Couldn't Help Noticing

Noticed in America #1

When in a foreign country, even one as seemingly familiar as the United States, there is a always a steady stream of couldn't-help-noticing moments. On a recent visit to Washington DC (for the inaugural Matthias Media USA ministry conference), I was struck once again by some of the cross-cultural differences. I don't just mean that Americans say the time is “10 till 12” instead of “10 to 12”, or that the ‘regular’ drink at an American Burger King is the size of a ‘large’ in Australia (and the American ‘large’ is approximately the size of a plastic garbage bin).

One noticeable difference in Christian culture was the unfeigned, unembarrassed generosity of heart that the Americans showed to us visitors. I don't mean to imply that Australian Christians are unfriendly, or unwelcoming. But there is a gospel-rooted generosity of spirit in American culture—especially in American Christian culture—that has struck me on each of my three visits there in the past few years. We were immediately put at ease and made to feel at home. Needs were provided for thoughtfully and lavishly. Nothing was too much trouble. Mark Dever and the people at Capitol Hill Baptist gave us unfettered use of their church facilities for three days, along with administrative support from their staff, for no cost and for no other reason than that they supported what we were doing and wanted to help us succeed. And this in the middle of a busy season of ministry conferences and workshops that they were already conducting through their 9Marks organization. It was enormously big-hearted of them.

I am not sure of all the reasons—cultural, sociological or biblical—for the commonness of this trait among our American brothers. I am sure that I would like to imitate them.

Christmas books for children

Three things made me walk into the bookshop at Moore Theological College in the last few days and emerge with an armful of kids' books. One: the first kids' Bible we ever owned is wearing out (our three girls are 4, 6, and 8, and it has done great service over the years). Two: the principal at Moore, Dr John Woodhouse, had mentioned some books that he thought I ought to be reviewing, and top of the list was David Helm's The Big Picture Story Bible. The third reason is that it is not far from Christmas, and now is the time to start stocking up on stocking fillers that may actually help my girls spiritually, not just feed their materialism.

At any rate, hopefully CHN readers who are into this sort of thing will also benefit from my armload of books since this is the first in a series of maybe half a dozen reviews of Christian children's books that I plan to post on the Couldn't Help Noticing blog in the next few weeks.

Top of the list is the one I just mentioned: David Helm's Big Picture Story Bible. And yep, the pictures are big, and the book is too, though not too big for manhandling at the dinner table. The parental reader will appreciate the size of both book and illustrations when faced with the regular complaint “I can't see!” because, with this one, you can see (so sit quietly!).

But the real reason this particular Big Picture Story Bible is so well-named is that it actually does provide, in the course of 26 parts, the Big Bible Picture. It begins with an explanation of Adam and Eve as made in the image of God, ruling over the world (and, incidentally, features one of the few illustrations I have seen where there is more than one lousy tree in the garden during the conversation with the snake, who is clearly identified as Satan). The promises to Abraham are explained clearly and referred to in the rest of the Story Bible. David receives the promise that a son of his will be the “forever King”, and once again, the story, from this point on, reminds the children hearing the story that we are looking forward to the one who will fulfil these promises. The Passover and temple sacrifices are explained, and provide the groundwork for understanding that the Lord Jesus, who is the promised “forever King”, is also the one who offers a sacrifice for sin and dies in our place. His bodily resurrection is taught clearly, along with his divinity and the power of the (divine) Holy Spirit.

Nor does this Bible shy away from the notion of divine judgement as God's kingly rule, which is taught and anticipated from the very beginning of the Bible and is established through the preaching of the disciples. In this version of Revelation, John “saw the holy room of God and the throne where Jesus sits. He saw the place of hell for everyone who rejects Jesus as God's king. He even saw Satan crushed forever.”

Most kids' Bibles line up one story after another like pearls on a string. These stories are great treasures, but, really, their order could be rearranged with no great harm to the final necklace. But this is not true of the Bible read by grown-ups, where the story of God's promises unfold until they are fulfilled in Christ. The great strength of this children's Bible is that, unlike most children's Bibles, the big picture of the Bible is taught clearly.

For the Cheng family, at least, we have found another Bible for our children to wear out.

Thanks for praying for our US conference

To the many who have been praying about our inaugural Matthias Media USA Conference (held last week in Washington DC), my sincere thanks. Following the logic of James 5, at least some of you must be righteous because, like Elijah, your prayers were powerful and effective!

Nearly 300 attended the conference (which was hosted by the very generous congregation at Capitol Hill Baptist Church) to hear talks from Phillip Jensen, Mark Dever and myself. By any measure it was a very encouraging and worthwhile few days. The topic of ‘Church Growth vs Gospel Growth’ offered plenty of scope for discussing what really matters in Christian ministry, and for explaining Matthias Media's unique approach to ministry resources. The level of interest and excitement was high.

Stay tuned for some free sample audio from the conference addresses which will go online sometime in the next few days.

The ‘prayer’ of ‘St Francis’

Does anyone else dislike this piece of kitsch as much as I do? Anyway, I subjected the longsuffering members of another forum to this rant, so you blog readers might as well get it too.

The prayer was discovered (and possibly written) anonymously in 1912. As the wiki article on it notes (you can find the words there too), the prayer has been used and promoted by Roman Catholics, although it has become popular in other circles.

It is an essentially Christ-free poem that makes the individual pray-er the focus of God's work on earth—where the true source of grace (the cross) has been eclipsed. In its place, I have become the channel of God's grace and the one whose work will bring knowledge of God.

There are a few other surprises in it, too. It is news to me, for example that I will be the one who brings about “true faith in you”, as the ditty purports to request.

Like many fluffy and ambiguous hymns and choruses we tend to sing in churches today, a good lawyer could probably get the prayer off the charge of semi-Pelagianism by appealing to the ambiguity and general vagueness of almost all of the words: “He didn't mean it, yer Honour. In fact, he didn't mean anything.” (Of course, on the basis of these grounds, most of our TV advertising and jingles could be sung in church with only the slightest of tweaking—for example, “Oh what a feeling! Lord Jesus!” might well be sung to the tune of the Toyota ad).

It's my (slightly belated) Reformation Day wish (October 31) that we might extirpate this pseudepigraphal prayer of St Francis from all Protestant hymnody and, incidentally, from the walls of some of the houses of our elderly aunts where it sits in all its cheesy needlepointed or tea-towelled glory under a picture of those praying monkish hands.

Conventional music

I recently attended one of those conferences that makes you glad to be a Christian living in Sydney. It was run by the Katoomba Convention people, who stand in the tradition of the great English Keswick convention movement that has spawned offshoots and imitators in many parts of the world, not just Sydney.

What I love about the Katoomba conventions is that, for sheer quality of Bible teaching, they almost invariably hit the mark. It's quite astonishing really, as there are many other situations in life when you feel you've blown your money and, worse, your time—for example, the takeaway food places that end with uncomfortable moments in the smallest room, or the movie that you know five minutes in is going to be a waste of time, but there you are, trapped to the bitter end with your friends. (I mean, come on, the third The Lord of the Rings movie could have ended 45 minutes early and only the two people who weren't sleeping would have complained.) But in the 20 plus years I've been to Katoomba, I've never felt let down, and I've often come away exhilarated and excited by the power of God's word powerfully expressed.

The recent ENGAGE conference, with speakers Justin Moffat and Chris Chia addressing workers' issues from Ecclesiastes, Jeremiah and other parts of the Bible, was no exception. The most spectacular surprise was the music, which was brilliantly led, technically tight, up-to-date, with carefully thought-through words and some stellar renditions of new tunes to the old words of some glorious hymns. There was nary a false start or a technical glitch in sight. There were no in-jokes among the musicians and no sermonettes from the song leaders. There was only half a hint of a PowerPoint slip-up, but even that is, in my book, a cause for rejoicing. I was transported.

My only problem is where I was transported to. I can be quite specific: in my mind and my heart, I was transported back to the Hillsong Annual Convention at Homebush Bay, Sydney in 2006. Hillsong 2006: where the medium was the message, where speaker after speaker happily contradicted themselves and each other, and where, at the end of the day, it was all just one glorious delightful party with a great big hole in the centre where you would normally expect theology to be fitted but instead which remained a large absence where you would expect the cross and the atonement to be.

“Right”, some discerning reader will respond. “So you're telling me that you went to a conference where the music was every bit as good as Hillsong, but on a lower budget and with all the theological problems fixed, with good speakers and with great coffee. Doesn't that mean that ... er ... it was a good conference?” Well, yes, it does. It really does. But here's my two niggles' worth.

The first niggle is that the antennae goes up when I get the sense that we as Bible-believing Christians are being led down a path by an organization (Hillsong) characterized by a gospel which, if it is not completely absent, has receded a very long way into the background. Are we Bible-believing Christians running our music this way because that is how Hillsong is doing it?

There are a number of indications that we are. In the case of this conference, one significant indication was that the whole style, sound, volume and appearance of the music was the same (but not the words, thank you, God, not the words!) One of the key organizers of this convention, a man I respect greatly, said to me, “Yes, we are in competition with Hillsong. We are aiming for the same market.”

There is nothing necessarily wrong with that, of course. But if it is true, then it is at least worth asking ourselves a serious question: “As we pursue headlong this great glittering prize of music that lifts and inspires our souls, and, as we try to do it at least as well as ‘those people over there’, are there any traps that we may have stumbled into?” For me, that question has been asked but not satisfactorily answered yet, and that is a concern.

The other niggle is much easier to name and claim. I loved the music and I loved the songs at this conference, and I enjoyed it far more than those at many other conferences I have been to (including Hillsong 2006). So why did I become more and more annoyed? It struck me that my annoyance was not at the musicians at all, but at the fact that I, in possession of a singing voice that is probably too loud, couldn't even hear myself shout. And being a man who loves the sound of his own voice, that bothered me. I certainly couldn't hear the voices of the two people on either side of me, or anyone else for that matter. I couldn't hear anyone apart from the clear and beautiful voices of the singers on stage.

So I stopped singing, and promptly discovered that I was no longer annoyed. I loved the experience of the convention music when I learned to treat it as a really well-put-together Christian music concert.

This is a problem. If there's one thing the Bible is clear about when it comes to singing, it's that the words we sing as a congregation when we sing them are addressed to each other. Here's Paul writing to the Ephesians:

And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart ... (Eph 5:18-19)

Now don't get me wrong here. The words of the songs at the convention were crystal clear, aided by the fact that, as they were being sung, they were being projected onto the screen in front of us. (However, now I can't remember the words, and I have no easy way of referring back to them, which is one of the advantages of the old hymn books over the new technology.) And it was clear that I was indeed being addressed by the singers and songleaders. But what I managed to lose somewhere in all the technical excellence (and the juiced-up volume) was the sense that we as a congregation were there to edify each other by what we sang to each other, and to God.

It was still a great, rockin', foot-stompin', Bible teachin' convention, and I will be encouraging others to go along next year to hear Don Carson and Mark Driscoll. But part of me is a little anxious about where parts of this are heading, and why.