For: The Institute of Contemporary And Emerging Worship Studies, St. Stephen’s University, Essentials Red Online Worship History Course with Dan Wilt.
What is the role of a worship leader? It seems like my answer to that question has varied over the years, depending on what season you found me in. This quote from Dan Wilt in “Essentials In Worship History” struck me as I read it:
“Worship leaders today must stand up again and again before the people, and routinely retell the same messages – forgiveness is possible, grace is irresistible, resurrection of the faithful is inevitable and new creation is just around the bend.”
One of our roles is to be story-tellers. Given our forgetful nature as humans and broken image bearers, we approach and re-approach the story of God in all of its dimensions and call people to look afresh on it. Often this will seem redundant, but wasn’t it Luther who said he re-tells the gospel week in week out because the people would forget and live as if it weren’t true? Therefore, we must acknowledge our role of re-storying those who come every week (or for the first time). We want to remind them who God is, who they are in Him, and why they’re still here. We repeat it, but perhaps in a slightly different light each time in order to allow others to come to a greater understanding of the attributes and acts of God.
Won’t it get old? Don’t people want the “new thing”? If God’s attributes are infinite, just as his mercies are new every morning, then we should have no problems finding new songs to sing or old songs with newly found fire. We have been, are being, and will be greatly saved, so greatly shall we praise him. Let that praise be spoken with our words, songs, and prayers. We will find that the stories re-told fuel our songs as well as our lives over and over.
I pause for a moment
and think of the love and the grace that God showers on me, creating me in his image and likeness, making me his temple.
— Sacred Space
What is there in my heart
that you should sue so fiercely for its love?
What kind of care brings you
as though a stranger to my door
through the long night and in the icy dew
seeking the heart that will not harbor you,
that keeps itself religiously secure?
At this dark solstice filled with frost and fire
your passion’s ancient wounds must bleed anew.
So many nights the angel of my house
has fed such urgent comfort through a dream,
whispered “your lord is coming, he is close”
that I have drowsed half-faithful for a time
bathed in pure tones of promise and remorse:
“tomorrow I shall wake to welcome him.”
— “Lachrimae Amantis” - Geoffrey Hill
For: The Institute of Contemporary And Emerging Worship Studies, St. Stephen’s University, Essentials Red Online Worship History Course with Dan Wilt.
This week we looked at the languages of art and music, and how they can be useful in connecting us to each other as well as to God. I’ve found that at times it’s nearly impossible to verbalize how one feels, but a melody might help capture a particular emotion, or maybe a color best describes one’s mood. Maybe you find yourself nearly weeping in a movie because for some reason you identify with a character in the story,or see yourself in a character’s eyes in a painting. Why is that?
Often I find that art steps in when words can’t. Indeed it does bypass much of our critical thinking, and allows us to feel something. In that moment, I’ve come to realize why I value connecting with that piece of art: it reminds me I’m not alone. Others have felt what I feel, although not exactly, for no one has lived in my shoes under the exact same circumstances. When I find something that allows me to say, “That’s exactly what I was trying to say, but didn’t know how,” it allows me to feel understood, less crazy. Others fight with the same battles too, so don’t give up.
This is, in a way, a call for artists to continue to bleed and weep and laugh till you cry onto the canvases we create. Express the deepest emotions and longings and the saddest hues of darkness and brightest shades of joy you can. Tell of the “mundane”, the ordinary, and even the boring. For when those who walk down that same road as you do (either now or 20 years from now) and see or hear or experience your work, they will know they are known.
