Good morning and Happy Super Bowl Sunday! Yes, I believe that this IS in fact a holiday and should be celebrated as such! Whether you’re a football fan, a lover of clever marketing,  someone looking for the possible half time train wreck, or someone who just loves to get together with friends and have great food, this is a day you’re looking forward to every year. I know we have a fun day planned leading up to the game, starting with the beginning of a new sermon series here at the church called Collision Course: Where Faith and Culture Collide. With it being the first Sunday of the month, we will also be celebrating Christ through communion. I believe God is going to do some really cool stuff this morning. I’m excited to give Him the praise He deserves. Here are the songs that we are planning to sing.

Come and Listen-David Crowder I LOVE this song as an opener. It really sets the tone for people to shake off everything that is going on around them and prepare themselves for what the Lord is going to say.

O Worship the King-Passion

You’re Worthy of My Praise-David Ruiz

All Because of Jesus-Fee

Communion-From the Inside Out-Hillsong

This is what we are singing at The Word at Shaw this morning. You still have time to join us here. Our service begins at 10:30. Click here for a link to the promo video for the sermon series that starts this morning

I will admit before I even get started. Someone will probably get mad at this. Granted, there aren’t hundreds of people reading what I write, but I’m convinced that out of the few of you that read this someone will get mad at me. That. Is. Totally. Cool. With that being said…

I’ve been thinking a lot about faith impacts culture and vice versa. As I continue to look at it, it seems like both have been generally bad influences on each other. It reminds me of when I was a little boy. I am an only child, but with my mom being eighth of 9 and my dad being the oldest of 6, I’ve got a TON of cousins. We used to do so many crazy things and we would get the other in trouble all the time. I guess that’s just part of life as a kid. One of us would dare the other to jump off the bed. Trouble. In retaliation, one dares the other to grab an extra cookie. Trouble.  We are good at influencing each other to push the envelope, and we usually pushed it too far.

So how have faith a culture been mutually bad influences on each other? Well, as I sit here in my office and have been thinking about the upcoming weeks in our church from a worship standpoint, one of the things that continues to be at the forefront of my thinking is the relevancy of our worship experience. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that we have to be relevancy is tremendously important to the church. So I don’t see that as a negative thing. I think the line gets blurry when we are striving to look so much like the world in the things that we do that “they can’t tell the difference”. I don’t think it is my job as a worship leader to confuse the people that walk in the door. I don’t want to put them in such a trance that when the service is over they say, “I didn’t even know I was in church! How did I get here???” Especially since I’m called to be different. As a Christian, it’s an honor for me to BE different. Look at 1 Peter 2:9. Being different is part of the job description. But I’ve been to churches where the people are trying to be relevant, or cool and trendy and they pull some things off. But inevitably, there’s one thing that starts to waver when we try to look like the rest of the culture we live in. That’s the gospel. I feel that in the different times I’ve gone to places that are trying SO hard to be attractive to the rest of the world, they end up diluting the one beautiful difference between the two.

This is the hinge between both faith and culture. As I said yesterday, when we turn both of these fast moving cars toward each other, there is only one place for them to crash. What was done at the cross changes both sides dramatically. I believe the reason that the church has influenced the rest of culture negatively is because of the way they look at culture. Just as you have some churches who try too hard to be cool, you have just as many trying too hard to make sure you know that they AREN’T anything like the rest of the world. Granted, we are called to not be lovers of the world or the things of the world (1 John 2:15-16). That doesn’t mean that we should shun the people that are in the world. As a matter of fact, they are the reason we are still here. Some of us have run so far away from the line that we are simply screaming at the cruel, vile world far from the other side. The rest of the world and the culture we live in has never asked us to change ourselves and then maybe they would be a part of the church. We are to look different and they will hate us for it. Bible says so. BUT, there is a lot more room closer to the cross for us in the faith as well. When we run so far the other way, no one can hear you except for when you scream about how bad the other side is. No one wants to hear that. Come a little bit closer. A lot of things change at the foot of the cross. The other side even looks a lot different than you think.

As someone who spends his days sculpting a service that is designed to bring glory to the Father, I have to keep in mind that in my church there are some people who will have never had this experience before. Do I want to alienate them so much that they feel uncomfortable and never want to come back? Heck no. But do I want to present the gospel in a way that it challenges everything they have ever thought about life and Christ and the people around them? Heck yes. But here’s the secret: I’m doing that for you Christians as well. Think about it. Then meet me as I push toward the foot of the cross.

This is going to sound weird and horrible, but bear with me. I realized on Sunday that I haven’t written much, if not at all about one of the most important things I can do as a Christ follower. You can scour through the w180 archives and you probably won’t find much about prayer. Why? I don’t know. I do talk about praying for people and things (see Sunday’s post), but I haven’t done much talking in depth about it and how it pertains to worship. So guess what I’m going to do today (in my Phineas voice)? If you haven’t guessed it yet, well…we are going to talk about prayer.

I can say that I have come a long way from “Now I lay me down to sleep…”, but when I think about that prayer that my parents taught me at a young age I think about how I was taught then to petition the Lord for my needs. The simplicity of that prayer was a foundation builder for my approach to prayer even today. I didn’t know it then, but I was creating my relationship with Christ during that few seconds each night that I prayed for restful sleep. From there I learned to pray for other people, upcoming tests, and even frivolously to not get into TOO much trouble when I broke the rules. It was much later that I learned that about the effectiveness of prayer in the lives of Christians and how it’s a critical part of this lifestyle. The Bible talks a whole lot about prayer because of the extreme importance. Just click on this link and go through all the different passages about prayer and see the different situations in which prayer is mentioned.

Prayer and worship go hand in hand. When I was growing up we used to have an altar call every Sunday right in the middle of the service. I actually used to loathe this time when I was younger because it took FOREVER! But as I look back at those times, I remember how people used to walk to the front and the petitions would be laid at the altar. I can still hear “Pray for me, pray for me. O-ooooOOO my brother, pray for me…” I think in all of my years I went up there like twice. Of course at that time I saw it as taking away from the songs that I would hear. Now that I recognize how effective a time that was for us as a people, it’s hard to find anywhere that places that emphasis and time DURING the worship service. Quick side note, I may be working that time back into the fabric of our worship experience. I’m being moved to do so even as I write this.

Psalm 141:1-2 gives us a unfiltered moment between David and the Lord where in verse 1 David cries out to God to hear his prayer. Then in verse 2 he asks that his lifted hands (worship) be “as the evening sacrifice”. I think it was on purpose that David was in prayer and worship at the same time. We cannot overlook the importance of prayer in our worship times. They go hand in hand. I know that for me sometimes prayer seems like something that gets in way of the busyness that is my life. But what would happen if we just slowed down and really talked to the Lord and let Him talk to us? During worship? What a concept…

Here’s a challenge, take some time this week and slow it down long enough to listen to God. Let me know how that goes. I’ll be sure to share my experience as well.

I can’t believe that I haven’t written on this before now, especially since this is sort of what I do. Okay, it is exactly what I do. Sometimes I feel like I have no idea what is going on and how to pull it all together. Sometimes I feel like I have a solid handle on what I’m trying to communicate from the stage. After being in many different musical positions in my life, I would have to say that this is the toughest. I was having a conversation with some a couple of weeks ago and they were asking me why I do some songs and don’t do other songs. In this situation the answer was pretty easy: you do what your people can do. But there are a lot of things to consider weekly. Here are a couple that I deal with.

Bringing Cultures Together

I look at this part like solving Rubik’s Cube. You’re spinning around old and young, black and white and Asian and whomever else, traditional and contemporary, male and female and trying to make all those things come together somehow in 20 minutes worth of music. It. Is. Hard. It’s next to impossible to bring them all together, and most weeks you can’t. For one, there’s hardly ever enough time. But even more than that, unless you have an hour long show you are not going to make everyone happy. When you spend your time trying to make sure that everyone is happy, you’ll find that know one is. Including you. Your best bet (which is ALWAYS your best bet) is to listen to God’s voice and let him tell you what needs to be conveyed through the music and then you play that. Let the chips fall where they may. Sometimes that’s David Crowder. Sometimes that’s William McDowell. Sometimes it’s Isaac Watts. It’s a wild party in my head, but with every wild party there’s usually good music.

Blending Styles

There are some similarities between this one and the first one, but this applies more to the way a song is arranged. I personally love to mix up the arrangement of a song. That’s one of the easiest ways to make a song accessible to different types of people. Of course, this also one of the more dangerous moves on a weekly basis. Why? Well, I call this one The Sing Off effect. If I haven’t said it before, this is by far my favorite show on all of television. I wish I was on everyday so I could keep getting ideas and hearing what these amazing people can do with their voices. One of my favorite things about the show is the fact that these groups with different styles have to find a way to approach multiple genres of music, sometimes in the same night. I find myself having to do that on a weekly basis to give things some variety. It’s a fun and it allows me to branch out. But there’s a lot of care taken since an arrangement could either really shine or flop. It’s one of those risks you have to take.

Letting Christ Be The Star

You would think this wouldn’t be a big deal to keep in the forefront. However, sometimes as musicians we work really hard on a project or an arrangement and then we take things personally good or bad. If a song goes real well and people give compliments then it can be difficult to step out of that feeling of “yes, I put in a lot of hard work that you would never understand to make this be something that you would enjoy”. Whether you are in a multicultural church where people are looking for variety in almost every chord or straight Sunday morning gospel or the Chris Tomlin Pandora station, this NEEDS to be your major focus. Otherwise you’re a thief and you’re trying to rob the kingdom of the glory that should be headed that way.

Are there any other worship pastors that are leading in my type of situation? What are your thoughts? How much do these thoughts translate to leading in general? What about those of you that aren’t on the stage weekly? How do you gauge what you hear when you go to church?

So, this will be the first TMQ (Tuesday Morning Quarterback) post that will have nothing to do with football because I didn’t watch any games on Sunday or Monday. Before you blast me out of the man cave, this was a rather unique weekend for me and so sometimes things have to take a back seat. And when your family is not accustomed to that being a regular thing, you have to go with the family. Anyway, I have still have something to share and it fits, so I’m using it.

Last night while watching the elimination portion of my favorite show, The Sing Off, something popped into my head. One of the groups that was in the last 2 (and the one that ultimately lost) was one that I expected to be there. However, the other part of the duo, I didn’t expect to see there for a while if ever. They are a powerhouse group of female vocalists who can blow the roof off. But in last night’s episode, they broke one of the big rules in music. They didn’t pick a song that they could sing. They changed their approach to the show and it almost cost them. They went for the cute factor and completely left behind the fact that as a group they probably have the strongest voices in the show every time they step on the stage. In a vocal competition that is so strong with a myriad of amazing groups, you have to lay it all on the line on every opportunity. They didn’t do that and they almost were sent packing.

Sunday, during our opener I had an idea that I thought was going to be a good one, but it sort of fell flat because I didn’t go all in and execute it they way I wanted to. I ended up being mad because about it because I thought it could have been a powerful moment that wasn’t because of me. So as I sit in my TMQ chair writing this, I know one of the things that was missing in this week’s service was me giving everything I had. The thing that is hard for me and should be hard for anyone in my situation is because, unlike the girls of Delilah, I didn’t give my all during a church service when I was supposed to be giving my all to the Father. How many times do we go throughout a day or week and not give our all? How many times can you look back and say “Man, this would have been better had I been able to give all to it”? After Sunday, I have decided that I don’t want to do that anymore. I don’t want to have to look back and say “I wish”. I had almost forgotten about how bad Sunday was until I was reminded during the show last night. Interesting how that works…

I will leave you today with the words of a hymn by Elisha A. Hoffman.

You have longed for sweet peace,
And for faith to increase,
And have earnestly, fervently prayed;
But you cannot have rest,
Or be perfectly blest,
Until all on the altar is laid.

Refrain

Is your all on the altar of sacrifice laid?
Your heart does the Spirit control?
You can only be blest,
And have peace and sweet rest,
As you yield Him your body and soul.

Would you walk with the Lord,
In the light of His Word,
And have peace and contentment alway?
You must do His sweet will,
To be free from all ill,
On the altar your all you must lay.

Refrain

O we never can know
What the Lord will bestow
Of the blessings for which we have prayed,
Till our body and soul
He doth fully control,
And our all on the altar is laid.

Refrain

Who can tell all the love
He will send from above,
And how happy our hearts will be made,
Of the fellowship sweet
We shall share at His feet,
When our all on the altar is laid.

Yesterday we talked about what it means to be a worship pastor and if any of you considered that person in your church a pastor or not. I got a few different responses to this. I also got a lot more questions, which is good. Today I want to continue that conversation because I personally think that there are a lot more questions out there about this. Like today’s question, who are they leading anyway?

Without thinking about it too much, I guess some would say that they are probably leading the band that plays with them. On Sunday mornings, they are the ones leading the people in the singing of songs. But I ask you, are you receiving any spiritual guidance from the worship pastor at your church? Do you know if you can? Do you even want to? Again, I know that there are different types of situations as I write this. Some of you may attend a large church where the worship person is not quite accessible. Some of you may attend a smaller church where one of the teens leads the singing. Do you feel as if you are being spiritually by the worship pastor? Or do you feel like they are just a name and a face? Do you feel that you could go to the worship pastor on a Tuesday and sit down and talk to him about anything?

I ask these questions because, as a worship leader, I’m always seeking to make myself better at the job that I do. Like I said before, I wonder what the perception of the worship pastor really is and if there’s a way to change it or justify it. I think that this allure has been created, this glamour status for the worship pastor that makes them almost unapproachable. Sometimes that makes it hard for people to really come to them at any point, Sunday or otherwise. Honestly, I haven’t been on the other side of this coin in a really long time so it’s hard for me to speak from that side as I sit here this morning. What I can say as a worship pastor who is still relatively unknown in his own church, sometimes we know a little bit more than we are given credit for.

We want to be able to share our hearts for worship as well as what has been placed in our minds from what we have heard or read from others. We want to pray for you and with you. We have a heart to see people engaged in true worship that reaches the core of who we are and transforms hearts. You may say, how in the world can that be pulled off in 15-20 minutes on a Sunday morning? Well, it’s not easy but that’s what we are trying to accomplish each and every week. That’s also part of the reason why we craft an entire service behind the scenes. We want to make sure that the message is reinforced from start to finish.

Am I speaking for each and every person that does what I do? Definitely not. Can I know for sure that they all think this way? Not at all. But I know some that share that desire and they are dang good at it. You’d be surprised at what your worship pastor would have to say if you sat down and talked to them. So the question again is, who are these worship leaders leading. The other question could be, are you allowing them to lead you? What are your thoughts? Let me hear them.

I’ve been thinking about this for a little while, but I couldn’t figure out the approach I wanted to take. This is an interesting topic in my own mind. And I also wonder what others think about this. I know that in the end this may be a matter of semantics, but maybe it will be more than that.

So here’s the question to ponder. How many worship pastors feel like they are truly shepherding people? How many church goers feel that they are being shepherded by the worship guy? I would hope that there is spiritual truth being presented in the songs that are being sung in your churches. That is definitely a huge part of people led. But do you know how much or how little that worship pastor is putting into that music? Do you think they are just picking songs? Or do you believe that they are praying over and through worship sets to make sure that what they sing on Sundays brings truth about our Savior? How accessible is the worship leader/pastor at your church? Now I know that some of us attend some pretty big churches and it’s hard to get to some of them. So I guess then this question really is for you as well. Are you being shepherded by them? Or are they just leading the music? Do you attend a church where the worship pastor teaches a class or leads a study? Do you know what books he or she is reading? Do you even care?

So that turned out to be a lot of questions. These are all questions I have as a worship leader. When I was in school I went through all of these classes that talked about where the role of worship leader is today and where it is going from here. It was very insightful for me to see that I should be well versed and read and know my Bible. The question I always come back to is “Does anyone else care about this but us?” That wasn’t to say that we were going through stuff in vain. I just wonder how much people who aren’t worship leaders care about what we know? I guess these are the questions I pose today. Answer at will.

“Harry, we are looking for you to be yourself. Let your personality shine through.” “Harry, I feel that you are at your best when you can be yourself.” “Harry, don’t be afraid to have fun.” These are all things that I have been told over time as I’ve led worship. I think that over time I’ve learned to discern these comments and deliver a style of worship that brings God glory and, at the same time, displays who I am as a person. I have a personal, continual tension when it comes to being an artist and a corporate worship leader. My job calls for me to lead people to the foot of the cross through song. My “profession” if you want to call it that, is to display the talent that God has given me through the words I sing and the instruments I play. It’s actually a blessing that these two come together. Sometimes the hardest part is making sure I don’t confuse the two. And that mostly means that I make sure that I don’t use Sunday morning to display how good I am at something. That is NOT easy all the time.

I believe that sometimes us worship leaders we can get confused as to what the focus is when we are on stage. There should be an element of excellence when we step on the stage each Sunday morning. But sometimes we step over the line and it becomes a performance and it becomes more about us and how we sound and what we can do. If I’ve learned NOTHING from being a musician and worship leader is that people can tell when we have switched from worship leader to self promoter. It is at that point when worship stops. That’s when I’m no longer doing my job. That’s when we are no longer doing our jobs.

At the end of the day, I’m talking about ways to help us become more effective worshipers. True worship is contagious. Let’s continue to search for ways to create a worship that others, Christians and non-Christians alike, see and take notice. THAT worship doesn’t just happen inside the walls of the church. Maybe it’s time to write about contagious worship…

THIS IS POST NUMBER 300!!!!! Wow! I can’t believe I’ve actually stuck with something this long. I mean, I’ve continued to get older, I keep buying new clothes, I keep eating, I keep going to work. But this is different. This is my voluntary act and I’m continuing on with it for a long time. The other thing that is cool is that I don’t have hundreds and hundreds of followers and it isn’t something that is read by the masses. But I said that this was something that I would do if people read it or not. And that’s what I’ve done 300 times. Whew!

So I was thinking the other day about this concept. I’d like for people to weigh in on this if possible. I was putting together worship sets for church (because that’s what I do), when I was going through a couple different arrangements for a popular song. And without a second thought I said “let’s think outside the box with this one”. Then I immediately thought, “Why do we say that all the time”? I mean, obviously I know why we say that, but I wondered just what the box was. I mean, does the box change? Does the box look different in 2011 than it did in 1998? In 2010? What does thinking outside the box mean in today’s world? Is the box SO bad? Is thinking outside the box an actual box itself? Am I over thinking this? What was I doing again?

As an artist, we are always trying to find fresh new ways to present what we do. That’s what keeps us moving forward. Sometimes I wonder if, in our search for a life of less boundary do we end up outside of where God wants us to be. I wonder if, in our search and desire to be relevant (which is a ever moving beast of a target), do we end up diluting what should be strong an highly concentrated. I personally like changing things up periodically because that’s part of who I am as a person and musician. Can a story be told in a different way and still get the point across? I ask that question every day. But I also have to make sure that I’m not changing the main point of the story. So does thinking outside the box change the story? Or does it just change the manner in which the story is told?

What do you think about this box? Is there even a box anymore? Lend me your thoughts…

It’s Tuesday morning and we are looking back at the weekend that was. First things first, my poor Rams can’t catch a break. Of course, they aren’t helping themselves out at all with the sloppy play. Their inability to score in the red zone will cause them problems all season long. I tweeted last night that they are going to need churches to start praying for them as part of Sunday service. But since this isn’t a football blog, I’ll let that be the end of that.

The other thing that happened this weekend is that God did some really cool stuff at The Word at Shaw this weekend. We were still sort of reeling from the Sunday of service on the 11th. Our community really loved having a church come in and serve in a practical way. This week we unleashed a flurry of new things on our church all at the same time. I was worried that it was going to implode. We launched a new service format. We also starting using a bulletin type thing as people have constantly asked for something to write notes on as well as something with important dates that they could keep. From a behind the scenes standpoint, we launched a new position called service producer that helped things go a lot more smoothly than normal. The best part? I wasn’t doing it all! We started our early morning Bible Study and, even though there was the normal first day confusion, things went pretty well. So there were a lot of moving parts Sunday morning and I was afraid that chaos was going to break out. But God did something marvelous. He brought a calm to the situation that I can not explain. Everyone found the same groove and sat right there in it. Then something awesome happened…

After the second song set the guy scheduled to pray got up and just opened his heart to the congregation. He said that he had a really tough week and it was comforting to know that God was working for our good (we had just finished singing Your Love Never Fails). So he turned to me and asked me to just lead us in that part again and let that be our prayer. So the church went back into that bridge and you could see people really start to embrace that line and this special moment of worship happened. I think we could have let that happen for the rest of the day and no one would have cared. What was special for me was that, in the midst of all the changes and structure that was finally created, God came and did what he wanted to with it. I LOVE when that happens.

Sometimes you can make all the plans in the world. Everything could be going just so smooth in your own mind and then God comes in and does what He wants to do. And then you just have to shake your head. Because then you remember that He’s the one that’s really in control. And even though we make our own plans, we are reminded that our ways and His ways aren’t the same. And that’s okay.