WorshipTraining

After you’ve done the assignments for Part 1 (they are posted to your right) please post a response to the following question:

In what ways does your faith community currently embody the values of 1) Intimacy and 2) Integrity in your worship expressions? How are these values reflected in your own life as a leader?

Please keep paragraphs to a maximum of 5 lines long and keep the entire post to a maximum of 250 words (about 20 lines of text). Keeping it short will allow more people to read your post and get some discussion going.

@ meriwitmer week 1
I applaud you in your daily habit of spending time in the Word. It’s easy to get distracted with doing the ministry and yet our daily time is the foundation.

Thinking of worship as the giving of our whole selves to God I see intimacy and integrity through the prayer times and practical reaching out that is done among our church body. We are a small congregation and it is wonderful to see small clusters of individuals praying with one another while at the same time it would be common to see ones reaching out to a guest or an elderly person.
As a worship leader I make it a daily habit to spend a time each day in the word and in prayer. I am daily asking the Lord for wisdom and humility in leading worship. It is his time not mine.

This really was a tough question for me and I have taken quite some time to reflect on it. I didn’t want my first response to be a quick judgment. Our community has struggled with intimacy and being vulnerable with each other and that bothers me. But with reflecting God has shown me glimpses of this in our community.

I started to pray for our church family to allow God to do what he would love to do in our lives and that we could share our pain and sorrow but and joy with one another. As I have seen this vulnerability come out the integrity. People honoring what God is doing in their lives.

God is amazing! HE really will draw us close to him and let us see is family through His eyes. For me personally it has been a journey for me to let people see everything but God has shown me his compassion through others in amazing ways. For this I am truly thankful and humbled day to day.

@jholmes193

I can totally relate with you on the issue of time. Our service is an hour and a half long but 30 minutes of it are devoted to a time of fellowship and welcoming. That leaves only an hour for service. Which ends up being about 5 songs a week.

I’m realizing it is a real struggle to create a time of intimacy with God when your time to worship is so short. About once a month or so our entire church congregation has a night of worship where there is about an hour and 15 minutes of straight singing and worship. And it is different from the last one almost every time. And I realized that THOSE are deeply refreshing and intimate times of worship that I really savor.

Some of the time can be made up in what songs you pick and how you present them which is a struggle for me to do and I hope that you can start doing that more effectively (with God’s help).

As I was reading the material and watching the videos on intimacy I started to think about how the worship with my community is not actually that intimate. Or at least the group of students that I lead. This made me somewhat sad as I realized intimacy with God in worship is really what it’s all about. That the end result of our worship is to connect deeply and spiritually with out Maker.

However, it also made me want to start working towards helping create that intimate feeling with God in my student community. As someone is not deeply emotional in how I interact with people, leading in a way that helps create this sense of intimacy is somewhat foreign to me. But nevertheless I am realizing that it is 100% essential to a real time of worship. As to how I will start helping this along I am somewhat unsure but I know I need to be relating to people on a personal level and picking songs that speak individually to people.

This study also made me reflect on those times in my life where I have experienced those times of intimacy with God in a worship setting. And it made me realize how hungry I am for those experiences. The genuineness and reality are overwhelming and intoxicating (in a good way!).

As for integrity, I feel this is a bigger part of our worship experience. God has blessed our community with many people who have a lot of integrity and deeply want to serve the Lord. Integrity isn’t something that is easily visible all of the time but it is something that as you get to know someone you realize is either a large part of their relationship with God or not.

In my life as a leader I am constantly striving to live a life of integrity. And that often means giving things up. That is a part of everyone’s integrity but being a leader has pushed me to set the bar even higher and to try and be somewhat of an example.

I apologize that this is way to long but I had a lot to say!

My faith community worships in a facility where time is a factor. We have to pack everything into a one-hour time slot on Sunday morning. I feel that because each part of the service is short, it is a hindrance to us and does not give us time to create the space for most worshippers to reveal themselves intimately before God.
I feel that our church could really grow in the value of intimacy. Our choir always prays together before rehearsal on Wednesday and after warm-up on Sunday. With God’s help I would like to see a stronger value of intimacy overall. I want to do my part to nurture this value.
Integrity is highly valued and embodied in our community. One can see and feel from our leaders that they are living and sharing with others the life they speak and sing about.
I love to worship and I have to hold myself back sometimes and remember that it is not about me. Intimacy is easy and often for me. I am on this Christian journey and by no means perfect, but by God’s grace, I strive to keep my life clean.
I can improve on the personal time I spend with Him, and I will. I bow before Him on Sunday mornings before I step foot into the church to lead, understanding that I can’t lead without Him. So, if I don’t fully worship there, I already have.

@plohrmann I agree with your comments about the importance of an accountability partner. I have partnered with a few guys throughout the years as prayer partners, and have also experience great Bible study and prayer times with fellow staff members. Those relationships are very important in maintaining a life of both intimacy and integrity with God.

The most intimate times in our church’s life are probably the informal midweek prayer gatherings. Individuals are able to share words of praise, testimony or prayer needs with the congregation, underscored by soft instrumental music that then segues into a musical worship time.

Integrity in worship is expressed, I believe, as we corporately adopt mission-efforts, thus putting feet to the things we say we believe and the songs we sing. This is something our worship choir has recently begun to contemplate as well – we are looking for specific ways that we as a choir can physically minister the gospel in our community, thereby bringing a new authenticity and life to our musical worship leadership in the church.

In my own life, I simply strive to prioritize the private worship moments between me and God during the week, so that when I lead worship publicly, it is an outflow and extension of my daily worship habit. The words of Dan Wilt in the media article, “How to Lead Worship” resounded with me: “If your personal life is empty, and your interior life is smaller than your exterior life, your worship leadership will resonate a striving soul behind the songs.”

@dpierce, I always enjoy reading your posts. I liked what you said about intimacy and integrity in worship. I would agree that our congregations have not been taught to associate emotion and vulnerability in worship. As you said, to truly approach God, we must move out of our comfort zones.