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Music courtesy of Ernst Stolz, “Psalm 72 Genevan Psalter – setting by Claude Goudimel – viols & organ.” All images not my own are from the public domain (attributions here).
Archive for November, 2019
RPM: Urban Reformation
Posted in Ordinary Means Ministry, Parish in American Context, Parish Theory & Practice, Reformed Parish Mission (RPM) Posts on November 26, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Considerate benevolence
Posted in Benevolence & the Diaconate, Thomas Chalmers on November 23, 2019| Leave a Comment »
“The Bible rescues the cause [of benevolence] from the mischief to which a heedless or unthinking sensibility would expose it. It brings it under the cognizance of a higher faculty— a faculty of steadier operation than to be weary in well-doing, and of sturdier endurance than to give it up in disgust. It calls you to consider the poor. It makes the virtue of relieving them a matter of computation as well as of sentiment; and, in so doing, it puts you beyond the reach of the various delusions, by which you are at one time led to prefer the indulgence of pity to the substantial interest of its object; at another, are led to retire chagrined and disappointed from the scene of duty, because you have not met with the gratitude or the honesty that you laid your account with; at another, are led to expend all your anxieties upon the accommodation of time, and to overlook eternity It is the office of consideration to save you from all these fallacies.”
-Thomas Chalmers, Sermon on Psa. 41:1, “The Blessedness of Considering the Poor”
RPM: Broad St. Outreach #2
Posted in Reformed Parish Mission (RPM) Posts, Uncategorized on November 5, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Last year we held our first evangelistic outreach meeting within walking distance of my S. Providence parish, right on Broad Street in Providence. Last Saturday evening we had our second. As before, we recruited Pr. Luis Morales to translate for me. We sang Psalm 1 in Spanish and English, and we read and preached from Matthew 21:1-11 on the Triumphal Entry.
In addition to many of our own folks, as well as the Morales family, several African contacts in the parish and the larger community came out. These are all professing Christians, but definitely not Reformed. While evangelism is my top concern, close behind is the pressing need to raise the profile of biblical, Reformational theology and worship within urban evangelicalism. Please pray that God may own these efforts as well.
West Port Experiment 