Worshipping after the Riots - Audio
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
It's good to be with you today. We've been in a series on the book of Ephesians, and we're in chapter 5, but things are pretty practical now. It's pushing on us a little bit. Some of the messages have been a little bit uncomfortable because they've been saying stuff to us, telling us how it is, what it should be like. Last week we talked a little bit about evangelism, what that looks like after the riots, and we'll talk more about what the riots are in a little bit, but this week we're zeroing in on worship, on music, on praise, and what that looks like after the riots. I don't know if you guys know this, but the person, did you know who has the worst job in our church? Do you know who's got the job that nobody wants, it's the pits, it's no fun. Anybody know? No, no, it's not me. My job's cake. I only show up once a week, I mean, it's a joke in me, but there is one person who has a rough goal of it. I know because I did this person's job for several years, really from about 2005 to 2009. When I got back from Japan, the church was going through a little bit of a transition, and one of the things that was needed was somebody with musical gift to lead the worship. And no one was here who could do it, so they gave it to me instead. Disastrous for four years, I can't believe you stuck with us. I'm so blessed that you did though. It's just a rough job. And the difference between me and Doug is that Doug's talented. So he's got like a gift, imagine what it was like for me, like, "Ahh, it was tough." Yeah, no, Doug has the worst job in our church. He does. It doesn't get worse than Doug's job. Because music is a flashpoint, it's constant, like, "Ugh." The reasons for this are many, but a lot of it has to do with style, right? Like you have your style, I have my style, I listen, when I'm not here, I'm listening to hardcore metal music or something like that, and you're listening to gospel. And so we're going to come together and try and have music here that works. It's hard, really. It's really difficult. And then churches in our area, churches around the North America and the United States, they have a lot of different ways of dealing with this problem, right? So if you have a ton of resources, if your church is just spilling out the door with a filthy leuker, one of the things that you do is they'll have churches where there's different pods, right, where you go to, like, the pod that has, like, kind of contemporary '90s worship. So if you're really in a Michael W. Smith, you can go there and listen to his songs. And then if you really, really love the Australians and the Brits, you can have, like, the Hillsong pod, where they'll have songs, a lot of songs that we actually sing here. If you're more into, like, kind of a spirit-filled, almost really charismatic, befels-style, commit-level pod for that. And so you'll go to these pods and you'll sing the songs there with a live band there, and then you'll either go to a large, you know, worship center for the sermon, or the sermon will be piped to you on video in the room that you're at so that we can hit everyone's
Transcription truncated.
In his message on Ephesians 5:18-20, Pastor Tom discusses worship as counterpropaganda, illustrating how it becomes internalized, producing propaganda-proof people that recognize and reject the lies of popular culture.