Posts Tagged ‘Worship’

A New Kind of Churchgoer?

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010

Over the past four or five years, I’ve repeatedly heard a comment similar to this one…

“I only come to church for the community.  My best worship experiences come from [cd/dvd/ipod/youtube], and the best sermons are on podcast”. The person making the comment tends to go on to say how much they just love the person leading worship or the pastor who is teaching, but they’ve been “spoiled” by engaging with the latest Jesus Culture DVD or by hearing Francis Chan’s latest podcast or webcast.  I can honestly say that I get it.  I am able to fully immerse myself in worship with a quality recording.  I am able to be moved deep in my mind, heart, and spirit by a passionate pastor or teacher over the internet.

With media becoming more and more a part of the daily life of our culture, is this any surprise?

I’m curious about this.  Are you?  We’re talking about this over on the forum.  Join us.

The Truth (1 of 2)

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

The Bible says that we are to “speak the truth in love” to each other.  One of the things that we as the Church are getting better at as a whole is the second half of this idea. We are (thankfully) improving at loving each other.  What we’re still needing to improve on, myself included, is in speaking the truth.  This is especially CRUCIAL in worship ministry.

Worship ministries are comprised of artists, and typically led by artists.  The classic artist mentality is one that does not see black and white, and rarely aligns itself with the lines, rules, and boxes that the rest of the world does.  It’s not that we’re unaware of reality, we just see reality a little differently.  We tend to see things to extremes.  When others are joyful, we see the reason behind the joy and want to capture it in song, word, dance, poetry, paint, or media art.  When others are mournful, we feel deeply along with them and want to give others a vehicle for expressing their sorrow with our art.

While we go about the ministry of worship as artists, centering our lives around the truth is our highest calling.  As we lead others in expressions of praise, adoration, worship, joy, lament, and contemplation, we need to be firmly grounding ourselves in the Word so that what we lead others in is not simply an emotion, but rather a timeless truth that seats Jesus on the throne of our lives.

This is no more true than in our interactions with each other.

With all that said, here’s the latest DW video installment, called “The Truth”, part 1 of 2.

Worship In The Ordinary

Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

I have discovered that God doesn’t need me to “get away from it all” to find Him, because He is already where I am.

Click to continue reading “Worship In The Ordinary”