Understanding biblical worship—what it means to worship God in spirit and truth.
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60014. Buddhism and Christianity both begin by taking suffering seriously, which is more than most modern philosophies manage, and then they move in opposite directions. That shared starting point is why Buddhism appeals to thoughtful Westerners who have given up on church. It is also why the differences need stating clearly. A faith that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60026. Few questions divide thoughtful believers as quickly as this one, because modern worship music from Bethel, Elevation and Hillsong is everywhere. Their songs fill hymn projectors, playlists and youth events across the English speaking church, and a good many of them are genuinely singable, warm and biblically shaped in their language. I have…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11095 Whether we should use instruments in worship is one of those questions that sounds trivial until you meet someone for whom it is anything but. There are sincere, Bible-loving congregations across these islands who sing unaccompanied on principle, and there are others where the drum kit arrived decades ago and nobody has thought…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11094 Ask ten Christians what music in worship is for and you will get ten answers, several of them contradictory and at least two delivered with some heat. Some treat the singing as a warm-up act before the sermon. Others treat it as the point of the whole service and everything else as an…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11091 Dancing in church divides congregations more sharply than the biblical evidence really warrants, and it does so because the argument is almost never about the texts. It is about culture, temperament, memory of previous churches, and a set of instincts that people find difficult to articulate. So let me try to separate what…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11048. Written prayers make many evangelicals uneasy, on the grounds that real prayer should be spontaneous and anything read from a page must be second-hand. I understand the instinct and I do not entirely share it. The Bible contains a very large book of written prayers, God’s people have sung them for three thousand…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11047. Ending prayers in Jesus’ name is a habit most Christians acquire before anyone explains it, and quite a few carry a low-level worry that they have been reciting a formula rather than doing something meaningful. The phrase comes straight from Jesus himself, repeated several times in the upper room discourse, so we are…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11046. Saying Amen at the end of a prayer is so automatic for most of us that we have stopped hearing it, which is a shame, because it is one of the few words that has travelled unchanged from Hebrew through Greek into English. Children ask about it and adults rarely have an answer…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11054. Fasting and prayer appear together so often in Scripture that many believers assume the combination works like a spiritual amplifier, as though skipping meals turns up the volume on our requests until God can no longer ignore them. That instinct is understandable, and I think it is wrong in a way that matters….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11053. Praying aloud feels natural to some believers and excruciating to others, and I have met plenty of Christians who quietly assume they are doing it wrong whichever way they lean. Somebody who was raised in a tradition of audible prayer can feel that silent prayer is half hearted, while somebody who prays best…