This is a book about making musical choices. But not just any choices. This is a book about making musical choices that are deliberately informed by the Word of God. It is about making choices that are discerning, wise, beneficial, and edifying. This book is about making musical choices that will bring glory to God. Six brief, engaging chapters will help you answer the most significant questions influencing our musical choices today.

Sound Worship: A Guide to Making Musical Choices in a Noisy World

Aniol, Scott

Religion & Spirituality

Religious Affections Ministries

The worship of the evangelical church has been ravaged by the triviality and banality of popular culture, the unanswerable appeal of pragmatism, and the ubiquitous presence of entertainment. The pastor who cares about offering God the worship He deserves faces the same question: is it too broken to fix? Do I start over? Do I steadily repair what is broken? In this booklet, David de Bruyn hopes to highlight the benefits of certain worship practices that are sometimes missing from the free-worship traditions in order to show how a wise use of these practices can only improve the worship we offer God.

Recovering Intentional Worship: Some Things to Consider Including in Your Church Service

de Bruyn, David

The Teacher's Edition for Sound Worship: A Guide To Making Musical Choices in a Noisy World by Scott Aniol includes the full text of the book, 14,000 additional words of instruction, illustration, explanation, discussion questions, student handouts, and more.

Sound Worship: Teacher's Edition: A Guide to Making Musical Choices in a Noisy World

"You want me to tell you why God is to be loved and how much. I answer, the reason for loving God is God Himself; and the measure of love due to Him is immeasurable love. . . ." What is love? In his text On Loving God, Bernard surveys the four types of love that Christians experience as they grow in their relationship with God: loving one's self, selfish love, loving God as God, and loving one's self in God. Bernard reminds us that not only did God give us life, but He gave us Himself. For indeed, "God deserves to be loved very much, yea, boundlessly, because He loved us first, He infinite and we nothing, loved us, miserable sinners, with a love so great and so free." Bernard reminds us that we are indebted to God for his love and His sacrifice. Not only should we love God because it is what He deserves, but also because loving God does not go without reward. Loving God is to our advantage. The Lord rewards those who love Him with the blessed state of the heavenly Fatherland, where sorrow and sadness cannot enter. St. Bernard's medieval prose is poetic and full of clever imagery. His work is as beautiful as it is knowledgeable.

On Loving God

Clairvaux, Bernard (de

This book addresses a highly complex and elusive matter: why the Christian Church was able to contribute so generously to music from its earliest days through the 18th century and why it has suffered since that time from a creeping artistic paralysis. Modern attitudes and assumptions often find the values and accomplishments of the Christian worldview enigmatic, even repellant, and church music has come to be one of the primary areas in which the tension between conflicting worldviews continues to be worked out on a daily basis. This thoughtful work investigates the historical interaction of theology, philosophy and music, and will be of interest to church musicians, theologians, music historians and cultural anthropologists. In its concluding chapter this work explores a number of basic questions: In what sense, if any, can the arts (and then the fine arts) be considered profoundly significant for modern society? Is there a meaningful role for artists of genius and total commitment? Do the arts (and then the fine arts) have any profound significance for the Church in the modern world? Of what significance, if any, to the Church in the modern world are the great Christian artistic accomplishments of the past? This exploration is by means of excerpts from historical sources, quotations from modern authors, and commentary on both. It calls upon historical, philosophical, theological, liturgical, anthropological, and musical sources and concepts in an attempt to develop a comprehensive understanding of musical developments that have served the Christian church for centuries and that have also provided a rich heritage of art music.

Wiser Than Despair: The Evolution of Ideas in the Relationship of Music and the Christian Church

Arts & Photography

Faulkner, Quentin

Music

This book of hymns is a modest attempt to collect some of the best congregational songs available in the English language. Herein are compiled texts and tunes with sources ranging from ancient Israel, North Africa, Syria, Greece, Italy, Germany, France, Spain, England, Scotland, Ireland, and America, covering a time period extending from second century b.c. through 2017. Translations into English come from sources originally written in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, German, French, Spanish, and more. This collection is truly universal in its scope.Our selection of hymns has been based on the central criterian of fidelity to biblical truth. What a church sings has often more impact upon the theology, devotion, and behavior of its members than the church’s doctrinal confession or even what a pastor preaches. It is therefore important that a church sings only what is biblically true.This is the primary reason we have placed an emphasis on Scripture-based hymns in this collection. Hymns that are close versifications or paraphrases of Scripture are clearly marked, and we have provided an index of these hymns as well.We have assessed a song’s truthfulness on at least three bases. First, we have endeavored to choose hymn texts that are theologically rich and sound. In most cases, we have attempted to preserve each author’s original text, particularly for hymns written in English. We have made some alterations for translations into English, especially updating archaic pronouns, as long as those changes did not sacrifice poetic integrity. In a few minor cases we have made changes for doctrinal reasons.Second, we have chosen only those texts we believe correspond to Scripture on a poetic level. Poetry is not merely decorative—it is an essential part of the communication of truth. The poetry of hymns expresses not just the what of biblical doctrine, but also how God chose to aesthetically present His truth in Scripture. Therefore, we have worked to choose hymns whose poetry shapes the affections and imaginations of worshipers in ways similar to how Scripture does.Third, we have chosen hymn tunes that we believe best communicate the kinds of sentiments and affections that are fitting with biblical truth. Like with poetry, musical form is not neutral; rather, melody, harmony, and rhythm combine to give expression to right affections.

Hymns to the Living God (Burgundy)

Though the acceptance of popular culture (and in the case of music, pop music) within the Christian church is now an established fact, its very normality across the face of virtually every variety of Christian theological persuasion is telling. In a climate of extreme multi-culturalism, pluralism, and relativism satiated with the notion that music is value-neutral and worldview-free, church music has been cut off from history, tradition, theology, aesthetic norms, and ultimately the Word. The result has been a breakdown of church music standards along with a collateral weakening in other areas of life as well.

Measuring the Music: Another Look at the Contemporary Christian Music Debate

Makujina, John

Christianity could die in one generation. The nature of Christianity (and any other religion, for that matter) is that the generation that professes it is responsible to preserve it and propagate it to the next. A failure to do so will mean that, at least as far as living adherents are concerned, Christianity will cease to be. For this reason, all Christians ought to be conservatives. Christians ought to be concerned with conserving all it means to be Christian, so as to pass this on to others. This book encourages church members in general and pastors in particular to consider practical methods to recover a more full-orbed Christianity in the context of a local church.

The Conservative Church

Hymns to the Living God (Gray)

This declaration reaffirms a historic commitment to fully orbed conservative Christianity. The authors believe in transcendent, absolute principles of truth, goodness, and beauty; they are confident that such principles are knowable; and they are determined to align themselves and their ministries to those principles in our pursuit of the whole counsel of God. They also pledge to conserve those institutions and forms that best reflect a recognition and respect for this transcendent order.The authors offer this document out of a deep love for Christ, his gospel, his inerrant Word, and his church, and from a humble desire to help churches conserve and nourish historic, biblical Christianity by affirming the teachings of the Bible concerning truth, goodness, beauty, and rightly ordered affections in life and ministry.

A Conservative Christian Declaration

Martin, Ryan

Riley, Michael

Bauder, Kevin T

Parker, Jason

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