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Worship songwriters Going Local

October 20, 2010 in Music, Worship with 2 Comments

A video was just posted on YouTube with Matt Redman giving some thoughts on writing songs – especially for the local church.  It’s an interesting discussion.

With the advent of the Internet and the current evolution of the music industry, we now have access to music and artists we never had before.  With the millions of choices out there, we still need someone to sort through them and tell us which ones are worth checking out.  One solution is to look into your local bands and artists.

I’m sure there is a temptation for Christian musicians and songwriters to have dreams of “making it big” and having their songs heard and even sung by the masses.  But what if the end goal of a Worship Leader/Songwriter was to write songs for their own congregation?  After all, there is so much competition out there, how in the world does a new songwriter get their song out on top to be heard?  There are some unique blessings to writing for your congregation.  Granted, you may not become famous or make a lot of money.

Here’s the video.


FSBO

July 13, 2010 in church, Daily Life, God and us, Pastoring, Worship with 3 Comments

I was listening to a sermon the other day and either my own mind came up with this or it was God’s Spirit revealing truth – or at least a different point of view to look from.  Now, this is all kind of off the top of my head.  I haven’t searched scriptures to verify the theological accuracy of these ideas :) But let’s take a quick look at the concept of “surrender.”

The act of surrender is a daily practice for those who call Jesus “Lord”.  When we wake up in the morning, our natural inclination is to take life into our own hands and let God watch.  Thankfully, God knows us well and Jesus told us we would need to deny ourselves daily.  After listening to the aforementioned sermon, I’m starting to wonder about surrender, what it really means, and what motivates surrender in my life.

Often times, especially while partaking in the Lord’s Supper (communion, during worship services) I meditate on what Jesus did for me.  I think of Jesus giving everything he had for me (and us).   It would seem natural to think “Jesus gave it all for me, therefore, I owe it to Him to give my life to Him.”  Is this way of thinking right?  Am I thinking that I am indebted to Jesus and therefore I have to pay Him back for what He did for me?  Do I OWE him my life because he gave His life for me?  If that were true,  doesn’t that make Jesus’ sacrifice more of a barter than a gift?  Jesus gave to me without any requirement of repayment.  It’s not a trade-off.

So now what I’m thinking is, in stead of “surrender” being a matter of giving and receiving, perhaps it’s a matter of ownership.  God owns all he has created – including me.  Perhaps surrender is about us re-acknowledging that God owns us and WE don’t own ourselves.  Yes, in a sense, it’s the same as “giving your life to Jesus”.  But I don’t know if I’ve really ever owned myself.

We often lead an existence with only a vague sense of God’s presence.   It’s so easy for us to lose sight of God’s ownership of the world (and everything in it) because there are much louder and more consistent messages in our lives that drill the ideas of personal possession and ownership into our consciousness.

In those moments when I remember that Jesus bought my life with His death, I need to re-align my way of thinking and humbly surrender ownership rights.

What do you think, reader?  Perhaps it’s all semantics.  Don’t know.  Whichever way you look at it, though, for a disciple of Jesus, surrender is a big deal.  And it’s really difficult.  And COMPLETE surrender might just be a rare quality.  Complete surrender – is it even possible?  Sounds like a good blog post.  We’ll see!

Preposition Proposition

July 11, 2010 in church, God and us, Worship with 0 Comments

It’s Sunday morning again and many of us will be heading off to some sort of worship gathering.  Currently, God has me carrying responsibilities as our local congregation’s worship leader (among many other things).  As a worship leader I am often thinking on and wondering about the corporate worship environment and experience.

A while back I was reading a few different passages in the Bible and a phrase came to me.  ”Look for God”.  This phrase, or invitation, has become part of my Sunday morning vocabulary and I’ve used it many times to help us all understand one of the facets of worship.  I explore it a bit here.  Lately, however, I’ve been thinking of a new preposition.

I thought about it a lot and it seems like my worship times with God (I mean those times of singing and just standing before God in adoration and awe) are often more like a phone conversation or writing a letter.  How much do we realize God’s presence among us when we’re worshipping?  I mean a real conscience, relational sense – not just the cognitive sense.  How much do we just send off our thoughts and words into the air with the trust or hope that it reaches the invisible God somewhere somehow?  Or that we send it off like an email and know that some distant God will receive it.  Or we express our hearts to God not really expecting a reply.

Let me suggest a new phrase.  ”Look AT God”.  This morning we will try an experiemnt.  Before we begin our time of singing, I will ask the congregation to try this experiment.  To close their eyes and in the best way they can figure out, to look AT God.  Then once we’re all looking at Him, to tell Him we are there to meet with Him, and to tell Him it’d be awesome if He would reveal Himself to us.

I realize this will have different results for different people.  For anyone who doesn’t really know God, this will be meaningless. I suspect there may be people more religiously oriented who’ve never began to imagine God is really there.  There may be some who know God but become painfully aware of certain sin barriers that separate them from seeing God.  Either way, I hope this helps shape our understanding of our relationship with God – that it is a real relationship.

Have you ever tried to close your eyes and look at God before talking to Him?

How Can You Love Him?

May 21, 2010 in Daily Life, God and us, marriage, Worship with 2 Comments

I got some good responses to my previous post about being honest and something one person shared with me got me thinking.  They realized at times they thought more of themselves then they thought of God, which, to a Christian, seems obviously not right.  She finds herself trying to force herself to think about God but that doesn’t really last for more than a few moments.  Someone else I know said once that he’s pretty sure he loves his wife a lot more than he loves Jesus.  The evidence is how much he thinks of her, spends time with her and tells her “I love you” compared to how much he does this with Jesus.

Speaking of being honest…how many of us are uncomfortable admitting to anyone that at times we aren’t sure we love God very much.  Of course we must define “love”.  Are we talking about how we feel?  Or something else?

Let’s think about marriage – our basic model of a loving relationship.  A spouse will demonstrate their love by their expressions of adoration, their acts of service and sacrifice, by fulfilling promises, showing you value them through listening and paying attention to them, etc.

So how do we know how much we love God?  Jesus said that if you love me you will obey my commands.  How are you at obeying Jesus commands?  And I’m not necessarily talking about the big 10 God gave Moses.  I’m talking the hard ones like “Love God with ALL your heart ALL your soul, ALL your mind, ALL your strength”.  Or “Love your neighbor as yourself”.

But that’s not what I’m writing about today.  Here’s the big question:

If we DON’T feel love for God, how do we grow our desire for God?

You can’t force yourself to like something.  So what do you do?

I’m going to do something different than usual here.  I’m not going to answer this or give any of my own ideas.  If you have any ideas, post them in the comments.  If you have wondered this and have been afraid to admit it, I challenge you to share that in the comments.  You can put a fake name :)

How can you get yourself to desire God more?

Honestly, I’d rather be somewhere else

May 19, 2010 in books, church, Daily Life, God and us, Pastoring, Worship with 0 Comments

Francis Chan in Chapter 5 of Crazy Love is exploring how we Christians often give our leftovers to God.  He asks the question, “How many of us would really leave our families, our jobs, our education, our friends, our connections, our familiar surroundings, and our homes if Jesus asked us to?  If He just showed up and said, ‘Follow me’? Now explanation.  No directions.”  He goes on to say:

You could follow Him straight up a hill to be crucified.  Maybe He would lead you to another country, and you would never see your family again.  Or perhaps you would stay put, but He would ask you to spend your time helping people who will never love you back and never show gratitude for what you gave up.

What scares me most are the people who are lukewarm and just don’t care.  I think that if I did a poll of the readers of this book, many of you would say, “Yeah, I am definitely lukewarm at times, but I’m not really at a place to give more to God.”  Many of us believe we have as much of God as we want right now, a reasonable portion of God among all the other things in our lives.  Most of our thoughts are centered on the money want to make, the school we want to attend, the body we aspire to have, the spouse we want to marry, the kind of person we want to become…. But the fact that nothing should concern us more than our relationship with God; it’s about eternity, and nothing compares with that.  God is not someone who can be tacked on to our lives.

What a world we live in.  For a few hours a week (more if we are taking responsibility for our spiritual growth like we should) we put truth into our minds.  But every other message around us seems to be both yelling and whispering “You, and what YOU want, and what YOU deserve is more important than anthing else or anyone else in the world.”  It’s no wonder we come to our gatherings to worship together and have such a hard time connecting with God.  Our minds and lives are so programmed to serve our selfish desires that it is a major mental, emotional, and spiritual shift to authentically sing praises to God.  We stand there and attempt to thank God for all He’s done when we spent the whole week wrongfully proud of ourselves and our own accomplishments.

As a pastor, specifically one who stands up front and leads people in worship of God, there’s is something I desire – possibly above all else – of myself and everyone else.  I can’t say that I practice this 100% of the time.  What I wish we could all do is be honest.  I wish that we could all be honest with God about how we feel, about our lack of faith, about our “secret” desires (God knows our secrets), or about our doubts.  I fear that when people walk in to our auditorium on Sunday morning, they feel there is a certain expectation of what image they are to portray.  They are driven by acceptance or by social rules.  If there is shame from sin, we bear it and hope it doesn’t show.  If there is boredom, we hide it.  To be honest, I see so many faces that seem to say “I wish I were somewhere else right now”.  And I’m not blaming anyone for how they feel.  I’m just saying, well, then don’t come to church!

As a worship leader, I would love it for people to come to me and say:

  • I feel far from God.
  • I don’t mean any of the words in the songs we sing.
  • I don’t understand what those words mean.
  • I don’t think God loves me.
  • I feel no emotional love for God.
  • I want to let loose but don’t feel comfortable in a crowd.
  • I’m angry with God
  • I don’t believe God is interested in me at all
  • Honestly, I’d rather be somewhere else then church on Sunday morning

Where is the safe place for people to voice their doubts?  Their hurts?

Going back to what Chan said, for those who call themselves Christians, but show no evidence that Jesus is in charge of their life, I wish they would just be honest.  For those who call themselves Christian and have no intention of working on a relationship with Jesus and are content following their own directives for the rest of their lives, why not just drop the label and call yourself not-a-Christan.  I wish we could all be honest.

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