1. Abstract thought is insane. You can’t make something from nothing and there’s no getting away from that. Engineers create useful things whereas Financial Engineers create illusions.
2. Don’t make things complicated (derivatives, CDO’s and CDS’s etc.)
3. Truth telling is key. Where this breaks down lies persist. The credit rating agencies needed to report the truth, the Professors of business schools should have been disclosing who paid them to speak and write, the banks should have had integrity and responsibility.
4. The moral integrity of political leaders, educational leaders and heads of the financial industry is paramount. Personal and corporate self-interest and greed that drives behaviour leads to massive corruption. e.g. pervasive use of prostitution, drug use and even the fraudulent billing of prostitution as business expenses in Wall St and Washington.
5. Predatory lending to unsuitable people is oppressive.
6. Crimes cannot be overlooked, those who have done wrong must be punished. None of the bank bosses have been charged. Compare this to the Savings & Loans Crisis in the 70’s where financial exec’s where jailed.
7. Warnings must be heeded. See Raghuram G. Rajan’s 2005 paper ‘Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?’ and Charles R. Morris’ book The Trillion Dollar Meltdown and others.

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I love this hymn, its words and this arrangement. Very very good. It can be a really struggle in some churches – the music that is. What do we sing and in what style do we sing it? To what I know of, of course, its really only a problem that churches in Western countries or Western-looking countries seem to struggle with. However, for the most part (and at times only just) I’m glad to still be sing hymns in a fairly traditional, organ n’ piano style although I do wish we’d give the style a lift. I want to take a moment to think about this.

Take for example this problem: artistic abilities. What are the chances (or should I say providence) that each church here in Australia or in the UK or America will have in their gathering, a decent 6 piece contemporary band? Usually to be soft-rock and contemporary you’ll need a keyboard, drummer, bass, lead guitar, rhythm guitar, lead singer, 1 or 2 backing vocals and maybe someone shaking a tambourine. Pretty slim I think from my experience. I suppose I’m working from the premise of, ‘a job worth doing is a job worth doing well.‘  BTW: The same goes for the organ-n-piano-only brigade – if you’re gonna play in that style, then it’d better be good. If you’re going to sing unaccompanied shouldn’t it also be done well as onto the Lord?

So if singing praise to the Lord isn’t all tightly wound up in the quality of the performance then it only matters how? The response of our hearts? Yes but not entirely perhaps.

Here some of my thoughts and principles which I hold to be true:

• The Lord Jesus himself said, “God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.” John 4:24
• Traditional does not automatically equal biblical; neither does contemporary automatically equal true, vibrant worship.
• Musical style and doctrinal emphasis are bound to be expressed differently from one culture to another and from church to another – and there should be Christian liberty enough to allow for that.
• Musical style and doctrinal content of songs is an issue worth examining in order to see how we can do better.
• We need to be aware that different people have varying taste and there are real and actual distinctions between the tastes of generations.
• When believers gather together to break bread or hear teaching from God’s word it is for believers, not unbelievers.
• The leadership of the church should be making the decisions on music.
• In matters of style music should be convey key doctrinal truth.
• Some songs should be about God objectively i.e what God says about Himself.
• Some songs should be about our corporate response to God.
• Some songs should be about our individual response to God.
• Music style and words should sometimes be lofty and grand.
• Musical style should take backseat to the words!
• Musical style should avoid being glib, frivolous, trite or hackneyed.
• Musical style should avoid being overly repetitious. Whilst it is true that there is an acceptable level of repetition found in Scripture (Psalm 136) we should mantra-like repeating of vacuous lines in our own songs.
• Some musical styles should be avoided altogether (such as trance, really heavy rock) because could they convey to us about God?
• We’ve all got favorites but particular songs should not be endlessly over-sung.
• The musical performers must be believers if they are leading the congregation in worship to God.
• The musical performance should be as good as possible.
• In regards to the singing, believers should invest time and energy in getting better at singing.
• The musical performers must not be unnecessarily distracting.
• The local assembly should strive to make strike a good balance between time/importance put on music practice and teaching/preaching.
• The doctrinal level of the songs should follow along with the level of maturity that the teaching is at.
• Should avoid being exclusive in choice of songs. So hymns and Psalms should not be neglected in favor of “Hillsong“/soft rock songs only. All hymns and “contemporary” songs should be evaluated on the basis of their doctrinal merit and musical style. Bear in mind, some hymns are rather poor in the doctrinal front but are popular among older generations.
• Surely the Holy Spirit of God still inspires (in a non-revelatory way) wonderful, doctrinally rich and powerful songs & hymns in the midst of our time.
• Surely a church that is writing its own doctrinally rich and true songs written in response to the teaching from the word of God is healthy.

What do you think? Have you say in the comments.

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I’ve been meaning to blog about the new iMac since it came out recently – now I will. Lynnie and I both agree that the iMac looks “sick” after viewing them online and then on Saturday at the mall. I dunno if and when I’ll get one but if I did I’d be stoked for sure. Oh, and I’d choose the 24 inch model.

Now, I often wonder along the following lines and try to relate them to more important things. So, how about this for a crazy idea – the iMac displays all the hallmarks of creative, intelligent design. Simply, the designers at Apple took what was in their minds and skillyfully impressed it upon physical material to produce this product.

The iMac is the product of creative design. On the inside, the updated hardware (Up to 2.8GHz dual-core Intel processor, up to 1 Terrabyte of storage and Advanced graphics from ATI) is the platform for the non-physical software (Mac OSX) to ride upon and operate. On the outside, the sleek brushed aluminum case and new glass-over-LCD screen improves the look on the screen no end. All this didn’t come together on its own. Not only does the iMac display all the obvious features of design but consider this – only a few decades ago a computer this powerful would have taken up an entire room. Now, all of this computing power is packed into a flat-screen monitor! Such micro sizing of technology is a strong indicator of very intelligent design.

Herein, lays the duality of godless thought – on one hand to praise the creators of such products as the iMac yet on the other profess to be wise all the while denying the Designer who made the world which clearly itself bears the hallmarks of design. The iMac is an incredible feat of creativity, careful engineering and precision production…(plus some brilliant marketing) and yet its hardly a scratch on the design and creativity shown in the natural world all the way down to a molecular level. Would you let someone persuade you to believe that the iMac climbed “mount improbable” fueled by chance? I wouldn’t think so. Then don’t be inconsistent in your thinking when it comes to the world and you yourself.

We were created by an immensively powerful, intelligent, timeless, creative, rational, orderly and transcendent Creator. Thankfully, He has been so kind and gracious to reveal Himself to us. His name? Jesus. (John 1:1)

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