Leonard R. Payton
All Content by Leonard R. Payton
Reforming Worship Music
This past August, I spent fifteen consecutive hours collecting ballots at a polling station. Along with me, there was a co-worker who had recently retired from a long teaching career at one of the larger schools in the California State University system. He had taught cognitive psychology and personality theory. In the slow moments of […]
Glossary of Church Growth & Contemporary Christian Music Terminology
Prune City, California, is an unfortunate town devoid of character. It tripled in size between 1965 and 1985. At that time, a plague of building contractors descended upon Prune City and immediately there were five thousand identical houses, a K-Mart, three supermarkets, five strip shopping centers, countless metal and tilt-up buildings, nine gas stations, eleven […]
Is It a Prelude or a Quaalude?
Should Amy Grant sing cross-over songs? (1) After all, the distinction between full-time Christian service and secular employment is arbitrary. One of the great Reformation truths is that all occupations done before the face of God, and in compliance with his revealed Word, are godly occupations. On the face of it, the conclusion seems self-evident: […]
The Pride of Simplicity
Egalitarian movements almost always spawn new breeds of elitism. George Orwell showed this bitter irony in Animal Farm. And Christians should find nothing surprising in such an assertion since all rebellions against any alleged elitism are tantamount to saying, “If I were Adam, I wouldn’t have sinned in the first place.” The Church falls prey […]
Morning Prayer
“The Lord be with you.” “And with thy spirit.” There are Episcopalians and then there are Episcopalians. “The Lord is in his holy temple: Let all the earth keep silence before him.” Some Episcopalians are recently converted Baptists. They are like famished people who have been adrift three months in a life raft. When they […]
