Generations ago, the pastoral prayer held a place in the church almost as significant as the sermon. Pastors were to write two main orations each Sunday: a prayer offered to God for the people, and a sermon offered to the people for God.
The pastoral prayer has a shepherding function. In it, the shepherd or elder prays for God’s scattered flock. The pastoral prayer also has a discipleship function in that it teaches people about God and how we should speak to him both for ourselves and for others. Continue reading Building an Intentionally Pastoral Prayer→
How do we preach in the church when we know we exist as a minority culture?
There was a time when this wasn’t a question, a time not all that long ago. But the truth is that this is not the culture in which we, the American church, live. Some lip service is paid to religion. A majority of the population still self-identifies as Christian. Church attendance is still high relative to other places in the “Christian” West. But the culture-forming and worldview-forming mechanisms of culture are not merely neutral toward Christian beliefs, but are decidedly unfriendly toward them.
This morning, I mentioned a Christianity Today article that talked about 10 of the most popular strategies for helping the poor that were actually cost effective.
Remember, this article is not arguing that other ways of helping the poor are bad. There are cost-effective ways of helping the poor, ways of helping the poor that are not cost-effective, and there are means of trying to help the poor that actually hurt them. There are many ways of doing humanitarian work that fall into the second category.
This article only seeks to highlight the top 10 most economically effective ways of helping the material sufferings of the poor.
The Bible has a songbook right smack in the middle of it. It’s called the Psalms. With 150 songs, it stands as the longest book of the Bible. Psalm 119 is the longest chapter of the Bible. Why is this songbook there?
There is another book that is entirely a song. It’s called the Song of Songs. This song isn’t even about God. It’s about romance and marriage between some newly married couple who apparently really like each other and have a very steamy relationship.
Even the book of Proverbs is mostly written in parallelism-style poetry. And if you go back to the book of Exodus, the first people explicitly filled with the Spirit of God are the artists that God commissions to create the pieces of art to be used in worship in God’s tabernacle.
For those of you who wanted to see the intro Nic gave about missions at High Point Church the Sunday Vince Burke was here, see below:
High Point is a missions church. We believe the message of the Gospel must be offered persuasively and non-coercively to all peoples, in all nations of the earth, in every generation.
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