Deus Misereatur

I was doing some “bid-ness” yesterday, rummaging about to find a quotation about baptism, and tripped over this. Read it slow and steady, and before you argue with it, disregard it, or dump it, think it over. "...faithfulness is different from and more important than effectiveness. But numbers are also important, not so much in the sense of the unsaved who need to be reached but in the sense of the baptized we let get away. ( . . . ) As much as the church needs to see how the techniques of contemporary church growth alter the content of the gospel, believers need to recognize that God has ordained certain techniques or forms for the church's growth. The one reliable God-given method is the natural and organic one of baptizing infants born to believing parents" (D.G. Hart, " Recovering Mother Kirk ," 46). Mike

D.G. Hart has rightly observed that in worship, “ You cannot separate form and content ” (“Recovering Mother Kirk”, 200). His point should be clear, but just in case it’s not, then allow me to rephrase it this way: You will either worship up to your theology, or you will lower your theology to your worship. One way to understand this is in regard to our liturgical language. To put it in the ancient formula, lex orandi, lex credendi est : The language of prayer is the language of faith . If the language of our worship (songs, prayers, etc) is predominately pietistic, individualistic, therapeutic, revivalistic, charismatic, and self-absorbed, then no matter what our official stated theology (whether it‘s the 39 Articles of Religion, or the Westminster Confession of Faith), our lived theology will become pietistic, individualistic, therapeutic, revivalistic, charismatic, self-absorbed, and that then develops into the gauge by which our people evaluate a church, their life experiences, a...