Southern Baptist Leader Says Contemporary Worship Doesn't Affect Quality of Christian Living9/8/2015
Southern Baptist leader Frank Page warns that contemporary worship doesn’t affect the quality of Christian lives. Page, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee, wrote the following in the introduction to Hungry for Worship: Challenges and Solutions for Today’s Church: “[Worship] has become a big claim in the twenty-first century church; but, based on the reality of people’s lives, the worship that we claim to be experiencing is not truly affecting the quality of our lives, our families, and our witness.” Though Page identifies a major reality and problem in regard to contemporary worship, he and the authors of this new book don’t have an inkling about the true cause or solution. The reason that contemporary worship produces such poor fruit is that it is worldly and fleshly. Though maintaining a “form of godliness,” it is fundamentally of the world. Unlike “traditional” or sacred worship, contemporary worship, even in its most conservative form with biblical lyrics, sounds like the world, looks like the world, and smells like the world. Further, it is experience oriented, being a product, largely, of touchy-feely charismaticism. Evangelicalism has been invaded by the charismatics since the 1960s, and the charismatic’s unscriptural, sensual experience orientation has permeated even the most staunchly Calvinistic evangelicals, such as John Piper’s Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis and John MacArthur’s youth ministry. Any church that wants to avoid the slippery slope of spiritual compromise will reject contemporary worship as the exceedingly dangerous thing that it is, which is a bridge to the world and the one-world “church.” The popular position that says you can safely mess around with contemporary worship in its more “conservative” aspects is unscriptural and will bring spiritual destruction to the next generation. (Friday Church News Notes, September 4, 2015, www.wayoflife.org, [email protected], 866-295-4143) Comments are closed.
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