I’ve been struggling of late with the question of whether using ‘traditional’ worship is at odds with saving the lost. The premise seems to be that the lost are in a culture, and those coming from this culture will be hindered by our worship form. This premise seems to be widely accepted, with various resulting… Read more »
Posts By: William Johnston
Further thoughts on the WELS translation decision
I wonder whether the move to allow NPH to use an eclectic approach will simply result as a backdoor into using the NIV2011. And isn’t it totally unfair to NPH that the broader synod would cop out of making a decision here by simply placing it on NPH? So instead of the decision of the… Read more »
WELS Synod President weighs in on translation question
The WELS Synod President has weighed in on the translation question. I hope that the project of a confessional Lutheran translation comes to fruition. I was quite concerned with the idea of just placing the decision in the hands of NPH as to which translation to use, and I’m concerned about the potential of a… Read more »
A layman’s defense of the ESV for recommendation as the primary translation in WELS congregations
I personally recommend the ESV be used as the primary translation in WELS congregations, much like the NIV84 is today. I am not a pastor, nor do I understand Greek, Hebrew, or Aramaic. As a layman, I have picked up from my faithful pastors a smattering of some of the above for use in understanding… Read more »
Luther’s Sacristy Prayer for Laymen
It struck me today how appropriate this prayer would be to another vocation. For my future (hopefully) reference with slight modification: Lord God, You have placed me as a father and leader in a family, but you see how unsuited I am to meet so great and difficult a task. If I had lacked Your help, I… Read more »
SSI method for outputting a copyright year
Here is a quick snippet if you are using Server Side Includes and you want to output a copyright notice including the year at the bottom of your page. SSI will automatically output the present year.
PHP Function for dumping characters
I recently needed to just dump all characters and their codepoints for debugging an encoding issue. Github Gist
“Jesus Take Us To The Mountain” for TTBB
Here is a rearrangement of hymn 712 in Christian Worship: Supplement for Men’s Chorus. Carl Shalk’s setting of Jaroslav J. Vajda’s text for Transfiguration. Copyright issues might apply here, so if anyone complains I’ll take this down. Hopefully everyone looking for this would already have a copy of CWS or another hymnal with this hymn and thus has covered copyright…. Read more »
Cheat Sheet/Reference Page for the strftime function
I end up using the PHP strftime format a lot in Smarty templating, so I created a cheat sheet (Word, PDF) to make life easier.
The pertinent law to the David Gregory high capacity magazine kerfluffle
Posting this just because I spent the time to look it up and it is a pain to find. The pertinent law is District of Columbia Official Code, Division I, Title 7, Subtitle J, Chapter 25, Unit A, Subchapter VI, § 7-2506.01: (b) No person in the District shall possess, sell, or transfer any large capacity ammunition… Read more »