Moving Beyond the Worship Wars
The worship wars seem far from over. While they don’t occupy the front page of current Christian magazines, and public disputes seem to have decreased, a quick meeting with your local pastor or music minister will show you how prevalent these concerns still are. Congregants have strong stances, and rightfully so. Decades after the rise of contemporary Christian music (CCM), local churches continue to wrestle with how musical style and...
Recommended Books (Fall 2017)
“Words are the progeny of the soul,” states Clement of Alexandria (A.D. 150-215).[1] As our bodies produce children for posterity, so do our souls. Just as we all wish to produce good children to build up the coming generation, Clement argues we should be careful to leave only the best words to those who come after us. In this way of thinking, “wisdom is a communicative and philanthropic thing.”[2] For this reason, Clement cautions us...
Rhetoric: The Christian Speaker and Non-verbal Communication
For the preacher, teacher, or leader, speaking well in public is vital. Of course, public speaking is verbal, but it’s also non-verbal. In fact, the majority of public speaking is non-verbal. Albert Mehrabian states, “Only 7 percent of a speaker’s message comes through his words; 38 percent springs from his voice; 55 percent comes from his facial expressions.”[1] Thus, the Christian speaker must concern himself not simply with what he...
Book Review: Remodeling Youth Ministry
by Ben Campbell “For too long, YFM (Youth and Family Ministry) has suffered from pragmatic solutions to eternal problems,” concludes Talbot.[1] For the past forty years, the goal of youth ministry has been to gain students through entertainment. The time has come for a reformation and a remodeling of youth ministry. In Remodeling Youth Ministry, Christopher Talbot does an exceptional job of communicating the need to return to a...
Thomas Helwys and Sola Scriptura
The foundational theme of the Reformers’ work was sola scriptura, Scripture alone. Each Reformer exhibited a strong commitment to look to the Scriptures for the truth about all of life. They rightly believed that the Roman Catholic Church’s problems stemmed from its departure from the Word of God as its rule in faith and practice. However, every Reformer struggled between their commitment to sola scriptura and their cultural context....
English General Baptists: The Arminian Anti-rationalists (Part II/II)
In Part I we considered scholarly claims that, of the Reformed, Lutherans, and Arminians, only seventeenth century Arminians were genuinely open to the new rationalism. We’ve selected two representatives of the English General Baptists (Arminians) to consider the merit of such claims. In Part Two, we’ll consider the writings of Thomas Grantham and Thomas Monck on how one acquires religious knowledge and compare them to the views of...
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