The simple text, “Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy,” each repeated three times, has been used in the worship of the Christian church since at least the 2ndcentury A.D. Loosely based on the prayer of the tax collector in Luke 18:13 (“God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”), it was so widely …
The following post first appeared with Christward Collective last year. The season of Easter draws to a close with the Ascension and Pentecost—the final days of the earthly ministry of Christ and the birthday of the church. There’s a very real sense in which the work of the resurrection is not complete until the ascension …
Outside of music, one of my great passions is history. Most evenings, after my children are asleep, you can usually find me in my library or on my back porch, engrossed in some bygone era. While reading in British historian John Keegan’s The American Civil War, I was struck by a passage that touched on my …
Sometimes a song and text just resonate with a congregation in unique ways. Such has been the case with this new setting of J.Edwin Orr’s text “Search Me, O God.” Although here at Cornerstone Presbyterian we use this song as a lead in to our weekly time of Confession of Sins, it could also be …
Short pieces of service music such as the Doxology are a gift to the church. They are wonderful additions to both the liturgy of life and corporate worship. While it is more intricate than the Doxology, I was immediately impressed with Greg Wilbur’s “Franklin Sanctus,” which, in my opinion, should become a standard. In any …
At certain times of the year Christ Covenant Church focuses its attention on taking the good news to the nations. This is both healthy and fitting as the practice of worship should build in us a concern, love, and urgency for the world. At the same time biblical worship should cause a humility to grow …