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Thursday, August 31, 2023

Thursday's Catch: 'Have We Lost the Thread of God’s Grace?' And More


Have We Lost the Thread of God’s Grace?
Religious traditions aren’t all bad. It’s important, even necessary, to respect our past. But religious traditions can go wrong. The biggest danger is this: Our traditions are always at risk of having lost the thread of the grace of God.

VOICES: Is Christianity really a white man's religion?
This question is imperative in a time like this. Christianity is seriously under attack from enemies within and without.

As pastors age, majority struggle to find mature young Christian successors: study
As American pastors continue to skew older, with an average age of 52, a majority now say it is becoming increasingly difficult to find mature young Christians willing to do their jobs as they prepare to retire, data from a new Barna study shows.

5 Physical Ways Pastors Prepare for Sunday
Pay attention to the physical side of preaching. If you are a church member, consider passing this along to your minister and incorporating this into your life as a worshiper. What can be said of preachers can also often be said of worshipers. If you are tired or in poor health during worship, it will impact you more than you think.

10 Tips for Preaching Students
As a new semester begins at Bible colleges and seminaries, many students look forward to taking their first preaching course. Some have no preaching experience and hold the syllabus tightly with nervous fingers. Some have experience teaching in various capacities and received glowing reviews from well-meaning church members, so they assume there is little to learn. Both should enter the upcoming semester with humility, patience, and at least eight other perspectives.

AI-Powered Preaching: How Much Should Silicon Valley Impact Sermon Prep?
With the expansion of AI, the over-reliance on technology can impact every way we communicate, including the Sunday morning sermon.

From the Archives: Worship in an Era of Permanent Change
It has been quite accurately observed that we live in a world of permanent change. Change is, in fact, the only constant factor in the history of our planet. The pre-Socratic philosophers recognized this. The little old lady who complains, “Things just aren’t the same as when I was young,” has recognized it. And it is true.

A Helpful Tool for Anglican Chant
The St. John’s Cathedral Psalter was created by Timothy Tuller, canon for music at St. John’s Cathedral, Jacksonville, Florida, and Dr. Carole Clifford. In an attractively bound spiral book, all 150 Psalms are presented and pointed for ease of use in a traditional Anglican Chant format.
Anglican chant requires strong musical leadership and the right acoustics and is best left to cathedral and large church choirs. Small churches which form the larger proportion of Anglican and Episcopal churches need a collection of metrical and responsorial settings of the psalms and canticles, which they can pull off under less than ideal conditions.
African Festival Promotes Traditional Hymns
An international festival, now in its 10th year, aims to preserve traditional Anglican hymn-singing in Central and East African nations. As with many churches throughout the world, hymns often must compete with folk and pop settings, or different worship music entirely.

Three Bad Ways We Read the Bible and Three Tips to Improve
As part of its annual State of the Bible report in 2022, the American Bible Society found that about 26 million people mostly or completely stopped reading the Bible in the last year. As Christianity Today noted in its article about the report, that's the steepest, sharpest decline on record.

5 Reasons Why Children Like Going to Church
Is your church a place where children like to be? One of our goals should be to create a place where kids love to come. We want to see kids dragging their parents to church rather than parents having to drag their kids to church.
I went to church as a child because going to church is what my family did on Sundays. It was a part of our way of life and it continues to be a part of my way of life to this day.
How to Encourage Prayer in Small Groups
What if there was a way to encourage prayer for yourself and those you lead to pray daily and encourage the ones they are praying for at the same time?

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