Music and the Arts in Worship – Lorn’s Seminary Project

April is typically the month of Graduation from many of our fine Canadian post-secondary institutions. What isn’t typical is that I am one of the graduates. On Saturday April 25th, I will be walking across the platform once again. I’m finally graduating from seminary. I’m very thankful for the experience, and to see God continue to teach me and grow me through Godly instructors.

So with that in mind, it seemed like a good time to share my final paper with the church. It’s already up on the Canadian Centre for Worship Studies website. If you click on the link below it’ll send you to it. Just a warning, it may take more than one sitting to get through it.

http://www.ccws.ca/musicandthearts/

Lead pastor Blog I.IV

In our spiritual journey there is always another level to ascend. Our journey actually begins long before we ever encounter Christ in a personal relationship. We are just unaware of the Holy Spirit’s gentle work in our life. However once we truly do enter into that personal relationship with Christ we embark upon a life-long journey of learning and growing…..or at least we should.

What I mean is that in all honesty we have many individuals who have encountered Christ and somehow decided that was all they really needed to do. They may have prayed a prayer or went forward at an event or in some way engaged the God of the universe out of a sense of their own personal need.  That was and is great but it is only a start.

One of the exciting things about our relationship with Christ on earth is that it can never be saturated. We literally can never get to a point where we say that is all there is when it comes to knowing/walking with God. No one has ever learned everything you can learn from God. No one has ever walked as close to God as it is possible to walk with Him. No one has ever trusted God to the point where we could say it is impossible to trust him more. Do you see where I am going with this?

The challenge is to keep on casting the vision for the people so that we collectively as well as individually catch the vision to go further in our walk with God.  I do not understand why we would ever stop at the great news that God loves us and sent His Son to die on our behalf to forgive us our sins.  That first slice of good news is only the start of the whole pie.  Keep cutting yourself another piece of the good news God has to share with you.  We could spend a life time just meditating on the basic truth that God loves us and we could keep going to new levels of understanding that truth.

If you are bored in your walk with God something is awry.  If you can’t get excited about trusting the God who created the universe we see as well as who knows what we can’t see then something is amiss.  Perhaps it is time to just pray a basic prayer: God shock me out of my lethargy.  The Christian life is anything except boring.  There is so much to see, feel, experience, understand, grasp, search and on and on it goes.

Are you with me?

Prayers of Kids

One night at Tidal Wave we were talking about prayer and there were a number of stations the kids went to.  One station was just where they wrote out their prayers.  Here were a few of them…

“Dear God, I wish for a hamctr (hamster)”

“Dear God, I am so happy that when I prayed for the girl at my school to stop bullying people and she did”

“Dear God, Thank you for people so taht they could make the stuff I like so much and thank you for imaginasons (imaginations) so people could invent music, skating, books, mitns and everything else. but I think we could do without war, fighting, hatred and other bad stuff that imaginations created.”

We just thought that they were too interesting not to share!

Jessica