Acts 13:1-3

God likes to speak to people who are worshipping him. I think that's one of the coolest things about worship. Not only do you get to serve your creator, you get to commune with him on an intimate level. I like to think of worship as a two-way conversation where we are showing God how much we love him and he is speaking his love and truth into us. That probably sounds kind of weird, but it's an awesome idea to think about. JM

Observational Worship

As times continue to change, I think the average worshipper is changing from being a responsive participant in worship to being an observational participant. Check out this video. It's from a recent opening from Buckhead church. Notice how hard everybody is working to pull off such an amazing opening. Feel the energy of the song. But watch the heads. They barely even move in response to the beat. Interesting.
At our church we talk about how to get our people to participate and be responsive in worship. I'm not sure if it's really like that anymore. I think people will respond by observing and praising, but we won't see anything that will make them stand out, especially if we continue to interact with them in the same format.
If we give worshippers a chance to interact in a personal way with a spiritual truth (prayer stations, experiential activities) I think they'll respond and really be engaged. Just thinking.

Noah Playing Guitar

Here's the video from a couple of Sundays ago of Noah playing guitar with us during the worship set. Right after he gets onstage he tries to walk over between me and Caleb because that's where he had practiced. And right at the end he looks up at me and tells me "Daddy, I gotta go potty." It was really cute.

JM

Worship

I got to play guitar with the youth praise band as they led worship in big church today. It was a lot of fun. I really liked the songs that we got to play, and I feel like we made nice arrangements of them and played them well.
My 3 year old son, Noah, had practiced with us the day before and the morning of. He was pumped about playing, but couldn't understand why he couldn't be on stage to play. So he's crying in the back of the sanctuary with my wife as daddy and the rest of his friends are playing.
So a friend of mine picks him up and puts him on the stage with his little fake guitar right next to me during the second song. I thought it was going to be amazingly distracting, but people seemed to respond well to it.
It was really cute to watch him strum his little guitar and get into it. I'll see if I can post some video once I get it.
JM

Most The Movie

This movie looks awesome. Somebody took the modern day parable about the drawbridge operator who sacrifices his son to save the people on the train, and put the idea into a short film. I showed the clip to our senior pastor the other day, and I think he wants to use it, it's just a question of when. It's 31 minutes long, so it would fit in well within our regular service. Plus that reinforces the simple church idea of using special events within your regular programming. JM

Easter Worship At FBCPTC

Easter morning at our church, we had 3 services (we usually have 2). We had a 7:15 am sunrise service outside at a nearby city park that overlooks a lake, and then our regular 9:00 am traditional and 10:45 contemporary services.
The sunrise service was extremely cold (34 degrees), so there were only about 90 people at that one. The other two services were slammed, though. We had over 1200 people between the two (our church typically runs about 750 in worship between the two).
We had 3 families from our neighborhood show up. It was awesome to see the routine of inviting them finally pay off. All 3 enjoyed it.
The message was really unique as it was kind of a drama and kind of a message. Basically woven throughout our pastor's message were interviews with the 8 people mentioned at the cross of Christ. Pastor would interview them and then draw analogies between where that person was with Jesus, and where people today are with Jesus. It was extremely creative and interesting.
After talking to a neighbor, the only real complaint was about the music. They did traditional music in both hours. I had mentioned to my neighbors before that the second worship hour is contemporary and they were disappointed that it wasn't that way when they were there.
As I mentioned in a post a couple of days ago, we discussed why we didn't put more effort into the music in the second hour, and the reason given was because of the sunrise service. So next year, I'm going to do my best to make sure that we have no sunrise service.
One of the main reasons that I'll push for it is because it really is just there to give Christians something special to do. I think it's awesome to create special experiences like that for believers, and is certainly something that should be done. But why does it have to be done on Easter when all of the resources are already being tapped out. Why not do it on some other time?
We'll see how that discussion goes once Easter 2008 rolls around. JM

Know Your Market

Our worship gathering this week was different than most of the ones that we've been planning. It started with a choir singing an anthem that had a gospel feel to it. Then the worship host talked for like 4 minutes and started singing the anthem again. The music was fairly normal otherwise. The thing that was interesting was that the people seemed to love it. More than a normal worship experience for us.
I hated it. I thought it was one of the worst worship experiences that we've created in a long time. But I'm beginning to realize that I'm not our market. I'm kind of an anomaly at our church. So if I'm going to continue to be on our worship planning team, then I need to change my mindset.
Now I just need to begin to prepare ideas for when we have the ability to do a worship experience for the students and those that desire a more experiential, contemplative gathering.
JM

Quality

Perry Noble pointed out this video from youtube about a Newspring attender who got his dad to go to church for the first time in 20 years. It's long (9:06), but it's informative as to what new people think about church. What I found to be interesting about it was that his dad really enjoyed the music and the whole experience in general. It shows that so long as you do something with quality, people will appreciate it, and maybe even enjoy it. JM