One of the key components to being a worship leader who makes an impact is to be sure that you are spending regular time worshiping God in your personal life as well as corporately. I’m realizing that I’ve been lacking in that area lately and would love to see a picture of what others do.
What do your personal worship times look like? Structured/unstructured? Prayer/music? Extended Scripture reading? Share in the comments!
Someone that’s been intriguing me with some fascinating thoughts lately has been Vince Marotte, a pastor at Gateway Church in Texas and author of the book Context and Voice.
He’s observing that the Church (as a whole) has become a place of consumption for too long and that Sunday morning is losing its value. People come to a building, sit in the seats, sing songs written by people outside of their own church, listen to a pastor, rinse and repeat week after week. With the advancement in both content consumption tools and content creation tools in our culture it takes much less than driving to church to hear a good sermon. Vince writes: Continue Reading…
Something got my wheels turning. I am placed in a strange juxtaposition of two different cultures. The culture I serve, my home congregation is a beautiful and wonderful place; a place I so enjoy serving, but I think we’re just starting to scratch the surface of how to be creative. We’re making excellent strides there and I can’t wait to see what’s in store.
On the other hand, the online world of church creatives that I daily take part in is a place of bold innovation, extreme creativity, and fresh thinking that, at times, might even be offensive to some within my congregation. Continue Reading…
Anyone who is on some type of “platform”; being a pastor, worship leader, or even having a lot of social media followers, can quickly and easily run into a problem:
“Wow. Look at this, I have some influence. People listen to me. This is pretty amazing.”
Now, the problem isn’t with people listening to that person, or even that they have influence. The problem lies with how that influenced is used. Will it be used for God’s glory or for personal gain? A new worship leader and blogging friend of mine says today that it’s possible and quite clear from Scripture that it could be used for both (think Moses, David, Solomon, the Apostle Paul), but there will always be a danger to take pride in the position we’ve been allowed to be placed into and forget about our call to magnify the greatness of God. Continue Reading…
This past week was the culmination of an opportunity I was presented with to organize a team to lead worship for several events dealing with our Free Lutheran association’s annual conference.
For the most part things went extremely well and I have no doubt that God was honored and glorified though it. Planning, however, presented a slight challenge. Continue Reading…
