'While believers are to worship in secret as individuals and in private as families, they are also to worship as churches in assemblies of public worship, which are not carelessly or willfully to be neglected or forsaken. Public worship occurs when God, by his Word and Spirit, through the lawful government of the church, calls his people to assemble to worship him together ... '
From the proposed Directory for Public Worship of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church
Friday, 5 June 2009
Thursday, 4 June 2009
Reflections
With the Church of Scotland fiasco still fresh in the memory thoughts turn to those who stood for righteousness and truth in that very mixed denomination. I don't know anything about them so can't comment but my mind goes back to those days in the late 1960's when churches began to secede from the Presbyterian Church of Wales. By that time Presbyterianism had become a dirty word among Bible believing Christians and the ensuing exodus - well it was more like a trickle of churches over a period of years - resulted not in a reformed Presbyterian church but a multiplication of independent churches and a solidifying anti-denominational feeling.
I regretted the loss of connectionalism, though was glad to leave behind that shell of a denomination and shed no tears over the eventual demise of the Presbyterian theological college, where I 'trained'. I was just wondering what hope there is of a reformed Church of Scotland emerging from the present mire. Maybe those brethren are as variegated and unconnected as many of us were in the days of yore. I hope not.
I regretted the loss of connectionalism, though was glad to leave behind that shell of a denomination and shed no tears over the eventual demise of the Presbyterian theological college, where I 'trained'. I was just wondering what hope there is of a reformed Church of Scotland emerging from the present mire. Maybe those brethren are as variegated and unconnected as many of us were in the days of yore. I hope not.
Friday, 22 May 2009
to étrangère
Thank you! I think it's nice too, even special. I'm praying that we will get to where we are going.
Tuesday, 12 May 2009
If you ever go across the sea to Ulster
Friday, 20 March 2009
No, No?
As a small group of churches we were recently asked whether multiple worship-leaders and guitar amplifiers were a 'no, no' among us? The question comes from the fringe but manages to persuade us that it belongs to the centre - such is the heat it always manages to generate! When it actually becomes centre-stage, we find that lots of other things have moved to the fringe. Worse still, so has Christ!
Does anyone ever ask who may and may not lead worship? The OPC did in the 1990s and came up with 'only those properly authorized' among whom they included missionaries and approved students for the ministry. Pretty conservative - but that's what they are - me too. There was nothing about music, even though the worship wars had by then begun to affect some of their congregations. What's with the music thing anyway - we are about worship not music and certainly not performance. But there must surely be some regulation.
Our freedom is to worship God, what a privilege! Poor old regulative principle! - we show such disrespect by charging it with bondage. It really is about freedom, like the freedom of Adam and Eve before the Fall - freedom on God's terms not ours. Remember Cain and Abel. There is such a thing as true worship - it must be in spirit and truth. It means at the very least doing it God's way not ours. Make me a captive, Lord and then I shall be free!
Does anyone ever ask who may and may not lead worship? The OPC did in the 1990s and came up with 'only those properly authorized' among whom they included missionaries and approved students for the ministry. Pretty conservative - but that's what they are - me too. There was nothing about music, even though the worship wars had by then begun to affect some of their congregations. What's with the music thing anyway - we are about worship not music and certainly not performance. But there must surely be some regulation.
Our freedom is to worship God, what a privilege! Poor old regulative principle! - we show such disrespect by charging it with bondage. It really is about freedom, like the freedom of Adam and Eve before the Fall - freedom on God's terms not ours. Remember Cain and Abel. There is such a thing as true worship - it must be in spirit and truth. It means at the very least doing it God's way not ours. Make me a captive, Lord and then I shall be free!
Monday, 19 January 2009
Concrete examples
doggiesbreakfast said...
Interesting. I have had one of Blamires' books (on the post-christian mind) on my Amazon wishlist for while but not got round to getting it. You are right it is a pressure! Have you any more concrete examples of the phenomenon?
Well I suppose we must look in the context of church practice at the fall of the sermon and rise of 'chat' as a prime example. Associated with it is the emergemce of 'counselling' and the widespread expectation that ministers should be community workers.
More generally, many assume that 'helping people' is so essentially Christian and 'witness-ful' that the 'how' doesn't matter. I spent four years (long ago) as a family case worker before fully realizing how humanistic social philosophy and social work practice are. Should have known better - there is no room for God because there is none for sin either. I'm not sure that we have really grasped what a minefield 'contextualizing' the gosel is.
Interesting. I have had one of Blamires' books (on the post-christian mind) on my Amazon wishlist for while but not got round to getting it. You are right it is a pressure! Have you any more concrete examples of the phenomenon?
Well I suppose we must look in the context of church practice at the fall of the sermon and rise of 'chat' as a prime example. Associated with it is the emergemce of 'counselling' and the widespread expectation that ministers should be community workers.
More generally, many assume that 'helping people' is so essentially Christian and 'witness-ful' that the 'how' doesn't matter. I spent four years (long ago) as a family case worker before fully realizing how humanistic social philosophy and social work practice are. Should have known better - there is no room for God because there is none for sin either. I'm not sure that we have really grasped what a minefield 'contextualizing' the gosel is.
Saturday, 27 December 2008
Thank you Harry Blamires.
I had to prepare an end of year sermon for our congregation and chose the subject of Our Spiritual Warfare. I decided to rework an existing sermon based on Ephesians 6:10-12 in the hope of improving it (I don't think it happened - too many thoughts came). It occurred to me, however, that Paul's reminder that we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers points to the inwardness and essential spiritual nature of the conflict. I also thought about the important role of deception in the enemy's strategy.
It occurred to me that we do not think about these things as we ought. If we catch ourselves thinking about Christian things, we are easily fooled into believing that we are thinking about them Christianly. In a moment of 'theological flashback' I thought of two older books, Lloyd-Jones' Conversions: Psychological and Spiritual, a critique of Willam Sargent's Battle For The Mind and Harry Blamires' The Christian Mind. The second of these, written in the early 1960s has always had a prophetic flavour for me; a kind of primitive precursor of Wells' God In The Wasteland.
Blamires wrote from an Anglican perspective about the abandonment of the Christian mind and exposed what he called the 'schizophrenic type', especially in the church hierarchy, who hops in and out of his Christian mentality. Blamires believed that British Christians had sold out to the secularists and that they were incapable of thinking Christianly even about Christian things.
We are a good deal further up the creek now and there's still no sign of a paddle. A couple of weeks ago a Dutch Ph.D. student told me that he was researching ways in which psychotherapy could improve the pastoral ministry. In his mind it did not savour of a sell-out to the secularists. He felt that too much pastoral counselling was intuitive and unscientific. I wanted to believe that 'unscientific' meant unbiblical or untheological but it was too much to hope for.
Back to Blamires ! He thought the sell-out to the secularists was partly the result of reluctance by Christians to stand up and be counted. Perhaps we have reached that bend in the creek where reticence has given way to enthusiasm - not for objective truth or anything like that but for cultural relevance and the felt need to communicate. It puts us under such huge pressure doesn't it?
I had to prepare an end of year sermon for our congregation and chose the subject of Our Spiritual Warfare. I decided to rework an existing sermon based on Ephesians 6:10-12 in the hope of improving it (I don't think it happened - too many thoughts came). It occurred to me, however, that Paul's reminder that we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers points to the inwardness and essential spiritual nature of the conflict. I also thought about the important role of deception in the enemy's strategy.
It occurred to me that we do not think about these things as we ought. If we catch ourselves thinking about Christian things, we are easily fooled into believing that we are thinking about them Christianly. In a moment of 'theological flashback' I thought of two older books, Lloyd-Jones' Conversions: Psychological and Spiritual, a critique of Willam Sargent's Battle For The Mind and Harry Blamires' The Christian Mind. The second of these, written in the early 1960s has always had a prophetic flavour for me; a kind of primitive precursor of Wells' God In The Wasteland.
Blamires wrote from an Anglican perspective about the abandonment of the Christian mind and exposed what he called the 'schizophrenic type', especially in the church hierarchy, who hops in and out of his Christian mentality. Blamires believed that British Christians had sold out to the secularists and that they were incapable of thinking Christianly even about Christian things.
We are a good deal further up the creek now and there's still no sign of a paddle. A couple of weeks ago a Dutch Ph.D. student told me that he was researching ways in which psychotherapy could improve the pastoral ministry. In his mind it did not savour of a sell-out to the secularists. He felt that too much pastoral counselling was intuitive and unscientific. I wanted to believe that 'unscientific' meant unbiblical or untheological but it was too much to hope for.
Back to Blamires ! He thought the sell-out to the secularists was partly the result of reluctance by Christians to stand up and be counted. Perhaps we have reached that bend in the creek where reticence has given way to enthusiasm - not for objective truth or anything like that but for cultural relevance and the felt need to communicate. It puts us under such huge pressure doesn't it?
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