The issue of music

If I told you I thought we need to stop singing during the worship service because it's unBiblical and merely just a tradition that has gotten watered down and pointless over the centuries, what would you say?

Excellence

I've been thinking a lot about excellence lately. The NCAA march madness is going on (for those of you that don't know, that's the big college basketball tournament that's on tv that is probably on in place of your favorite cbs shows) and we're looking to whittle down all these teams and claim excellence by the fact that a team won by beating all others (some of us will claim excellence because we picked that team :) Is that the essence of excellence?
Webster defines excellence:
Excellence
–noun

1.	the fact or state of excelling; superiority; eminence:

2.	an excellent quality or feature:

hmm... an excellent quality or feature. I think a lot of times we look at excellence as just beating out all the other competition, but I think God calls us to a difference kind of excellence. There are many ways to go from here, but I'm going to focus on how we should be applying excellence in the Worship Ministry.
First, we should have spiritual excellence. What? he didn't say we should be excellent singers/musicians?.... nope. we need to start focused on the right thing. God uses people who are quite terrible at things to do big stuff. Moses was a stutterer, Paul killed Christians. We need to have our hearts focused on God... and I don't just mean on Sunday morning. This focus is throughout our entire life. If you think you can come on Sunday morning and give all to God and that's enough, well then you need to rethink why you're part of the Worship Ministry. Once we have our hearts, minds, and souls focused solely on giving God back all the talents, gifts and blessings back to Him we can start working on our musicianship.
Excellence in musicianship... what does that mean? Psalms 33:3 says we should "play skillfully" while we sing to the Lord with loud shouts (maybe we should shout more in our service? ;). Ok so just the musicians should be skilled, right? Errrr wrong! Singers should be skillful, sound guys should be skillful, video techs should be skillful, even ushers should be skillful. Everything that has breath should be praising the Lord in a skillful way.
What's that? You're not a professional musican? So... being skillful kind of bugs you? You think you're somehow inadequate because you can't do things like the pros? Skillful doesn't mean you're the best at what you do, it means that you do the best with what you have and you always look to be better. If we just keep relying on the default we'll never get better. We need to practice more, we need to keep each other accountable, we need to learn from others, and maybe we should think of trying to copy the pros (not their hairdo, their skills). We need to be humble and work as a team. We all need to do this.
Ok, homework assignment. Sometime this week after you're done with your devotions I want you to pick 2 songs that you really love to listen to on the radio, CD, iPod, whatever and I want you to listen to the subtleties. Start of by listening to your instrment/voice does in the song and maybe write it down. Then listen again to what all the other instruments are doing. It may surprise you how everything works together.
I'd still like to see more comments back here. If you're having trouble, email me (). This is a place for dialogue. Please use it (and do you're homework assignment, it'll be graded :)

On stage presence & a question

So we've talked about why you worship, we talked about communicating, and now we're gonna talk about how you act on stage during Sunday Morning.

Before I start, if you think I'm singling you out, I'm not. I don't really know what you do/don't do on stage. So nothing is specifically designed to offend you or make fun of you. If you feel that I am, then that probably means you need to change whatever it is that offends you.

That being said... we've all been told we need to smile and look pleasant up on stage. If you've ever watched American Idol, they're always harping on people for not feeling the song (ok usually they're complaining about song choice, but this issue comes up too). It's true though that when performing a song a person should look like they're enjoying the song if it's upbeat or feeling the emotions when it's a sad or moving song. So shouldn't we be doing the same?

Singer usually have a tendancy to do this better than musicians (sorry musicians) because they're singing the words, not just playing notes. However, it's easy to just smile to look pleasant rather than thinking about the words we're singing. For example, "Crucified laid behind a stone" isn't exactly the happiest thing to be smiling about. Yes, because Jesus did that we have salvation, but it was quite the brutal thing, so just think about what you're singing.

Now musicians, some of you may not be able to sing and play at the same time, I understand that. However, you need to be thinking about it too. Partially because how you play for a section is determined by the words, but also people DO look at you sometimes too so sing if you can, smile when it's appropriate.

Think about what you look like up there, don't just do what you always do because it's easy.

So now the question. I would like to know what you think about how we can do things better. How can I help you be better at what you do? What do I do that bugs you? (don't be shy, I can take the heat). What can we as a church try to spark creativity and worship? Feel free to comment here or if you're not one to post here just email me.

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thanks in advance for your thoughts