Status Updates From Worshipping with Calvin: Re...

Johnson rightly criticizes the Market Driven / Seeker Sensitive / Culturally Contemporary approach to church. Today, online media is able to cater to extreme niche content, the church follows along, creating microculture churches, e.g. Cowboy Church with dirt floor. Often contemporary means for the young at the exclusion of the elders. We have lost the catholicity of the church, allowing secular culture to direct us.

"To improve property was to put it to good use as opposed to allowing it to lie idle. Improving baptism is simply ensuring that one's baptism is not merely external, not merely formal, and not merely symbolic." Excellent section that covers the catechizing, discipling, praying, and training that goes on by parents, elders, and the church in the process of improving ones baptism from infancy well into old age.

"The fenced table, excluding the unrepentant, was like a divine cannon-shot over the bow, warning, one to get right with God." Among the many things the Lord's Table represents for us believers, it's also a good reminder, it is also a tool of Gospel Evangelism to the unsaved...For baptized non-communing members, it is also, "a reminder that, though a covenant child, one had unfinished business with God."

On Hymnody: A church using a trad. hymnal, honors Scripture, respects the past, esteems tradition, and affirms the church's catholicity: hymns from Late Antiquity, Middle Ages, Reformation and Puritan Eras, 18th Century Evangelicals, and 19th/20th century. Replacing the hymnal with contemporary genre/style will result in a generation ignorant of its rich history and continue the slow death of congregational singing.

Sec. 1 Bible Filled is convicting. The Word should permeate our worship service: Congregational readings of Scripture, Psalm Singing, Prayers full of Scripture, and Preaching as exposition from Scripture and covering whole books of the Bible. This is how we address the widespread biblical and theological ignorance in the churches: Read, Preach, Pray, and Sing the Word as practiced the last 450+ yrs since Reformation.