Congregational singing wasn’t destroyed overnight, and it won’t be relearned overnight. But in time, implementing these ideas would begin to build a singing culture in our congregations once again. 

Congregational singing is dead, and we have killed it. If it wasn’t dead before Covidtide, it probably is now. So let’s start again, and let’s get back to basics. The pop-worshiping house cover band style will never grow and sustain a culture of singing.
Here is a new way forward.
Teach.
Teach your people. Teach them why we sing. Teach them why we sing the songs we sing. Teach them that anyone can sing, and how to sing as well as they possibly can. Teach them to sing liturgy, psalms, and the best hymns. Christians must understand their history as a singing people and the biblical mandate to sing together, or they won’t understand why they should sing in the first place. Singing is your job as a worshiper.
Dust off the organ console.
There’s a reason the organ was brought back into the church during the Protestant Reformation. It wasn’t because it was cool. It wasn’t that it helped people feel “connected.” It wasn’t because it was relevant, and obviously not because they were listening to organ music in their cars! (Side note: Rick Warren doesn’t get it.) It was because the organ is uniquely able to support sustained, hearty congregational singing. It’s not that I hate guitars. In fact, I listen to guitar-driven popular music all the time. But even when amplified, the guitar just isn’t up to the task of leading and supporting a large group. That’s not what it was created to do.
Bring the choir back.
With a choir, you have a significant part of the church committed to serving as an example and encouragement for the rest of the congregation. And it’s much easier for a hesitant singer to join in with a sizable, confident, prepared group than a soloist or smaller ensemble.
Make it obvious that your congregational singing isn’t supposed to be a pop performance.
Is it really any wonder that congregational singing has declined as the church has increasingly mimicked the musical entertainment of our culture?
When the congregation’s role in singing is shifted from primary to dispensable, as if they’re singing along at a rock concert or with the radio, there’s no compelling reason to sing out. Even our vocabulary has changed. Instead of chancel or platform, we have a stage. I even read something recently recommending the creation of a “worship producer” position. Want to offer christianized pop entertainment? Keep it up. Want to revive congregational singing in your church? Don’t make it into such a spectacle. Turn up the lights, stand still, and be serious about the task at hand.
Get rid of the lead singer.
While we’re on the subject of performances, there is absolutely nothing that kills group singing like a soloist crooning into a microphone. If it is absolutely necessary to have an individual leading by themselves, make sure it’s someone who can model a warm, pure, neutral tone, without affected vocals or ad-libbing. If possible, eliminate the amplification, or at least have them step back from the microphone after bringing the congregation in, so that the congregation learns to take initiative and not simply defer to the leader. Build a culture in which people are confident in their own ability to sing.
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If the “follow your heart” religion is indeed the dominant religion of our cultural moment, as Williams has argued, Christians, for the love of God and the love of our neighbors, will need to commit cultural heresy. We only find our “true selves” in right relationship with God. Reject the death spiral of self-worship. Embrace the abundant life Christ offers.  

“Follow your heart” is a slogan popularized by Disney movies, pop psychology, and social media. Ultimately, it is just another version of the oldest lie in the world: That you and I can be our own god.  
In his new book Don’t Follow Your Heart: Boldly Breaking the Ten Commandments of Self-Worship, Professor Thaddeus Williams of Biola University has exposed “the cult of self” behind these mantras. The cult of self is, in a sense, the largest religion in the world and promises to elevate adherents to the place and prerogative of God. In the end, however, like all bad ideas about God and self, this lie dehumanizes us, leaving us empty, unsatisfied, and isolated.  
Don’t Follow Your Heart is a must-read today, wise in its analysis and practical in its application. Today is the last day to receive a copy as our thank-you for a gift of any amount to the Colson Center this month. Just visit colsoncenter.org/January. 
Williams shared more about the “the cult of self” in a recent conversation with Shane Morris on the Colson Center’s Upstream podcast. As he noted, everyone worships something.  
For Paul, it’s never a question of the theist versus the atheist. For Paul, everybody worships. Everybody’s a worshipper. Everybody’s on their knees to someone or something, either the Creator or the creation. 
The key is right worship. In today’s version of the world’s oldest idolatry, voices across our culture urge us always to put ourselves first, ultimately in the place of God and as the object of our devotion, allegiance, and obedience. At one point, Williams lamented: “Who isn’t telling us to follow our hearts?” This idea, however, has consequences:   
Now when you erase the creator-creature distinction, which has happened in the mainstream culture, that attribute of simplicity, or even we might say impassibility, a lot of the divine attributes, sovereignty, we now start attributing to ourselves.
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Written by Richard B. Gaffin Jr. and David B. Garner |
Tuesday, May 10, 2022
The adopted sons’ predestined sharing by resurrection in a human nature like that of the glorified firstborn Son rests on and derives from the adoptive significance of the Son’s own resurrection, when by the Spirit he was effectively declared/appointed what he was not previously (in his human nature), “the Son of God in power” (Romans 1:4).

Abstract
This article responds to the recent article by Joshua Maurer and Ty Kieser, “Jesus, ‘Adopted Son of God?’ Romans 1:4, Orthodox Christology, and Concerns about a Contemporary Conclusion.” While we commend these authors’ desire to promote orthodox Christology, we correct their misreading of our own positions, particularly our view regarding the adoption of the divine Son according to his human nature, an adoption essential for the perfecting of the Son in accomplishing the salvation applied to believers. We conclude with an important pastoral observation concerning the adoption of the Son for the adoption of believers.
We appreciate the evident concern for orthodox Christology in the article by Maurer and Kieser, “Jesus, ‘Adopted Son of God?’”1 We assure readers that we share this concern. Also, we appreciate the tone of the article and take at face value their saying that they are not accusing those whose views they critique—including us—of heresy (p. 328, n. 53). However, despite this distinction intending to de-escalate, an unavoidable conclusion remains, even though the authors do not choose to draw it: If the positions they attribute to us are in fact ours, then we are guilty of serious heresy and in fundamental violation of our ordination vows as ministers of the gospel.
The whole of the article seeks to show that our views are “incompatible with orthodox Christology” (p. 328) and “unlike the affirmations of orthodox Christianity” (p. 332, emphasis original). Having made these general assertions, they specify our alleged kinship with particular heresies:

Adoptionism. “The only possible means to affirm Jesus’s adoption is to deny that Jesus was the Son of God before the resurrection” (p. 327), and Gaffin and Garner argue for “a change in Jesus according to his divine nature” (p. 331).
Nestorianism. Gaffin and Garner “incline toward affirming two sons, two persons” (p. 331); “the only way to speak of filial progress is to introduce a second Son” (p. 332); and “the implication here is that the ‘eternal Son’ and ‘economic Son’ are distinct persons, two Sons” (p. 332).
Kenotic Christology. “These accounts could appeal to some version of Kenoticism” (p. 331, n. 70).2

It is difficult to see how the quotations they selected, let alone the fuller body of our writings, could possibly be aligned with the Christological errors they attribute to us. We are disappointed by the massive misreading of our work that has led to the alien views imposed upon us.
Where the authors get untracked and are wrong in their basic assessment of our views is signaled in the final, summarizing sentence of their opening paragraph: “Paul, they suppose, spoke of the eternally divine Son’s ‘adoptive divine sonship’” (p. 320). Put in quotation marks yet without any indication of a source, “adoptive divine sonship” presumably highlights their own representation of the basic view they are intent on critiquing as erroneous: that the Son’s divine nature is not immutable but changes.
“Adoptive divine sonship” occurs multiple times in characterizing our views: in the introduction (1 time), in section 1.1. in relation to Gaffin (3 times, in two of which “adoptive” is italicized) and in section 1.3 in relation to Garner (1 time in the body, 1 time in n. 26; in each occurrence “adoptive” is italicized).
Suffice it to say, at no place have we ever spoken or written of “divine adoptive sonship” or of “Jesus’s acquiring of divine sonship.”3 As an encapsulation of our view we reject such language as thoroughly misleading.
In what follows, we reply further to Maurer and Kieser’s critiques. Gaffin responds first to the authors’ critique of his view. Then Garner addresses their assessment of his position and offers some observations about issues related to orthodox Christology raised by their article. Finally, together we offer concluding remarks concerning some pastoral implications of adoption.
1. Response from Gaffin
Maurer and Kieser summarize my view of Jesus’s sonship as follows in their article:
We see evidence of something like this alteration of the Son in Gaffin’s argument that Romans 1:4 “teaches that at the resurrection Christ began a new and unprecedented phase of divine sonship. The eternal Son of God … has become what he was not before.” Gaffin assigns this change to the “eternal Son” and his “divine sonship” (rather than his humanity) and thereby seems to fall into the ditch of a Son whose divinity changes. (pp. 330–31)4
This quotation and the conclusions the authors draw from it prompt several observations.5
First, this is what I actually wrote in The Centrality of the Resurrection: “Verse 4 teaches that at the resurrection Christ began a new and unprecedented phase of divine sonship. The eternal Son of God, who was born, lived, and died κατὰ σάρκα, has been raised κατὰ πνεῦμα and so, in his messianic identity (of the seed of David), has become what he was not before: the Son of God in power.”6 Further, to reinforce what is meant by these two sentences, I directly appended this footnote from Geerhardus Vos: “‘From resurrection-beginnings, from an eschatological genesis dated the pneumatic state of Christ’s glory which is described as sonship of God ἐν δυνάμει.’”7
To say that there is a considerable difference between the way Maurer and Kieser have quoted me and what I wrote is an understatement. I have puzzled over what prompted them to elide the material they did (italicized for easy reference above) and without any indication why they had done so. Presumably, it is to find an instance of the notion of “adoptive divine sonship” they are concerned to critique as erroneous and unorthodox.
However, in the second sentence of what I wrote, the relative clause they elided (“who was born…”) is not there as dispensable filler material that can be ignored without drastically changing the meaning of the sentence as a whole. Nor can “the Son of God in power” be omitted as they did without removing the specific bottom-line conclusion of both sentences taken together. The elided material is essential to the meaning of the two sentences. The way the authors have quoted me so substantially changes what I wrote that they do not simply obscure its meaning, but give it a sense it does not have.
At the end of the excerpt quoted above, Maurer and Kieser append footnote 67: “Gaffin shows that he is aware of, and willing to, predicate particular attributes to Jesus according to one nature and not the other (Gaffin, Centrality, 105). Yet, he (curiously) does not make these same qualifications for adoption” (p. 331).
To this I can only say that what they find “curiously” to be the case is because in quoting me (see above) they have deleted from their consideration the relative clause in the second sentence. There “…born, lived, … died, … raised, …, (of the seed of David)” are true and can only be true of Christ, the eternal Son of God, according to his human nature, not his divine nature. The sense of the sentence, particularly when it is read within its immediate and the broader context of the book, is accurately restated by substituting “according to his human nature” for the relative clause: “The eternal Son of God, according to his human nature, has become what he was not before: the Son of God in power.” The two sentences, properly cited and read, do not by any stretch of sound reasoning provide evidence of attributing change to the deity of the Son (rather than his humanity), or, as the authors think, of seeming “to fall into the ditch of a Son whose divinity changes” (pp. 330–31).
In Romans 1:3–4, there is indeed a change in view for God’s Son, a change that is at the heart of the gospel, a change without which there is no gospel (note how these verses connect with vv. 1‒2 and that the gospel is a primary focus of vv. 1‒4). That change is this: In his human nature the eternal Son of God, the person of the divine Son, “for us and for our salvation” (Nicene Creed), having persevered in his state of humiliation (v. 3), entered his state of exaltation (v. 4).
The authors’ concern for orthodox Christology is commendable. Their misreading of my view is regrettable.
2. Response from Garner
2.1. Adoptive Divine Sonship Predicated upon Eschatological Sonship
As previously noted, Maurer and Kieser designate our positions with the formula “adoptive divine sonship”—a phrase likely drawn from Michael Peppard.8 Whoever is the source, the quotation deserves attribution. More pertinent to my response here, however, is the unorthodox theological baggage toted in the phrase, since Peppard rejects the pre-existent sonship of Christ and openly aligns himself with the adoptionism of James D. G. Dunn.9 Just as Maurer and Kieser do with Gaffin, they impose the phrase and its objectionable theological baggage upon me.
The authors write, “He [Garner], like Gaffin, understands Romans 1:3–4 ‘is an epochal designation of historically attained sonship rather than an ontological one concerning the hypostatic union.’”10 Then, deploying their refrain of choice, Maurer and Kieser draw the following conclusion: “This means that Jesus’s adoptive divine sonship is, therefore, properly predicated only to this ‘eschatological’ sonship” (pp. 324–25, their emphasis).
In this quote, as in the one from their note 67, referenced in Gaffin’s response above, the writers here employ a grammatically strained formulation of a matter predicated “to” something rather than “on” or “upon” something.11 If what they mean here is that Christ’s divine sonship is predicated upon his adoption, the response is an emphatic no to such Christology from-below argumentation. Jesus is the divine Son from eternity past and remains ever so. He does not and cannot acquire, obtain, mature into what he already is eternally as “very God of very God” (Nicene Creed), the only-begotten Son of God.
Jesus’s divine sonship does not derive from his incarnational experience or eschatological sonship, formulations more reflective of Pannenberg than of Paul. Contrary to Maurer and Kieser, who seek to demonstrate that I make Christ’s divine sonship contingent upon his resurrection, I openly contend precisely the opposite: Christ’s human sonship experience is only properly predicated upon his antecedent divine sonship.
In fact, the chapter in Sons in the Son from which the selected quotation comes begins with an extensive treatment of the deity of the Son of God.12 I affirm the tried, tested, and trusted Christological creeds of Nicaea and Chalcedon, and applaud the brilliant summation of orthodox Christology in the Westminster Confession of Faith chapter 8. In this same chapter of Sons in the Son, I further counter the heterodox and heretical Christology from-below paradigms, which predicate any notion of divinity upon his humanity. Instead, “the Son of God is ‘very and eternal God’ who took ‘upon him man’s nature. Christ’s divinity lies antecedent to his humanity.”13
Maurer and Kieser further misconstrue my view when they degrade my approach to Christ’s eternal sonship: “As Garner admits, ‘this sending does not create sonship, but presupposes it’” (p. 333). As the structure, argument, and tone of Sons in the Son unequivocally manifest, never do I “admit” the eternal sonship of Christ. Mere admission of Christ’s divinity strikes the protological and doxological heart of faithful Christology. As I make explicit, “The Logos asarkos precedes and qualifies the Logos ensarkos.”14 For this reason, the sentence immediately following their chosen quote from Sons in the Son cites Herman Ridderbos affirmingly: “The divine glory of Christ, even already in his pre-existence with the Father prior to his redemptive revelation, determines and underlies the Pauline Christology.”15 It is the divine Son that became incarnate, not a human son that became divine. This theological priority we must celebrate and effectuate, and never moderate or merely tolerate.
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