Please Pray for the Chapman Family

Christian singer Steven Curtis Chapman suffered an unthinkable tragedy Wednesday when his 5-year-old daughter was killed in an accident involving her brother.

Chapman’s daughter, Maria Sue, died after being struck by an SUV in the driveway of the family’s Nashville-area home late Wednesday afternoon. She was playing in the area with several other children. Her teenaged brother did not see her in the driveway when he struck her with the Toyota Land Cruiser he was driving. Maria was the youngest in the family and one of three daughters adopted by Chapman and wife Mary Beth.
Please pray for God’s loving embrace to hold the Chapman family and carry them through this impossible situation.

Source: People.com

Who's Your Boss?

A couple of decades ago, Bob Dylan announced his faith conversion with an album that famously and artistically declared, “You’ve got to serve somebody.” Dylan realized there was going to be an authority in his — and everyone’s — life.  That’s something that fewer and fewer people believe.

Consider the current talk about the emergent church (or emerging conversation, or any one of now a half-dozen labels being used to describe various thinkers, writers, and leaders). Some earnest scholars have tried to figure out how emergent thinkers “fit into” Christianity as we know it, and most admit that the emergent movement itself is splintering into any number of its own factions, proving that while they may not be Presbyterian or Baptist in doctrine, they certainly are in practice. It won’t be long until we see “Reformed Second Mosaic Church of Christ,” or “First United Mars Hill Assembly of Ohio, 2015 Convention.”

At root — the root that really matters — is the issue of authority. It comes down, in a very simplistic sense, to this: Who’s going to be your boss?

Read the rest.

Avoiding Nonsense in Worship Songs

I found this book review by Bob Kauflin, at worshipmatters.com. It’s a commentary on the book, “And Now Let’s Move Into a Time of Nonsense: Why Worship Songs are Failing the Church“, written by Nick Page. Here’s a short, but I think right on, quote from the book:

“Worship songs are not solely vehicles for personal expression, they’re invitations to corporate worship. If you want to write stuff that only you can understand then keep a diary, otherwise you have to cut the rest of us some slack; you have to help us understand.”

I think I’m going to check this book out, but check out Kauflin’s entire review.