Josh Friend

Finding ways of connecting Scripture and culture in worship.

Can pop culture be redeemed for Christian purposes? This is a question often asked by worship leaders.

It may come as a surprise to some of us that the Holy Spirit does not take a day off. Thankfully, the Holy Spirit works on Tuesday as well as he does on Sunday mornings. Even the Tuesday a week before. Or a month before.

Rest is fleeting. Rest is fleeting not like a vapor or a memory, rest is fleeting like the next rung on the monkey bars—you know it, you can see it, but it seems never to be in grasp.

Rest is fleeting as we sit beside our over-weary child, up past bed time, while we respond to a facebook post, while Jimmy Fallon laughs at his own joke and we feign to find the rest that our bodies have been asking for all day. Not just asking for—banging on the door for. Rest has been begging for you to find it.

You can’t. Just accept it. It isn’t the role of the worship leader, worship coordinator, worship pastor or solo pastor to craft worship in such a way that makes everyone happy. This is impossible. When you try to make everyone happy, you end up making nobody happy. Yet, crafting inclusive worship is the most important thing that we can do for our churches.

This is the Golden Rule of radio. People like listening to songs that they know because of the feelings and emotions that came with hearing the song the first time all come rushing back. Most every couple can point to ‘their song’, maybe the first one they ever danced to or the one playing when she walked down the aisle. We have songs that are special to our churches too; the one sung when the last pastor retired, when you celebrated the Jubilee Anniversary of the building you meet in and sang ‘Great is Thy Faithfulness’.

Worship is Work

Worship is a verb. It requires work. Work in preparing all sorts of elements with moving parts including many people. Can it ever be perfect?

In the harmony of a musical triad, the first-third-fifth of the chord, we may have the closest human experience to perfection that we can encounter on this side of heaven. There seems to be an achievable perfection in music. You can even measure it if you have something reading sound waves and frequencies to confirm ‘perfection’.