Each week I have the job of looking at the upcoming Sunday worship services and choosing songs that will bring it all together. Setting the tone for people walking in (many for the first time), songs of praise, prayer, worship, participation, instruction, lamentation, comfort, and joyful fun. Songs to stir the emotions and imaginations and set up the teaching. Not every week has every element, of course. Ever wonder what some of my personal guidelines might be? I’m so glad you asked. (more…)
Archive for the ‘Sound’
Ever Wonder What Thoughts Go Into Our Setlist?
The guy Who Went to Africa and Wrote a Journal
OK, so I went to see John Michael Talbot play a solo concert at a big Roman Catholic Church in the Woodlands. It was several years ago, and I don’t remember a lot of the details. He wore a monk robe, played a classical guitar, and sang a bunch of songs I have never heard before or since. He was great.
He also told a bunch of stories that I have forgotten, but there was one story that has stuck with me. I don’t remember many of the actual details, but I remember the basic idea. He gave actual names, dates and addresses that could be verified (feel free to research the details).
A wealthy French nobleman became convinced that he should sell all of his possessions and become a missionary to Africa. No one talked him into this, it was his own idea based on what he believed God wanted him to do. His friends tried to talk him out of it, but he had his mind made up. A few garage sales and a splash of holy water, and he was off to Africa.
In Africa he lived alone. His attempts to reach out to the Africans were completely fruitless. Alone, he would pray, read his Bible, and write detailed accounts of his attempts to reach out to the natives. He continued to do this for many years, I don’t remember how many, but for maybe ten or twenty years he kept at it. Not one person came to a Bible study, or a prayer meeting, or was baptized, or showed any interest in what he gave his life up for. He became depressed and disillusioned.
One night a band of men came to his door. They had heard that he was a French spy. They brought guns. They killed him.
The end.
Seriously. The end.
Several years later, after everyone had forgotten that a crazy French guy had ever been there, an African man found the Frenchman’s Journal. As he read the tortured story of a deeply Christian man who gave up everything so that some people that he had never met might hear the good news of Jesus Christ and believe, he was deeply moved. He read about the conversations and rejections by all the people that he had come to help, and an amazing thing happened. The African man found faith. He shared the story with people from his village and they also believed.
Today there is a large missionary outpost/church/community that has been built by the people who found faith through the Journal of the French guy who was killed by bandits.
This story drives me to continue writing songs, and blogs, and makes me want to start keeping a journal.
No sacrifice for the Gospel is ever wasted. AMEN
Love and Hate and Evil
It is common to think of love and hate as opposites.
Most people live their whole lives thinking that love and hate are as opposite as dogs and cats, salt and pepper or chocolate and vanilla. And they are. They are opposites in exactly the same way. They appear to be opposite, but they are not truly opposite like big and small, light and dark, near and far.
There are many things that God hates, and yet God in His very nature is love.
Love hates.
1st Corinthians chapter 13 is the very definition of love in action, and to do the opposite of those words is not to “hate” someone, but to be impatient with them, be unkind to them, envy them, put them below you, be rude to them, be angry with them, remember their faults, rejoice when they fall, fail to protect them, not trust them, and basically give up on them. Some of these things are pretty subtle, and most of them do not rise to the level of hating someone.
Love is self sacrifice.
We show love to our friends and family through small sacrifices of patience and kindness. Jesus showed ultimate love for us by His complete sacrifice through His life and death.
The opposite of love is not hate, it is selfishness. It is “me first,” “mine!,” “shut up,” and “whatever!” The opposite of love is evil.
We are to live our lives following God. We are to become more like Him. We are to constantly measure ourselves against the standard of who He is. In God’s character we find the truth, and the truth will make us free.
We can not be nicer than God. We must learn what God hates, and we must hate it, too.
Wrote a song about it:
Who is that skinny guy in the Underdog shirt?
Confession of Malachi and the Thief
“But you ask, ‘How have we shown contempt for your name?’ Malachi 3:13
This is a song that I included on the “Human Liturgy” album. The night that I wrote it, I played it for Kim and after she had listened to it she said, “You’re not a very good person, are you?”
I had been reading in the book of Malachi. I like the Old Testament, and I love the minor prophets. Like them, we also live in a time when “every man does what is right in his own eyes.” I can feel their pain as they speak God’s message to the people, and the people respond with apathy. What I found particularly interesting while reading Malachi was that I had done every terrible thing that God was angry with His people for doing. They are terrible things, and I had done them.
So, I wrote this song as a confession. I invite you to sing along.
The video is a bunch of pretty images that show how broken and in pain the world is. All of these awful things are going on all around us, and we are tempted at every turn to remain hard hearted. They are starving and in pain and we are too often satisfied with giving them platitudes and prayer. The world needs Jesus, true, but there is more to our Christian duty than pointing our holy fingers at them as they suffer and telling them to REPENT!
We actually need to repent first. We … you and me … the church … we need to take a serious look at Malachi and point it at ourselves first. It is written to God’s people. The salvation that Jesus offers to the world He offers through a river that flows from the church as the church worships Him in Spirit and in Truth. It is not the mission of individuals alone, it is the mission of a people.
I think if you look hard enough you will see yourself in the video.
Only Visiting This Planet | Larry Norman
I was really into Jesus when I was 14 years old. I was already writing songs and performing them in church. My Sunday School teacher, Rico Dunsmore, was a card carrying Jesus Freak. He was always loaning me his records (vinyl LPs) and introducing me to Christian rockers. He changed my life when he loaned me a small stack of Larry Norman albums.
Half the songs were acoustic guitar driven folk/protest music (Dylan), and the other half were rockin/pop songs (Stones, Beatles). They all felt so heavy with meaning that the net result was like a religious experience to me. I drank his music in like it was the elixir of life. My songs started having underlaying meanings and layers of lyrical complexity, I started wearing black, grew my hair long and dyed it blonde. I had already known that I wanted to be a Christian and a singer/songwriter, I knew that I wanted to be in full time ministry, but now I knew something else, too. I wanted to be Larry Norman. (more…)