thanks for sharing for those of us who couldn’t be there!

-jason

What I’m most impressed by in your recounting of your experience is your focus on what is, without the moralizing. You describe your feelings and perceptions, the positive and the negative, but there is no hard edge of judgment.

What’s been most apparent to me about myself in contrast to others’ posts, in this first week of the essentials course, is how much I am focused on people. It’s not that I’m not focused on God in my worship or in my worship leading, but when I begin to articulate my experience, I can get caught up in what everybody else is doing/not doing. Maybe it’s because their engagement or lack thereof seems to interrupt or challenge my personal God experience and my vision of how awesome it could be if we all could truly be with God together.

It’s the stock co-dependent’s dilemma – in order for me to worship best, I feel I have to help everybody else do it. But in so doing, I can lose my own experience, and end up feeling slightly victimized and bitter. Like the recovering co-dependent, I must reprioritize myself, and live my own values before God. If I am in the role to lead others, I must do some from that solid footing.

This points to some spiritual work ahead for me to recalibrate myself as a worship leader more singly on the goodness and aliveness of God in our midst, and to allow all other observations about the worship activity to come under and submit to the greater thing.

Here you offer me an accessible model of how you do that, and the course also presents an opportunity to do such recalibration. So I thank you.

Too often the familiar can become dull to me and I develop an ungodly sort of immunity to seeing the vibrancy of God present in ritual and tradition. So, I love coming upon an unexpected blast of fresh spiritual air in unlikely surroundings. I would agree that how we come has a lot to do with what happens, but perhaps not everything. I have often come in poverty of spirit (and grumpy and tired as well) only to be overwhelmed by the generosity of God’s spirit in letting me be a witness to compassion, redemption, loving sacrifice, truth, and mostly humbling, his personal attention to my lowly state.

Those songs that most often move me to think on God and forget myself for a moment are the ones where people honestly believe what they are singing or playing or saying. It means they give themselves to the music in a way that often borders on discomfort for the observers because it is so intimate. I want to be able to do this more often.

I enjoyed reading your reflections. I would have loved to have joined you for the Renaissance Singers. As much as I love rock ‘n’ roll and hitting as many drums as I can inside of one measure (Yes, even in Christmas songs), what moves me tends to be warmer, more reflective, more personal, and more spontaneous worship experiences.

I admit that I fall into the category of young people who are quite taken in by the ancient-future approach to worship. For some reason, though, I must work at exposing myself to worship expressions that are rooted (or actually come from) our shared Christian traditions. If I don’t water that desire that I know is there – the “hidden spring,” if you will – I tend to fill my music listening days with the latest proffers from the contemporary Christian and worship scene.

I was reminded of this over Christmas I was visiting some of the old missions in San Antonio. Some of them are still active. I found myself running my hands along the cracking walls, kneeling at pews, gazing with meditative breath at the bronzes, the windows and the alters. It’s as if my spirit was awakening within me because of the legacy of prayer and devotion that lingered in the room. My wife and I booth lit prayer candles and found ourselves wishing that we would have candles in the senior citizen’s center where our Vineyard meets.

Again, thanks for the analysis. If was a joy to read. I look forward to much more such stimulation throughout essentials blue!

Benjamin

The music and its connection with individuals, trust of the leaders, the people around you, the sense of connectedness around the music, the sound, the events leading up to arrival, the state of our own hearts and societies, the level of faith support we may feel – so many factors come in to play in these settings.

But that spontaneity you mentioned certainly is strongly offset by the fact that the ratio of people leading to those trying to participate from afar is huge. The intimate gathering of people who are more approachable makes more sense in many ways because I believe that trust has a lot to do with leading worship. If you can’t trust the leader, you are less likely to engage with them in worship (even though you should probably try).

Thanks for writing!