Worship and Music

Why is it so easy for Christians to forget the Holy Spirit?
I don’t mean that we forget the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Most of us are grounded enough in a Trinitarian belief system never to do that. We are all aware, at least on a cognitive level, that the Third Person of the Godhead exists.
But, nevertheless, we forget him....

In addition to our 11:00am worship service, we are going to provide an alternate Sunday morning service at 9:30am starting on February 10. That's the first Sunday of Lent. We'll try this through Palm Sunday. If the idea works, we'll keep going with it.

Each service will have the same sermon (& the same preacher). The early service will place a greater emphasis on traditional hymns and liturgy. The 11:00 service will stay pretty much the same -- a blended music style leaning toward contemporary. But both services will be centered on the same things -- Word & Sacrament.

Charles Spurgeon, a Baptist pastor in 19th century London, was renowned for his preaching abilities. Thousands of people flocked to his church on Sundays to listen to him speak. 25,000 copies of his sermons were sold every week. But when visitors came to see Spurgeon’s church building, rather than showing off the pulpit, he would take them down to a room in the basement where a group of people were on their knees praying and say, “This is the powerhouse of the church.”...

What does God want Astoria Community Church to look like five years from now?
That is the question our elders and pastors asked during a planning retreat we attended in August. With much prayer we reviewed the history of ACC, studied information about Western Queens and discussed the mission and core values of our church. Then we set out to form 1-year, 3-year and 5-year goals. During the months of September and October, we shared our thoughts with other church leaders, asking them to help us discern the will of God for our church.
Here is what we sense God calling us to do. In the next five years we want to work toward three basic goals ...

I appreciate these thoughts of C.S. Lewis:

‘If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents—the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else’s. But if their thoughts—i.e. of materialism and astronomy—are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents. It’s like expecting that the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milkjug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset.’

C.S. Lewis (1898–1963), The Business of Heaven

The writers of the Westminster Confession of Faith really loved to worship God. They wrote: “God is to be worshiped everywhere, in spirit and in truth; as, in private families daily, and in secret, each one by himself; so, more solemnly, in the public assemblies.” (WCF 21.6) Of those three spheres of worship (worshiping God privately, worshiping God with our families, and worshiping God publicly) the idea of a family worship time is the most challenging one for many people today.

The family worship time in our home could certainly be improved. But let me tell you what we do, in case you are looking for some ideas about how to start....

I love listening to sermons on-line. Some preachers to whose sermons I listen are Vaughan Roberts (http://www.stebbes.org.uk/), Tim Keller (http://www.redeemer.com) and John Piper (http://www.desiringgod.org/.) I am grateful for the volunteers who post my sermons on this website. I know they don’t compare with the messages preached by those guys, but I hope that they are helpful to somebody.

I think that there are right ways and wrong ways to use sermon podcasts (or sermon CDs, radio preachers, etc.)

One of the joys and challenges of parenthood is teaching your child how to eat. Newborns can instinctively breast-feed, but they usually have a hard time handling a fork. Before little Junior can sit at the table and dine with the family, a long, messy process of training is usually required.

Churches also face the joy and the challenge of preparing children to come to the Lord’s Table.