Interview: Why Prayer Is Still Public Schools’ Best Hope
The founder of Teachers Who Pray calls public education “America’s biggest mission field.”
Marilyn Rhames had made it. A journalist in New York City, she worked as a reporter for People and Time magazines. Then she started teaching Sunday school. &ldqu…
Azusa Pacific Reverses Approval for Gay Student Couples
Board of Trustees never sanctioned the recent code of conduct change. Now the wording’s back to before.
Days after Azusa Pacific University (APU) dropped a ban on “romanticized” same-sex relationships from its code of student conduct, its b…
Azusa Pacific Okays Gay Romance (But Not Sex and Marriage)
Christian university is also now hosting a formerly underground LGBT student group.
Azusa Pacific University (APU) has dropped a policy preventing students from engaging in “romanticized” same-sex relationships.
The Southern California memb…
Christian College Drops Sex Standards in Law School Bid
Trinity Western University abandons its community covenant after Canadian Supreme Court loss.
Two months after Canada’s Supreme Court ruled against what would have been the country’s first Christian law school, Trinity Western University (T…
John Piper Changed ‘Great Is Thy Faithfulness.’ Experts Weigh In.
Reformed tweaks to Methodist hit raise the question: Should hymns keep the theological orientation of their authors?
The worship team at The Gospel Coalition’s recent women’s conference selected “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” to conclude speaker John Piper’s remarks. But the prolific preacher and writer was concerned that the lyrics didn’t thematically match his sermon. So, he wrote two additional verses:
I could not love Thee, so blind and unfeeling;
Covenant promises fell not to me.
Then without warning, desire, or deserving,
I found my Treasure, my pleasure, in Thee.
I have no merit to woo or delight Thee,
I have no wisdom or pow’rs to employ;
Yet in thy mercy, how pleasing thou find’st me,
This is Thy pleasure: that Thou art my joy.
Piper is well known for his Reformed convictions, including the “Christian hedonism” reflected in the new lyrics. But the author of this famous hymn, Thomas Chisholm, was a Methodist, which means that he most likely held Wesleyan-Arminian views like his denominational fathers, John and Charles Wesley (though a third co-founder, George Whitefield, led a Calvinist minority within the movement).
In 2018, a scholarly “vetting team” of the United Methodist Church gave “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” the green light for its theological content, based on the “criteria of adherence to Wesleyan theology, appropriate use of language for God and humanity, and singability.” (The team is tasked with reviewing the CCLI Top 100 because most of its worship songs come from “artists whose theological traditions are not generally Wesleyan-Arminian” and instead are “charismatic, Pentecostal, Calvinist, or neo-Calvinist.”) While the hymn was among the 40 out of 100 top songs deemed to have “few if any obstacles …
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