Very rousing! Your article made me think of our favorite modern Christian album. Kemper Crabbe put it out in 1980. It’s called The Vigil, and the whole album is seeded with the truth of the call to be a warrior for Christ. Here’s a link to a playlist on YouTube:
Thank you. I have had the book “Why Men Hate to Go to Church” for a couple years now but something, probably Old Scratch, and old habits, has kept me from finishing it. It seems too “hot” and might make me go find an exciting church!
Yet I know how excited I was when I was invited to go to summer Bible camp as a pre-teen, by a friend: and heard “Onward Christian Soldiers” for the first time. And for the first time Church was exciting to me. (I want to a newly liberal campus UCC, which taught me weekly how pitiful and sinful I was as an American, nor as an individual sinner, nor powerful, as a redeemed sinner, —since we were in a liberal club so far above the sins of our fellow Americans.)
Church hasn’t been very exciting very often since then, although I did go on to get saved, at 21 (nott at “confirmation”) —when I was spoken to by Baptist rock climbers in Yosemite. Without them, John Denver getting high in Colorado had been the most exciting thing in life as a young man. I wish I’d gone home from Yosemite with that youth group! Too chicken, however!
The only time previous to hearing Onward Christian Soldiers I’d found Jesus exciting was when Mom read us “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” and all the books culminating in THE LAST BATTLE,” —which final “children’s” book SHOULD be required reading, for our pallid American church ADULTS. Perhaps NOT reading it has made Islam so popular, in prisons and in the ghettoes.
Very rousing! Your article made me think of our favorite modern Christian album. Kemper Crabbe put it out in 1980. It’s called The Vigil, and the whole album is seeded with the truth of the call to be a warrior for Christ. Here’s a link to a playlist on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDfIvErAo1k&list=PLPcTOx34g9XRqEDPiZWK_BmJPrZrMUzr9&index=3
I think that there is a beginning of a resurgence of that holy mindset happening. At least I pray that is so. Keep up the good fight! 🙏
Thank you. I have had the book “Why Men Hate to Go to Church” for a couple years now but something, probably Old Scratch, and old habits, has kept me from finishing it. It seems too “hot” and might make me go find an exciting church!
Yet I know how excited I was when I was invited to go to summer Bible camp as a pre-teen, by a friend: and heard “Onward Christian Soldiers” for the first time. And for the first time Church was exciting to me. (I want to a newly liberal campus UCC, which taught me weekly how pitiful and sinful I was as an American, nor as an individual sinner, nor powerful, as a redeemed sinner, —since we were in a liberal club so far above the sins of our fellow Americans.)
Church hasn’t been very exciting very often since then, although I did go on to get saved, at 21 (nott at “confirmation”) —when I was spoken to by Baptist rock climbers in Yosemite. Without them, John Denver getting high in Colorado had been the most exciting thing in life as a young man. I wish I’d gone home from Yosemite with that youth group! Too chicken, however!
The only time previous to hearing Onward Christian Soldiers I’d found Jesus exciting was when Mom read us “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” and all the books culminating in THE LAST BATTLE,” —which final “children’s” book SHOULD be required reading, for our pallid American church ADULTS. Perhaps NOT reading it has made Islam so popular, in prisons and in the ghettoes.
Fantastic and Amen!