I’ve noticed very few Bibles in our Sunday gatherings. I hear very little rustling of pages while I am preaching. This has got me thinking. I’m curious. If you don’t bring your Bible on Sunday, why not?
Author: Jonathan Dodson
Tangible Kingdom Primer
As a member of the VERGE social media team, I recently received The Tangible Kingdom Primer, an 8 week study to put incarnational missional community to practice. The Primer seems eminently helpful, and has been used by megachurch Austin Stone, host to VERGE, to promote missional community in their own church.
As Halter & Smay point out, when a church grows, slowly or by leaps and bounds, something is needed to continually reproduce your missional values. Their response was the Primer.
The Primer offers helpful exercises, thought-provoking questions, and insightful comments along the way. Here are a smattering of those:
- The reason we struggle to live a missional life is that it pulls against every natural fiber, sin, rhythm, habit, muscle, and thought pattern we’re used to. viii
- Right now, what is hindering you from living a missional life?
- Imagine what could change if the Good news of Jesus was allowed to shape and inform all the area of our lives.
- What personal interests and hobbies can you turn into communal ones?
Although the Primer is highly structured, it provides very practical help in cultivating missional communities. On the other hand, I find it difficult to imagine our church working through a 200 page primer (I thought primers were supposed to be short!). In the end, every pastor and leader must find the methods that best suit their people and their context. No doubt the TK Primer will be a good one for many!
PlantR: A City of Church Planting
God has done a lot through PlantR this year! It’s amazing to see the gospel advance through a grassroots network with no staff. Thanks to the PlantR board for donating their time to provide direction for the network, and to the trench-weary church planters who continue to look beyond themselves and their churches to catalyze a Christ-centered, context-sensitive movement.
Austin is gaining a reputation as a church planting city. Other cities are learning from us and starting their own area-based church planting networks…
Watts' Joy to the World
The famous Christmas hymn, Joy to the World, didn’t start out as a Christmas song. The hymn was written by Isaac Watts, a famous 18th century preacher turned hymn writer. With his health in steep decline, he turned from the pulpit to the pen, composing around 750 hymns.
Christ-centered Hymnody
Watts diverged from the traditional church practice of strictly adapting Scripture to song, by adding his own lyrical reflections to Scripture inspired hymns. Mike Cosper notes: “Isaac Watts recognized that people needed to see the gospel in the psalms and hymns of the church, and they needed to sing them in language and metaphors that they understood. In this, he became not only the father of the modern hymn, but the pace-setter for contextualizing the gospel for the people of God.” Joy to the World was included in Watts’ 1719 hymnal, Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament.
Origins of “Joy to the World”
Joy to the World was a poetic reflection on Psalm 98. Reflecting on this psalm, Watts bridged Davidic joy in the Lord to its prophetic fulfillment in Christ (the Lord). The original title of the song was “The Messiah’s Coming and Kingdom.” His aim was “to show David as a Christian” by revealing the Christ-centered character of Davidic psalms.
Joy in the Story of Scripture
Using the larger Story of Scripture as an interpretive guide, Watts locates “the joy of the world” among the various chapters Creation, Fall, Redemption, and New Creation (Genesis to Revelation). He weaves a redemptive thread that begins on the fateful day of Adam’s fall and finishes at the future return of the Christ:
No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found
In his first coming—Christmas—the Second Adam relaxes the curse by redeeming human hearts. In his second coming, all of heaven and nature will joy the song of redemption. The joy of salvation is for both creature and creation:
Joy to the World , the Lord is come!
Let earth receive her King;
Let every heart prepare Him room,
And Heaven and nature sing,
Every person and nation will be called to account for their response to the “good news of great joy”. God is gracious but he is also just. Those that respond to his grace will be spared his judgment and enter into an everlasting joy to the world that forever glories in his righteousness.
He rules the world with truth and grace,
And makes the nations prove
The glories of His righteousness,
And wonders of His love,
May our hearts receive Jesus as King with fresh joy and exultation this Season, as we join the refrain of all creation singing: “Joy to the World, the Lord is come!”
Check out the music of Sojourn in the Isaac Watts Project.