Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #62981 in Books
• Published on: 1995-09
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 316 pages

Customer Reviews

Must read
This is a must read for all Christians who care about meaningful worship.

Marva is marvelous!

Marva is marvelous and if you cannot have her as a guest speaker then this book is the next best thing. It will help you resist the temptation to dumb down your worship in order to "attract" new members.

Instead of the thoughtless quick fix method to filing pews (which has a mixed record of success at best) Marva makes the case for quality worship with outstanding, scripturally sound content that will last the week for one and all.

Do buy this book. Share it with the worship committee, your pastor and your governing board of your church. Indeed it would be a great adult education study book or circle study. Before you and your church toss out all that is good and faithful, read why what we do in worship matters so much, in this, the best rationale I know for staying a faithful church.

If you find this review helpful you might want to read some of my other reviews, including those on subjects ranging from biography to architecture, as well as religion and fiction.

A one-sided attack
Though a great deal of her book deals with a one-sided attack against what she sees and trivial and "dumbed down" modern worship music, Dawn correctly warns us against going to either of the extremes of traditionalism versus contemporary worship and falls us instead to hold a "dialectical tension of traditionalism and reformation" (Page 93).

While appropriately trivializing some of the more trivial modern praise songs, Dawn seems to ignore the fact that a good deal of modern praise music is simply a verse or two from the Psalms being put to music.

Dawn endorses Thomas Gieschen's criteria for acceptable worship music. First it must not give an invitation to repent or believe the gospel. In support of this point, it is argued that worship is for edification rather than for evangelism. However, all edification necessarily begins with the cross and does not stop short of our appropriation of it. Secondly it rejects any form of synergism that pictures man as searching for God. I would conclude that this means we cannot set Deuteronomy 4:30 or other similar passages of Scripture to music.

Dawn quote Gaddy as stating that "worship is for God. Only!" She then concludes that this foundational criteria would eliminate most battles over worship styles. While it is true that we must never lose sight of the vertical relationship of worship, 1 Corinthians 14 points out a horizontal dimension to worship when it speaks of the legitimate concern we ought to take when an unbeliever attends a worship service.

The place where I agree with Dawn is in her endorsement of a variety of styles that can be used in worship (page 180). She is not inherently opposed to any particular style, but only against limiting worship to one style (Page 187). She quotes Martin Luther's rhetorical question: "Why let the devil have all the good tunes?"