Tag: worship

Episode 113: An Interview with Dee Wilson

In this episode we sit down to chat with the newest member of the New Life Worship staff, Grammy-winning artist Dee Wilson.

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A Grammy is really cool… but honestly, the coolest thing for me has been my daughter, who is so proud of it… to watch the lightbulb go on for her—that means so much to me…

I’ve been blessed to write with amazing artists that I love and respect… I don’t take it for granted…

The song I’m most proud of has to be between Rose Petals and The Medicine… I love it when a person says they felt something they never felt before because of the song… 

The first thing that you have to integrate isn’t the music, but the person… they have their own culture and view of the world… it’s not fair to invite my songs but not invite me…

So if you’re going to bring someone in, you have to know that you’re bringing in a person… you have to learn to love each other… and then the songs will come…

The church I grew up in was an anomaly among the churches in the area… we set the culture that worship isn’t about your preference but about giving glory to God… the sound of unity is so much more important than what the chord changes are… 

I’ve so appreciated being at New Life because we can do hymns and then go to gospel music… 

What keeps me ‘true north’ is my wife, who doesn’t care about Grammys… I’ve learned to lean on the relationships that don’t need anything from me other than for me to be whole… 

My wife and daughter don’t thrive from me being successful but from me being grounded, close to Jesus, and dedicated to his cause… 

If the things that are happening to me now had happened when I was 25, I wouldn’t have been able to handle it… I’m so glad to be surrounded by the people I’m surrounded by now…

Episode 105: The Places of Encounter

In this episode we feature a conversation we had at our recent Essential Church Learning Community on “places of encounter” in our worship gatherings.

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Worship in the early church was designed around a fourfold shape or movement: the (re)gathering of the body, the proclamation of the Word, the response (which was usually done at the Table), and the sending, where the church is sent back out as missionaries… 

One of the things that can happen to us when we think about “encounter” as the place where the Holy Spirit “fits” within our worship service… but in the thinking of the New Testament, the Spirit is the whole logic of the service… the Spirit supersaturates everything that the church is… 

The third stanza of the Creed speaks to this… the church is a continuation of the stanza on the creed… the impact of the Triune God in the world is the existence of the church in the first place… which means that the whole service, in a sense, is “charismatic”…  

When we’re thinking about the “encounter” paradigm, it’s easy to think that we only encounter the Spirit in one part of the service… but this runs contrary to what Paul says in Ephesians 5…  

Paul thinks that we get filled with the Spirit by speaking to one another, by singing and making music, by giving thanks, and by submitting to one another… which means that we encounter the Spirit in each one of these places… 

Too much evangelical preaching prizes doctrinal correctness as the bar we must measure up to… too much charismatic preaching prizes experience… we think both are crucial… 

We think that the sermon is the place where the Word of God himself is speaking through the words of Scripture and through the words of the preacher… good preaching happens when we ask, “What is the Spirit saying NOW to these people?” 

Art is intentionally evocative… when Cranmer wrote the prayer book, he knew that what the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies… part of why the arts belong in church is because we are trying to help people love Jesus, not just learn about Jesus… 

Sacraments are a proclamation that there is a startling physicality to the life of faith… we’re not gnostics or dualists… Jesus gives his people bread and wine because Jesus thought that faith was startlingly physical… to follow Jesus is to become “fleshy” in all the right ways… 

I want to remind you that sacraments are not just nice little mental assents to something that happened but that Jesus is changing us spiritually, physically, physiologically through them… 

The Spirit comes to us through other people… when we show up in worship, we are bringing the gifts and graces God has given us for other people…

Episode 104: The Pastor and the Worship Leader: 5 Battles

In this episode we take you to a conversation between Pastor Brady and Pastor Jon Egan at our recent Essential Church Learning Community on the relationship between the senior pastor and the worship leader.

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I firmly believe that this is one of the most vulnerable relationships in the church… it’s an area where the enemy attacks… the key for Pastor Brady and I is understanding that we have different personalities…

If you do not like conflict, you can’t lead… leadership requires conflict… conflict is where the best ideas come from…

I believe that there is an ordained leader to lead the church and that it is not the worship leader… I think the senior pastor is the worship pastor of the church… deciding that early makes things a lot simpler…

Most of the major conflict in the church is just the accumulation of minor aggravations that went unsaid… but if you’ll speak out on the minor issues, you’ll have very few major issues…

One of the things that’s helpful is that you want your worship pastors to feel like they have ownership over the process of choosing songs, but they have to be willing to submit it…

Another battle is the battle for the clock… we shouldn’t go long just because we haven’t prepared… a lot of worship can happen if everyone comes ready…

I grew up in a tradition where 20-minute worship sets felt like a joke… it was a great lesson to realize that every minute, every breath, can truly count…

A lot of the wasted time in worship is not the songs, but the transitional moments that aren’t prepared… if you’re not prepared, you’ll start rambling…

All of us need words of affirmation, but we all need to wrestle with whether we need inordinate amounts of affirmation in order to do our job… how much of the spotlight do any of us really need? 

People are coming to church when their whole world is being turned upside down… people need to know that church is predictable, stable, and safe… and sound and lights can help with that…

This is a highly relational environment, and there needs to be as much relationship as possible between the senior pastor and the worship leader… I don’t just see Jon as a gifted musician and singer… the first thing I see is a remarkable person who I enjoy as my friend and who happens to be my worship leader…

Episode 096: 10,000 Fathers

In this episode we sit down with a new addition to our staff, Aaron Keyes, to talk about the mission of his organization 10,000 Fathers and how to raise up worship leaders as genuine pastors in our churches. You can find out more about 10,000 Fathers at worship.school.

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I was never a great musical performer or singer… what I was able to do as a worship leader was to open the Scriptures and invite people to try it out… people came alive to that… I started realizing how rare it was to be led in worship by Scripture…

The stuff that pastors are trained in now is very different than what worship leaders are trained in… the apprenticeship and training that is required for being in pastoral leadership in the church doesn’t really exist for worship leaders…

Big songs will only carry small leaders so far… and that’s what’s happening… but the problem is more with the system—we’re hiring people because they know how to play guitar, and then we’re mad at them because they ONLY know how to play guitar…

The reason we started our worship school was to address this need… my wife and I and our pastor started praying and decided to bring worship leaders from around the world in to come and live with us… we wanted to do discipleship in the context of life together…

We’ve shifted it now to an 18-month thing where people don’t have to move… our goal is to raise worship leaders up who can be elders in the church for years to come…

We’ve had pastors call us to say that having worship leaders who can help them make disciples is such a gift… and that’s what we want to see…

Many worship leaders live with anxiety about their relevance… when they’re no longer relevant, they exit ministry… 10,000 Fathers is trying to equip people so that when their stage value starts going down, their spiritual and practical value to the church goes up…

Worship leaders are easy targets… but most of them want depth and want to be helpful to the church for a long time… most would jump at the opportunity to be equipped for that…

Episode 082: The Art of Songwriting

In this episode we sit down with Jon Egan and Micah Massey to talk about the agony, ecstasy, and discipline of songwriting.

Songs begin in the amateur’s heart and are finished in the craftsman’s hands… I have to start with childlike wonder and playfulness, and eventually something will take form…

The longer I’ve been writing, the harder it’s getting, but also the more rewarding it’s getting… sometimes the process is playful, but the majority of the time it is a wrestling match…

There’s a lot of humility and openhandedness involved in songwriting, especially in a cowriting situation… you know it’s going to morph and transform along the way and might be completely different than what you thought…

I worked with one really spectacular songwriter and one of the things I noticed about him right away was that he was totally unafraid to look like a bad songwriter… that’s how it has to start…

The saying “start with the end in mind” is bad advice for writers… you have to learn to fall in love with the process again… you have to fight for and protect the innocence of it…

There are a lot of different ways to write a song, but I love writing a song for the corporate body of Christ…

It’s a different approach when you’re writing congregationally… you have to write more objectively than subjectively…

There are three things that a corporate worship song needs: it needs to be accessible; it needs to be beautiful; and it needs to be theological…

This is one of the reasons why songwriting has been more of a boxing ring for me… I’m realizing that the singing is forming belief, forming culture, and how people think about God…

Silence and solitude are crucial for me… Dallas Willard said that you have to find your divine center every day… if I don’t have that, I will venture into a territory that is more subjective, more about me than it is about the church…

Community and friendship are the biggest disciplines for me… I learn so much from my friends… but also just remembering who has come before us… reading and community both help me…

Episode 056: Jon Egan “Unveil” Interview

In this episode we sit down to talk with our dear friend and worship leader Jon Egan about his new album “Unveil” and all that he’s seeing and learning as a worship leader and songwriter. (You can pre-order Unveil wherever good music is sold online. You’ll get one song each week till the album releases on March 29th.)

 

 

For me this project was about singing song together… almost like giving the songs back to the people… we have so much going for us in modern worship, but my burden is “Are people actually singing?”

 

My story is not my story but God’s story… I can declare the realities of my life or I can declare something else… these songs are designed to equip the church to rise out of their own reality and sing a greater one…

 

Most of my life I’ve had a propensity to get lost in my feelings, and worship has been the thing that’s “unveiled” my eyes to see something greater… I run toward worship and I want my church to run toward it… worship has been the antidote to my propensity to fear…

 

I could have had the label give me a budget to record in a studio somewhere, but it would have been missing the church… I get emotional about it… my love for the church and their love for me has lifted me…

 

The song “Unveil” is one of those songs that we can only sing now… when all things are made new there will be a fullness of glory… but in this life we can cry out for things we don’t see… we can cry out for the glory, for God to “unveil” our hearts and eyes to know him…

 

The song “the Table” began because I was imagining a table where the Father, Son, and Spirit were at, and there was an empty seat where they were saying, “Come, there is a seat for you here…”

 

The song “Pure Exaltation” came because we didn’t have a song like that on the album… language for the church to help pull them up out of their reality and into heaven…

 

A burden of mine is that the voice of the worship leader is being muffled… we have great production, better than ever… which means you can get by now with echoing and not being an actual voice…

 

My challenge to young worship leaders is to use their voice… to write original songs for their church… churches sing their own songs the loudest…

Episode 047: A Conversation with Andrew Wilson

In this episode we sit down to talk to our friend Andrew Wilson about his new book Spirit and Sacrament: An Invitation to Eucharismatic Worship to talk about the what, why, and how of blending the charismatic and sacramental expressions.

 

 

https://www.spiritandsacrament.com/

 

I don’t remember where I first came up with the word (“eucharismatic”), but my history is that I have some Anglicanism in my childhood that was non-charismatic… and then I went to a charismatic church that had almost no awareness of the historical church…

 

At around six or seven years ago I started thinking there was a need for the church to bring together these two gifts… the term eucharismatic is a putting together of two words: eucharistic and charismatic, and the link between them is charis—grace (or chara—joy)…

 

When we understand the gift of God in the spiritual gifts and the gift of God in the Lord’s supper, we can receive all of God’s gifts rather than just some…

 

For me, the sacramental tradition was not associated with joy… but then I began reading the history of the church, these people who had almost unutterable moments of revelation of the beauty of who God is [while celebrating the eucharist]…

 

The Lord’s Supper is the lovely thing where everyone knows that this is something they are supposed to do; the question is how and how often… our church was doing it in homes, like they did in Acts 2…

 

For us, we had to recognize that whatever we did not practice on Sunday we did not ultimately value… you can say the same for the gifts… unless we do this at some point on Sundays, the church will think this is relatively unimportant…

 

I think that for many in more traditional churches, they are concerned about the charismatic out of a concern for orthodoxy and for things to be done in a decently and in order kind of way…

 

One of the things you can do is pick low-hanging fruit… the judicious and careful use of a prophetic impression (and you might not even call it that)—most people, even the most conservative (traditional) are happy with the idea that God might lead them to do something…

 

You just need to be sensitive to the fact that for many people this is really new… you need to be able to explain things in a non-weird way what God is doing…

Episode 035: A Conversation with Louie Giglio

For this conversation, we sit down with Louie Giglio and discuss the Passion movement, worship, and everything in-between.

 

I love that crossroads of life that is the university moment… we said yes to God and 22 years later we’re still gathering students… it’s not a conference really, or an event, but a purposed movement praying God will open eyes to see what life is really about—the glory of God…

 

We weren’t trying to build a monument; we were trying to be a fuse, we wanted to be an explosion, we wanted to see God start doing something that was unexplainable…

 

When college students come in, everything they’ve learned up to that point suspends… The university is a crossroads of life… people stop deciding for what their parents believed and start deciding what they believe… and that’s where you want to be standing—with the person of Jesus…

 

Early on [in the Passion movement], there was a presumption of “normal American life”… now we’re on the backside of the greatest economic depression in our memory, with lots of instability, and kids now are anxious and depressed and have so many conversations every day that they don’t even know who they are anymore…

 

But there’s also a belief [with this generation] that our voice matters… people want to congregate now… they believe there’s something more than the old school American dream… they want to make their lives count…

 

When I was younger I thought that way you make the biggest impact on the world is that you go to most places you can and speak to the most people you can speak to…

 

At 40 I had a wakeup moment where I realized that you make the greatest impact by staying in the same place for a longest amount of time to see the reproductive power of the gospel at work in the generational cycles that come… I wanted to root somewhere…

 

The calling to lead worship is holy… the heart of worship is still someone who worships in their closet, they like the lobby better than the green room, they like the mirror of the Word better than the mirror, and they come to lead the people and not to lead the songs…

 

There are 1000 people out there who know how to lead songs… we need leaders who have an anointing and an authority to lead people…

 

 

RESOURCES

Episode 028: Singing Our Hope

What happens when we worship? How do we select songs for congregational worship that instill hope? In this conversation, Dr. Glenn Packiam talks about what he learned as he researched the expression and experience of hope in our worship.

SHOW NOTES – Episode 028 – Singing our Hope

 

The thing that was most surprising to me in my research was how little the songs dealt with the future… we don’t sing about the future (or the past) all that much… it concerned me that songs about hope had no future orientation…

 

It might be that the spirit of the age is one of the reasons why we don’t sing about the future all that much… it’s a luxury to sing about the present tense when the present is pretty good…

 

There’s a challenge here for pastors and worship leaders to help people see their felt needs in terms of the great need of our lives, which is the hope of Christ…

 

The Holy Spirit is the experience of God’s presence, and many would say that the Spirit is God’s future presence in the now… which is why people who experience the Holy Spirit feel hopeful [regardless of the song lyrics]…

 

Only on paper can you distinguish between hope and comfort… when people say “I feel hope,” what they’re saying is “I have a sense of God’s presence with me”… theologically we’re saying, “The Holy Spirit, who is the deposit of the future—you’re having a taste of him now…”

 

The good songs are not just songs that are true this month… I think we address the realities of our day better by singing about something that transcends our day… it’s great to sing about our present pain, but there’s something about the church coming together to sing about something quite a bit better, higher, and stronger…

 

One of the things we’ve challenged worship leaders and writers with is not just thinking of theology as the fence but as the doorway…

 

I hope that what worship leaders and songwriters hear is that what they’re doing is incredibly powerful and the Holy Spirit breathes on it, so let’s allow him to make our craft the very best it can be… when he breathes on that, how much more could it do?

 

 

QUESTIONS FOR YOU AND YOUR TEAM

  • Look at your worship set lists from the last 8 weeks. How many of the songs speak of the future hope of Christ? What do you think that says?
  • What are you doing to create space for people to experience the presence of the Spirit in your worship services?
  • What can you do to help your congregants fix the concerns of their lives in the future hope of Christ?

Episode 022: The Purpose of Sunday

Sundays come around with an alarming regularity. As we plan for our weekly worship services, the constancy of the calendar can inhibit us from stopping to focus on the lens through which we plan or what our end-goal should be. In this conversation, we talk about the factors we consider as we plan worship services that allow people to meet Jesus, to be formed into disciples, and to encounter God.

 

Mission, formation, and encounter are the three broad approaches to worship… I’m of the opinion that we are meant to hold all three of these together in tension…

 

Each service should have elements of all three but there are different elements for each service… for instance, I know that on Easter and Christmas Eve we will be filled with guests… so I need to have a service that day that emphasizes that…

 

At the end of 52 weeks, we should be able to look at our worship and see all three in healthy tension and balance throughout the church year…

 

If you want to make your team a bit uncomfortable, take a look at the songs you’ve sung over the last year and ask this question, “If people’s view of God was formed solely by these songs, what kind of God is that…have we said anything about who he is or just how we feel about him?”

 

By doing weekly communion, it’s made us as preachers preach towards the Table… the end of the sermon is turning to God and asking for his grace again… the gospel proclamation moment reaches the lost, forms the faithful, and creates encounter—somehow, by the power of the Holy Spirit, Jesus meets us when we come to the Table…

 

Singing, sermon, sacraments, and prayers should mirror all three of these things… to ignore any of them is to do so at your peril… embracing them helps the church come to maturity…

 

 

QUESTIONS FOR YOU AND YOUR TEAM

  • What do you think about the “mission, formation, encounter” grid? Would you add any?
  • Which of the three does your church do best? Worst? Why?
  • What can you do to grow in a balanced approach to worship?

 

 

RESOURCES

Andy Stanley – Deep and Wide

James K. A. Smith – Desiring the Kingdom

Glenn Packiam – Discover the Mystery of Faith

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