A Posture of the Heart

I found this the Facebook page of a worship leader that I have liked for a long time - Jami Smith.

"Do we sing songs to God or about God? Vertical or horizontal? I think we need a healthy blend of both. Worship is a posture of the heart. If you can’t worship with hymns, there’s a heart problem. If you can’t worship without music, there’s a heart problem. If you need “I Can Only Imagine” to be able to worship, there’s a heart problem. You need to be able to worship with a song that maybe you’ve never heard before. Your heart has to want to connect with God to the point that even if you don’t know the song, you’re going to read the lyrics and listen to it and take it in anyway. There’s no difference in the way your heart responds. Otherwise, if you need your favorite worship song to worship, well then maybe you’re worshipping that song.

About five to six years into worship leading, I hit a period of time when I couldn’t go to church and worship. I was critiquing everything. Oh, that was a cool transition. Oh, what chords is he playing? (I’m all focused on his hands.” That’s a neat idea, let’s try that. I couldn’t worship. God was going, “This is supposed to be about Me, and you can’t separate the leader who wants to have good ideas and do a good job in worship from the one who just wants to worship Me in church.” I found I could go o a Catholic mass and worship more fully. That was out of my world, so I could just focus on Jesus."

It has challenged me to think about my posture of worship. And I hope it makes you stop and think, as well...

Refreshing

Check this out! A very cool way to "do" church. They get it!

Commissioning

For my family...and anyone else who it interested. Here are the pictures and video from my commissioning.

Missions Festival

I took this directly from an email from my pastors but it got me excited about what God is doing in and through Westwind Church and I just wanted to share it with you all! Our Missions Festival was amazing and it truly gave us a picture of unity of purpose in the Body of Christ in several ways. Our pastors stepped aside to let others bring God's Word to us two weeks in a row, God provided so we could bring in a missionary from Brazil (my teammate) to share with us one of those Sundays, Cornerstone Church (as you'll see below) allowed their pastor to come speak to us one Sunday and they also brought workers down to work in every ministry area so all our people could be a part of the service that day. To me, that is true biblical unity. We ARE all in this together!! There is no loner Christian or loner church in this endeavor! I just cannot say enough about Westwind……if you live in the Des Moines area and you do not have a church home please come check us out. It's a simple church…..but God is truly at work there! We will also be taking our church's first missions trip this summer to Rosebud (June 20-27) and I can't wait to see how God works in people hearts and lives as a result of some of us going out of our comfort zone!

Here are some highlights from my pastor's email:

"What an incredible month Westwind has experienced in February! Not only has God added people to our Celebration Service (we had 202 people present on Sunday), but he has ignited a passion for missional living in the hearts of our worshipping community. Some of the highlights of our first Missions Festival are:

1. Commissioning our very first missionary, Amy Miller
2. Including our children in a heart for giving through our globe banks
3. Being introduced to Kevin and Pat Mayer, missionaries for Crossworld
4. Partnering with Cornerstone Church, who brought workers in every ministry area on February 8
5. Our World Buffet which fed over 120 people with different tastes from around the globe.
6. Hearing inspiring messages from Jeff Dodge and Shane Latham
7. Singing in Portuguese
8. A focus on missional living at our Connection Groups
9. Experiencing our first Commitment Sunday in which people pledged to our 2009-10 missions budget
10. Realizing that we are taking the first steps to never letting the sun set on our work around the world."

I will write more about my Commissioning later and, hopefully, be able to upload some pics and video from that day.