stories on Intergenerational Worship

Lutheran pastor Hans Fiene...in 2018...writing to parents who are worried about having children in church because of the sounds they make, Fiene said, For many years, there were no little children at ...

Participating in God’s glory-sharing life, then, happens in two contexts: scattered and gathered. Worship scattered is the Spirit-filled life of the Christian in the world, and worship gathered is the...

We have become so performance-oriented that it is hard to see how compromised we are. Consider one small example. In many of our churches, prayers in morning services now function, in large measure, a...

Good liturgy, whether formal or informal, ought never to be simply a corporate emoting session, however “Christian,” but a fresh and awed attempt to inhabit the great unceasing liturgy that is going o...

At a worship service I attended a couple of years ago, my attention was drawn to the enthusiastic worship leader. He opened our time with prayer, asking God to meet us and draw us together in the Lord...

I pastored a church in the Chicago area for almost fifteen years. During the worship service one Sunday morning the ushers came forward to receive the offering, and one of the ushers was asked to pray...

The [Trinitarian] view of worship is that it is the gift of participating through the Spirit in the incarnate Son’s communion with the Father. That means participating in union with Christ, in what he...

When one prays the hours, one is using the exact words, phrases, and petitions that informed our faith for centuries. . . . We are using the exact words, phrases, and petitions that were offered just ...

These days, music is everywhere. It’s on television and film, elevators and restaurants, public bathrooms and dentist offices. It’s in our cars and on our phones. With just a few taps to our screens, ...

In his excellent book on worship, The Dangerous Act of Worship , pastor and president of Fuller Seminary Mark Labberton shares a story of the transformation of one of his former congregants: Ben ...

One Sunday morning in a more traditional worship service, a rather verbose minister stepped up to the pulpit and announced to the congregation, "I've been told that I'll be moving on to l...

A missionary family who has started organic churches in some of the most dangerous fields in the world once returned to the states for furlough. On the first Sunday back, they visited a large Baptist ...

My friend Isaac Wardell, a pastor of worship and founder of Bifrost Arts, asks whether we think of gathered worship as being more like a concert hall or a banquet hall. If it’s a concert hall, we show...

One Sunday I was preaching on Psalm 27. It is a remarkable psalm of hope for God’s- deliverance from fear for those who have faced tough times. With the same candor found in many psalms, this one vivi...

Just this morning, my family attended church with our son who has autism. He was particularly enthused by the music today, and he was moving around quite a bit. A man in the choir noticed our son, and...

I came to appreciate liturgy during a time in our church’s life when we were rediscovering the gospel. We planted the church in 2000, and for the first several years, we struggled to discern the best ...

Imagine celebrating a birthday party for your child. You buy a cake, invite guests, and give her presents. Now imagine discussing the party with your spouse later that night. Your spouse asks you what...

Worship gives us a workable structure for life. The psalm says, “Jerusalem, well-built city, built as a place for worship! The city to which the tribes ascend, all God’s tribes go up to worship.” Jeru...

The kingdom of God turns the Darwinist narrative of the survival of the fittest upside down (Acts 17:6–7). When the church honors and cares for the vulnerable among us, we are not showing charity. We ...

Whoever dubbed the debate over musical style a “worship war” failed to realize that worship is always a war. The declaration that there is one God, that his name is Jesus, and that he has died, has ri...

The advantage that cities and traditional neighborhoods have over sprawling suburbs with respect to interdependence is that they allow people of a greater variety of ages to participate meaningfully i...

I sometimes wonder (although I exaggerate in order to make my point) if it would not be very healthy for church members to meet only on Sundays (for worship, fellowship and teaching) and not at all mi...

Editor’s Note: The following illustration came from one of my own sermons, as I was trying to help a congregation see itself not as a building, but the body of Christ. It has been adapted for TPW. No...

In a November 1882 sermon on 1 John 2, the renowned pastor and preacher C. H. Spurgeon offers a profound insight into the nature of Christian maturity. His remarks come as part of his exposition on th...

From the outside Calvary Church in Holland, Michigan, looks like a typical large church that many Americans attend. The church developed the typical way: it started small and then began to grow. As th...

The story of worship as told in the Bible defines worship in a radically different and surprising way. It’s a story that surprises us because we discover that it doesn’t primarily feature us. The star...

Some marches are not against anyone or anything. They are marches for something or someone. Jesus. Peace. Hope. Unity. In a town where I lived for many years, a few of us organized an annual Walk of t...

When a person is confused and things refuse to fit together, she sometimes announces a need to get out of noise and turbulence, to get away from all the hassle and “get my head together.” When she suc...

[T]he liturgy helps us enter a counter-intuitive story. In an individualistic culture, the liturgy helps us live a communal life. In a culture that values spontaneity, the liturgy grounds us in someth...

Susanne Wesley, wife of Pastor Samuel Wesley, lived in the late 1600’s and early 1700’s She gave birth to nineteen children, ten survived. Everyday she would take her Bible to her favorite chair and...