Yesterday, Coral Ridge announced our official partnership with our new Organist and Artist in Residence, Chelsea Chen. You can read all about it here. She’s remarkable from top to bottom, and she’s the right person to help us steward our 6600-pipe Ruffatti organ. It’s a stunning instrument, and it’s especially remarkable when it’s in capable hands. Coral Ridge has had a rich history of such capable hands, and Chelsea will be able to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in that line. I have … Read More
Singing the Bible – Cardiphonia’s Canticles
Astounding. They just keep getting better. A little before Christmas, Cardiphonia (that influential blogging and resourcing site that is in my top three go-to worship destinations online) released Canticles. A “canticle” is just fancy liturgical language for any song actually pulled directly from the pages of the Bible, more or less. Read more about it in my post here. There’s a lot of talk out there about “biblical worship.” It means a lot of things. I’ve posted before about the difficulty … Read More
Addressing Blind Spots for Non-Denominational Worship Leaders
As the years go by, I become more grateful for the journey and leadership of modern worship leader and pastor, Glenn Packiam. God has planted him in the non-denominational, Pentecostal tradition and has given him a voice, along with a gift for writing both songs and prose. He’s an Integrity recording artist with some great albums out there. In fact, I think his latest album, The Mystery of Faith, is his best yet and is a testament to his most … Read More
What Worship Leaders Can Learn from a Fourth Century Songwriter
Worship leaders would do well to learn at least a little bit about the life and work of Ambrose (c. 340-397), a pastor and church leader in Milan, Italy. He became an important figure in the early church because of his strong opposition to Arianism, a heresy which argued against the full deity of Christ and therefore challenged Trinitarian theology. Ambrose was also an early mentor to Augustine. What is less known about Ambrose is that he was an early … Read More
Driving the Fear of Tradition out of Our Evangelical Psyche
My Story I grew up in the free church tradition (some people say “free church tradition” is an oxymoron, buy it’s only an apparent one). This means I had a healthy skepticism, even fear, of anything that would subvert the raw, naked authority of Scripture…which means I had a special fear of and kept a healthy distance from anything related to “church tradition.” Perhaps the Apostles’ Creed wasn’t suspect, but reciting it in worship was. I carried the default … Read More
Glenn Packiam’s The Mystery of Faith – Another Testament to Modern Worship’s Increasing Embrace of Liturgy
Pentecostalism Meets Historic Liturgy Several years ago, while still in Colorado, my wife, kids, and I stopped by New Life Church in Colorado Springs one Sunday evening to worship with the saints there. Glenn Packiam was pastoring the community of Christians what would regularly gather in one of their smaller spaces on the megachurch campus. I was taken aback by how much historic liturgy and practices were incoprorated into that service, especially when it was coming out of a church … Read More
Hallel Psalms – A Joyful New Worship Compilation
Cardiphonia offers up yet another album full of great music, chiseled from the stone of liturgical history. And this time, the liturgy is not just ancient. It’s from some of the earliest songs of doxological antiquity. Psalms 113-118 are often called the “Egyptian Hallel”: “Egyptian,” because these psalms as a body were used by ancient Jewish singers during Passover, which took place in Egypt; “Hallel,” because that is the Hebrew word for for “praise,” and these psalms in particular are … Read More
What Technology’s Democratization of Worship Songwriting Means for Us
Ones and Zeros Chuck Fromm, publisher of Worship Leader magazine, recently summarized and explored the implications of the shift of the church’s song from paper to bits and bytes in the January/February article in that publication, “The Hymn Cloud: Generation to Generation.” The transition from hard publishing to web publishing has much more de-centralized and democratized the enterprise of hymnody for both songwriters and publishers (“hymns” being used in the broadest sense of “the Church’s body of sung prayer”). Fromm, … Read More
What Modern Edgy Worship Leaders Can Learn From Modern Edgy Painters
Frank Stella, Untitled (1967), from Black Series IIMy new colleague at Coral Ridge, Daniel Siedell (author and curator of Liberate), has a terrific series of posts over at Patheos on “The Poetics of Painting.” In the final installment, Siedell examines modern painter, Frank Stella, and his minimalist paintings from the 1970s, rehearsing questions about how a modern minimalist, who painted simple, repeated stripes on a canvas, could have been so enamored, enthralled, and informed by the tradition of painting that had come … Read More
Hail to a Great New Album: Indelible Grace VI
“My heart is stirred by a noble theme” is my best one-shot phrase to describe the experience of hearing (and hearing again) Indelible Grace’s latest offering to the Church, Joy Beyond the Sorrow: Indelible Grace VI. The impressive production choices and continued growth of the artists in the IG coalition alongside unapologetically gospel-drenched hymn lyrics make this album a feast for the ears, mind, heart, and soul. As a worship leader in a local context, I can say that, per … Read More