A number of years ago I felt impressed by the Lord to drive to a local strip club, park my car and pull my guitar out. I started to sing a song standing in the middle of the parking lot. It was a song about innocence and freedom. It was a song that carried the heart of Father to restore places of brokenness and injustice. I let faith be the driving force behind why I was there, I didn’t really know what was going to happen. All I know is that I felt impressed to do it. There was an inkling in my spirit that people would come out of the club and repent and fall on there knees……that didn’t happen….. but about thirty minutes later the bouncer told me I had to leave.
I recently had a discussion with a friend of mine Jon Shirley who’s a worship leader in Kansas City. We were discussing the merging of worship and mission and how there seems to be a vast disconnect between these two words. If you know anything about me, you know the more I talk, the more I discover the answers to my own questions. I’m a verbal processor for sure!
I began to elaborate on the outcomes that we can predict for the most part in our Church services Sunday in and out. We can predict the fruit. If I know it’s an apple tree, there will be apple’s growing on it, that kind of thing….you get the point. I’m not necessarily saying this is wrong as much as potentially boring and I think in a lot of ways disconnected with our faith.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the times of corporate worship and have spent a long time cultivating a culture that really pursues encounters with His Spirit in those times. But whether I play two fast songs then a medium, then a slow song and then build it back up or flip that all around, I still see a lot of the same type of results/fruit. One Sunday definitely doesn’t look like the one before and I’m over the whole idea of trying to build off fabricating something bigger than last week’s “move of God.” I want more, we all want more and for it to be fresh…..which is why I’m asking the question. What does worship look like in the hard places?
We’re discovering what it looks like in the home and we definitely have a ton illustrations of what it looks like in the temple/Sunday Morning. But what about the places between those two spaces, the places that require mediation for a city/community? What if I didn’t have the people on Sunday morning in front of me raising their hands? What if all of the sudden faith had to rise up and the fruit simply came about by standing in a place unknown and releasing a song or a sound because you encountered Jesus and you felt so burdened you had to release it? More to come.