Communion Ideas from WorshipIdeas.com
“The tips in this special report will help you bring new life to your Communion services.” 

Podcast Episode 88: Interview w/ Jennie Lee Riddle from AllAboutWorship.com

How to Raise New Leaders on your Worship Team from churchleaderinsights.com
by Jason Hatley, Pastor of Worship Arts at The Journey and Founder of  WorshipLeaderInsights.com. 

Jonny Baker puts us in touch with some  gorgeous loops

Melissa Pirtle from worshipministry.com asks “Can An Instrument Prophesy?”

Q&A with Rick Muchow:  When Should You Remove Someone from the Worship Team? from churchleaders.com

Finally – don’t miss the best deal going on Fridays : 5$ Resources from Ligonier Ministries

Sinclair B. Ferguson

” I am struck by the lack of biblical literacy from virtually every voice in this discussion. Let me start with Christians. It seems that we have little sense about what politics does and does not achieve. My brothers and sisters, “we won” is not an appropriate response. Patting ourselves on the back is silly. Moving forward with anything less than continual proclamation of the gospel of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ with the somber realization of the lostness we face is simply missing the point. Politics does not bring victory over sin, death, hell, and the grave – Jesus does. Laws do not change people’s hearts – the Spirit of Christ does. Elections will not bring this country to be a picture of God’s Kingdom – God the Father and his electing purposes will do so when he sends his Son to restore all things at the end of the age. Don’t get me wrong, we ought to vote in a way that reflects God’s Kingdom, and in doing so perhaps some will be confronted with the reality of God and his created order. But please don’t act like temporal laws in a temporal government will ever bring about the true spiritual change that’s needed to redeem hearts, minds, souls, and bodies for Christ.”

An excellent article from the Secundum Scripturas blog.

NC Amendment One and President Obama   by Matt Emerson

At the time it was installed in 1978, the organ was the largest mechanical action organ in the United States.  It was a massive instrument that thundered and whispered with power and beauty.

In 1998 after water and neglect had damaged the organ, there was a move to repair it and then:

“On December 2, 1998, twelve years of silence ended as the organ sounded once again during chapel amidst cheers from the student body. (Mr.) Tracy Russell, the new organist, accompanied the singing of the hymn that morning: Amazing grace, how sweet the sound.

“I’m very thrilled to see it and hear it being used again,” Celestino said. “From the beginning,” when plans to make repairs were announced, “the reaction from the students has been very positive,” he said. In talking with students, he added, “some thought (the organ) was for visual benefit only, because they’d never heard it. It never dawned on them that it made music.” (Story Link)

Never dawned on them that it made music?  University, right?

Nine years later in 2007, pictures showed the organ hidden behind banners and a massive video projection screen. When I was there last February it was no where to be seen. Blue curtains and bland panels covered the space and the grand organ was said to have been dismantled, put into storage and put on sale.

Bill McConnell was chapel organist for the 1999-2000 school year while he was full-time Minister of Music at St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church in Tulsa and teaching part-time at ORU. He says:

I don’t know that the instrument has been dismantled (it might have been, I just don’t know for sure). It just makes me very sad that funds were spent to build this magnificent instrument, it was allowed to deteriorate once and then restored, and then was allowed to deteriorate again. It is an incredibly poor example of stewardship to use funds for a project of this size and complexity that you haven’t made any plans to sustain.

Shame.

Such a stunning work both visually and acoustically traded in for what? Bands playing the song of the week.

The video below is a nice piece on a young man who discovered what an organ could offer and plays regularly at his church.

The Christianity which is from the Holy Spirit will always have a very deep view of the sinfulness of sin. It will not merely regard sin as a blemish and misfortune, which makes men and women objects of pity, and compassion. It will see in sin the abominable thing which God hates, the thing which makes people guilty and lost in his Maker’s sight, the thing which deserves God’s wrath and condemnation. It will look on sin as the cause of all sorrow and unhappiness, of strife and wars, of quarrels and contentions, of sickness and death – the curse which cursed God’s beautiful creation, the cursed thing which makes the whole earth groan and struggle in pain. Above all, it will see in sin the thing which will ruin us eternally, unless we can find a ransom, – lead us captive, except we can get its chains broken, – and destroy our happiness, both here and hereafter, except we fight against it, even unto death.

~ J.C. Ryle

Tract: Authentic Religion

“If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come.” – C.S. Lewis

When we have exhausted our store of endurance,
when our strength has failed ere the day is half done,
when we reach the end of our hoarded resources
our Father’s full giving is only begun.

His love has no limits,
His grace has no measure,
His power no boundary known unto men;
for out of His infinite riches in Jesus
He giveth, and giveth, and giveth again.

- Annie Johnson Flint
He Giveth More Grace