Imagine, for a moment, that I came to your typically conservative evangelical church and asked to visit with your young people, high school through young married couples. I want to ask them some questions.

-What do you think of the President?
-What is your position on abortion?
-What do you believe about the legalization of gay marriage?
-Are you in favor of any version of Federally controlled health care?
-What is your church’s definition of the inspiration and authority of scripture?
-What is a brief definition of the Trinity?
-How does your church’s beliefs differ from Roman Catholicism? [Continue reading]

We’ve been talking the Evangelical/Protestant liturgy recently, so why not something to give us some background in an evangelical Anglican liturgy. I’ve been watching with great interest- OK, with undiluted envy- the growth of one of the new Anglican congregations in the southeast, St.Peter’s Anglican in Tallahassee, Florida. If you aren’t getting their podcasts, you are really missing a positive, exciting example of why ACNA churches are going to do some amazing things. (If you can, listen to the wonderful 4th anniversary sermon 10/11/09, Blessed to be A Blessing.) They have big plans.

A growing Anglican church has a lot of evangelicals to educate in the basics of liturgy. Rev. Eric Dudley is a wonderful preacher and a fine teacher. In this presentation, he takes an hour to guide you through the basics of Anglican liturgy. Many of you in the IM audience will learn a tremendous amount about the larger, deeper tradition in the Anglican and Episcopal churches. Listen to his explanation of not being “sermon centered” and what is an “Anglican altar call.”

The Nuts and Bolts of Anglican Liturgy from St. Peter's Anglican Church on Vimeo.

PLEASE keep this discussion on topic. No Baptist bashing.

First, read Matt Schmucker’s short piece regarding his advice on “special needs” church members. (Note to commenters: be respectful of Matt, please. If you disagree, do so graciously.)

In 1983 I was finishing seminary and serving as youth minister at a church near the seminary and populated by mostly seminary students and their families. Among the non-seminarians was a single mother and her 15-year old son Bryan. Bryan was what some would call “special needs.” Severely autistic, Bryan gave no outward signs of communication. He lived in a self-contained world of a few repeated movements.

Bryan and his mother had been part of the church for years and were much loved. Bryan accompanied his mom to adult Bible study, worship and Wednesday fellowship meals. She gave him commands for everything. To any observer, it appeared that nothing much registered with Bryan and nothing came from him in any form of communication.

One day, Bryan’s mother came to see our pastor and asked that he baptize Bryan. While we could not see his faith in Christ, she could, and as his mother, she was asking that he be baptized and be included as a professing member of the congregation. [Continue reading]

I discovered last night that the large church I’d passed several times this week here on Sullivan’s Island was an Episcopal church with a 10 a.m. Wednesday Eucharist service. After checking the church’s web site, I noticed that one of the contributors at Mockingbird, John Zahl, was a pastoral associate at Holy Cross. IM readers know of my appreciation for what these Lutheranized Anglicans are doing, so I hoped that John would be leading this weekday service.

I was delighted to discover that I was right, and that Pr. Zahl was the minister preaching and leading the service. [Continue reading]

Time to blog will be short or non-existent today, but this comment from
“Becky” in the “8 a.m. Mass” discussion is the best post of the day anyway. Thank you Becky, for framing what it means to be human in a beautiful and helpful way. She starts out quoting two of us, then hits the ball out of the park herself.

Jeff: “More experienced, mature Christians who should be teaching the young about and sharing with them their great Christian heritage are instead asked to ‘get with it’ or ‘get out.’” [Continue reading]

From Ray Ortlund at Christ Is Deeper Still:

“My passion isn’t to build up my church. My passion is for God’s Kingdom.”

Ever heard someone say that? I have. It sounds large-hearted, but it’s wrong. It can even be destructive.

Suppose I said, “My passion isn’t to build up my marriage. My passion is for Marriage. I want the institution of Marriage to be revered again. I’ll work for that. I’ll pray for that. I’ll sacrifice for that. But don’t expect me to hunker down in the humble daily realities of building a great marriage with my wife Jani. I’m aiming at something grander.”

If I said that, would you think, “Wow, Ray is so committed”? Or would you wonder if I had lost my mind?

If you care about the Kingdom, be the kind of person who can be counted on in your own church. Join your church, pray for your church, tithe to your church, participate in your church every Sunday with wholehearted passion.

We build great churches the same way we build great marriages — real commitment that makes a positive difference every day.

Someone is saying “You’re going to disagree with probably the most respected, spiritually passionate guy in the Christian blogosphere? You really are out in left field knocking down the fence.” [Continue reading]

I’ve been thinking about this post quite a bit, and for the life of me I really can’t think of much to say than some of the obvious.

The evangelical worship service is the worship of the people of God. God acts, speaks invites and offers. God’s people respond in worship, service, ministry and mission. This is the character and content of worship as a gathered event and as a continuing influence. To make the evangelical worship service anything else is to misrepresent worship.

The congregation represents the human and cultural spectrum in which the church exists. To create a congregation that distorts the natural human and cultural context may provide an effective matrix for growth or other activities, but will have serious consequences for many aspects of church life where multi-generational and natural contexts are important. (A congregation of twenty-something skateboarders only is certainly possible, but will have issues regarding leadership and mission beyond that age and culture.) [Continue reading]

Intro, 1, 2.

If you are looking for a complete theology of the pastorate, sorry. I am going to talk about the relationship of leaders to the worship service itself, and a few related issues. The sermon is a separate subject. One point I am making is that ministers are not entirely preachers.

Someone has already asked if I am giving my own views or recommending what everyone should do. I’m speaking entirely from my own perspective on these matters. I’m well aware many disagree, and I’m neither looking for debate nor implying others must change.

For example, even though I will use the pronoun “he,” I believe women are called and gifted to be pastoral leaders, preachers and worship leaders. If that call and gift is recognized by a congregation, it can and should be exercised. I complete respect those who differ and I realize my view isn’t shared by many of my own peers.

The key to worship leadership is to lead as a servant of Jesus and of God’s people. Not to entertain, self-promote, distract or dominate, but to lead; to be a means by which worship’s direction is made clearer and the content of worship is communicated effectively so that a congregation can respond. [Continue reading]

Looking over recent comments and emails, it occured to me that many of you would benefit from the writing of Alastair Roberts- a former IM favorite blogger now semi-retired- who wrote some of the most helpful thoughts about the church I’ve ever read. In fact, I carry around the originals in my brief bag all the time. This past post of mine just surveys the excerpts. Follow the links to his blog, Adverseria and get the entire original post. Those of you looking for the “right church” will be greatly challenged and helped.

Let me begin by thanking God for Alastair Roberts, his clarity in writing and his heart for the Church and Gospel of Jesus.

Alastair has a post at Adversaria called “The Denominational Church” that is, in a phrase, magnificently helpful for me where I am right now. [Continue reading]

NOTE: Despite the fact that this post is law, you should still read it

I want to talk about a specific problem in preaching and teaching: the problem of preferring law over Gospel.

I consider the primary problem with preaching and teaching in my Southern Baptist tradition these days to be an obsession with (or addiction to?) preaching the “law.” To put it mildly, it’s brutal out there. In many churches and ministries, you’re getting clubbed into putty with the law and hearing slightly less Gospel than what you’d get in fifteen minutes of country music, all courtesy of a preacher who has no excuse not to know better.

I’m using the simple Lutheran “law/Gospel” division here: all of scripture is either what God commands/demands under penalty or what he promises/provides freely by grace. This is law and Gospel. “Do” or “Done.” Moses or Jesus. God the accountant older brother or God the Father of the Prodigal. Advice or announcement. Sinai or the cross. Threat or comfort. Blessing or curse. You do it or else. God did and praise.

If you get this, Luther said, you are a theologian even without the degree. So if you don’t know this, learn it, and if ou learn it, use it. Go to New Reformation Press and get you some Rod Rosenbladt or, if you’re up for it, the book by Walther. (Lutherans can make suggestions for the rest of us on this.) [Continue reading]

UPDATE: Pr. Cwirla has a follow-up post on worship at Higher Things.

I recently became aware of a youth ministry movement in the Lutheran Church: Missouri Synod called “Higher Things.” I was intrigued on several counts.

HT takes the best of the Lutheran tradition and makes it the substance of student conferences. Rather than hear what they would never hear at church, HT gives students the best of what they do hear at church, done with excellence.

No “big names” do the conferences. Gifted communicators who are all in local church ministry as pastors, etc.

There’s a distinctive denominational focus. Like that or not, the goal is the make better Lutheran Christians, not students who will abandon ship to find what they heard at the conference.

One of the most exciting concepts for me was the idea of a “spirituality toolbox,” made up of scripture, the Small Catechism (and the Confessions) and the Lutheran Hymnal. What would be involved in a “spirituality toolbox” in your tradition or mine? Is such a thing even possible?

Is HT an example of what could happen if generic evangelicalism had a more confessional identity and a sense of its own tradition? Is this one of the directions in youth ministry that we should consider if we want to actually prepare young leaders for our churches, rather than provide more reasons for students to abandon evangelicalism? [Continue reading]

6: 9 Don’t you realize that those who do wrong will not inherit the Kingdom of God? Don’t fool yourselves. Those who indulge in sexual sin, or who worship idols, or commit adultery, or are male prostitutes, or practice homosexuality, 10 or are thieves, or greedy people, or drunkards, or are abusive, or cheat people—none of these will inherit the Kingdom of God. 11 Some of you were once like that. But you were cleansed; you were made holy; you were made right with God by calling on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. -Paul the Apostle, First Letter to the Corinthians

I’ve always been encouraged that there is so much discussion of the Gospel in the Christian blogosphere, but I’ve been disappointed where most of that discussion has focused. I’m sure there’s a great need to clarify the differences between Piper and Wright on the nature of justification, but I doubt that the church on the corner has many people walking in the doors who particularly care. (Oh, I know that the theologians among us can tell us why they should care, but the theological class has never suffered from a lack of confidence in the significance of their particular areas of interest, yours truly included.) [Continue reading]

Welcome back IM First Officer Michael Bell as the guest blogger today.

You may have heard people say that the “average” sized church in the U.S. or Canada is about 75 people. You also may have heard someone say that the “average” sized church in North America is about 185 people. Who is right? It all depends how you define “average”.

Statisticians use three terms when describing populations. “Mean”, “Median”, and a third term that won’t really enter our discussion today called “Mode”.

I have borrowed, and expanded upon, an analogy from the The National Congregations Study that was released last month, to help us understand the differences in these terms and why they are important to our understanding of churches in North America. What you will read here is U.S. data, but the numbers are very similar for the Canadian situation as well.

Imagine you are looking down a very, very long street, and all the churches of U.S. are lined up along the left side of the street from smallest to largest. In behind each church are all their Sunday morning attenders.

If you counted the grand total of everyone standing behind each church and then divided this number by the total number of churches that you see on this very long street, you would come up with a “mean” or “average” size of 184. “Mean” is usually what we mean of when we think of “average”. But this number of 184 is a very misleading number. [Continue reading]

Moving on, folks. Moving on.

Reader Chris has written me a couple of notes on my overall views of youth ministry. I owe him an answer, but I’d like to open up a couple of posts on the general idea of where we are going in youth ministry. I’ve been involved primarily with teenagers for 30 of my 34 years of church ministry. For more than a decade, I did lots of church consultation and I had successful youth ministries in two large churches. I made it to a lot of large youth events down through the years and heard most of the best speakers on the youth ministry circuit.

There was a time I was really sure how to “do” youth ministry. Today….a lot of my thinking has changed. Here’s a few thoughts. More coming. [Continue reading]

My posts so far have carried an agenda. I would like readers to consider what church discipline looks like when it is the church’s compassionate ministry to those who are suffering, rather than primarily a punitive action toward those who are sinning.

I am aware that, according to a full understanding of church discipline, it is compassionate to deal with someone in a way that their need for repentance and returning to faith in Christ becomes obvious in their life. What concerns me is that the paradigm for church discipline is assumed to be radical surgery rather than the promotion of health in as much of the body as possible.

There are Christians who need church leadership to step up and take church discipline seriously, but not by attempting to turn an issue into a “bring it before the church,” I Corinthians 5 kind of response. These are persons who need church leaders to show an interest as shepherds, offering oversight, accountability, resources or mentoring, as needed, in situations that might normally be ignored. [Continue reading]