exchanged living.

threshingfloorpodcast: The Magnificent Three take on several...

Sat, 25 May 2013 16:03:25 -0400

The Magnificent Three take on several somewhat related topics, and unlike another ill fated episode 1 ours doesn’t involve Jar Jar!

The focus of the conversation is the tornado is Moore, OK earlier this week and John Piper’s subsequent comment. You can read the exact information and Piper’s response here. We talk about theological determinism, a particular persuasion some Christians hold. The larger conversation centers on a discussion of God choosing (or not choosing) to cause pain.

You can also expect several alternate topics like Online Dating and the benefits of a personal theme song.

All in just 45 minutes!

Download

theclearlydope: Thursday morning is brought to you by … no...

Thu, 16 May 2013 11:13:42 -0400

theclearlydope:

Thursday morning is brought to you by … no stopping us now … It’s almost the weekend.

WOW.

An Unbalanced Focus in Worship: Overemphasizing the Sermon

Tue, 07 May 2013 13:01:20 -0400

An Unbalanced Focus in Worship: Overemphasizing the Sermon:

An interesting article by my friend Chase. He ends the article with a paragraph of questions that are all worth asking, though I think the critical question he misses is this one: How has the church throughout history already addressed these questions?

What do you think of the article?

"Now remember, as Scripture defines a disciple, it is someone who learns, over time, to do everything..."

Wed, 01 May 2013 15:48:47 -0400

“Now remember, as Scripture defines a disciple, it is someone who learns, over time, to do everything that Jesus and his disciples could do, both on the inside and the outside. The interior life and the exterior life.”

- Mike Breen, The Great Disappearance.

I have been thinking about how I would define the word “disciple”, and how to describe the process of being “discipled”. How would you define it?

Picking Worship Songs 101: Winking is Not Enough

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 14:25:19 -0400

(Worship leaders have an incredible responsibility in choosing songs for the church to sing; this series is aimed to help worship leaders choose better songs for their churches. For context, you may want read my first two posts in this series here and here. Thanks for reading! )

Last time we were together, I offered one of the questions I use to choose better songs for my congregation to sing each week. In this post, I want to offer another question I use in that process:

Does this song give a clear picture of what God has done for us in Jesus?

A few years ago, a friend of mine asked me about a worship band of whom I had never heard. Our conversation went something like this-

Friend: Hey, Drew, have you heard the latest album by Cool Guy Worship Collective?

(aside: Cool Guy Worship Collective is my go-to general referent name for a worship band on my site. Don’t read into who I’m secretly talking about when I call them CGWC. Unless you want to read into it. Then go ahead. End aside.)

D: No. I’ve never even heard of them.

F: Dude, you have to check out their album! They are the future of praise and worship!

So I go home. I buy the CGWC album. I give it a spin. Great musical ideas, incredible musicians and vocalists, nice melodies…but there was something missing. And sadly, at first, I couldn’t put my finger on it. But when I did, I was shocked, both at the album and at myself for missing it:

At no point in the entire album was the cross or resurrection mentioned.

Yeah. Read that again. I went back and went through the lyrics of the entire album, and there were only two lines in one of the 10+ songs that even winked at the suffering or rising of Jesus. How is it that an album centered on the worship of Jesus fails to mention the absolute pinnacle of Jesus’ life and ministry to the world?

Yet it’s not all too uncommon. The more I survey some of the music being sung in the church, the more I notice that some songs never move from the general notions of grace, justice or love to the specific manifestation of grace, justice and love on the cross of Christ.

Think about this: the most popular hymn in the western world, “Amazing Grace”, does not even mention Jesus, the cross, or the resurrection. I love this hymn, but it’s kind odd, eh?

The specifics of Jesus’ actions matter to our worship. They are deeply central to the confession and worship of the church. The mystery of our faith is this: Christ has died! Christ is risen! Christ will come again! Those are specific revelations of God in human history, and their specificity gives them their power. God has acted to redeem his people! This is what we need most desperately, and this is the good news we gather not only to announce, but to celebrate and participate in together. People cannot participate in good news they have never clearly heard. We cannot just wink at the gospel; we must name it clearly.

Worship springs out of what God has revealed to us all through Jesus. As Matt Redman wrote,

Worship starts with seeing You-

Our hearts respond to Your revelation.

Songs that name how God has been revealed to us in history will be better for the church precisely because they position the church to see. They hold Jesus up, naming him as clearly as possible, that our eyes might be opened and we might respond and participate as worshippers and children of the living God.

So when you are considering a song for your church, ask, “Does this song give a clear picture of what God has done for us in Jesus?” If it is calling people to act (bow, lift hands, lay down their lives, etc…), you must ask, “In response to what?” If it’s not clear, you may need a better song or design plan to make that answer obvious.

Feeling GIFridays - This is not how I feel, but it is now what I...

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 11:24:22 -0400

Feeling GIFridays - This is not how I feel, but it is now what I feel like doing.

premiumgifs:

Mattress Jousting

Picking Worship Songs 101: God's Love > My Love

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 12:03:22 -0400

Picking worship songs for your church or worship gathering is an important task. In a previous post, I argued that we need to start to think about how we choose songs with a long-term vision of what happens when we gather together. The things we sing shape how we view God and what it means to live as the people of God. Our song choices need to function more like a grammar for the faith and less like sacred karaoke; choosing better songs will hopefully lead to a people who are better shaped by and better proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ.

So how do we pick better songs? Or how do we know if a new song is worth singing together? Today, I want to offer one of the questions I use to filter out what is better from what may not be: Who is doing what in this song? I know- what horrible phrasing and what an awkward question, right? Well, this is how I start to think about something grammatical people call agency. When studying the grammar of a sentence, the agent is the initiator of the action of the phrase or sentence. Agency is about who is doing what is being done in a text. Where there are verbs, there is agency, for every doing is linked to a do-er.

Let’s take a fairly popular worship song and look at agency in its lyrics. In Tim Hughes’ “Here I Am To Worship,” the opening line of the chorus read,

Here I am to worship,

Here I am to bow down,

Here I am to say that You’re my God.

In these lines, the agent is the “I” who is singing. “I” am the one who is acting, who is worshipping, bowing down, and saying what I then say. Similarly, in the first verse:

Light of the world,

You stepped out into darkness-

Opened my eyes,

Set me free.

The agent who stepped out, opened and set “me” free is God, or more specifically Christ, as these lyrics reference the Incarnation. There are many songs that we sing in churches that name who God is or who we are (we call those stative verbs), but even stative verbs have agency: If you claim, “Jesus is Lord”, the verb is still referring to Jesus (the agent) who is in a state of Lordship. So every song we sing has verbs in them, and the verbs point to the do-ers of the actions they name.

What does this grammar talk have to do with picking worship songs? Stick with me…

The gospel, or good news, of Jesus Christ centers on the actions that God took to bring salvation to us all. Paul calls the gospel, “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Rom 1:16). The Father sends the Son, in the power of the Spirit, and the Son willingly lays his life down to atone for our sin, is raised, ascends, and will return to redeem his people and the entire creation (a brief synopsis, I know). Notice how all of the verbs in the gospel have God as their agent. Why? Because he is the author and perfecter of our faith. He has acted, and we respond to his grace by his grace.

With this in mind, I firmly believe that songs that lean more on God as the agent in their lyrics are better for the church because they better reflect the agency we find in the gospel. When you listen to a new song and it is more about what I or we are doing than what Christ has done/is doing/will do, the song should seem off-balance in light of the agency of the good news. There is definitely a place for songs and lines of response (and I will talk about that soon), but as worship leaders whose song choices shape the thoughts and hearts of those who join us in song, we must first and primarily name who God is and what God has done, for in God and his actions we find the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, and that includes the people singing in our church.

So when you listen to that new Cool Guy Worship Collective album, pay attention to the verbs. Who is the primary do-er in this song? Who is acting, and what actions are being named? Live by this rule when choosing songs: a song with heavy God-agency will always be healthier for your church than a song with heavy us-agency. The more the saving actions of God are named, the more likely the song will shape your church into the redeemed people the good news redeems by the power of the Spirit.

"The idea that following Jesus’ teaching will lead to a boring life is one of the most..."

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 11:36:14 -0400

“The idea that following Jesus’ teaching will lead to a boring life is one of the most effective false narratives employed by the enemy of our souls. Satan and his minions know all too well that real joy is found only in obeying Jesus’ commands. But with a twist here and there and the help of well-meaning but misguided religious folks, the Christian life can be portrayed as a holy bummer. The devil wants people to fear the high cost of discipleship, but in reality, the cost of non-discipleship is much higher.”

- James Bryan Smith, The Good and Beautiful Life, p. 31.

Picking Worship Songs 101: Leaving Karaoke Behind

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 11:32:20 -0400

So you’re a worship leader/designer/planner and you have just picked up the latest album from Cool Guy Worship Collective and are wondering to yourself, “Self- which of these songs, if any of them, are worth doing at our next worship gathering?”

Great Question. No, seriously. You need to ask that question every time you hear an album or song. Why? Because not every song you hear should be lead in your church. And that’s not just because of time restraints; there are actually some songs that are better for your church than others.

You see, when the church gathers together, it matters what we say and do. This isn’t just about the preaching, either. Everything we say and do together communicates something about who God is and what it means to be his people. Thomas Long calls the gatherings of the church the grammar school of the people of God; people learn how to speak of God, how to speak to God, how to respond to God, and how to be the people of God every week in your gathering. So yes, it matters what we sing, because you are giving people a vocabulary of words and actions that they will carry with them into the world each week.

In this series of posts, I want to pose some questions that I use to help me discern which songs would be better for my church to sing in the long run. One of the reasons I like Long’s grammar school idea is that it forces me to think about song selection more like soul-training and less like a karaoke sing-a-long. The church is not a praise-and-worship top 40 showcase, and we have to move past picking songs on the basis of popularity (even how much we personally like them) and more for the long term growth of our people.

So how do we pick better songs for our churches? In my next post, I will address the first question I ask of a song when I consider it for use in my church: Who is doing what in this song?

But for now, I’ll leave you with these questions: How would your song choices change if you looked at song selection like teaching your church the language of their faith? Say they could only speak of God using what they were singing in your church, what areas of their God/Jesus/gospel vocabulary are strong? Which areas are weak or missing altogether?

Thinking about dinner tonight. #hungry

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 16:15:20 -0400

Thinking about dinner tonight. #hungry

Interested in Help in Picking Better Songs for Corporate Worship Gatherings?

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 14:41:49 -0400

I’ve been thinking of writing some practical posts for worship leaders on how to examine the content of worship songs, with the goal being to choose better songs for your congregation to sing together. Anyone interested in such posts? Let me know here or via twitter-

GIFeeling Friday Excited for the weekend?

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 09:16:40 -0400

GIFeeling Friday

Excited for the weekend?

eauxyl: art

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 14:39:01 -0400

eauxyl:

art

Let’s end it!

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 11:30:20 -0400

Let’s end it!

andyandbeyond: What is the resurrection and why does it matter...

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 15:51:51 -0400

andyandbeyond:

What is the resurrection and why does it matter for the Christian faith? Hear Dr. Ben Witherington share about its uniqueness and significance for every believer.

"One thing is sure: You are somebody’s disciple. You learned how to live from somebody else...."

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 11:40:02 -0400

“One thing is sure: You are somebody’s disciple. You learned how to live from somebody else. There are no exceptions to this rule, for human beings are just the kind of creatures that have to learn and keep learning from others how to live.”

- Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy.

"Lord our God, we are gathered here on this day to consider how you have carried out your good, firm..."

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 09:16:05 -0400

“

Lord our God, we are gathered here on this day to consider how you have carried out your good, firm will for the world and for all of us, by allowing our Lord Jesus Christ, your dear Son, to be captured that we might be free; to be found guilty that we might be found innocent; to suffer that we might rejoice; and to be given over to death that we might live forever.

Under our own power, we could only be lost. And we have not deserved such a rescue – no, not one of us. But in the inconceivable greatness of your mercy, you have shared in our sin and our poverty, in order to do such a great thing for us. How else could we thank you but to grasp, take up, and acknowledge this great thing? How else should this happen, but that the same living Savior who suffered for us, was crucified, died, was buried, and was also raised up, should now come into our midst, speak to our hearts and minds, open us to your love, and guide us to trust in it completely and to live by it and by it alone. So we ask you in all humility, but also in all confidence, that this happen in the power of your Holy Spirit. Amen.

”

- Karl Barth, as found here. Thanks, Jeffrey!

A Great Stations/Good Friday Resource from Scott Erickson

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 09:20:57 -0400

The incredibly talented Scott Erickson has released a set of the Stations of the Cross for personal and corporate reflection that I think you should take advantage of this weekend. The resource includes Scripture readings and the images associated with them. The readings are based on the Spiritual Way of the Cross by Pope John Paul II

Click here to download the resource for free. And thanks, Scott!

3-2-1 Gospel presentation - one of the most simple and straight...

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 09:46:41 -0400

3-2-1 Gospel presentation - one of the most simple and straight forward videos I’ve ever seen on the story of the gospel.

Tim Tennent's Review of Rob Bell's Latest Book

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 09:51:29 -0400

Tim Tennent's Review of Rob Bell's Latest Book:

Anyone read this book yet? What are your thoughts?