Sublime

This included responding specifically to Jesus’s commands (giving us baptism and the Lord’s Supper, for example), but it also included careful selection, reappropriation, and reorientation of formative cultural practices into the repertoire of kingdom-indexed liturgy.

Liturgy is the way we learn to “put on” Christ (Col. 3:12–16).

their leaders are supposed to make decisions by consulting with God.

the tangible practices of Christian worship paint the picture, as it were—in the metaphors of the biblical story, the poetics of the Psalms, the meter of hymns and choruses, the tangible elements of bread and wine, the visions painted in stained glass—all of which works on our imaginations, teaching us to want.

They kept the festival seven days; and on the eighth day there was a solemn assembly, according to the ordinance.

Baldwin pushed himself beyond mere description into a higher literary region of sounds and rhythms, of shared faith and shared emotions: The church was very exciting. It took a long time for me to disengage myself from this excitement, and on the blindest, most visceral level, I never really have, and never will. There is no music like that music,

There is nothing magic about any particular church tradition. Liturgy is never a silver bullet for sinfulness. These “formative practices” have no value outside of the gospel and God’s own initiative and power.6 But God has loved us and sought us—not only as individuals, but corporately as a people over millennia. As we learn the words, practices,