outside is better

The 7 bowls of...

A few months ago, Blogging Guru Michael Spencer came to Asbury and talked about blogging.  One of the things he suggested was to find a way to handle "link" posts and offer your readers pieces of information that they might find handy.  My liturgical jedi JD Walt, does a regular posting of "14 stations of" posts, so I decided to follow his lead.  I will try to get this going every Saturday.  Since most of my schoolwork/research is in Revelation, I decided to call this the "7 bowls of..." and offer 7 great links.

1.  Top 10 Printable Paper Productivity Tools.  Great lifejacker article collecting some amazing uses of paper-which is still my favorite method of organization (sorry Jeremiah)

2.  NT Wright on Worship Songs.  JD has quite the discussion going on here.

3.  Why Contemporary Music makes congregational singing difficult.  Michael spencer has had some difficult posts this summer, asking the questions that we are often to afraid to bring up.  This is a post that any minister should read.

4.  Rise of the New Living Translation.  Rick Mansfield taught an Accordance seminar on Asbury campus this spring, and I enjoyed getting to meet him.  Lately, I have been pulling my old NLT 1st edition of the shelf and using it-and I like it alot.  Rick has offers several reasons why we may see the NLT become the most popular English translation.

5.  Going To Seminary Adds Video.  So I guess part of this is shameless promotion since I contribute to the site.  But some new features have been rolled out lately and I am excited to see what happens around the site once the school year gets closer.

6.  Why You should Twitter with Me.  My buddy Jeremiah really brings out why Twitter is a great tool for ministers and/or Christians.  For anyone weary of tech advances, read this.

7. The Worship Community.  This entire site has had my focus over the last few weeks.  I have looked for years for a great online worship resource, with articles and forums.  This is it as far as I am concerned.

Outside is Better Wordled

Wordle is a great new site that collects words used and makes a sweet map of them.  You can enter your blog into Wordle and get the results.  Here's mine.

I can say that this was interesting and a great way for me to learn what topics I have been writing about for the last couple of years.

I also entered in a paper I wrote last January about the worship passages in Revelation.  This was really interesting too.

A new song for the morning

About a year ago when I started to think about leading worship, I prayed for songs to come to me.  I have written off and on since I was 13 years old, but I have never wrote "worship" songs (or as I like to call them "jesus songs"), I was great at writing simple country songs.  I have fragments of lyrics scattered throughout notebook, but I have rarely been able to finish a complete song.

I was walking down to our local coffee joint the other night and I had a lyric or two come through my head.  I fought over and over about writing it down, because I realized that many of this fragments deal with not sinning.  While that is an important concept, it doesn't seem to be the write thing to focus on.  I prayed about it, and left it as a fragment.  Well this morning in the shower another song started coming to me, and I am happy that it isn't focusing on sin.  After the shower I was able to jot down a few more verses and I am surprised how it turned out.

There's a nakedness to this
exposure to my King
God of Heaven has come down
the slain lamb is here with me

Holy Spirit sanctify
with fire you enter in
cleanse the pitted old life
through you I'm born again

I now approach the throne
my trembling is Gone
I walk with steady steps
because Jesus is my friend.

Revelation 19, remembering God, and some great conversation

I think this is the biggest title I have ever had.

This week I am finishing up my series on the worship passages in Revelation by looking at chapter 19.  I am taking alot of thoughts from Robert Webber's "Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting Gods Narrative."  Webber is the Yoda of worship theology as far as I am concerned (don't worry JD, I would put you on the Jedi high council).  I haven't gotten past my initial notes from January on the chapter, but at a cursory glance most of this passages are the redeemed remembering God's mighty acts of salvation inside of history.  This isn't a direct look at remembering history, but more of remembering the wide spread of salvific history.

So whats the big deal with remembering?

I did a quick Accordance search, and remember is in the NASB 168 times, I didn't do a crazy search on all variations of the term.  The greek word used the most is μνημονεύω, giving the idea of remembering and constantly recalling, not forgetting but keeping something on the forefront of our minds.  We are called to remember the Lord our God and how he is always in the business of salvation.  That is our focus on worship, the acts of the Triune God. 

What this separates us from is us telling God what we are going to do for him, and internalizing our salvation in our worship.  Part of our life-style of worship is remembering what God has done for us specifically, but I am having a hard time thinking that it is something we do as a corporate body.  This is the link in the chain that I haven't really been able to wrap my head around.

My good friend JD Walt has some great conversation regarding worship on his blog, go check it out.

Revelation 5 and the ramp-up slowdown

tFor those of you that are interested in last weeks sermon, you can Download sermonrev5.mp3 .

One of the issues I always struggle with when preaching at my church, is how do I translate  my 28y.o speak to a group of retired folk, not to mention the various theological differences I know that we have.  I have learned so much about the pastoral task of understanding the needs of the congregation while working at my church.

This week is going to be stacked...more than any so this week.  Next weekend we fly down to my parents house for a vacation.  I can't begin to think how nice it will be to take a break.  I always find it odd that we have to go full-tilt before a break, and then never really recover.

Hopefully I can get things rolling here more this week, I know it has been light and I apologize.

The End of an Era...the Exciter is gone.

broken down
Originally uploaded by chadbrooks

Well I just sold my motorcycle.  I bought it from a friend back at Tech and really enjoyed riding it while it ran.  This picture is from a great day of riding, in which I ran out of gas.

I will end up getting another bike one day, not anytime soon though.  I enjoyed riding, and it is sad to know that I no longer have a motorcycle.  Their are several pics of the bike on Flickr if you want to see more of it's evolution.

Planning and Leading Worship as a Pastoral Task

This is a re-post from our Worship Design Team Blog.  I wish I had more information on the article I am talking about, but I think you can get the idea from this essay.

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I have had the luxury of using our reader for almost a full year, I guess you can call it a benefit of being on the team for two years. Both times, one of my favorite article is this one. After 6 years of being involved in planning, leading and running worship-I understand how sometimes it just seems to be a task that must get done.

I have a quote written on a piece of masking tape in my bible from Dr. Kalas from last years NSO chapel.

“Becoming familiar with sacred things can hurt us-because the sacred becomes normal.”

Everytime I read this quote it jumps out at me. It really speaks to the situation we have as worship designers. The article outlines four self-images of the worship planner, and I think the last one of “Spiritual Engineer” is the most dangerous. We feel the need to always “out-bling” ourselves at every service. How often have we thought that we can get enough of a holy frenzy going on for the Holy Spirit to come down (I have blogged about this before, you can read the post here). As the article states we sometimes think we have the task of “turning an ordinary moment into a holy moment”, and that is something the church has been facing for thousands of years. But we can’t do that, and this idea always reminds me of the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal, screaming and cutting themselves in an attempt to call down fire.

In our attempt to make a moment holy we have to daily be stepping back and remembering that we serve the Holy One, and a moment is not just Holy to him, but His entire makeup screams holiness, it is the output that shapes all other outputs of God.

We have to understand our task of “worship”. It is not just music filler before the sermon. And the sermon is not the apex of our worship. We have the goal of completely integrating the entire service as a unitive whole. When we design a service that is fully integrated together and shows the journey through the Biblical Story of a Triune God who desperately loves this world we have accomplished designing worship. Then we are truly focused on God in our entire service, through the announcements to the benediction.

ESV Study Bible: Introduction to Psalms

I am increasingly excited about the ESV Study Bible.  They released the Introduction to Psalms  yesterday, and it looks nice.  I think that they spent alot of time looking at what the average layperson wanted in a study bible, because these introductions are filled with great information.  Read the post here and you can download the introduction.

Contemplating Worship

It has been a long time since I have made one of these "Sunday" posts.  I used to do them as a college minister when I was waiting for leadership meetings at a local coffee house.  Here I am today, in a coffee house, finishing up my sermon for tonight.

I guess I am making a reputation for myself, because me peers see me as the "worship" guy.  When I leave Asbury I may try to do some more school, or I may go into the local church, either way would be great with me.

But why worship?  Couldn't I find something more important to focus on, like justice, evangelism, or leadership?  I have this odd relationship with worship-I can't get away from it because I am drawn to it from the depths of my soul, but nothing will make me roll my eyes and get cynical as quickly as a "bad" worship service.

I have taken several classes with Lester Ruth, and I will take more I am sure.  We were discussing my involvement with worship earlier this year.  Some people brand me as a traditional/liturgical guy, while my students from Wesley will say that I am pretty progressive.  I read way to much patristic writing, but I really wish I had the outlet to involve myself with more experimental expressions of corporate worship.

We have had the whole CCM thing for 30/40 years now.  Worship music as a genre is approaching the place where our youngest leaders will have grown up dreaming of David Crowder or Chris Tomlin, where I wanted to be Tom Petty and/or Jimmy Page when I was 14 (both would have been great). 

We are at some sort of crux.  I don't want to tear down contemporary expressions of worship, but we are entering the place where some have only grown up singing songs in church about their actions, and not placing the Triune God in the proper place as the sole object of their worship.  What will their children sing about?

I want to see worship mature.  To a place where it is culturally and contextually relevant, but retains the classic strains that will always be pre-eminent in Christian worship, most notably a Triune emphasis and a body of language that is mainly made up of Scripture.

That is why I am hung up on worship.

The lion and the lamb

Tomorrow night I am going to be preaching through Revelation chapter 5.  We went through chapter 4 last week, so I am excited being able to preach these chapters back to back.  Earlier I posted about how there is simply to much information in both chapters to really go through in one night.  Looking at my previous notes, here is a list of what I will try to cover.

-The Lion and the Lamb
-What does it mean by saying these are "new songs"
-The idea of Worthy

The church is also getting rid of our old tape based system of recording sermons and using a laptop to record straight to Audacity (the best free two track editor out).  What that means is I may post the audio here. 

Thanks to everyone for putting up with all of the Revelation posts recently.