The following message is by pastor John Piper. More information from desiring God is available at

W. W.

D. D. D.O.G. I'm David Nelson from southeastern Baptist theological seminary and I'm glad to moderate this

biblical worship consultation this year.

I want to tell you a little bit about what we've done with the consultation. work that was put together by the committee when we made application.

The consultation will examine Christian worship from the perspective of biblical, historical,

and theological studies.

The intention is to encourage scholarship that rightly relate scripture, doctrine, and doxology.

Thus, informing and enriching church practice, pastoral ministry, and missiology, we hope to promote the scholarly study of worship in the

service of the church and to encourage a greater awareness of and commitment to

these foundational concerns by Christian educators in the training of

pastors and missionaries. So we are interested in scholarship related to

worship and liturgy, but we're also interested in seeing to the training of pastors and others who will lead.

Last year we focused on the need for such a focus and kicked off with a couple of papers and a panel discussion.

This year we wanted to get to the hard work of actually talking about where we are.

And this year we're focusing a bit on the state of affairs.

We're going to hear from a man who is a pastor in a local church.

We're going to hear from a scholar who teaches at Calvin College about what's going on in research and scholarship

in worship in liturgy literature and then Dan Ailshire from ATS is going to talk to us about what's

actually happening in our ATS schools and then we will conclude with

Dr Bruce Ware presenting a paper on how theology matters for worship.

So a very good way for us to begin is for John Piper to come a pastor who cares deeply about the worship of God in his congregation.

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