Imagine

Today, on a train ride into Chicago for a stimulating lunch discussion Jon Dennis, Holy Trinity Church Downtown, I caught up on some reading. Correction: I got at a little bit of the backlog of reading that accumulated over the past months.

Among the articles that someone or other had copied and passed along is an excellent piece by Mark Noll in the November/December issue of Books & Culture.

... imagine a fully harmonious and spiritually edifying service of Christian worship where new Christian believers played Palestrina on the indigenous musical instruments of Burkina Faso, where an African American gospel choir led in a chorale of Heinrich Schütz, where white middle-class Presbyterians surged with Christian ecstasy to the beat of a drum, where teenaged believers filled up their iPods with the Robert Shaw Chorale, and where learned Western theologians delighted in a nearly infinite repetition of "God is so good, he's so good to me."

Oh yes, may it be so.

Watch Holy Trinity Church, Chicago; they may just be a place for such a gospel-rich and joyous fusion!