Category: Christmas
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Five things to watch and read this Christmas
1. Scot McKnight on Mary’s song New Testament scholar and Anglican deacon Scot McKnight has a fascinating discussion on the meaning of Mary’s song in Luke 1:39-56. He says that there are echoes between what Mary says and the Lord’s Prayer, adding: Mary’s song evokes dozens of lines and terms from Israel’s scriptures, and you…
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How to fill churches at Christmas
Filling up churches at Christmas could be as simple as inviting people, research into church attendance has suggested. Over half of Americans who don’t go to church at Christmas would likely attend if they received a personal invitation. That’s according to a survey from Lifeway Research, part of the Southern Baptist Union. Lifeway found that…
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The lost verse from ‘Hark! The herald angels sing’
Hark! The herald angels sing is one of the most popular Christmas carols, and justifiably so. The words, originally drafted by Charles Wesley but improved upon by his friend George Whitefield, celebrates the purpose of Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem. It begins with the distinctive line: to ‘hark’, meaning listen, because angels, doing the work of…
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From Isaiah to Revelation: the scripture behind Handel’s Messiah
Nearly 300 years after George Frideric Handel, the German-British composer, completed Messiah, it remains one of the most popular pieces of baroque music, attracting audiences whether they have faith or not. Writing in the 1950s, Percy Scholes in The Oxford Companion to Music describes the work as the “most imperishable” of Handel’s oratorios. It is…
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Why ‘O Come, O Come, Emmanuel’ is worth grappling with
Now that Advent, the start of the church’s liturgical year, has begun, we start to sing “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”. It’s the classic advent hymn, but the words can seem impenetrable. So what’s it all about? 1. Longing for the Messiah The central theme of this hymn is a longing for appearance of the…