When you understand what worship is, it’s easier to be active and truly present in worship.
Like learning the rules of baseball before you go to your first game, learning why we worship the way we do can help you better appreciate and participate in what’s going on. Conversely, not knowing can make the experience boring and even frustrating.
So if you want to be more present in worship, take some time to learn about worship.
There are some things on my Recommending Page you can read. And I preached a sermon last Sunday to get you going in the right direction. Give it listen.
Let me introduce you to a teenage Americana band that will knock your socks off, our good friends, Young MacDonald.
Will and Lee MacDonald are brothers who play gypsy jazz, bluegrass, and lots more on their violin and cello.
A couple days ago, they were staying up late answering questions and performing live on KXCI’s Locals Only. Listen to the show! You will not regret it. These boys are amazing.
This Sunday at Covenant, a young man we’ve been mentoring for a few months is going to profess his faith and be baptized. We’re so happy for him!
One of the things he says made a big difference for him in becoming a Christian was a book by Greg Koukl called the The Story of Reality: How the World Began, How It Ends, and Everything Important that Happens in Between, which he came across while working at a local library.
If you’re interested in learning more about Christianity you might want to read it for yourself. The Kindle version is on sale at Amazon right now. And, of course, you might find it in your local library too.
Sadly, many people would rather assume things about Christianity than take the time to learn how and why Christians see the world the way they do.
But if you are a curious person, I encourage you to take the time and learn more about the Christian faith. It might change the way you see things. It might even change your life.
Michael Kruger, author of Canon Revisited writes on his blog:
So, no one hid or suppressed these books. On the contrary, early Christians were quite open about the problems with these books and overtly stated why they should be rejected as part of the biblical canon.
Read the whole thing: What about the ‘Lost’ Books of the Bible?
The center of a clay tile mural handmade by Gail Roberts. You can see her amazing art all over Tucson.
⍟ According to this WaPo story, you should breathe through your nose.
Dog? at (32.7299, -114.6378)
⍟ I learned a little more tonight about how to make my website more accessible to people with visual impairments. This is a fun topic! Now my links are underlined (mostly), and I’m looking forward to making a few other changes.
Fred Sanders, professor of theology at Biola, on Twitter:
Clarity ensues. But as I’m paraphrasing their own arguments, I notice that their case is stronger than I remembered. And as I type in some short quotes, I notice that they are coming at the whole issue from a different set of animating questions and concerns than I am.
Quality scholarship often goes slower than you’d like, but the work is so much better.
John Muether, professor of church history and dean of libraries at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, writes in Tabletalk:
The stakes may be higher than we think. As distraction dulls our senses, it can lead even believers to indifference about heavenly matters. The book of Hebrews (which many commentators believe was originally a sermon) speaks powerfully to our digital age when it warns, “We must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it” (Heb. 2:1).
There is a lot to lose and a lot to gain. Isaiah 55, from which this post is titled, calls our attention to this as well.
I took these photos of the Yuma Territorial Prison.
Another picture worth seeing is the mug shot of Pearl Hart, a media savvy prisoner who was part of a scandal (or was it a con?), that got her a pardon and early release on the condition that she’d leave and never return to Arizona.
Dear Covenant,
As you know, this last Saturday through Monday I went with my family to Yuma. While there, my wife was able to take an art class with a master painter from Canada (here’s what she’s working on), my kids and I spent time together exploring this unique part of our state, and on Sunday we were able to spend the day getting to know the mission work better.
Though I’ve not been able to visit very many times, Yuma OPC is close to my heart. I helped get the mission work started in the early days and our congregation has done what it can from a distance to help see a new church planted in this part of the state. In the pictures below, you’ll notice that they are still using the logo Bryce designed a few years ago.
The last time I was there, I was with a group of us from Covenant that went to help pass out flyers around town for the mission work, but I had to get back to Tucson quickly that day and wasn’t able to worship or even visit with the saints for very long. So I was happy for the extended time we had last Sunday.
The mission work meets at First Presbyterian Church, a generous and friendly congregation of the PCUSA that allows the OPC to use the entire basement of their building, which includes a kitchen, a classroom, an eating hall, and a meeting room. Last Sunday, the meeting room was packed with more than eighty people. A quarter of the congregation were visitors, many who were Canadians preparing to head back to Vancouver and other places.
I was invited to preach, which I did, and worshipped with the others there. It was exciting to see what God has done since the earliest days when all this was just an prayer request. And it was a joy to connect with old friends as well as meet new ones.
The afternoon was spent getting to know Pastor Baker and his family better. They treated us to a St. Patrick’s Day lunch of corned beef stew, cornbread with butter, and some of the best cupcakes I’ve ever had, thanks to Pastor Baker’s middle daughter.
Throughout the afternoon, while the kids played, we talked about evangelism and pastoral ministry. Lessons we’ve learned; lessons we’re trying to learn. We all agreed that we were mutually blessed by the encouragement, fresh ideas, and fellowship.
Then, back to church in the evening. This is when the mission work has their Sunday school. The small children met separately, while Pastor Baker helped the rest of us through some catechism questions, singing, prayer, and a lesson. He taught about the sacrificial death of Christ. And I was reminded of how many terms we have to describe Christ’s sacrifice and how important it is for us to understand them. It’s something I’ll be reflecting on going forward.
By the time we said our goodbyes, we were already excited about our next time together, when the Bakers visit Tucson.
Thank you for your prayerful support this weekend, for donating your money to home missions, and for your zeal for the evangelistic mission of Christ’s church.
Encouraged,
Pastor Chelpka
⍟ I’ve posted an update on what I’m doing now.
⍟ I wrote some summary notes on John Owen and Herbert Croft’s thoughts on deacons. Their books on the nature of the church were published in London only a year apart from one another.
Every so often I find it helpful to read a book about reasoning. It was about that time again when Alan Jacobs recommended Think Again: How to Reason and Argue in his newsletter, so I decided to get a copy.
Here’s what @ayjay said about the book:
“In my book How to Think, my goal was to encourage my readers towards a thoughtful disposition rather than give them methodical guidance. But since my book came out, Walter Sinnot-Armstrong has published Think Again, which provides a lot of that step-by-step direction, and does so very well indeed. When I was giving a talk at Duke last year I met with Walter and his students, and I was pleasantly surprised at how neatly our books converged.”
I had previously read and enjoyed Jacobs’ book, so this seemed like a great idea.
Sinnott-Armstrong’s book is an introduction to the principles of good reasoning. He teaches you how to identify, analyze, evaluate, and make arguments. He helped me remember things I had forgotten and understand some things I was unclear on.
In addition to addressing how to reason and argue, Sinnott-Armstrong explains why it’s important. One reason is that civil, reasoned discussion, “gives us more chance of arriving at mutual understanding and respect as well as true beliefs and good policies.” (46) It has the potential to reduce polarization.
“Most people see arguments as ways to persuade other people or to beat them in some kind of verbal fight, debate, or competition. That view is not all wrong, but it is limited and incomplete. Some people do present arguments as displays of prowess or power, but arguments can also play more constructive roles in social interactions.” (56)
Learning how to reason and argue can teach us how to “get beyond name-calling and figure out how strong an argument really is”; we aim to “reconstruct the argument as charitably as possible and then ask how strong it is in its best form.” (199) In this way, arguments can lead to good results like learning, humility, and compromise..
By teaching how to do more than merely assert, Think Again can help you reach those noble goals.
The following is a repost from my November 2017 review on Goodreads.
Alan Jacobs. 2017. How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds. Currency. WorldCat link.
I loved How to Think and highly recommend it for anyone who is committed to knowing the truth or helping others know the truth (e.g. journalists, politicians, scholars, pastors, etc.).
Thinking well requires one to take a certain posture towards the truth, oneself, and others. The posture toward “others” is a main idea of this book. Alan Jacobs shows how thinking is always relational. And he describes how truth seeking and community ought relate to each other and what happens when they don’t—a topic of central importance to me as pastor.
Here are some choice quotes:
“The more useful a term is for marking my inclusion in a group, the less interested I will be in testing the validity of my use of that term aginast—well, against any kind of standard.”
“The only real remedy for dangers of false belonging is the true belonging to, true membership in, a fellowship of people wo are not so much like-minded as like-hearted.”
“The problem, of course, and sadly, is that we all have some convictions that are unsettled when they ought to be settled, and others that are settled when they ought to be unsettled.”
“As I’ve said before: Thinking is hard.”
Thanks to @ayjay, I read Think Again: How to Reason and Argue by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. This is an introductory book on the principles of good reasoning. But WSA teaches more than how to reason and argue, he also explains why. I’ll write a little more on this tomorrow.