This book comes with a solid endorsement by JI Packer, who tells us that Michael Horton’s ‘enlivening wisdom is surely a godsend to all evangelicals’. As you leaf through the book you find sharp observations about how we run church and helpful secular wisdom about church, religion, and Gen-X and Y thinking. Most importantly, one discovers a serious attempt to maintain the primacy of the word of God, over and against a modern tendency within evangelical churches to be simultaneously seeker-driven and theologically vacuous.

Thankfully, the book never lapses into an ‘old equals good, new equals bad’ traditionalism. Horton writes, for example, “I am always somewhat nervous when people argue for the ‘old hymns’ as opposed to the ‘new choruses’. Often, ‘old hymns’ means romantic Gospel songs written between 1850 and 1950 that exchanged object-centred praise (God and his saving work in Christ) for subject-centred praise (we and our spiritual activity).”

Horton proceeds on the basis that when it comes to church meetings, grace must govern both content and method. ‘Grace’ here means nothing more than the word of God preached and the sacraments rightly administered. By these two means only, we understand that Jesus died and rose again for the forgiveness of our sins. He also holds preaching in high estimation – and this is a good thing.

Unfortunately he asserts that through preaching alone we hear the gospel which saves us (I assume that the omission of Bible study, personal evangelism and so on is accidental). This positive statement about preaching jars with his attempt to maintain a high view of the sacraments as a means of grace. The supposed relationship between preaching and the sacraments is never clearly articulated.

An equally significant flaw, and more damaging for the purposes of his topic, is the failure to define his central term, ‘worship’. Despite his contention that Christ changes everything, Horton consistently applies the term ‘worship’ to what Christians do when they meet – rather than as the Bible applies it, to the whole of life (Rom 12:1). His sloppy methodology at this point is as damaging as it is common among contemporary evangelical writers.

Biblically speaking, the centre of our experience of God is the cross of Christ itself. This book, however unintentionally, has the effect of tilting our experience of God away from the cross of Christ and towards what is frequently and misleadingly termed our ‘corporate worship’. This is an unfortunate step in the direction of Roman Catholicism. I fear Jim Packer’s recommendation is over-enthusiastic.

Gordon Cheng is associate minister at Christ Church, Gladesville.