November 11: The Day the Mayflower Compact was Signed
Today, November 11, in 1620, the Mayflower Compact was signed. You can read a transcription of the original, view the original, and read about its history here.
Should churches participate in Halloween?
Should churches participate in Halloween? Most churches will either shun it, seek to engage the culture through it, or put their own twist on the event to still let the kids get candy. Some larger churches put on haunted houses then give a gospel presentation at the end, right after the frightened people have viewed the horrors of the crucifixion. More recently, churches have “trunk or treat,” an event where kids dress up in costumes and get candy from the back of cars, which sounds like an abduction waiting to happen if you ask me. Other churches have fall festivals, but remember, bobbing for apples is really gross. Overall, churches will either participate in the horrors of Halloween (and what’s more horrible than a haunted house that’s not scary), let the church-going kids have fun because all the non-Christian kids dress up and get candy, or ignore Halloween altogether. At the end of the day, Halloween remains a commercialized event, even at church. Is there nothing redeemable about the October 31st?
Actually, October 31st is one of the most redeemable days on the calendar, being far more important from a Christian perspective than Independence Day and Thanksgiving. Here’s why: On October 31, 1517, a monk made his way to his church door in Wittenberg, Germany and nailed to it a list of Roman Catholic beliefs and practices that he found unbiblical and outright deplorable. The monk was Martin Luther, and his little protest led to the Protestant Reformation.
Martin Luther
Unfortunately, many Protestant churches today don’t really care much about church history. Lutherans, obviously, have the market cornered on all things handed down from Martin Luther, but for Presbyterians, Baptists, and the rest of evangelicalism, what Luther did often matters little to church life today. My church has decided to capitalize on what Luther did on October 31st and throw a Reformation Day Party. We’ve decided to redeem Halloween.
A Reformation Day Party must celebrate the fact that we’re Protestant. What does it mean to be Protestant? The theology of the Protestant Reformation can be summarized by five biblical doctrines called the 5 solas. Our senior pastor gathers the children and tells them about the 5 solas. The word “sola” means “alone” in Latin. There’s sola Christus, sola gratia, sola fide, sola Scriptura, sola Deo gloria. All of this fancy language translates into being saved by Christ alone, grace alone, faith alone, Scripture alone, and for God’s glory alone. Essentially, we present the gospel in the first 5 minutes of the party to the parents and children.
After a Protestant presentation of the gospel, we lead the kids into a room where they’re introduced to a pastor from the Reformation time period (1500s). Every year one parent dresses up like a Protestant Reformer, such as Luther, John Calvin, Thomas Cranmer, or even a Puritan from the 1600s such as John Bunyan, and tells the life-story of the person. This only needs to last about 5-10 minutes long, but the children are brought into the world of the Reformation and get to learn church history. Make sure you don’t announce ahead of time who the Reformation figure will be. Let it be a surprise, even to the adults. (Though I’ve heard there might be a Protestant lady in Louisville that evening this year.)
We then let the kids do a craft that teaches them about the Reformation. Last year the children created shields with each of the major Protestant Reformers pictures and a quote that summarizes their theology.
Then it’s game time! There’s pin-Luther’s-95-theses-to-the-wall, bowling over the heretic, and other fun games designed to highlight aspects of the Reformation.
This is how we’ve redeemed October 31st, and the kids still get to dress up and get candy. Our Reformation Day Party is a significant church event in the fall, as all parents and children now look forward to it. The party is an evangelistic opportunity, so invite non-Christians for a night of fun where they’ll hear the gospel and learn some church history. It’ll also be an evangelism opportunity at work, as non-Christian co-workers and neighbors will probably ask you if you let your children celebrate Halloween. That question gives you an opportunity to tell them about Christ, grace, faith, Scripture, and God’s glory.
Essentially, you get an easy chance to talk about the gospel all because of what Martin Luther did on October 31, 1517. So will your church redeem October 31st?
Our Obligatory Reformation Day Polka Song & Dance
The Black Death DNA Discovered
The Black Death was one of the greatest pandemics in human history, killing between 30-60 percent of Europe’s population, some 450 million within several years between 1347 and 1351. The plague was known as the “Great Pestilence,” or “Great Mortality,” during the Medieval time period.
The Dance of Death
Just recently scientists have drafted the composite for the genome of the pathogen that killed millions:
“The scientists analyzed the skeletal remains of four individuals exhumed from an East Smithfield ‘plague pit’ sited under what is now the Royal Mint in London. Tiny scraps of Yersinia pestis DNA were obtained from the victims’ dental pulp. From these fragments, the researchers were able to reconstruct virtually the whole of the bug’s genetic code, or genome.”
Plagued Monks in England
The plague reinforced the practices of Medieval Roman Catholic theology, most notably prayer and penance. Diarmaid MacCulloch, in his book The Reformation: A History, writes,
“No wonder purgatory was one of the most successful and long-lasting theological ideas in the western Church, or that it bred an intricate industry of prayer. There is no doubt that this was much encouraged by the trauma of the Black Death in 1348 to 1349 . . .” (p13)
“Many [prayer] guilds were linked with the flagellant movement, whereby, especially after the Black Death, western Europeans sought to appease God by solemnly and publicly beating themselves and each other.” (p16)
Reformation theology, on the other hand, had a biblical understanding of prayer and directed weary souls to find comfort in Christ Jesus alone in prayer. Writing on prayer, John Calvin encouraged Christians,
For in Christ God offers happiness in place of our misery, all wealth in place of our neediness; in him he opens to us the heavenly treasures that our whole faith may contemplate his beloved Son, our whole expectation depend upon him, and our whole hope cleave to and rest in him. . . . Words fail to explain how necessary prayer is, and in how many ways the exercise of prayer is profitable. Surely, with good reason the Heavenly Father affirms that the only stronghold of safety is in calling upon his name [John 2:32]. By so doing we invoke the presence both of his providence, through which he watches over and guards our affairs, and of his power, through which he sustains us, weak as we are and well-nigh overcome, and of his goodness, through which he receives us, miserably burdened with sins, unto grace; and, in short, it is by prayer that we call him to reveal himself as wholly present to us. Hence comes an extraordinary peace and repose to our consciences. (Institutes III.XX.1,2)
The Charleston Clap
As I grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, I found this story from Reuters pretty interesting.
The Mt. Zion Spiritual Singers from the African American Episcopal Church in Charleston keep a century old tradition alive by singing unpublished Negro spirituals passed down by oral tradition.
“Dressed in suits, hats and shawls, members of the group recreated the African American ‘praise house’ meetings of the early 20th-century rural South in the sanctuary of the Mt. Zion church, whose congregation first formed in 1882. It was considered raggy music, slave songs,” Alphonso Brown, leader of the group, said. “It was done in rural parts. They were singing the same old songs that slaves and free blacks sang before and after the Civil War. Slaves made them up. They had creativity. They didn’t have the manuscript paper to write them down.”
“The Charleston Clap” is characterized by a “call-and response style, with natural harmonies and improvised shouts, the choir performed such songs listed in the program as ‘Hab yuh got lidgun’ (Have you got religion), ‘W’en dah tray’n cuum ‘long’ (When the train comes along) and ‘O Zyunn, Wah de mattuh now? (O, Zion, what’s the matter now?). They sang in Gullah, the language developed by West African slaves brought to Charleston starting in the late 1600s and preserved on South Carolina and Georgia sea islands. Gullah, a word believed to come from Sierra Leone’s Gola tribe, also describes the speakers, often descendants of those slaves who brought their rice-growing skills to this coast.”
Below is a video on Gullah in Charleston which includes a reading of the Lord’s Prayer. And by the way, if you’re from Charleston you know the city is pronounced Chal’son.
“The Most Evangelical”
George Whitefield preaching
This week in September 1740 George Whitefield had an interesting conversation with ministers of the Church of England in Boston who viewed his ministry with skepticism. Five Anglican clergy wanted the 25 year old evangelist to defend several of his statements and actions…
“We hear that you called Gilbert Tennent, the Presbyterian revivalist in New Jersey, a ‘faithful minister of Jesus Christ,’ but surely someone ordained as a Presbyterian could not be a real minister.”
Whitefield repeated that he did indeed think Tennent was a faithful minister of Christ.
Gilbert Tennent
They then questioned him, “How come your supposed friend and colleague, Charles Wesley, supports the Church of England so vigorously but you do not?”
Whitefield pointed out how Wesley believed God changed his mind on this matter and was willing to minister with non-Anglicans as he did.
John Wesley
Even more vexed, the Anglicans added another query. “We have heard that when you were in Savannah, you allowed a Baptist minister to take part in a communion service that you led. Could this really be true?”
Whitefield not only stated that this took place but that he could receive communion as an ordained minister in the Church of England from the hand of a Baptist.
Then Whitefield make an amazing statement to the Anglican clergy. “I saw regenerate souls among the Baptists, among the Presbyterians, among the Independents, and among the Church [of England] folks – all children of God, and yet all born again in a different way of [ecclesiastical] worship: and who can tell which is the most evangelical?”
- From Mark A. Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys (IVP, 2003), 14-15).
The Passing of Rev. C.K. Barrett
One of evangelicalism’s foremost New Testament scholars, C. K. Barrett, passed away August 24, 2011. He was an ordained Methodist minister who taught at the University of Durham for 24 years. Though his passing is largely overshadowed by the passing of John R. W. Stott on July 27 this year, Barrett was a significant author, writing commentaries on the Gospel of John, Romans, 1 Corinthians, and Acts.
Here’s an excerpt from The Telegraph on his obituary.
Barrett never forgot that he was first and foremost a Methodist minister. He exercised a gentle and sensitive pastoral ministry, and remained a regular and engaging preacher in the Durham Methodist circuit into his nineties.
Modest as well as charming, he possessed a great gift for combining profound scholarship with a simple conviction of the need for the Church to rediscover the ethics and discipline of the New Testament.
That he managed to combine ministry and academia was testament to his great energy. After finishing his circuit duties at 10pm, he set aside four hours each day to pursue his New Testament research, retiring only at 2am.
Shunning the frills of intellectualism, he declined offers to lecture on luxury cruise liners. He was, however, more than happy to take the local bus in order to preach to small congregations in village churches, where those who listened did not know him as the “renowned professor” CK Barrett, but simply as Kingsley. During his last weeks in hospital he continued to speak of God to patients, staff and visitors, even if some were a little astonished when he sang to them the hymns of Charles Wesley.
You can find his commentaries at Westminster’s bookstore.
The Kingdom of Christ
Eusebius, the historian of the early church, gives an interesting account which he received from Hegesippus of when the grandsons of Jude appeared before the Roman emperor Domitian. The first part of the quote below is considered to be the words of Hegesippus and the latter Eusebius’s paraphrase of the account.
”‘For Domitian feared the coming of Christ as Herod also had feared it. And he asked them if they were descendants of David, and they canfessed that they were. The he asked them how much property they had, or how much money they owned. And both of them answered that they had only nine thousand denarii, half of which belonged to each of them; and this property did not consist of silver, but of a piece of land which contained only thirty-nine acres, and from which they raised their taxes and supported themselves by their labor.’ Then they showed their hands, exhibiting the hardness of their bodies and the callousness produced upon their hands by continuous toil as evidence of their own labor. And when they were asked concerning Christ and his kingdom, of what sort it was and where and when it was to appear, they answered that it was not a temporal nor an earthly kingdom, but a heavenly and angelic one, which would appear at the end of the world, when he should come in glory to judge the quick and the dead, and to give unto every one according to his works. Upon hearing this, Domitian did not pass judgment against them, but, despising them as of no account, he let them go, and by a decree put a stop to the persecution of the Church.”
- Eusebius, Church History, Book III, Chapter XX.
The Centrality of the Doctrine of the Trinity according to Bavinck
Now in the confession of the Trinity we hear the heartbeat of the Christian religion: every error results from, or upon deeper reflection is traceable to, a departure in the doctrine of the Trinity. . . . To the church the doctrine of the Trinity was the dogma and hence the mystery par excellence. The essence of Christianity – the absolute self-revelation of God in the person of Christ and the absolute self-communication of God in the Holy Spirit – could only be maintained, the church believed, if it had its foundation and first principle in the ontological Trinity.
-Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, p.288, 296
The rest of his discussion on the Trinity is excellent. It’s definitely worth the read!
Historic Shape Note Singing Still Lives On Today
Shape note singing was popular in the 19th century south, when long before organs many congregations sang a capella. Shape note singing takes form when the singers for the four part harmony face each other to sing. The most popular hymnal for shape note singing was The Sacred Harp.
Greg Garrison has an article linked to The Baptist Standard on how shape note singing lives on today in Alabama.
