Clear The Stage | Worship Is More Than A Song

CLEAR THE STAGE

Clear the stage and set the sound and lights ablaze
If that's the measure that it takes to crush the idols.
Chuck the pews and all the decorations too
Until the congregations few then have revival.
Tell your friends that this is where the party ends
until you're broken for your sins you can't be social.
Then seek the Lord and wait for what he has in store
and know that great is your reward and just be hopeful

Cause you can sing all you want to.
Yes you can sing all you want to
you can sing all you want to
And don't get me wrong, worship is more than a song.

Take a break from all the plans that you made
And sit at home alone and wait for God to whisper.
Beg Him please to open up his mouth and speak
And pray for real upon your knees until they blister.
Shine the light on every corner of your life
Until the pride and lust and lies are in the open.
Then read the word and put to test the things you've heard
Until your heart and soul are stirred and rocked and broken.

Cause you can sing all you want to.
Yes you can sing all you want to
you can sing all you want to
And don't get me wrong, worship is more than a song.

Anything I put before my God is an idol.
Anything I want with all my heart is an idol.
Anything I can't stop thinking of is an idol.
Anything that I give all my love is an idol.
We must not worship something that's not even worth it.
Clear the stage and make some space for the one who deserves it.

Cause I can sing all I want to.
Yes I can sing all I want to
I can sing all I want to
And still get it wrong, worship is more than a song.

And you can sing all you want to.
Yes you can sing all you want to
You can sing all you want to
But don't get me wrong, worship is more than a song.

- Ross King

Such a beautiful line. Such a beautiful truth.

I was reminded of the song "Clear The Stage" by Ross King not long ago by my friend Lynsey Koles (@OneBlindMouse) This song always gives me perspective and helps me to drop my pride a bit if you will. I was thinking this morning quite a bit about the role of "worship" in our churches. I thought about how much time and effort and money and staffing is put into our "worship ministries" in our churches. We spend so much money to create worship environments that are extremely visually engaging and interactive for our congregations. This song reminds me that in order to truly worship sometimes we need to strip the stage. We need to get rid of all of that and simple get alone with God. Worship in public can't happen if worship in private is not happening already. What things do you need to clear out of the way to make way for genuine authentic worship that is seeking God completely looking for nothing for self but giving completely and sacrificially to God in Spirit and in Truth?

My Favorite Things... (In This Module)

We'll my favorite topic in this module didn't have much to do with raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens.... but it does have to do with style of church and worship. As a worship leader I love to see how and why the church does what it does as it ebbs and flows through culture creating new art and teaching new generations about the love of God. It's amazing to look at the Charleston vs. Sandy Creek Movements and trace through to how my church does worship today.

Some background would be nice I guess. Charleston Baptists started in 1740 and grew mainly in the US state of South Caroline. Interestingly enough I've spent a fair amount of time in Charleston this summer doing missions and speaking to youth. Characteristically Charleston Baptists have a more liturgical style of worship. They value highly their education programs and believe that discipleship should be the main emphasis of all teaching in the church.

Sandy Creek Baptists, originally called Separate Baptists, started in 1755 were a bit more of a wild bunch. They were very evangelistic in nature and in their congregational methods. In general they were less educated and wealthy that the Charleston Baptists and had a more "extemporaneous" worship style. They emphasized evangelism and church planting over discipleship and education in ministry.

It would honestly say that my church falls somewhere in between. While there are deep Charleston roots it seems that our worship styles feel more Sandy Creek. Regardless of where they come from or which movement we claim for our roots the important thing is that both of these stylistic methods for "church" can point to Christ and draw others to Him.

It can be messy that's for sure... but, it's beautiful.

MFUGE 2009: MOVE

PowerSource just returned from our large summer trip. We go to a missions oriented camp called MFUGE. It's a camp run by LifeWay and this particular site was in Charleston, South Carolina. We stayed on the campus of Charleston Southern in suites (2 dorm rooms strung together by a connected bathroom). But, I'm getting ahead of myself.

On Monday morning June 22nd my wife, Kristin, and I arose around 4:45am in order to get to the bus and be loaded and help with packing and such by 5:30am. The students arrived between then and 6:00am and we loaded up the bus and van and headed out onto the road. I'm not one for long car rides or trips as my stomach gives me a hard time about it so I took 2 Dramamine and knocked out pretty early into the drive. We stopped once for a bathroom break and snack and then again for lunch but other than about an hour and a half at the end of the ride I slept pretty much the entire way there which was really nice. I needed the rest for what would become a very long, hard, and enjoyable week at MFUGE.

Upon arrival at Charleston Southern we went through the ins and outs of checking our students and leaders into their rooms and familiarized ourselves with a very open and beautiful campus. With spacious lawns and a reflection pool it provides a place for great meditation times and great fun with tennis & basketball courts and a pool. These amenities are not why we have gathered in sunny, and hot, South Carolina. We, along with many other church youth groups, have gathered to serve. We paid good money and drove from hundreds of miles away to love people with the love and message of Jesus.

Our students and leaders were broken up into serve tracks, similar to our Surv Teams, based on their 1st 2nd and 3rd choices. The tracks included: Creative, Games & Rec, PCY (painting construction and yard work), Social, and Children. Each of these tracks provides the students with a rough idea of how they will be serving. The PCY track works on mowing lawns construction sites and functions much like a Habitat for Humanity team. The Games & Rec, and Children teams work mainly with young children. They go to daycare centers or drop off points and plan out a day of fun for these young ones, all the while looking for opportunities to share with them the life changing gospel of Jesus. The Creative team works with children as well as homes for the elderly and they plan a program consisting of music and drama that points toward Christ. Social is basically a grab bag of all the other teams. They could be stoking food pantries, playing with children, visiting the sick and elderly, or doing some PCY.

Almost all of our students got the track they were hoping for. I was a van driver for the Social track in which I was put in. I really enjoyed my track group. None of my students from PowerSource were in my group so I got the opportunity to meet and learn a lot of new faces and make new friends. At first I was a bit nervous at the spiritual temperature of the students in my track. (I wrote about this in an earlier post you can read here.) However our track leader, a young woman by the name of Kara Barefoot, and I have a history. We group up together as friends in the same youth group at Raleigh Road Baptist Church. It was really cool to be able to serve with her and talk with her about the paths God has taken her on over the course of the past few months. It's a great thing to see God moving in the lives of my friends.

During the week, my track group worked with children at a downtown center (more on my time there in this blog post), helped spruce up a homeless shelter (in which I had a fight with some vines hanging from a tree and the vines won), and helped to harvest some squash at a farm that donates it's food to the homeless. All in all it was a great time of ministry and fellowship with other believers.

During the night time and morning worship sessions we experienced a very passionate hearts from our camp speaker Brian Jennings and our worship leaders The Rescued (nice name). Brian's actually an alumni of PowerSource middle school ministry and used to attend Thomas Road during his youth. He was very excited to see our youth there and was able to communicate to our students very well. He understand the struggles of being in a large church connected to a Christian school and the apathy that can sometimes cause in students.

Now I will say.... the group we took to MFUGE are mostly our core students. By that I mean they are student who dig deeper that we tell them to and ask the hard questions about what it means to follow Jesus in this great big Wild Goose Chase we're on to know Him and experience Him more fully. Not only do they ask questions they dive in head over feet. They live it.

There was true evidence of that this week. Collectively our students lead about 20 children and adults to begin a relationship with Jesus Christ while we were at MFUGE. It's a really exciting thing. Even more exciting to know that the MFUGE staff will be working with those individuals all summer to help disciple them and bring them along in their walk with Christ.

I loved sitting in our Church Group Devotion times every night after our worship sessions. God taught me a lot simply by listening about the stories of courage and bravery chronicling our students sharing the message and love of Christ and seeing lives changed. I got the opportunity to teach one of these sessions and I think I may have been more moved than some of the students. I was at the brink of tears thanking God for what He was doing in the lives of my students and those they connected with that week. (More on that night in this blog post. )

Overall God did some amazing things while we were in MFUGE. I'm thankful for opportunities like that. To love God by loving those He loves (all people). After the lives changed and time spent meeting other Christ-followers from around the nation we said our goodbyes and began to make our way back to good old Lynchburg, Virginia.

We made it about 15 miles.......... then our bus broke down.

We were in pretty heavy stop and go traffic and the brakes on the bus locked up and began to smoke excessively almost to the point of fire. Craziness. We assessed the damages and realized we would have to be towed in order to fix the problem. We shuttled students in the van to a Chic-Fil-A in Summerville, SC a few minutes down the road (I'm leading a worship evangelism conference there next weekend pray for me if you think about it.) It took us about an hour and a half to get all the students there. We then walked over to a shopping center with a PetsMart a Target and some other interesting stores. We passed the time waiting for the bus to arrive and arrive it did at about 9:00pm that evening. (We left camp at 10am). We loaded everyone up on the bus very tired and were ready to be on our way. Then another problem happened. The temperature gauge was reading close to a boiling point on the bus. We went back and examined it and had to call a repair man to come take a look. During this time a couple drove up next to our bus (which reads THOMAS ROAD BAPTIST CHURCH in the side in big letters) and asked us if we were from TRBC like "Liberty University TRBC) turns out they were both Alumni and let us know that if we needed a place to stay that we could sleep on the gym floor of their church, which had showers and AC. Considering how late it was and not knowing the extent of the problems we would be facing with the repair we stayed at the church.

We slept like rocks and a shower felt great after being in a sweating bus for a long time. Our students were great. Even though a few started feeling a little sick due to the heat, for the most part no one complained. It was awesome. The next morning TRBC had sent a new bus that drove through the night (THANKS SO MUCH Mr. Parra!!!!) to pick us up. We loaded up and headed home. With Rubik's Cubes in hand we made our trip home. I slept most of the way again but woke up and worked on some DLP Church History lessons that I ripped to my iPod.

I love long sweaty bus rides with break downs. I wouldn't trade them for anything because...

God moved in our hearts. God moved in the hearts of others.

Some will never be the same again because we made the trip.

I love this ministry.

I love it.

I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Apathy & The Modern Church

In recent years there are many Christ-followers who have come into the thought process, through false teaching, that following Christ means a one-way ticket out of Hell and nothing more. These Christ-followers, if you can call them that, are content to sit in a plush seat in an air conditioned building doing nothing but “soaking up the rays” of light and truth that come from the mouth of their pastor. If that is all following Christ has been limited to one will find themselves in a rather uncomfortable position upon reading the apostle Paul’s writings in Romans 12:1-2 and Ephesians 4:17-20. Paul lays down a picture of how one is to follow Christ that doesn’t line up with much of what is seen in the modern church. To simply sit doesn’t cut it according to these writings.

“In the Lord’s name, I tell you this. Do not continue living like those who do not believe. Their thoughts are with nothing. They do not understand, and they know nothing, because they refuse to listen. So they cannot have the life that God gives. They have lost all feeling of shame, and they use their lives for doing evil. They continually want to do all kinds of evil. But what you learned in Christ was not like this.” [1]

Paul lays out some hard things to swallow in this passage for those who are Christ-followers and not living like it. He basically calls them ignorant and stupid people, saying that their thoughts are worth nothing of value. Paul abrasively reminds them that this type of living is not what Christ called them to.

This could be the case for the modern church in our current culture. Christ-followers have become immersed in the idea that they “go to church” to “get something from it” rather than becoming immersed in the truth that they should “be the church” and “give God their lives in worship."

Some might align this with what is called the Pareto Principle. The Pareto Principle says that 20% of the people in the church do all the work and are actually growing active members of the church body; they are “being the church”. Then the other 80% are consumers, like sucker fish on the side of an aquarium they gorge themselves on all they can get until they have doubled in size but done little more than slide around sucking glass. This is not how this passage calls the Christ-follower to live.

In the book of Romans Paul shows the Christ-follower the type of life that Jesus has called him to live.

“So brothers and sisters, since God has shown us great mercy, I beg you to offer your lives as a living sacrifice to him. Your offering must be only for God and pleasing to him, which is the spiritual way for you to worship. Do not be shaped by this world; instead be changed within by a new way of thinking. Then you will be able to decide what God wants for you; you will know what is good and pleasing to him and what is perfect.”[2]

Paul begs the believer in light of God’s great mercy, which is the salvation through Jesus Christ death on the cross, to offer their lives as living sacrifices. Sacrifices in the minds of these men and women would have meant something very different that what may come up in the mind of the modern church. Sacrifice to these people meant finding a lamb or a bull and slaughtering it. In the book of Leviticus in the Old Testament there is a long list of various rules and regulations and sacrificial ordinances that the followers of Yahweh were to adhere to. What did this word sacrifice mean under the new covenant that Jesus had set up when he died on the cross? How were they to offer themselves, as sacrifices, yet remain alive?

It’s no doubt that this way of thinking through the original readers for a bit of a loop. Paul tries to clarify a bit by stating that this living sacrifice is the spiritual way for them to worship. Before Jesus, the only way they could worship Yahweh the infinitely almighty God, was through the system of sacrifices that had been set in place. Jesus changed everything. He made a way for God become “intimately approachable”[3] by His people. It is through this that Christ made a way for the living sacrifice to be possible. This sacrifice wasn’t about the shed blood of bulls and lambs it was a bout the shed blood of Jesus and how to live a life that followed his teaching.

The problem with this living sacrifice thing is that some people thought they could take a break from the hard part of sacrifice, take the modern church and the Pareto Principle, and just cost on through. Or they felt as if they could do certain things saying it was for the glory of God when really it was to draw attention to them. Paul reminds these types of thinkers that this living sacrifice is meant to be “only for God”. He challenges them to a “new way of thinking” this requires taking the natural state of selfishness humans dwell in and giving that desire over to God as a sacrifice.

Christ-followers in the modern church seem to be thinking way too much about themselves than their sacrifices to God. Is this giving God everything? It doesn’t appear to be so. It seems like Christ-followers prefer to be fat and happy to growing in their relationship with their God and Savior.

So what is the solution? How does the church fix this problem? A dramatic rethinking of what “the church” is and how it operates must come into focus for Christ-followers. They must stop going to church and start being the church. It begins with asking questions like: “If a church shuts down, would the community know? Or care? Or be different? If the answer to those questions is NO, then the church isn't fully being the church... Hopefully this is changing.”[4]

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[1] Ephesians 4:17-20 (NCV)

[2] Romans 12:1-2 (NCV)

[3] “Infinitely Almighty” and “Intimately Approachable” terminology taken from Louie Giglio’s book The Air I Breathe.

[4] A comment on a Facebook status by Michael Larkin the pastor of Cinema Church in Hartford, CT.

A Screaming Little Girl In My Church Growth Class

I'm in my church growth and evangelism class right now with Dr. Towns. Across the room from me there is a little girl, talking and screaming at the top of her lungs about her love for her daddy. She's sitting in his lap and crawling all over the desk and Dr. Towns is very calmly ignoring her. Wow. It's a snow day for almost all of the schools in the immediate area so this little girl is her with her daddy. She's talking non-stop and it's really hard to concentrate. The thing is this girl doesn't care about anything else but her daddy. She wants to play with him and talk with him. She doesn't care that class is going on. She doesn't care that she's distracting... all she wants is her daddy. While this is greatly aggravating to me and a few others around me I've started thinking about this girl and her out loud love for her daddy. Leave it to me to over spiritualize but, I can't help but thinking about how God must want us to be like that with him. When's the last time I cared about nothing else around me except for being with my God, my Daddy? When is the last time I have so recklessly and unashamedly run after God like that? I love Him. I've told God this and He knows it. I just can't help but think about the comparisons the apostle Paul (the apostle formerly known as Saul) makes in Galatians to Christ-followers as "children of God". Jesus calls little children unto himself and scolds his disciples for turning them away. Maybe this is a picture of how God wants us to be with Him? Maybe God wants nothing less that for us to be completely infatuated with Him. Funny how a screaming little girl in my church growth class can teach me so much...

Great Quote #1

"We need church leaders today who are models of holiness and reverence, pastors who "flow into silence before the very Name of God, who speak in hushed tones in the sacredness of God's presence, and who speak of themselves and their tasks with a sense of gratitude and wonder." - Scot McKnight