Church Life

I think this post from Steve Jeffery is very helpful

2 Samuel 6 describes what King David did when the Ark of the LORD was brought into the city of Jerusalem.

"Once you are convinced that your people need — I say need — the whole Word of God, and you get over the shock to your indolent flesh that you are not in the ministry for an easy job, you simply roll up your sleeves, and having gathered, or being in process of gathering, the most helpful library of commentaries and reference books you can find, you get down to it: and book by book you give your people a balanced diet of the truth." (William Still, The Work of the Pastor (p

For those of you who belong to a small group at church, Richard Perkins has a couple of excellent posts on how you can belong to one so as to make it thrive, and how to belong to one so as to make it struggle.

Church Society have just launched a new series of publications entitled The Reformed Evangelical Anglican Library. Lee Gatiss, the editor of the volumes in the series, recently dropped me an e-mail to point them out, and they look promising. In particular, I often feel that the wisdom we most often seek out is that from our own generation, but those of former years and centuries so often have much to teach us.

Finally, we have an announcement. It was announced this morning that the new Bishop of Rochester is to be Rt Revd James Langstaff, currently Bishop of Lynn in the Diocese of Norwich.

Then enjoy the wisdom of William Cowper, as found in two verses of his hymn What various hinderances we meet:

Have we no words? But think again;
words flow apace when we complain
and fill our fellow-creature’s ear
with the sad tale of all our care.

Were half the breath thus vainly spent
to heaven in supplication sent,
our cheerful song would oftener be,
‘Hear what the Lord has done for me!’

I have once had the fortune to take part in a carol service where While Shepherds Watched was sung to the tune of On Ilkla Moor baht 'at. It was a slight novelty: "Did you know that these words can be made to fit to this tune? What fun - let's do it!"

It is a joy to discover Sam Allberry has a blog. He has a particularly excellent post on there with some very important reminders for those of us who lead public prayer in church. Check them out at: http://allberry.blogspot.com/2009/09/public-prayer.html

I recently received an e-mail asking about how you work out what the "meter" for a hymn is, and how you go about finding a tune that fits the words of a particular hymn.

In case my reply helps anybody else, here's what I said:

Doug Wilson says some very helpful things about getting major issues and minor issues the right way around in theology.

Specifically, how sad – and how serious – when people take a minor issue (one on which we may quite respectably agree to disagree) and turn it into a major issue (one on which we do not have the latitude to disagree). As Wilson argues, at that point the issue has to become a major one on both sides. It is a major issue to mis-classify a minor issue as major.