Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 11094 Music has been part of the worship of God’s people from the earliest pages of Scripture, and its role in the life of the church is so deeply embedded that most believers have never paused to ask why. What is music actually doing in corporate worship? Is it a warm-up before the sermon,…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 11014 The short answer is yes, emphatically. Worship is not confined to a building, a service, or a Sunday morning time slot. The longer answer requires understanding what worship actually is in biblical terms, because the question itself often rests on a definition of worship that is too narrow. If worship means singing songs…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 11015 Private worship is the believer’s personal, individual engagement with God, carried out apart from the gathered church. It is the devotional life that sustains a Christian between Sundays, the hidden practice that Jesus assumed His followers would maintain, and the foundation without which corporate worship becomes hollow performance. Jesus taught about it directly,…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 60026 This is a question many believers wrestle with honestly. Bethel Church (Redding, California), Elevation Church (Charlotte, North Carolina), and Hillsong Church (originating in Sydney, Australia) produce some of the most widely sung worship music in the English-speaking church. Their songs appear in hymnals, on projection screens, and on streaming platforms across every denomination….
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 60014 Buddhism is the world’s fourth-largest religion, with an estimated 500 million adherents, primarily in East and Southeast Asia but with growing influence in the West. It is often presented in popular culture as a philosophy of peace, mindfulness, and inner tranquility rather than a religion in any traditional sense. This presentation, while not…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 11095 The question of whether musical instruments should be used in Christian worship has a long and sometimes surprisingly heated history. For most contemporary evangelicals, the question seems settled beyond discussion: of course instruments are used in worship. But a significant minority tradition, most notably represented by the Churches of Christ and some Reformed…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 11029 Few topics have caused more friction in local churches over the past fifty years than the question of worship styles. The so-called “worship wars” have divided congregations, exhausted pastors, and generated an enormous amount of heat with remarkably little light. The question deserves a careful, biblical answer rather than the tribal loyalties it…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 11027 Few words in the Christian vocabulary are more frequently used and more poorly understood than “worship.” In contemporary church culture, worship has become almost synonymous with singing. A “worship leader” leads the music. The “worship time” is the part of the service before the sermon. But the biblical concept of worship is far…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 11028 If worship is the response of the whole person to the worth of God, the question of how we worship is not a matter of personal taste but of biblical obedience. God is not indifferent to how He is approached. Scripture contains both positive examples and serious warnings about worship, and the pattern…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 11030 Few topics in corporate worship generate quite as much variety of opinion as whether Christians should raise their hands during prayer and praise. Some congregations see lifted hands in every service; others would find the practice deeply uncomfortable. The question is whether Scripture gives us any guidance, and if so, what that guidance…