Around the web this week

Here are articles I've found interesting around the web this past week.

One of my professors, Roger Olson, asks the question, "Whatever happened to the cross?"  His thoughts apply to worship in general, but certainly are good reading for the preacher.  Olson writes, "The cross, properly, biblically understood and not reduced to a martyrdom, is scandalous. But it is a scandal central to the gospel and therefore to Christianity. I am not sure one can find Christianity where the cross is absent or diminished in importance." After reading his article, the preacher is left reflecting upon the question, "How often am I preaching the scandalous good news of the cross?

Christian singer/songwriter, Shaun Groves, writes about the difficulty of finding just the right word for a song about God.  He sounds like a preacher when he confesses, "I write about God because I love Him deeply. And yet because I love Him, I’m afraid to write about Him."

In England, a six year old girl wrote a letter to God and the Bishop of Canterbury answered on God's behalf. Read his well-crafted answer here.

Illustration-a-day: Worship or art?

The other day I was listening online to a concert by one of my favorite singers.  I don't know this woman's faith story.  Most of her music is not faith oriented, but her latest album is an album of gospel covers.  It's a tremendous collection of songs and a the concert was terrific.  At the end of the show, as the credits rolled, the producers showed some backstage footage of the singer discussing her making of the album.  These were her words:

There’s so many performers that I got to listen to and find out about that I had never heard of that were just astonishingly good and that most people . . . that were definitely not household names.  So they're people who came to this earth and did this amazing music that a couple a hundred people heard in a church and then now they're gone.  But this music is out there some of it’s recorded.  It’s so exciting to me that there are people who just made this impossibly beautiful music because they loved it and that was it.

Like I said, I don't know this singer personally.  I just like her music - both the sacred and the secular.  I also know that it's not good to judge a person based on a soundbite.  So I don't want to speak to her whole concept of art and worship, but at least in that short little paragraph, this artist confuses the motivation of art and worship as being identical to one another.  Now, all good art probably walks up to the front porch of worship in some way.  That is, the best art touches upon the transcendent.  But true worshipers make it past the porch, they march right on into the house.  The difference?  Artists sing for the love of the song.  Worshipers sing because they love the one to whom the song is directed.  Gospel music may very well be a kind of art - but those who've been touched by Christ's gospel make art that is first and foremost, true worship.