Stonebrook Music

Jamie Brown recently gave some great suggestions on how to improve the corporate worship of the Church. The suggestions from this short but important blog post are all things that we have worked on at Stonebrook, but we want to continue striving to do them better for the glory of God and the edification of the gathered Church.

This fall our music ministry will be reading through Christ Centered Worship by Bryan Chapell together. We are planning to take 20-30 minutes of each practice time and read a section of the book together, and reflect on what we’ve read.

Our goal is to understand the purpose of corporate worship from a Biblical perspective so we can help communicate to people why it is important that we arrive on time with hearts prepared to engage in the music, scripture, prayer, offering, and announcements, with the same expectation as we do the sermon, rather that simply seeing it as a big “warm up” or “prelude” to the “real meat” of the service.

I’m looking forward to this study, I’ve benefitted greatly in my thinking on corporate worship from this book, and I hope you will too.

Please check out this 3.5 minute video of Bryan Chapell explaining why he wrote the book:

Good post by Mark Altrogge (who has written several of the songs we use on Sunday morning) on how we should pick songs to sing in church.

His points: briefly:

• Are doctrinally sound (Is it biblically accurate? Years ago, we sang a song about blowing a trumpet and victory and when I looked up the passage in the Bible it was about God’s judgment on his people)
• Are significant (“Joy is the flag flown from the castle of my heart when the king is in residence there” – wave your handkerchief above your head as you sing – it’s probably true but is it significant?)
• Have creative lyrics (Come on now, we can do better than “You saved my soul and made me whole”), yet “literarily apt and thoughtful” (One man I know once said, “God is so good – he’s like a greasy piece of fried chicken” – creative, but the metaphor doesn’t work too well)
• Have good music (Raise your hand if you want boring music and melodies)
• Have music that’s appropriate for the lyrics (Does a snarling death-growl vocal fit lyrics declaring the holiness and majesty of God? Maybe it could to some, but if possible we should seek to appeal to a wide audience). We should seek music and melodies that highlight the lyrics.

This boy was created by God to be blind and autistic, and to sing this powerful prayer to Him in order to break all of our hearts and encourage us to a renewed passion to know and see God as He truly is.

There are days I am very thankful for YouTube. This is one of them.

As Jesus passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him. – John 9:1-3

On November 12, Desiring God held a mini-conference in Minneapolis on “Gravity and Gladness“, John Piper’s theology of corporate worship. At this conference, they did an hour-long interview with Bob Kauflin. Author of the [Worship Matters Blog](http://worshipmatters.com) and a Book by the same name, which is one my highest-recommended books on the subject.

Here is the interview:
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