For years, my job when selecting the response song after the sermon was simple: match the message.If the pastor preached on grace, I'd pick a song about grace. If the sermon was about surrender, I'd find something that felt like surrender. The criteria was the content of the sermon —...
For most of my early years leading worship, I planned by feel.I'd think about the sermon topic, pick songs that matched, and arrange them in whatever order felt right. Fast song to open, something quieter to settle people down, a reflective song before the preacher stepped up. Emotional pacing —...
There's a feeling I've had in certain services that I've never quite known how to name.It's not boredom, exactly. It's more like waiting. You're sitting in the service — or standing at the front — and somewhere in the back of your mind is the sense that the real thing...
There's a moment in rehearsal that I've learned to dread.You're working through a new song with the worship team — one that's genuinely beautiful, technically demanding, harmonically interesting. The musicians are locked in. The vocalists are tight. And then you step back and realize: no one in a congregation is...
I still remember the first time I sat through a worship service and didn't understand a word.It wasn't ancient history. It was my mid-twenties, traveling in a country where I didn't speak the language. A friend had invited me to his church, and I said yes without thinking through what...
There's a document called the Didache. Most Christians have never heard of it, which is part of what makes it interesting.It's a short manual — some kind of handbook for new Christian communities — written somewhere around the end of the first century. Maybe earlier. Scholars argue. Early enough to...
Sometime I came across a line that stopped me mid-page. It was in a history of early Christian worship, and the author mentioned — almost in passing — that for the first three centuries of the church, Christians had no purpose-built church buildings. None. For most of that time, no...