High Tech Worship

Technology can help your church glorify God--or reduce your worship service to nothing more than entertainment. Here's how to use it wisely.

In this volume Sam Hamstra -- a veteran resident pastor responsible for planning worship -- catalogues and describes twenty-nine biblical principles that, to one degree or another, shape the weekly gathering of those Christian congregations who wish to worship in a manner consistent with the Scriptures and coherent with their particular theologies. In so doing, he not only rises above denominational labels, he also tells the story of the process of liturgical renewal within his congregation. This clear and concise work is at once scholarly and practical, traditional and contemporary, biblical and relevant. The book is written for clergy and laity alike, who, together, long for relevant liturgies faithful to scripture.

An interdisciplinary investigation of the co-creation of gender and technology Each of the ten chapters in Women, Gender, and Technology explores a different aspect of how gender and technology work--and are at work--in particular domains, including film narratives, reproductive technologies, information technology, and the profession of engineering. The volume's contributors include representatives of over half a dozen different disciplines, and each provides a novel perspective on the foundational idea that gender and technology co-create one another. Together, their articles provide a window on to the rich and complex issues that arise in the attempt to understand the relationship between these profoundly intertwined notions.

In the past three-plus decades, a significant conversation has taken place among American Protestants about worship. As a result, countless books have been written on the subject. We have read books on music and worship, ancient-future worship, worship as spiritual formation, worship and the arts, worship and children, even life as worship. Listen to that conversation, however, and you will notice one word conspicuously absent. While the heart and soul of the Christian life is love, and while the apostle Paul (I Corinthians 13) insists that worship without love fails to be worship, recent conversations on worship fail to answer this simple question, "What's love got to do with it?" In this volume, Sam Hamstra answers that question and more by identifying biblical principles that shape our love as worshipers. The end result is an invaluable resource for worshipers and for those responsible for planning corporate worship.

Building on the work of Jacques Ellul, Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, as well as a wide range of Reformed thinkers, Derek Schuurman provides a brief theology of technology—rooted in the Reformed tradition and oriented around the grand themes of creation, fall, redemption and new creation.

Music and the Broadcast Experience explores the complex ways in which music and broadcasting have developed together throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. It brings into dialogue researchers working in media and music studies; explores and develops crucial points of contact between studies of music in radio and music in television; and investigates the limits, persistence, and extensions of music broadcasting in the Internet era. The book presents a series of case studies that address key moments and concerns in music broadcasting, past and present, written by leading scholars in the field, who hail from both media and music studies. Unified by attentiveness both to musical sound and meaning and to broadcasting structures, practices, audiences, and discourses, the chapters in this collection address the following topics: the role of live orchestral concerts and opera in the early development of radio and their relation to ideologies of musical uplift; the relation between production culture, music, and television genre; the function of music in sponsored radio during the 1930s; the fortunes of musical celebrity and artistic ambition on television; questions of music format and political economy in the development of online radio; and the negotiation of space, community, and participation among audiences, online and offline, in the early twenty-first century. The collection's ultimate aim is to explore the usefulness and limitations of broadcasting as a concept for understanding music and its cultural role, both historically and today.

Pastors of smaller membership churches have a huge calling. They are responsible for changing the world! Rather than look at the small number of members in their congregations as a limitation, pastors should view their congregations as an elite force, able to impact their communities for the Kingdom of God. Small Church, Excellent Ministry is a handbook designed for pastors serving in smaller membership churches. This book will help you to conduct your ministry with excellence. Written by practitioners and professors, the information provided in this book is on the vanguard of pastoral ministry and is useful for training pastors to be leaders of their churches.

This volume surveys the state of the discipline on topics of greatest importance to evangelical theology. Each chapter has been written by a theologian or scholar who is widely recognized for his or her published work and is considered a leading thinker on that particular topic.