word | spirit | world | church
Paul in 1 Corinthians 14 is keen to express to the Corinthians that worship should be orderly. Yes, you can have a flow of charismatic life with everyone bringing their prayer, tongue, Bible reading, prophecy, and the rest, but you must also have some order. At the very least you need to take it in… Continue reading Order and the Charismatic
Worship has three, or maybe five, dynamic directions. There is a gift and receipt dynamic to it. It looks a little bit like this: Worship goes up, it goes out, or sideways, and it goes in. What I mean by this that the primary direction of our worship is towards God, or ‘upwards.’ We worship… Continue reading Directionality in Worship
Places matter. They accrue meaning as we do meaningful things in them, but also they are better or worse for different things. I’d like to consider ‘response times,’ by which I mean the part of your Sunday meeting where people are invited to respond to preaching or prophecy and then are prayed for by someone… Continue reading The Location of Response Times
In my church tradition—the conservative end of the British new church movement or ‘reformed charismatic’—it’s normal that we engage in what we call ‘contributory worship.’ Essentially this means that at the same point in our worship when we’re singing songs, members of the church will pray, read from the Bible, and use spiritual gifts. Lots… Continue reading On Microphones
My last two thoughts for now on the Eucharismatic ‘manifesto’ that I sketched. Regularity and Form I’ve drawn a doctrine of the church that maps four encounters with God: Baptism, Lord’s Supper, Preaching, and Contributory Worship. It’s not wildly different from lots of Protestant versions, it’s essentially word and sacrament, with the charismatic addition being… Continue reading Two final Eucharismatic Words
Every member of the church is meant to participate in the church’s gathered worship, because the Bible insists that we do. Continuing my series on my Eucharismatic manifesto, I’d like to talk about the importance of what we might call ‘worship,’ but I’ve referred to as ‘prayer.’ I’ve deliberately shifted the language because I want… Continue reading Worshipping in Spirit
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