Let the peoples praise You O God, let all the peoples praise You! -Psalm 67
Inspiring, enriching, vision-giving, moving us to character, spirituality, joy, wisdom, mission, ministry…
Worship is hugely important! Our chief purpose is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever! “To glorify and enjoy” can happen anywhere and everywhere, but especially during gathered, corporate worship.
...our consuming passion is to worship the Triune God in spirit and in truth, with excellence and creativity, passion and authenticity, and with an ever-deepening understanding of Who God is, who He has created, and what purpose He wants to fill us with.
One of the ways that we worship our Lord is through singing and music. Every week, we sing together a lot, and we do it for many reasons: to honor and exalt our Creator and Savior, to encourage and admonish one another, to prepare our hearts to receive the Gospel, and to respond to the stirrings of the Holy Spirit in our hearts.
Every Sunday, the music is led by a small cadre of musicians from the front of the room. Although we are up front with microphones and amplified instruments, our goal is to be “invisible” – eliminating all distractions, and allowing God’s Spirit to flow through us, bringing glory to Himself, and drawing people into a tangible, life-altering experience of His presence. In our worship, we utilize music that spans hundreds of years of the church’s story, and we work carefully to balance relevant, inspirational music styles with profound theological truths.
Music leadership/team is always “on mission.” It is our chief purpose in all of life to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. The worship team believes that it is our job, our calling, and our privilege to be the accompanists to the worship choir--which is the gathered congregation. We try to play our instruments and sing with our voices in such a way that we can lead the gathered worshippers and, at the same time, get out of the way of the worshippers. Though the quality and excellence of the music is extremely important to us (we want to offer God our best!), we are equally concerned with becoming the kind of people whose lives bring worship to God. We aspire to be a team who lives out what we sing and what we play.
In our society, you don’t have to look far to find people engaged in passionate "worship." You can observe them at any major sporting event, rock concert, or political campaign rally. Millions of people are "worshiping" in movie theaters, shopping malls, casinos, cafes, and classrooms. Worship is everywhere, and it’s happening all the time, all around us. That’s because worship is what we were created to do.
The challenge for Christians is to learn how to refocus and redirect our worship, making God the most important thing in our lives.
When the Apostle Paul visited Athens, he recognized that the Greeks were “very religious in every way”; they were already worshipers, but the objects of their worship were pagan idols. When he came upon an altar dedicated to “an unknown god,” Paul took advantage of the opportunity to tell the Athenians about Jesus Christ, who was the very God they had already been worshiping as “unknown”!
We recognize that true worship is both a personal and a corporate experience. We understand that worship is essentially a response to God’s romantic advances toward us. The key to true worship is simply acknowledging Who God is and what He is already doing in our lives, and giving back to Him what is already His … our schedules, our relationships, our passions, and our very lives.
As we preach, read the Word, pray, sing, give, and share the Lord’s Supper together, we are following Christ’s example of turning our eyes toward heaven, and acknowledging the Father’s place upon the throne of our lives. Preaching, singing, giving, receiving … it’s all worship. And as we worship, we are changed to be more like Him.
There’s a “seamlessness” to our ministries of music, worship, discipleship, preaching, and mission—all of them are stitched together with purpose.