Trying to market the Mass?
It’s the kind of devil’s advocate question that Roman Catholic priests discuss when no one else is listening. How short do you have to make a Mass to appeal to parishioners who don’t want to get out of...
View ArticleHitting the 500-year wall
Every half a millennium or so, waves of change rock Christianity until they cause the kind of earthquake that forces historians to start using capital letters. “What happened before the Great...
View ArticleFM radio reality in church
The clock is ticking and soon Jeff Crandall while face the challenge of selecting the right music for the Christmas services at High Desert Church. This will be tricky, because Christmas is what the...
View ArticleLife after CCM, the remix
The first time Jay Swartzendruber held a compact disc, he wondered if music fans would miss the artwork, readable lyrics and other goodies that came inside old-fashioned album covers. Years later,...
View ArticleNailing the evangelical fads
The upperclassman sat across the cafeteria table from freshman Joe Carter and, in a matter of minutes, asked The Big Question — a question about eternal life and death. As any evangelical worth his or...
View ArticleMcChurch history 101
In the beginning, revival preachers used their dynamic voices and dramatic sermons — framed with entertaining gospel music — to attract large crowds and to pull sinners into the Kingdom of God. This...
View ArticleXmas is fake, so deal with it
As the Christmas pageant dress rehearsal rolled to its bold finale, reporter Hank Stuever found his mind drifting away to an unlikely artistic destination — a masterpiece from the Cubist movement. The...
View ArticleTalking to real, live ‘Nones’
Like many computer pros whose lives revolve around the Internet, Marc Yoder eventually created a weblog in which to share his views on life, technology, faith and other cultural issues that happened to...
View ArticleMaking a case for the common hymnal
There was a time when the faithful in the heavily Dutch corners of the Midwest would not have been able to sing along if the organist played the gospel classic, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” True,...
View ArticleSouthern Baptists without (many) baptisms
Visitors who enter Southern Baptist churches these days will usually see posters and pamphlets for everything from marriage enrichment retreats to tornado-relief fundraisers, from weight-loss classes...
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