damned county!’ ”

While 15 minutes of cursory observation by a layperson isn’t sufficient to explain everything, the general sense I got was that for the students concerned, this is normal, this is expected and this is not a problem. This is what you do. Welcome to life in 2014.

When I look back to my own teen years, I can only say that when someone handed you a camera, your first instinct was not to strip and take pictures of yourself. My earliest memories of photo taking were pictures of my friends, a trip to Niagara Falls, my new bicycle, and the kittens that our cat birthed in the basement. (Okay, the cat photo thing hasn’t changed much.) There were boundaries, there was personal privacy, there was modesty. On a high school trip, I remembered the horror when the people billeting myself and a friend put us in a room with a double bed. As soon as they went upstairs, we went out to their station wagon, which contained sleeping bags for a later part of the journey, informing them in the morning that they needn’t change the bed since nobody had used it.

Even in our pajamas — yes, we packed and wore those on this trip since we were guests in peoples’ homes — the notion of same sex contact of even knees or elbows had a certain yuck factor to it.

Today, parents should consider the possibility that their son or daughter’s first kiss may not have been with a person of the opposite sex. And kissing may be the least of their worries. If you can’t picture that, then I suppose denial helps.

You simply can’t talk about all that is taking place for more than about ten minutes without the internet factoring into it. Technology is driving a cultural shift at an unprecedented rate, and telling the kids they can’t use Facebook is simply missing the point.

Wednesday Link List – Saturday Edition

Weekend List Lynx

The link list bucket is overflowing and needs to be emptied a few days early…

• We’ll start out serious. Here’s a scorecard, so to speak, of how your persecuted brothers and sisters in other parts of the world made out over the holidays.  “Because the persecution of Christians in the Islamic world is on its way to reaching epidemic proportions…”  Read. Pray.
  
• Stuff Fundies Like has a Sunday School curriculum done in the style of the Westminster Catechism. If you grew up in church this is a must-read, must-forward.
  
• Another Baptist church dumps the NIV in favor of the Baptist-owned HCSB translation.  If it turns out that the majority of SBC churches switch to the Holman-published HCSB, then this whole affair was undermined by a massive conflict of interest.
• Mars Hill’s Shane Hipps reflects on the departure of Rob Bell.  “I was aware of something stirring in him for some time.  While I wasn’t surprised, I was full of grief and joy.”
• Because the people need to know, here’s Justin Bieber’s take on the subject of church attendance.  “…I focus more on praying and talking to Him. I don’t have to go to church.”
• And in the same vein, here’s rapper Jefferson Bethke’s rap, Why I Hate Religion but Love Jesus.  “Religion’s like spraying perfume on a casket.”
• And going for the three-peat on this subject, here’s Matt Hafer’s take on why “good enough for church” just isn’t good enough.”People, without saying it out loud, seem to think that God exists in about 4 places.The church building…,funerals,hospitals, sporting events…”
• Did you sponsor a child through Compassion or a similar organization?  For those who need motivation, here’s ten reasons to write your child.
  
• For all the young moms and new moms in the audience: How does a mother in a large family create some time for God in the course of a day? Alyssa gives a great answer.
  
• In one of the longest articles I’ve ever seen on Christianity Today online, Duanne Litfin writes about clothing; in particular, what we wear to church.  “…[W]e should not conclude too quickly that because God looks on the heart, what we wear to church doesn’t matter.”
• Also at CT, an interview with David Crowder on the occasion of the band’s retirement after sixteen years, and David’s move to Atlanta. “There’s just so much life has passed among us, and the depth is really deep relationship feeling, friendship.”
• The Wall Street Journal sits up and takes notice when Christian media company Salem Web Network surpasses one million Facebook friends. Be sure to read the last paragraph; you may interact with this corporation more than you realize.
• And speaking of corporate culture, Shaun In The City thinks churches should rethink the concept of competition in ministry.  “In the end you end up with dozens (even hundreds & thousands) of organizations with similar missions, visions, and goals that are not only not speaking, but are often downright combative.  They miss collaborative opportunities and so much more because of this faulty way of thinking.”
• Also on the topic of church, here’s a megachurch in Nigeria with a major staff shakeup involving the resignation of 200 pastors.
  
• In an election year, we have to forgive our U.S. friends for forgetting that the rest of the world still exists. So we tend to ignore American politics here to balance things out, but this article accurately identifies the issues that the election brings to church in 2012.
  
• Thanks this week for link leads goes to Todd Rhoades.

Dressing Your Children Appropriately

This first appeared here almost exactly two years ago, was repeated about a year ago, and still applies…

Check out this statement:

The clothes that our children wear do not merely cover the nakedness of their flesh; they shape and reflect the contours of our children’s souls. What I encourage my child to wear is a statement not merely of fashion but of theology and axiology—and this link between our theology and our wardrobes is not a recent phenomenon.

Intrigued? Want to read more? If you’ve ever wondered if there is a “theology of clothing,” check out Dr. Timothy Paul Jones Continue reading here. Maybe your choice of shirt or pants today wasn’t entirely spiritually ‘neutral.’

 

 

 

About 50 pictures were rejected before choosing this one. Then there were dozens of others that were never seriously being considered.

Forever Young, I Want to Be Forever Young

I want this blog stay fresh and to stay relevant. I want to be cutting edge. I want to attract young readers with fresh ideas.  I want to present a contemporary perspective.  Or post contemporary.

Although there are lots of clues if you look, I’ve been told that I write about ten years younger. My wife and I are really into churches that are finding new ways to reach their communities. We’re always looking a new worship choruses for ones we can introduce to our local area. I like to read books that younger bloggers are writing about. I have regular conversations with youth pastors.

But you can imagine my surprise on learning over the weekend that I type wrong. Or more accurately, I type old.

You see, I am of a generation that leaves two spaces after a period. Every single post in this blog is typed that way. Until today. I must change or die. I must adapt or be cast aside into whatever the “seniors group” equivalent is in the blogosphere. (The whole “seniors group” thing will probably end up as the topic for another blog post.)

It all started with a friend who was told off by her boss for double spacing after a “full stop.” I told her there was nothing wrong with that. (First sign of aging: refusing to notice that the world is changing.) I went online today to prove her and I correct.  And I got this:

From online “radio” show — isn’t radio equally antiquated? — Grammar Girl:

…His friends believe it is antiquated to use two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence…
Yes, the caller is correct and he’s also right that a lot of people haven’t heard about the change.

Two Spaces After a Period–The Old Way

Here’s the deal: Most typewriter fonts are what are called monospaced fonts. That means every character takes up the same amount of space. An “i” takes up as much space as an “m,” for example. When using a monospaced font, where everything is the same width, it makes sense to type two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence to create a visual break. For that reason, people who learned to type on a typewriter were taught to put two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence.

One Space After a Period–The New Way

But when you’re typing on a computer, most fonts are proportional fonts, which means that characters are different widths. An “i” is more narrow than an “m,” for example, and putting extra space between sentences doesn’t do anything to improve readability.
Furthermore, page designers have written in begging me to encourage people to use one space because if you send them a document with two spaces after the periods, they have to go in and take all the extra spaces out.

I know it’s a hard habit to break if you were trained to use two spaces, but if you can, give one space a try.

And from the Modern Language Association (publishers of the MLA Style Guide so often quoted at colleges and universities):

Publications in the United States today usually have the same spacing after a punctuation mark as between words on the same line. Since word processors make available the same fonts used by typesetters for printed works, many writers, influenced by the look of typeset publications, now leave only one space after a concluding punctuation mark. In addition, most publishers’ guidelines for preparing electronic manuscripts ask authors to type only the spaces that are to appear in print.

Because it is increasingly common for papers and manuscripts to be prepared with a single space after all punctuation marks, this spacing is shown in the examples in the MLA Handbook and the MLA Style Manual. As a practical matter, however, there is nothing wrong with using two spaces after concluding punctuation marks unless an instructor or editor requests that you do otherwise.

Thank goodness for the last sentence. Sort of.

And this from Savvy Tech Tips:

You finish typing a sentence. How many spaces do you add after the period, before you begin the next sentence?

If you’re like many people, you’ll likely say two, because that’s the way you were taught in high school.

Well, things change, and not everything your high school teachers taught you is correct. The correct answer is one space.

Two spaces after a period is a throwback to the typewriter days of yesteryear, when letters in typefaces were all the same width and two spaces were needed to help delineate the end of a sentence. Nowadays, computer characters have variable widths so only one space is used after a period.

Don’t believe me? Well, pick up any popular magazine or book and take a look. All professionally typeset pieces have one space after the period.

Think academic writing is exempt from this rule? Not true. The APA Publication Manual (5th edition, page 290) says this: “Space once after all punctuation as follows:…after punctuation marks at the ends of sentences.”

Don’t feel too special if part of you is rebelling against this one-space rule. When I cover this in design seminars, it’s amazing to see the shock and disbelief it causes in a few participants. It’s as if they have been told the world is flat, or that Santa is not real. But times change, and it’s time to leave the 20th century behind us.

Period. Space. Next sentence.

So now you know. I’m not letting go of my large font format anytime soon however — gotta run, it’s tea time and I need to find my slippers.

When it comes to changes in your local church, do you feel that you’re able to roll with the changes, or as the years pass, do you find yourself increasingly longing for the “good old days?” Do you ever find yourself using outdated expressions or colloquialisms? Did you happen to catch Lawrence Welk last night on PBS?

Why Johnny Chooses Not To Sing Hymns

While some blogs are content to work their way through books on a chapter-by-chapter basis, I may have erred last Friday in presenting a partial review of Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns by David Gordon.   I think the early review I presented was valid as far as it went, and if you missed it, pause now to click back to it; my final conclusions are somewhat different.

In the end, I believe that as powerful an argument as Gordon makes, this is mostly an emotional argument placed in an academic frame.   Where I think he betrays this is with the assertion that our present culture is “paedocentric.”

Literally, we are not a “child-centered” culture, and neither is the church.   The places where I served in worship leadership covered a wide swath of music, including items borrowed from the youth group and from camp ministry; but we never did “Jesus Loves Me;” or “Jesus Loves the Little Children.”

Rather, our culture is definitely music-saturated, as Gordon admits, and that music (as well as the larger culture) is very definitely “youth centered.”  But neither condition should be considered “infantile;” the law of entropy is not at work here.

For example, Gordon rightfully acknowledges that the loss of print music to overhead and computer projections has meant a loss of actual staff notation and four-part singing.   That is true, and I miss that also.

However, is it any less complex for people to learn tunes by memory as opposed to reading them?   Wasn’t playing the four-part game often a distraction for those of us who knew how to read music?   Is not the addition of bridges and codas to the familiar routine of verses and choruses not more complex than the simple verse-chorus rules that governed the hymns?

I’m not saying that I don’t sometimes find the bridges particularly irritating, but I don’t think we should lament the loss of something (i.e. four part SATB) when we have also gained other things (i.e. tune memorization, more symphonic forms, etc.)

Plus what are we to say of modern choruses like “I Will Give You All My Worship,” and the incredible intricacies of “You Are Holy (Prince of Peace)”?   The only hymn I know of that comes close is the chorus of  the Diadem tune to “All Hail the Power of Jesus Name” (or possibly “Wonderful Grace of Jesus”) and I don’t for a minute believe that if Johnny can learn the former he can’t learn the latter.

There are also inconsistencies in Gordon’s argument.   He acknowledges having a liking for modern works such as “In Christ Alone;” but then he seems to have less admiration for “How Great Thou Art” because it was translated into English only in the early 1950s, and therefore can hardly earn the “traditional” handle.

Gordon would have us sing “A Mighty Fortress” much more often, and many other lost songs of that era.   I agree that there is great theology contained in the verses of true classic hymns.   But nowhere does he address the difficulty we find today with people understanding lyrics such as “a bulwark never failing.”   Growing up, I always thought “this terrestrial ball” was a party; one that I looked forward to attending. Music has changed, but so has spoken English. No wonder I think Johnny can, Johnny simply chooses not to.

Rightly or wrongly, the present generation is choosing churches which have a presentation that is contemporary in nature.   Gordon despises “contemporaneity,” using the term as though it were a vice.

To “reach” the young by propagating youth culture would be analogous to Jesus’ “reaching” the rich young man by giving him money.   Money was part of that particular sinner’s problem, part of the reason he needed to be reached.  Extended adolescence is part of what our youth need to be delivered from. (p.162)

The first two sentences work, the third one undermines the force of what he’s saying.  Forgive me for thinking at that point that this is your kindly great uncle decrying the culture from his chair in the corner of the family room.

I agree with his suggestion that the music of the church ought to speak with a distinctive voice to the larger culture, but he offers no quick fix for how to attract 20-somethings and 30-somethings to a service of classical worship and preaching.

But I’m also not sure that the voice of today’s church music is not distinctive.  I remember decades ago hearing someone say, “There are secular parallels to a lot of contemporary Christian bands, but then you find a group like The Second Chapter of Acts for which there is simply no parallel.”

I also wondered, while reading, what the late Robert Webber would think of David Gordon.   Webber was a strong advocate of blended worship (something old, something new…) but might find this book a little off the balance he was trying to suggest.

On the positive side, this was a good read.   It’s one of the few books I’ve done in the last five years where the footnotes were perhaps more engaging than the main text.

Charles Wesley was surely one of the most prolific, and arguably one of the more accomplished hymn-writers in the English speaking world.   …[He] wrote at least 6,500 hymns.   Yet not all his hymns succeeded in making their way into the hymnal.   The United Methodist Hymnal has 862 hymns, only 41 were written by Charles Wesley.   So out of 6,500 hymns that Wesley wrote, only 41 are found in the hymnal of the denomination most influenced by him… That’s barely over half of one percent.  Are our contemporary hymn-writers superior?  Probably not.  Is their success rate higher than one out of every 158 they write?   Of course it is, because unlike Wesley, they get a “free pass.”  As long as their music sounds contemporary, virtually every other criterion for measuring hymns is discarded. (p. 44)

Some of our worship songs are incorporated into Sunday morning too easily — I agree with Gordon on that — but many offer something that is unique.   Furthermore, while I know it may not be everyone’s favorite, I can’t find any significant lyrical or musical difference between “How Great Is Our God,” and “How Great Thou Art.”

But other observations are not so kind such as referring to the Awakening of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield as an “alleged awakening.” (p. 151) Gordon is decidedly distanced from Evangelicalism and prefers to refer to those of that movement as revivalists.

Some of his tangential observations are helpful, such as the fact that among his students, while they all prefer contemporary worship, they almost always choose classical pieces for their weddings; though he may place too much weight on this observation.

I’m now curious about his earlier Why Johnny Can’t Preach (also P & R Publishing, also paperback)  and I have placed a copy on order.   However, I shudder to think he might complete the trilogy with a book on Bible translation.

I still think if you lead worship or have an interest in this topic that this constitutes one of those “must read” titles.   I just think that in the end, particularly in the long chapter ‘Strategic Issues,’  the emotional argument overshadowed the possibility of a completely academic treatment.   I feel he too often betrays his attempt at objectivity, while still having something worthy to say.

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A video of You Are Holy (Prince of Peace) is available here.   Or just click the comments section of this post.   It’s a fitting song with which to conclude this.

P&R Publsihing did not supply a copy of this title for review.