Holy To-Do Lists and Pious Soups Don’t Save
Behind the Music: Clergy Edition
Rev Coles on Living in the Gap Between Jesus’ Love and Our Best Efforts
Join Us for Palm Sunday!
This week we’re streaming the service from All Saints Winter Park FL, with Stuart Shelby presiding and Paul Zahl preaching:
Remembering Sy Sperling — and Your Pastor, Minister, or Priest
The Professionals are the Clients, Too
Daniel Defoe on Preaching During a Pandemic
A resonant passage from A Journal of the Plague Year 1665, in which the author of Robinson Crusoe describes some of the preaching in London during that catastrophe, ht WDR:
Neither can I acquit those ministers that in their sermons rather sank than lifted up the hearts of their hearers. Many of them no doubt did it for the strengthening the resolution of the people, and especially for quickening them to repentance, but it certainly answered not their end, at least not in proportion to the injury it did another way; and indeed, as God Himself through the whole Scriptures rather draws to Him by invitations and calls to turn to Him and live, than drives us by terror and amazement, so I must confess I thought the ministers should have done also, imitating our blessed Lord and Master in this, that His whole Gospel is full of declarations from heaven of God’s mercy, and His readiness to receive penitents and forgive them, complaining, ‘Ye will not come unto Me that ye may have life’, and that therefore His Gospel is called the Gospel of Peace and the Gospel of Grace.
But we had some good men, and that of all persuasions and opinions, whose discourses were full of terror, who spoke nothing but dismal things; and as they brought the people together with a kind of horror, sent them away in tears, prophesying nothing but evil tidings, terrifying the people with the apprehensions of being utterly destroyed, not guiding them, at least not enough, to cry to heaven for mercy.
Join Us For Morning Prayer
This week we’re streaming the service from St Albans in Waco, TX, with Aaron Zimmerman preaching:
The Blessing (in which I begrudgingly admit everything will be alright)
Confessions of a Certified Catastrophizer
Join Us for Morning Prayer
We at Christ Church in Charlottesville again taped today’s planned Morning Prayer service, which you can follow along with by downloading the service bulletin here. Paul Walker presided and preached, Sam Bush did the music, Amanda McMillen did the readings, and Christie Walker said the prayers.
