Tag Archive - God’s presence

Holy Ghost Hokey Pokey: What’s It All About?

April 14, 2010 in being christian with 0 Comments

Are you ready for a miracle?

Anybody remember the movie, Leap Of Faith?

It’s one of my all-time favorite comedies… The soundtrack is fully-awesome, the cast is top-shelf and I remember Steve Martin saying in an interview, “If you’re a believer, you’ll really like it.  If you’re really a schiester, you’ll hate it.”

And I think he’s right.  Aside from some PG-13 language, the movie tells the story of a con-artist-turned-preacher who gets stranded with his entourage in a small town and decides to pitch his tent and hold a “revival” to raise money.  He’s the classic flashy, evangelista… complete with a glittery jacket that transforms him into a human disco-ball… Using high tech gadgets and the skills of a few seedy friends, he pulls off a scam that has the money rolling in…

Until a real miracle interrupts the groove and he has a change of heart.

He tells the boy that’s been healed, “I’ve pulled off just about every kind of scam there is and there’s only one thing you can’t get around: the genuine article.  You are the genuine article.”

Here’s what I want to know about the Holy Ghost Hokey Pokey:

Are people really getting healed?

Jesus didn’t establish a methodology for healing… He did it in a variety of ways.  Some of them probably seemed crazy to people watching… Like when he spit in the dirt to make mud, then spread it over a blind guy’s eyes… OH, and Jesus healed on the Sabbath, which was not only a little crazy, but much maligned by the religious leaders… Anyway…

I’d like to be open-minded about how crazy something LOOKS until I know whether God is really in it or not…

And aren’t the hearts and needs of people more important to God than methodology and PR?  And isn’t Jesus’ best PR the way that we believers treat one another in a loving way?  I think that’s what He said… SO…

I propose this litmus test:

If the healing is REAL, then God is glorifying HIMSELF in the midst of the madness (which I confess confounds my own wisdom in much the same way that Jesus confounded the prevailing wisdom of His time)… but if the healing is staged, then we can blow these guys off as kooks and idiots…

It has, at least, the benefit of making us appear reasonable in the midst of the madness…

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On Missions and Martyrdom…

April 13, 2010 in being christian, devotional with 0 Comments

What are you called to give?

I just completed a fairly substantial redesign of the website for an organization called LifeChange International… They partner with missionaries on 4 continents to serve the needs of people and share the love of Jesus… I’m very pleased to be involved with the organization and happy to help them use social media to raise awareness of the work that they do.

My first project with LifeChange was working with Jack Fairweather at Arise Ministries in Manila, the Philippines.  Arise has opened an orphanage outside of the city proper, where they take in kids off the street and give them a safe and loving home… I first wrote about Jack when we launched our GiveBack feature last summer… You can read those articles and see a video about Arise by following this link.

The funny thing is that I know Jack and his family… his daughter and mine are the same age and went to each others birthday parties before they sold all of their worldly goods and moved to the Philippines to live in a dorm with a dozen or so homeless, street kids.  I had talked to him about that move for six months and it still kinda stunned me when they actually did it.  Now we Skype occasionally and I think of him as “my friend in Manila.”

Jack and his family have given themselves to God in a very literal, measurable way that many of us never will.  Even for me and my wife, as we move back into church staff ministry, the sacrifice isn’t as “real”… We still have a nice home, two cars, other stuff we like…

I wonder how I would respond to the call of God that Jack has on his life…

OR EVEN MORE POIGNANT, a woman in our church named Semsa (say: Shem-sa) Aydin, whose husband was martyred for his faith in Turkey in 2007,  shared her testimony on Sunday in halting ESL that somehow communicated the message of Jesus more eloquently than any preacher I’ve ever heard…

Semsa’s husband knew the men that murdered him for weeks before his death… They had been coming into the church and asking questions about Jesus.  And as a pastor, he had been talking with them, answering their questions and trying to share Jesus’ story to them and his own story of conversion from Islam.

He told his wife that he knew they were false… He used the illustration of Judas’ betrayal… He somehow saw what was coming but felt that the call of God on his life was to keep serving these men and sharing Christ with them…

On April 18, they made another appointment to talk about Jesus…

And they slit his throat.

I also thought about one young lady who was killed in the Columbine shooting, more than a decade ago… The shooters pointed guns at here and told her she would live if she would renounce her faith… she declined… they shot her…

What kind of faith?  What kind of relationship with Jesus makes a person do that?

There might be an answer in the life… or more pointedly in the death of Stephen (Acts 6)…

But Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, looked up to heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.
“Look,” he said, “I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.”
At this they covered their ears and, yelling at the top of their voices, they all rushed at him, dragged him out of the city and began to stone him. (vs 55-58)
It could be that those called to give their lives (REALLY, REALLY GIVE THEIR LIVES) see some of heaven before they actually leave earth…
The bigger question: What am I called to give?  What are you called to give?

Creativity Killers, Part 1: The Block…

March 27, 2010 in being christian with 0 Comments

The view from here...

For a Christ-follower, using your gifts in worship is an act of heart… Something most creatives can easily wrap their right-brains around…

Heart… Feeling… Inspiration… Soul…

Virtually required elements for creativity.

Lately, Inspiration has been eluding me. I generally feel that I have a fairly deep well to go to when I need to draw out an idea… a image… a solution…

But not recently.

It’s like there’s a gate inside my mind that all of the good ideas are hiding behind… All I seem to be capable of is approaching the gate and knocking… But the gatekeeper is nowhere to be found and I seem to have misplaced my keys.

I haven’t even been able to write for a couple of weeks… In truth, I think my best writing is actually months behind. So, I dug deep and consulted a reliable source…

I prayed about it.

I wonder, often, about non-believers… How they access their creativity… Because I really identify with Jesus’ assertion:

I am the vine, you are my branches… Apart from Me, you can do nothing…

I’m not courting false-humility here… This is literally true.  I’ve tried to use my creativity outside of the realm of worship and “Christian service” and it’s always a dismal failure.

I understand that this isn’t true for every christian… I know a number of artists that are able to move in their creativity in “secular” situations.  I’ve always found this interesting and have recently just accounted it to differences in individual calling…

But true worship flows from the heart.  On another occasion, Jesus said:

The time is coming, and is already here, that the true worshippers will worship in spirit and in truth…

Worship through artistic expression, therefore, must naturally flow from a true reflection of my innermost being… from a heart empowered by God’s Spirit. Whether I write or lead the band or doodle graphics or any of the other outlets for creativity that I offer up, it’s just not “worship” without integrity and connection with God.

When I suffer from “blocked” creativity, I start looking for a breakdown in either Spirit or truth or both…

I found an interesting combination of breakdowns when I prayed about this…

And I want to share these… If not for the sake of anybody but myself…

And, what are blogs for if not narcissistic navel-gazing…

Tomorrow… Part 2, All Stressed Up and No One to Punch…

Worship That Connects, Part 5: Like a Sloppy, Wet Kiss…

December 11, 2009 in being christian, leadership, live praise and worship, music with 0 Comments

Ok, if you don’t get the song reference from the title, you can watch the video…

I have mixed feelings about this song…

On the one hand, the verses are virtually impossible to sing the first several times that you hear it. It’s lyrically poetic, maybe too poetic for the average midwestern Joe that we meet in our church, but rhythmically awkward. The first three or four times that different worship leaders pitched this on to our church, it struck out. No one sang along…

On the other hand, the chorus is so strong and connects with people’s hearts so poignantly that it gets very emotional responses, particularly as it builds in intensity towards the end.

In fact, the emotive aspect of the song is SO powerful that it completely hijacks the visually bland performance on the video… If you can stand to watch it long enough to get to the chorus, without getting bored watching the Kim sway and stagger around with her eyes closed, you’ll see what I mean…

The truth is that a LOT of the modern worship songs that connect are ME-focused… Like this one: it’s kinda about God and the intimate aspect of his nature, but it’s mostly about how much we are loved by God.

Introduce that idea in an emotive way to a group of people who haven’t been still since they sat in the same spot at church last Sunday… It’s bound to connect at a very visceral level with a few of them.

But is it really worship? Or is it just a sloppy, wet sentiment?

A pastor-friend of mine derides this kind of music as “Jesus-is-my-boyfriend” songs…

And then there’s the en vogue idea, out there in worship-leader-land, that emotive songs don’t connect with the manly blokes…

I don’t mean to endorse either of these ideas… They just represent the other extreme on the continuum…

There certainly is a place in the life of the church for sloppy, wet worship… because it does CONNECT with people who live in a world where intimate relationships are ended via text-message. The message that God loves them intimately is life-giving and true.

But, I fear, if that’s all we have, we end up with men and women in church that connect with a sugary, milk-toast god (small “g”) that falls pathetically short of being the real and powerful One that they desperately need…

So… mix it up…

Next time: God-Centered worship songs connect too…

Worship That Connects, Part 4: Communitcating From The Platform

December 3, 2009 in being christian, leadership, live praise and worship, music with 0 Comments

Is this thing on?

Is this thing on?

I wanted to come back and talk more about the benefit of using performance tools to connect with audiences in worship… I think this is important, and it’s not just because I’m comfortable on stage with a microphone in my hand…

It’s important because it is one of the primary tools in bridge building…

Leaders (read: the entire worship team) have the responsibility to bridge the gap between God’s presence and the people in the audience.  It’s not enough to just play songs or even play them well…

The Audience is Ignorant…

If you read my blog much at all, you’ll be aware that I’m a big fan of Tom Jackson, a live-music producer.  He does the circuit of artist development conferences and I try to catch him whenever I can.

Tom teaches that audiences are ignorant… They don’t understand music or audio or that yellow box on the floor that your guitar player keeps stomping on.

Here’s an example: As I have been increasing my leadership role in worship at my church, I’ve received a lot of (mostly unsolicited) input from people in the church. The musicians among them like to give me tips on audio equipment that will revolutionize our sound by adding nuances and tone.

The non-musicians have a different perspective. They tell me that no matter who is leading, everything sounds the same to them…

Being an insider, I know that the previous leader spent a huge amount of time, energy and money on equipment to nuance the tone.  He is very good at that and very committed to it.  Every guitar effect was carefully crafted, meticulously dialed-in, for the expressed purpose of adding variety to the sound. The past and current leaders (myself included) spend a lot of time in rehearsal working on dynamics within songs and throughout sets…  There is absolutely no way that any 2 songs sound the same on a given Sunday…

So, why is that the perception of the non-musicians?

What the Audience Knows…

Tom says that if all the songs look the same, the audience will perceive that they all sound the same…

A guitar player understands his nuanced tonal differences, the musician understands subtle dynamics and the audiophile understands a good EQ… a soccer-mom just sees a band that never moves while playing songs that all look the same… She’s becomes easily distracted and starts wondering where she can buy Gatorade on sale this week…

It doesn’t help in our church at all that the platform is small and the center area is devoted to the pastor’s MacBook.

The other thing that the aforementioned soccer-mom understands is human behavior…

If the worship leader and all of the musicians are focused on their printed music, or their equipment, or even their own experience of worship, it sends a non-verbal message to her that they’re not interested in connecting with her. It may just mean be that they’re  nervous or afraid of making a mistake or that the suffer from the misguided ideas that we talked about in Part 1 or Part 2… And so she doesn’t connect with them…

An effective leader can alter the dynamic in a number of ways, but the simplest way is to unchain himself from the instrument… Even if it’s just for one song in a set.  He can  make eye contact, encourage people to clap, raise hands, smile… just by doing those things himself… The other members of the team can do the same thing… It brings freedom to the audience when the leaders are free.

Toll Bridge or Troll Bridge…

Worship leaders (and again: every member of the team is a worship leader) bridge the gap between God’s presence and the people in the pews… but building bridges is an expensive undertaking. And leaders pay the price of transit for the church they lead.

Purposeful connection (which is the goal of good leadership and performance) by the leaders is required to get people over the bridge. When we refuse or neglect to be purposeful, we end up being road blocks… Metaphorically, we stand in the middle of the bridge and declare, “None shall pass.”

Reach out to the church you lead, with your eyes, with your hands, with a smile, or by taking a step toward them… you can call it “ministry” instead of “performance” if it makes you feel better, but it’s really both and that’s the balance  that makes all the difference…

Next week: Connecting with sloppy, wet kisses…
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