worship

How helpful are these creative ideas for alternative worship?

August 16, 2010

Oh dear. I so wanted to really like this book Creative Ideas for Alternative Sacramental Worship. It’s the sort of resource many of us ought to be looking for and making use of. But this one is quite a mixed bag. Let’s start with the positive. It really encourages people to have a go at [...]

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Going god shopping in the worship mall

August 4, 2010

I’ve been reading The Worship Mall by Bryan Spinks (SPCK / Alcuin Club 2010). It’s unusual in that it’s a book by a bonafide academic liturgist about the stuff people – many of whom would claim not to be doing liturgy at all – actually get up to, especially when they’re being “non-traditional”. A short [...]

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When worship songs become entertainment

June 13, 2010

There was a time when charismatic and evangelical Christianity was simply populist. In many ways it still is, but that early populism was no more apparent than in its (re-)introduction of more contemporary musical styles into worship. The new musical approach to songs instead of hymns joined hands with a much older evangelical critique of [...]

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Tongues, translations and non-rational worship

April 21, 2010

(This post is one of a sporadic series on the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles) I did wonder whether to simply pass over the twenty-fourth article, not only because it is so brief, but because the principle it enshrines is, at least in the Western Church, more-or-less universally accepted, that worship should be in one’s [...]

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Desiring the kingdom: some observations on a good book

February 5, 2010

I’ve been reading James K A Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom and finding it quite stimulating. The book was awarded Christianity Today’s best theology / ethics book award for 2010, though I didn’t know that when I started reading it. Smith begins by introducing the idea of cultural liturgies with an extended description of visiting a [...]

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Bless this Blackberry, and show love to the laptop

January 12, 2010
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I’ve been trying to work out whether it is just the gimmick value that makes me uneasy about this story of the vicar who blessed laptops and mobiles at the start of the week. But I think my unease might just run a little deeper than that. I note his justification for this as an [...]

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Everything we do in church is weird

January 11, 2010

I was taken to task today for not including “accessibility” in my discussion of good worship over on another blog. The thrust behind that is that we live in a “mission-shaped church” and people coming into worship are meant to find it an accessible experience. There are some problems with that: and the biggest problem [...]

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A new blog for good worship

January 10, 2010

I’ve decided to start up a second blog focussed very clearly on ideas and resources for worship, and am more than happy to receive ideas, links and useful material for it. From time to time I may cross-post something here, especially while I’m getting it started. It is not going to be a frequent daily [...]

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Songs for the dark side?

January 10, 2010

I’m working on next month’s hymns, and I had cause to stumble across the complete listing of the English Hymnal on the Oremus site. (On the one hand it seems strange to be thinking about Lent today, on the other the story of Jesus’ baptism leads to him being driven out into the wilderness.) The [...]

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The uselessness of worship

October 9, 2009
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Sam Norton has been posting a series on worship. Yesterday he had another good provocative piece about worship being useless. Sam’s first rule of worship: worship is useless, and as soon as worship is used for something else, it ceases to be worship. In other words, worship must be centred upon God with all our [...]

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