I'm speaking to people 95 and above, with a few young whipper-snappers in there too, like me. I'm only 75, but I "get it" when you talk about some of the music in the church.
Here's the deal. Growing up, my church, probably your church too, had these books. Remember the books? Huge collections of songs written anywhere from the Middle Ages to Isaac Watts, the Fanny Crosby era, to just a few years back. We sang it all. What we didn't understand, the better songleaders would explain, and our comprehension of the things of God grew in every song service.
No one style was honored above another. There were fast bumpy tunes and majestic making-you-want-to-worship songs. Songs we could relate to and songs that were "out there" to be discerned on another day.
Fast forward. It's the twenty-first century. By and large, youth have taken over the music program. It was wiser, we thought, to give them sway, than to see them go down the street to another church that was "woke", or to no church at all. And all of their "homies" (remember that word? That was contemporary just a few years ago, now smiled at) would be able to hear about Jesus. We would grin and bear it.
And. The music they brought in was often theologically sound, even if the other "sound" was unpleasant to half the congregation. But the music they brought in was the only music we heard after awhile, not that great mixture I described above. Monolithic. One relatively small group of musical offerings. Gone were the Middle Ages. Gone Isaac Watts. Gone Fanny Crosby. Only the cool stuff with an occasional bone sent out to the 95 and over crowd to let them know they were in church...
Yes, us old guys can still learn. We can "move on" if we must. But does it have to be at the price of a treasured collection of music God has given His people over the centuries?
C'mon, dust off those books. Some of us are so old we can't see your screens and we certainly don't know the words and we can't rock to the beat. Give us a break, yes? Let us know that the church we helped bring into the world wants to bring us back into the church.
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Remember the old song, "tempted and tried we're oft made to wonder, why it should be thus all the day long..." Tempted and tried? Tempted or tried? Which is it? Is temptation the same as testing? Is one a subset of the other? Do we really receive...[ abbreviated | read entire ]
Silence still reigns over my last question. Oh well. Let me try another. And i realize up front that this can be considered a surface matter, not a matter of the heart. Not a matter of one's salvation. Not a huge doctrinal issue. I get it. But...[ abbreviated | read entire ]
I put a question out to my facebook friends the other day. It was about semi-nakedness at the public beach. Not about the world's practices, but about ours. I normally get some kind of response to the things I bring up over there. All my friends...[ abbreviated | read entire ]
I'll return to Matthew 24 soon, but please indulge me as I comment on my November book about KJVO Syndrome. (With the "O" being the operative word) I was thrilled recently to find that one of my books, Speak My Language, has been reviewed...[ abbreviated | read entire ]
There are constant hindrances to the modern-day reader as he tries to comprehend God’s message to him. Why would anyone want to put this roadblock in front of a new believer? A person would have to have a dictionary and a guide to grammar at...[ abbreviated | read entire ]
We understand that in every reading of every Bible there are words and ideas hard to be understood. For this we have Bible dictionaries and commentaries. We are not looking for a child’s Bible. The doctrines still must be carefully taught by...[ abbreviated | read entire ]
“Some American fundamentalists have denounced Westcott's and Hort's Greek text of the Bible as corrupt. Most of these critics subscribe to the King James Only movement. King James Only author Gail Riplinger quotes them in her book New Age...[ abbreviated | read entire ]
David Otis Fuller, Baptist Pastor, d. 1988. I want to take you through a 1977 pamphlet of his, entitled, Is the King James Version nearest to the original autographs? It’s a strange question to ask since the “original autographs”...[ abbreviated | read entire ]
