A few months ago our church released a new tool to help our congregation read God’s word and pray together throughout the week. It’s an app called The Reformed Hours of Prayer, which organizes our communal life around seven hours of prayer, from waking to bedtime, rotating new prayers each day of the month. I and pastor Matt worked on it with Jon Boldt and Seth Copeland, and we continue to make small improvements to it. 

As we begin the season of Lent next week Wednesday (Ash Wednesday), I’d like to offer another plug for this resource. Historically, the season of Lent is for giving renewed attention to prayer and fasting. If you’re anything like me, an existing structure and ready-made prayers help you to adopt a new practice. I’d like to tell you a bit about the app, in hopes that you will use it over the coming weeks and beyond.

In the first article of this series, I explained my desire to articulate a fresh vision for PCA churches in the Pacific Northwest for the coming generation. While the vision of the gospel-centered movement in the last generation celebrated important truths about salvation by grace in Christ alone, and inspired many to plant churches and share the gospel, it often left important practical matters of the Christian life and culture insufficiently addressed. In the article to follow, I would like to offer more clarity, particularly in the areas of worship, family, education, institution-building, and politics. This article is on worship. 

In this series of articles, I want to articulate some of the areas of life and culture that I believe the next generation of pastors need to address more clearly in their discipleship of God’s people in the Pacific Northwest.

Earlier this year, a Reformed pastor friend asked why our church observes Ash Wednesday. It was a fair and loving question—one others may share. Here’s how I responded.

In reflecting on what it means to be a gospel-centered church, the question arises: does spiritual maturity involve moving beyond the gospel, or is the gospel integral to every stage of our faith journey? It could seem that maturity means shifting focus from the gospel to the law. But is that true? As Tim Keller famously said, “The gospel is not just the ABCs of the Christian life but the A to Z of Christianity.” This article builds on earlier discussions and seeks to explore the profound ways in which the gospel remains foundational—not just at the beginning, but throughout the entire journey of faith.

We live in a culture that doesn’t sing. Our culture listens (quite a lot) to other professionals who sing. But for most cultures in history, singing was an activity for common people. And certainly throughout the Bible, singing is crucial to a life lived to God’s glory. 

Since our founding our church has been, and continues to be, a gospel-centered church. We believe the gospel alone has the power to make us into a people of joy, freedom, and righteousness. But the gospel-centered movement has received some criticism of late—namely, that since its constant aim is to motivate the Christian life by God’s grace, it can at times fail to give practical instructions to believers about how to live as a Christian.

Paul commands us to “be at peace among yourselves” (v. 13). In a sermon I gave a few weeks ago on 1 Thessalonians 5:12-28, I discussed how this command relates to avoiding unnecessary burdens on your leadership by not quarreling with each other. I'd like to offer further explanation to clarify what I mean.

We use our bodies to help us understand what is happening spiritually and to bring our hearts into it. Kneeling in prayer, specifically, became a formal part of confession during the Middle Ages—and it remained a feature of Reformation worship, even as the Reformers (rightly) discarded the sacraments of penance and confession. 

It is important for church members to understand the kinds of decisions that are made at General Assembly. They signal broader movements in evangelicalism in America, but more importantly, they affect the way our pastors pastor, our elders rule, and our ministries do ministry. And so, they affect you.

As a church, while we will benefit from wisdom wherever it is offered, we will not be making new parenting fads the core of our parenting philosophy. The basics around what the Bible teaches about being a Christian parent are more than sufficient for nurturing children in the grace and truth of Jesus Christ.

How can our Father love us and hate our sin at the same time? How should we imagine God’s disposition toward us as we wrestle through life in the flesh? The Scriptures are complex on this topic, but when we fit them together, we see that ultimately, God wants us to know what a good Father he is, wants us to take sin seriously, and wants us to be assured of his love and our salvation.

If you have to choose between Christ and your spouse, the choice must be Christ. Christians should be committed to marriage but not yield their identity to it.

Are pastels and Easter baskets a distraction? Is an egg hunt fitting for Resurrection Sunday?

It is very clear that the early church used wine and not grape juice. Grape juice did not even exist in Jesus’ day. It was an invention of the 19th century and was a part of the prohibitionist movement. Up until that point, using wine in communion had been the universal practice of the church in all her branches, Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox.

As much as his book makes valuable observations about how Genesis 1 sees the world as a temple in which God seeks to dwell and make his home, there were two underlying assumptions that guided his reading of Genesis that seem to be deeply problematic and, ultimately, just wrong.

In this article, we outline the holidays within the calendar that we celebrate, and how that looks in practice. Our hope is that you are able to join in the celebrations with more understanding and thus find them to be more fruitful experiences.

The priesthood and the eldership of the Old Testament and the ministry and eldership of the New Testament are unmistakably male offices. If the diaconate in the New Testament broke with this pattern, the change would have represented a dramatic revolution in biblical polity.

There is a very human desire to participate in seasons and commemorate important events. It is important to follow the Reformed instinct and seek an answer from the Scriptures, to discover if the historical church calendar has a foundation in the Scriptures or if it solely grew out of church tradition.

The basics of the pastoral argument are that the Bible gives us permission to regard the children of believers as Christians who need to be discipled, not unbelievers who need to be converted.