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| Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down: A Theology of Worship for the Turn-of-the-Century Culture | 
| Author: Marva J. Dawn
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Category: Book
List Price: $20.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  17 reviews
Sales Rank: 149131
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 316
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.9
ISBN: 0802841023
Dewey Decimal Number: 264.001
EAN: 9780802841025
ASIN: 0802841023
Publication Date: September 1995
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 1-5 of 17 | | NEXT » |
 Must read May 13, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a must read for all Christians who care about meaningful worship.
Marva is marvelous! April 28, 2007
Marva is marvelous and if you cannot have her as a guest speaker then this book is the next best thing. It will help you resist the temptation to dumb down your worship in order to "attract" new members.
Instead of the thoughtless quick fix method to filing pews (which has a mixed record of success at best) Marva makes the case for quality worship with outstanding, scripturally sound content that will last the week for one and all.
Do buy this book. Share it with the worship committee, your pastor and your governing board of your church. Indeed it would be a great adult education study book or circle study. Before you and your church toss out all that is good and faithful, read why what we do in worship matters so much, in this, the best rationale I know for staying a faithful church.
If you find this review helpful you might want to read some of my other reviews, including those on subjects ranging from biography to architecture, as well as religion and fiction.
 A one-sided attack December 27, 2006
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
Though a great deal of her book deals with a one-sided attack against what she sees and trivial and "dumbed down" modern worship music, Dawn correctly warns us against going to either of the extremes of traditionalism versus contemporary worship and falls us instead to hold a "dialectical tension of traditionalism and reformation" (Page 93).
While appropriately trivializing some of the more trivial modern praise songs, Dawn seems to ignore the fact that a good deal of modern praise music is simply a verse or two from the Psalms being put to music.
Dawn endorses Thomas Gieschen's criteria for acceptable worship music. First it must not give an invitation to repent or believe the gospel. In support of this point, it is argued that worship is for edification rather than for evangelism. However, all edification necessarily begins with the cross and does not stop short of our appropriation of it. Secondly it rejects any form of synergism that pictures man as searching for God. I would conclude that this means we cannot set Deuteronomy 4:30 or other similar passages of Scripture to music.
Dawn quote Gaddy as stating that "worship is for God. Only!" She then concludes that this foundational criteria would eliminate most battles over worship styles. While it is true that we must never lose sight of the vertical relationship of worship, 1 Corinthians 14 points out a horizontal dimension to worship when it speaks of the legitimate concern we ought to take when an unbeliever attends a worship service.
The place where I agree with Dawn is in her endorsement of a variety of styles that can be used in worship (page 180). She is not inherently opposed to any particular style, but only against limiting worship to one style (Page 187). She quotes Martin Luther's rhetorical question: "Why let the devil have all the good tunes?"
 Re-Educating Youth Through God's Intervention. October 30, 2006
1 out of 10 found this review helpful
By the 1990s, the dumbing down of the educational system had infiltrated and become a quandry for the religious establishment. In the thirty years since Johnson had started this dumbing down process for all of the children to be equal in America, they must talk alike whether they think alike or not. The churches had to intervene and train children who did not live in the ghettoes that what they had been learning was brainwashing and they had to reach out to put some semblance of intelligent design to the thinking of most of the population. We are not all New Orleans where they've always talked that way.
The church schools had to try to put matters straight so that upper class and middle class students could return to the level of their parents in the educational system. Our Methodist college in Pulaski never did dumb down as we had only a few foreigners who wished to be taught proper English and not the dumbed down slang out of the projects of America. It took a dumb and stupid person in authority to make this country into the uneducated nation it has become. Drugs and crime proliferated as the language skills hit skid row. Movies were as bad and apparently the teachers were forced to teach in an inferior way. Surely, their higher education courses did not use that kind of language.
Some of the lower classes still don't know grammar in this enlightened age of history. We have a lot to answer to as a person who only pretended to be a historian was only a creative writer. Now, the local daily newspaper has one named Jamie Satterfield, could be female or male, who uses adjectives for complete sentences and uses opinions instead of facts in front page articles. It riles me no end and I complain. But trying to get anything done properly in this town is almost impossible.
Churches have the most influence on young people than the schools these days and the trend can be reversed with the right leaders. Tutors can be used to show them proper English. Now, I understand why the Orientals who come to this town refuse to speak English. Today's version of English grammar is not correct in any language. They prefer to talk in their own dialects and funny-sounding fast talk so that we can't understand what they are saying. The churches could do the same by teaching the old way of Bible talk.
Don't Let Worship Be Flushed Down America's Cultural Toilet July 16, 2005
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
This book, along with Thomas Long's "Beyond the Worship Wars" is a must read for all committed Christians, particularly those who are worried about where both Christ-centered worship and church membership numbers are headed in the current wasteland of contemporary culture.
Dawn goes into how we got into the current cultural mess in our society, though given the book's age it is a bit dated as it refers primarily to "Boomers" (from what I've gathered in other research, the situation is similar for GenX, just worse). She then critiques the well meaning (I hope) attempts to reach America's dumbed down, short attention span, commitment phobic generation with worship styles that would be attractive to them, no matter the cost to the Gospel.
Dawn critiques not only contemporary worship but traditionalISM as well. She sees the function of worship (quite correctly, I might add) not as means of attracting numbers (AKA "worship evangelism"), but of having a personal experience with part of God, forming the character of the worshiper, and building community. Both extremes are the antithesis of this.
I have two minor criticisms of this book. Dawn, who I guess has no training in science or technology, tends to present as scientific fact the results of single research studies which appear to be unverified by independent work (to be fair, some are unlikely to be reproduced anytime soon) and might not have had significant peer review. Second she, unlike Long, is a little vague when it comes to solutions, though they seem to be there somewhere. In other words, she can ramble a bit.
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