by | Jan 26, 2024 | Uncategorized
Songwriters and hit worship singers including Matt Maher, Chris Tomlin, and Mitch Wong come together to celebrate the hymn’s 75th anniversary.
The choir and Mr. Shea now sing for you “How Great Thou Art.”
Cliff Barrow’s announcement at Billy Graham’s New York Crusade at Madison Square Garden on June 16, 1957, preceded the televised performance that helped cement the hymn’s position as a fixture in American Protestant repertoire.
The choir of hundreds began the performance with the last line of the chorus: “How great thou art, how great thou art.” Then George Beverly Shea’s famous baritone introduced the hymn to millions of viewers—an estimated 96 million by the end of Graham’s New York Crusade.
As Shea sang the second verse, taking expressive liberties with the tempo, the text at the bottom of the broadcast invited viewers to call the phone line “to begin a relationship with Jesus Christ.”
2024 marks the 75th anniversary of the publication of “How Great Thou Art,” and to celebrate the hymn’s legacy, songwriters Matt Redman and Mitch Wong contributed new text for a collaborative recording, featuring an array of popular performers like Chris Tomlin, Matt Maher, Kari Jobe, Cody Carnes, and Naomi Raine.
“This is a hymn that everyone knows and loves,” Redman said in an interview with CT. “It felt quite daunting to come in and make changes.”
Redman and Wong’s version of the hymn, “How Great Thou Art! (Until That Day),” preserves the original English text and nods to the song’s international origins and history. Their recording debuted Friday.
The timeless song captures the tension of the Christian life, having to live with eyes open to both the temporary and the eternal. “We’ve got these two realities: the here and now, and the …
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by | Jan 26, 2024 | Uncategorized
For Gen Z men who feel purposeless and lost, the way off the couch is the way of the Cross.
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
A few weeks ago, I was talking to a group of men—some atheists, some Christians, some Jews; some conservatives, some progressives, some centrists—from completely different geographical, cultural, and vocational backgrounds.
They all wanted to talk about one thing: the number of young men they know who seem purposeless and lost. For some of them, the problem was pressing because it was about their own sons. For most, it was about their nephews or godsons or the sons of their friends and neighbors.
In most cases, they weren’t talking about the sort of things people used to worry about with boys and young men. They weren’t concerned about gang violence or drug addiction or drag racing or street fights. They weren’t even talking about sexual promiscuity or binge drinking. They were talking about something quite different: a kind of hopelessness, a lack of ambition, in some cases even to leave the house at all, much less to go out into the world and start families of their own.
One way to identify this problem is to follow the old tried-and-true path of blaming the next generation for laziness and being coddled. You know you are getting old not when you see the first gray hairs or when your muscles ache from picking up a sock on the floor, but when you see Instagram memes for your generation showing streetlights at dusk with the words Hey Gen Z, this was the app that told us when to come home.
Usually this kind of You kids get off my lawn (or Get on your own lawn instead of gaming on the couch) mentality is vapid—a mixture of self-deceiving nostalgia with We’re better than you generational narcissism.
Plus, those …
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by | Jan 25, 2024 | Uncategorized
James Kekela and his team stuck it out on the remote Pacific island chain—and earned recognition from Abraham Lincoln along the way.
In 1853, the Hawaiian Missionary Society sent missionaries to the Marquesas, an island chain about 2,400 miles away. American and English missionaries had already attempted and ultimately failed to reach the area made famous in the West by author Herman Melville’s 1840s novels Typee and Omoo.
The ordination of the first Native Hawaiian pastor, James Kekela, catalyzed the beginning of this mission.
“Several Hawaiians had been licensed to preach, but Kekela was the first to receive ordination, becoming the first pastor of a church,” later wrote Rufus Anderson, the foreign secretary for the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM).
Sending Native Hawaiian missionaries to faraway Pacific Islands on independent missions was seen as a vital step in preparing for the end of the oversight and support of the ABCFM. By 1864 the Hawaiian Evangelical Association had replaced ABCFM’s Sandwich Islands Mission.
In 1853, Matunui, the high chief of the Marquesan island Fatu-hiva, accompanied by his son-in-law Pu‘u, a native Hawaiian, arrived in Lahaina, Maui, where Pu‘u was born and raised.
“It soon became apparent that Matunui came to Hawaii for the specific purpose of soliciting missionaries,” wrote Dwight Baldwin, a missionary physician at Lahaina. “In reply to [a] query about his request for missionaries, Matunui replied, ‘… we have nothing but war, fear, trouble, poverty. We have nothing good, we are tired of living so, and wish to be as you are here.’”
The Hawaiian Missionary Society selected four Hawaiian ministers and schoolteachers, who were accompanied by their wives. This included Kekela, “a modest, persevering …
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by | Jan 25, 2024 | Uncategorized
A husband-and-wife team introduced a royal to Christianity and her conversion changed the islands forever.
In 1822, a group of Protestant missionaries arrived in Hawaiʻi. But unlike the dozens of American missionaries who would make their way from New England over the course of the 19th century, this party sailed from another Polynesian island, Huahine. Among those aboard were three English missionaries and four Tahitian missionaries.
Though Tahitians had settled in Hawai‘i hundreds of years previously, the two kingdoms had had little contact until recent decades. The missionary party saw the Hawai‘i trip as merely a stopover on a voyage to restart a mission to the Marquesas Islands. Instead, in a series of serendipitous coincidences, the Tahitian missionaries connected with the Hawaiian royalty and used their shared Polynesian culture to share the gospel with them.
After centuries of no contact between Tahiti and Hawaiʻi, British explorer James Cook unknowingly sailed the ancient sea lane between the two kingdoms in late 1777. When he anchored off Kauaʻi in 1778, Cook asked native Hawaiians if they knew Tahiti, and they responded that Kahiki, as they called Tahiti, was their homeland in the South Pacific. (In the Hawaiian language, Kahiki refers to both the islands of Tahiti and all the lands in all directions located beyond the horizon of Hawaiʻi.)
While the ancestors of the pioneer settlers of the Hawaiian Islands are likely indigenous people from the Marquesas Islands who arrived between A.D. 1000 and 1200, a second wave of settlement came from Tahiti between 1200 and 1400.
By 1400, the Tahitians ruled Hawaiʻi politically and transformed how it practiced religion. An influential Tahitian tahu‘a (kahuna, priest) introduced human sacrifice and helped establish an all-powerful royal caste known as the aliʻi. Over …
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by | Jan 25, 2024 | Uncategorized
The biblical call to maintain “a good reputation with outsiders” is becoming a bigger challenge in the US as public perception of clergy falls to a record low.
Americans are having a harder time trusting anyone these days—including pastors.
The country’s perception of clergy hit a new low in recent Gallup polling, with fewer than a third of Americans rating clergy as highly honest and ethical.
People are more likely to believe in the moral standards held by nurses, police officers, and chiropractors than their religious leaders. Clergy are still more trusted than politicians, lawyers, and journalists.
The continued drop in pastors’ reputation—down from 40 percent to 32 percent over the past four years—corresponds with more skepticism toward professions (and institutions) across the board.
Americans are also less likely than ever to know a pastor, with fewer than half belonging to a church and a growing cohort who don’t identify with a faith at all.
“As American culture becomes increasingly pluralistic and post-Christian, we can’t assume that Americans in general default to a positive view of clergy,” said Nathan Finn, executive director of the Institute for Transformational Leadership at North Greenville University. “Ministers must work harder to gain public trust than was the case even a generation ago.”
Finn also pointed out how scandals like clergy sex abuse, growing political polarization, and evangelicals’ countercultural moral positions can contribute to the decline in credibility among clergy, “especially among those who have either had bad church experiences or whose worldview assumptions are already at odds with historic Christian beliefs.”
The most dramatic decline in clergy trust came around the crisis of sex abuse by Catholic priests in the early 2000s, when positive …
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