5th Sunday Worship

When people tweet about it on Sundays and tag their church or worship team I often wonder what makes for a brilliant/amazing worship service/experience.

Yesterday we the worship team at our church were publicly thanked in the service by the minister for the worship. This is as rare as a month with five Sundays.

There’s not a particular formula we follow to get a 'good' result. We put in the practice as we do during most weeks and through warming up on Sunday mornings. 

We are all unpaid amateurs who love Jesus and love music as much as each other (work out what I did there.)

We have a fairly strong core of rhythm and bass most weeks. The music is mainly led from the keyboard and we three keyboard players have different styles. Within the group we have different ideas about; what we like; what works and doesn’t; songs that we like that don’t get picked; songs that we don’t like as much that get picked just a little too often.

My actual personal preparation that I do when I’m on the rota to lead, is for an hour or two on the Saturday:

• play through all the songs, partly about word familiarity and partly muscle memory exercise*
• work out and finalise how the songs in the first set might link together musically if we’ve not already done it in the week
• think about instrumentation, particularly if there are strengths and or weaknesses among the players on the rota
• drink in the words, which is often a deeply personal act of worship and prayer and nearly always for me more meaningful than Sunday itself

I can honestly say I didn’t spend ages praying when I woke up yesterday morning. And as more often than not we were a little late leaving the house for church to get there for the time I’d asked everyone else to be there. My left ear was a little blocked and I forgot my glasses too (*lack of glasses is where the muscle memory practice really kicks in.)

And so I will continue to say it's something of a mystery how things turn out.

The majority of the time we turn up, do our stuff, and someone might say ‘thank you for the worship’ if they are stuck next to you in the coffee queue after the service or if the minister has done a ‘be thankful’-type message.

If we had a prayer/preparation formula that we followed it would cease to be about God. And God doesn’t actually need us to do the work of corporate worship, but He wants us to.

Not a deep piece. Random musings. Just musician, writing here and recording thanks.

continuously shuffling, never dealing

Many are the thoughts that have passed in and through my mind this summer, especially around social media.

Continuously shuffling but never dealing and putting cards on the table.

I have toyed with stepping off the social media carousel and have spent time reading blogs of those who have/are doing. But..


NOTICE or BEING NOTICED

How come someone with a high profile gets a gazillion likes and shares when they post a picture of a pair of shoes?

(totally ironic photo)

Like, like, like, like, like, like, la, la, la, la, la, la

Wading through opinions, hot-buttons, promotions, entertainment, oversharing, myriad holiday photos from exotic and not so exotic locations, excellent writing, writing that other people think is excellent writing (discuss).

Is it how cleverly we play to the gallery?

I say that I like the smallness of my social media world, some days I disagree with myself and start to measure my worth by it.

And I guess that is it in a nutshell, how we measure our worth.

I recall some meaningful interactions and their timings:

• a late night blog comment thread which lead to the discovery of a gem of a book
• a stumbled upon twitter comment that only has meaning for those who know – a ‘me too’ of epic proportions
• gentle, middle of the night,life-giving stories that go largely unnoticed
• tweeting song lyrics which simultaneously had deep meaning for others
• wading through three hours of early tweets with morning breath and stumbling on something priceless

All these is when this happens:

(I ruminated lo-ng on this tweet)

Some days the thing you need to notice is right in front of you and you don't have to share it with the world.

 

Other times you just need to keep on scrolling to find the things that really matter.

comfort (5 minute friday)

Joining with the community that is Five Minute Friday with the lovely Lisa Jo Baker. Writing not for comments or traffic or anyone else’s agenda. But for pure love of the written word. For joy at the sound of syllables, sentences and paragraphs all strung together by the voice of the speaker.

Five minutes on:  Comfort

Having lived in different areas of England we have assimilated a varied local vocabulary of every day phrases, such as saying hello:

Alright my lovely

Yow Awright

Ey-up

‘Ello chuck

The most disconcerting one for the boys when they were teenagers in Yorkshire was male bus drivers who called them love and duck.

The Shunnamite woman responded everything is all right to the holy man’s how are you at the time of Elisha (2 Kings 4:26)

It is well with my soul words penned by Spafford. If you don't know it, it is well worth reading the story behind the words of this hymn to see just what well of the soul they were drawn from.

Deep and unfathomable to most of us in a lifetime.

And the best hymns with the best words they bring a real comfort to the soul, comfort that is hard to express with words unless it is a place that has been visited by the soul.

It is well with my soul

The comfort of the Comforter