Thursday is a day of breakout sessions at the arts conference. I come to you from lakeside at Willow 🙂 The first session was led by Ross Parsley who is the worship pastor of New Life Christian Church in Colorado Springs. This is a church that has been made famous for housing the Desperation Band, it is Ted Haggard’s old church, and the church where the shooting of 2 girls during a Sunday morning gathering happened. So needless to say I was looking forward to hear from him. We do a lot of music by him at Sunset and he has been through so much in the last 18 months that I knew God was doing something special in him. So here is what he had to say on biblical worship.
- God is the initiator, we are the responders. If we don’t see God as the initiator, we become performers and not worshipers.
- Art is simply a tool to incite a worship response to a greater revelation of who Jesus is. Yet we are also called to be skillful stewards (Ps. 33:3, Matt. 25:14).
- Look at where we spend our time in worship ministry:
- Skill
- Tradition
- Personality of the leader
- Musical style
- Organizational structure
- Ministry philosophy
- Yet all of these things need to be rooted in Biblical principles. And we spend the least amount of time on biblical principles. If we do not teach biblical principles, all of those other things become what worship is.
- Here is The Biblical Model:
- Revelation
- Transformation (it has to be more than emotional tugs; you don’t have to be perfect, you have to be surrendered)
- Illustration (Biblical worship is people who have been transformed telling their story)
This was convicting for me. I spent a large part of this past week preparing for the band workshop I ran on Sunday. It was focused on skill and style, and I had little focus on biblical principles. I wonder how I can lead the band into what Biblical worship truly. How can I allow our musicianship to grow while focusing more on him?
