I Don't Believe in a Hill Called Mount Calvary

While criticism of contemporary worship music is sometimes fully justified, I'm baffled that older gospel songs seem insulated from such scrutiny.  The truth is hymns, gospel songs, and contemporary worship music all have their fair share of either shallow, silly or even wholly heretical (a phonetic oxymoron) lyrics.

We ought to stop longing for A Mansion over the Hilltop.  In 1611 the word "mansion" simply meant a place to live.  The actual idea in John 14:1-2 is clearly the "Father's house" has more than enough room for everyone.  The gospel song seems to suggest heaven is going to be a land of millions of eternal antebellum southern plantations.  I would note this is an image of heaven many black Christians, for some reason, find less than appealing.  

Racism and Dressing Up for Church

As the title suggests, this post will explore dressing up for Sunday worship and racism. Racism, I need to acknowledge at the outset, may not be exactly the right word, particularly if someone is thinking about a consciously malicious way of looking at people based on ethnicity or skin color. Myopic cultural provincialism would actually have been a better description. But, then again, would you have read the post even this far if I stuck those words in the title? While it may start to sound like I’m writing about proper clothing for Sunday worship, bear with me to the end and you’ll find the point I want to make is considerably more important than clothing for church.

In an undergraduate course on Christian worship, I was concluding the unit examining the history and traditions of African-American worship in the United States. Since the students had seen the videos and pictures, my question was, “So, why do predominately black churches dress up for Sunday worship?”