Use Your Head

As a worship leader, I feel a great responsibility to lead the Church through a well-rounded, theologically sound song-list every week. But I’ve always been hesitant to put certain songs into a worship service that have a central theme of “I need Your presence” or “come now,” or “saturate me,” and so on. To an extent, those statements are Biblically sound on a personal level, but if you take a historical look at worship in the corporate sense, songs like that don’t really appear too often, if ever. Often when you see corporate songs of praise in the Bible, they tell a story of remembrance for what God did (see Moses’ song of praise in Exodus 15:1-18), how we are going to respond to him (see Psalm 9:2), or simply praise his name. I haven’t searched the Bible all the way through to check—haven’t managed to find the time—but I don’t think you really see people coming together for corporate worship and then singing “I need” and “come now.” Truthfully, those are very immature statements, like what young children scream to their parents. And these statements don’t really lend themselves to edification of the church body, which is the purpose of coming together for worship services. Additionally, isn’t it true that when we meet together in his name, God is already there with us? So saying “sweep through this place!” is kind of redundant if he’s with us already. I would much prefer leading the church in “It is written, Christ is risen, Jesus You are lord of all” than “Saturate us now, God”. I feel we are reminded of the purpose of our existence

Competitive Philanthropy vs. the Stealthy Right Hand

I have recently been amazed at the overwhelming support for the disaster stricken country of Haiti. The response seems to be more widespread and urgent than the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami which claimed the lives of around 200,000 victims. And as luck seems to have it, these catastrophes strike third world countries more often than not. It would appear that us fortunate “first-worlders” are starting to learn our lesson in generosity and compassion for the less fortunate. But as with anything, I think it goes a little deeper than that. I want to talk a little bit about what’s called “Competitive Philanthropy.”

Road-Remorse

This weekend I was asked by Danny Vincent from Dwelling Place (Zion Bible College in Haverhill, MA) to play guitar with them at a youth leader’s summit called “Pillars Conference.” After the Saturday morning session I had to head back to Agawam to get ready for our Saturday night service. On the way home while driving through Worcester on I-290, I accidentally took the slower of two ways to get to the Mass Pike because I was distracted while tweeting (#dangerousThingsIshouldntDo) a good line I had just heard in a Gary Go song (#lameThingsIshouldntDo). FYI, the “#” is called a Twitter “hashtag,” and I don’t really know what they do either.

Since I was slightly detoured, I found myself in somewhat unfamiliar territory. The only thing I could do was drive very slow while frantically looking for “I-90″ signs. When I finally found my access point to the Pike, I had to cut across four lanes and

Some Stupid Punk-Kid’s Shoulder

Last night a few other leaders and I took a pack of kids from our youth to go see Hillsong United’s “The I-Heart Film,” which was a one-time event, broadcast via satellite from Australia to North America. Since we have youth group every Wednesday night, we couldn’t take everyone (potentially 200 kids), so we made it optional for whoever wanted to come along. If you’re a follower of Christ and don’t know what this film is, first, emerge from the cave in which you dwell (take no offense, I’m kidding, sort of), then do a Google search with terms like “The I-Heart Revolution” or “we’re all in this together” and read up on this movement. Or just go to I-Heart.org and get involved.

I could talk all about the injustices and horrible atrocities that we were made privy to through this film, but I won’t. I could talk about how I have been given a kick in the butt to start reaching out to the people around me, but I won’t. I could talk about a lot of the things this film was mostly intended to get us talking and thinking

Sand Castles + Easter Eggs + Piñatas

Over the last few days I’ve had and/or heard some discussions with people concerning Halloween and how it fits in with the Christian life. We’ve all heard the claims over the years of its alleged “pagan roots,” but probably nine out of ten people that use this argument are simply just regurgitating it because they heard someone else say it… (which unfortunately is the foundation of many Christians’ viewpoint on such issues). And let’s be honest, it makes you sound really smart when you say something has “pagan roots.” It screams, “I read leatherbound books and have discovered the true evil that hides behind the commercial mask we have placed over this holiday/object/person/etc/etc…” I know full well that I’m not the first person to delve into this debate, but

Freedom From Routine

So I was just reading Galatians 5… Why did I always think growing up that “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free…” is referring to freedom from our sinful nature? Simply understanding who Paul was writing to and why, and then actually absorbing the text reveals that he is referring to freedom from religious law/systems/traditions. Why is this verse often quoted out of context and applied to our sinful nature? Later in the chapter Paul does talk about not gratifying the sinful nature, but for pretty much the first 15 verses, he’s talking explicitly about freedom from religion. Paul was writing to these fairly new Christians