There has been a lot of mention in various blogs about the recent survey report from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. It was incredibly revealing, maybe not shocking though as many have seen the clear trends nationally and globally. But never the less, it was painful to be confronted with some of the facts. Here’s a few that caught my eye:

• 66% of Protestants believe there are other ways to heaven than through Christ
• 11% of Protestants who claim the existence of God is an absolute certainty, say it isn’t very important to their lives
• 27% of Protestants do not believe in hell

The survey results should be sobering for church leadership and certainly is for me. A professor from Rice University summed up the report in an article well by saying,

“The survey shows America is, indeed, 3,000 miles wide and only 3 inches deep.”

That is just a beautiful way of describing a horrific reality. It makes me examine what I’m doing as a worship leader to either contribute or combat this. Am I leading hundreds of people every week in singing a wide variety of songs that only go 3 inches deep? Do we sing songs that confront the notion that there is no hell, that there is a way to heaven besides Christ, or that Christ life, death and resurrection shouldn’t be that important to our lives? I sure hope so.

I think the important thing as a worship leader is to get prayerful and purposeful not just in our sets but in our leadership of our teams and songwriting. We focus a lot on unity, singability, melody which are all important, but what good is unity without truth? More specifically, essential truth. What the findings in this report tell me is not just that 66% believe in other ways to Christ, but that 66% feel comfortable showing up to church with that lie and aren’t confronted by truth.

I have no desire to lead such weak and sanitized worship that the flesh and lies of the enemy aren’t offended. In the coming weeks I’m going to start a series of posts on how our phrasing and word choices in worship lyrics can contribute to essential biblical truth. No ambiguous language, no vague interpretation, no confusing imagery.

If you have any examples of worship songs you feel do this I’d love to hear them in the comments.

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I got sent a brilliant story of a visiting, wasted, couple getting it on to our friend John Mark McMillan’s “How He Loves” during service. I don’t think this is what John Mark had in mind with his crossover ability. I’m guessing things heated up substantially on the “sloppy wet kiss” line.

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Carlos Whittaker runs the crazy popular blog RagamuffinSoul.com. He is the worship leader at a megachurch in Atlanta called Buckhead Church. Currently he’s acting as a blog reporter at a stealth Rick Warren conference where a 1,000 pastors were invited to attend and a select few invited to speak on a range of topics. Mark Driscoll is there speaking on discipleship and had some really interesting, amazing and funny things to say as usual. Mark tackles the topics of worship, multi-site churches, the fake Mark Driscoll on twitter and why he likes to pick fights. Feed folks you gotta click through to see the video.

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Here’s American cheap church gimmick #135,346,234 in drawing people to service. First Baptist Church in Snellville, GA put out a sign in front of the church offering “Free Gasoline”. And just to show that the church is not above misleading marketing ploys, there is a catch. Every time you attend a church service or “event” you are entered into a raffle for a $500 gas card. This is a very interesting headline for this story:

“Church in Georgia tempts prospective worshippers with $500 gasoline raffle”

The term “prospective worshippers” is an interesting choice of phrasing, and when I say interesting I mean terrible. Nobody is a prospective worshiper, we were formed as worshipers, born in continuing worship, and now live a life of either fallen or redeemed worship. I don’t attribute this headline to the church pastor at all but it’s a telling statement and perspective of faith by the writer which is shared by a lot of the church. This belief and attitude negatively impacts our ministry and evangelism by believing that we just need to find a way to get people in corporate gatherings and to start worshiping by mere attendance or participation and our mission is accomplished. This is made further evident by this telling statement in the article.

“The church boasts a congregation of 9,000 but church officials say only about 2,500 regularly attend Sunday services.”

So we boast about a group of uncommitted, event attending, “prospective” worshipers? This certainly doesn’t sound like the description Christ gave as to who was a follower and who wasn’t. Shouldn’t we be able to say, “we have a group of committed disciples, living a life of redeemed worship in fellowship with fellow believers, being sharpened with accountability, reaching out to the lost through loving relationship and gathering together regularly to celebrate our victory in Christ and to testify of His goodness”. That’s the description I want to give of my church, that sounds like an Acts church.

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There is a series of 3 videos on You Tube that is a great documentary on the christian persecution happening inside of Egypt. This isn’t meant to be the most extreme example of persecution, although it is very bad, but it really puts into perspective what people sacrifice for a life after Christ. This is nothing I have any sense of, even after watching this I feel so humbled that I most likely will never face 1/10th of what these people face every day.

I don’t want to summarize what the videos will tell you, but one of the most amazing quotes comes at the end of the 3rd video. The Zebeleen is a Christian community that lives in garbage, there’s no real other way of explaining it. But their entire community is a garbage dump, it’s in their homes, they live with rats and rubbish, it’s just terrible. So this Christian man and his family was living outside the Zebeleen and was getting tirelessly persecuted amongst the muslim population and decided to move his family into the Zebeleen garbage community. Even though he was a successful businessman in Egypt, he moved into squalor by choice. He at first thought there was no way they could survive there. But he goes on to say this:

“I didn’t even think I could survive…but it’s because of the Christians and the faith that I am here. Even if my children have diseases from the garbage I want them to live here with other Christians. The most important thing is that my children are raised in a Christian environment. It is much better to be in a place with garbage that has Jesus than to be in a place [without Jesus] even though it may be clean.”

I started crying at that point in the video. For a father with 2 beautiful little girls to say, their place in the kingdom and body of the church is more important than their health is just incredible. That it is by choice, is even more incredible. I’ll link the 3 videos below, but I wanted to tie this into worship.

I started thinking about what place persecution has in our worship songs. Of course in the English speaking countries that generate our worship(US/UK/Australia) there really is no persecution, just ridicule. So our worship stance becomes a “I’m not ashamed” anthem. An admission that we’re prepared to accept ridicule and I think that’s great. But I’d love to hear what these Coptic Christians sing, what they are prepared to accept as a sacrifice for the Kingdom. I think our disconnection to the reality of persecution foreign Christians face does us a true disservice and undermines the depth of our understanding of sacrifice and strength through Christ. I’ve never before considered persecution in any of my worship writing, but I will now.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

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Thanks for everyone’s votes on the tattoo poll. We got a lot of feedback on that one. 70% of you had a balanced approach and thought the worship leaders responsibility with his/her tattoo depended on the tattoo and the congregation. Almost 20% took the Crazy Town approach and said, flaunt those suckers. 15% of you said the leader should hide their tattoos. And the other 15% said it was a mistake to get the tattoo in the first place. That’s a pretty diverse set of responses so I’m excited.  I promised my take when we finished up so here we go.

The Levitical law (19:28) that states “do not cut your bodies or put tattoo marks on yourselves”. This is the foundation of the argument against tattoos and the belief that they desecrate the spiritual image of God, the functional image of God due to a mutilation of our body, relational image of God due to the dis-unity it may cause in the church body, and lastly the vision/purpose/being of God by glorifying the vulgar or ungodly things. Many in the church believe this, a small portion believe just the opposite that tattoos actually glorify God and his image by demonstrating our God given artistic body in a exalting way to God.

I, as you might expect, fall between the two positions. The Levitical law exists due to the nature of tattoos in that time, which were a symbol of ownership and devotion. Slaves were tattoo’d to show who they belonged to, or were tattoo’d with a name of some pagan god. Many Old Testament scholars(including rabbis) say this prohibition was to combat idolatry and worship of false gods, in fact some believe there was even an exception to this law where a tattoo was ok for a slave so he did not run away. There’s layered problems in that, but that’s another discussion.
I believe tattoos are not inherently immoral, but rather amoral with the potential to be moral or immoral. I am not bound by the Levitical law but deeper than that the spirit of God that wrote the law. As long as a tattoo is not idolatrous in nature, and that it does not cause dis-unity in the church, I believe it to be a liberty and not sin. There is a very good and in depth ethical evaluation on tattoos done by the Christian Research Institute from which many of my positions basis derive. It’s a really interesting read and if you are thinking of getting a tattoo or already have I highly recommend reading it and devoting a lot of prayer time and practical evaluation of the consequence of the tattoo relationally.

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I’ve always admired Bono for his take on many things. I as many in the Christian community are always interested in where Bono finds himself in the journey. I find his honesty refreshing and there is no doubt that God has used him in many powerful ways. Here is a great quote from him on his revelation of Christmas in a St. Patricks Cathedral:

“The idea that God, if there is a force of Logic and Love in the universe, that it would seek to explain itself is amazing enough. That it would seek to explain itself and describe itself by becoming a child born in straw poverty, in sh*t and straw…a child… I just thought: “Wow!” Just the poetry … Unknowable love, unknowable power, describes itself as the most vulnerable. There it was. I was sitting there, and it’s not that it hadn’t struck me before, but tears came streaming down my face, and I saw the genius of this, utter genius of picking a particular point in time and deciding to turn on this.”

Originally posted on blog.worship.com.

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Sally Morgenthaler literally wrote the book on Worship Evangelism, she also co-wrote Emerging Worship along with David Crowder and others. So she is somewhat of a worship authority in the church. I have heard of her and read a few articles on her, but I’ve not read either of those books, for sake of full disclosure. I did recently read an article Sally wrote explaining how she shut down her worship resource site and is now trying to fix the unintended consequences of what her book help create. As an aside I don’t personally hold her responsible for anything, especially since nothing I’ve done in worship has been because of any direction from her.

I have become more interested in her books now because of the pragmatic approach she has now taken. She never meant for worship evangelism to become a Christian subculture outreach where it only witnesses to the churched. It amounted to merely better stage designs, safer contemporary music, and an all tenor choir. She says this in her article about the state of the contemporary worship service:

“No sad songs. No angry songs. Songs about desperation, but none about despair. Worship for the perfect. The already arrived. The good-looking, inoffensive, and nice. No wonder the unchurched aren’t interested.“

I couldn’t agree more with her assessment. It raises an important issue, one we take very seriously at Life Connection Church. Who are we here for and how are we reaching them? Our life is worship, so I believe all evangelism is worship evangelism. So we’re either doing a good job worshiping God or we’ve twisted our worship and our outreach suffers. When we seek to contextualize our worship it’s for the lost, not for the church drifters or church shoppers. I’ll be honest, I look at mega-church worship services and I get a little ill. It’s the cheesiest, most manicured, safe, clean, polished music you can ever witness. That’s not life, it’s not what the lost are experiencing, it’s not even what the saved are experiencing.

I heard a pastor say that after 9/11 the church had no songs to sing. I remember the sunday service after 9/11 and feeling the exact same way. What on earth are we going to play? We’ve sanitized our worship and left a huge slice of human emotion and human experience out of our worship. That certainly isn’t how Psalms was written. We should capture all of life and seek to glorify God through it all. That is currently my focus in my songwriting. Many in our church are struggling with disease, pain, death in the family…how can God see glory in that, how can our music creatively capture that and raise it to God’s ears, his heart. It won’t be pretty and clean, it won’t sell on TBN, but will God be lifted and will the lost feel like God is relevant in their pain? That’s my prayer. One of the greatest sicknesses of the church is avoiding the questions that the lost are asking, I refuse to let that be the case in our worship.

I encourage you to read Sally’s article. I admire how she’s basically put the brakes on what she feels partially responsible for creating in the church, a holy huddle in worship. That isn’t our heart at Life Connection Church, again I’ll use the words of Keith Green,

“I repent of ever having recorded one single song, and ever having performed one concert, if my music, and more importantly, my life has not provoked you into Godly jealousy or to sell out more completely to Jesus!”

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