Welcome to the Worship Essentials Network blog! I hope to publish a few thoughts here that might be helpful to my fellow worship ministry travelers every week or so.
If you were a subscriber to the WorshipLife blog I wrote for Lifeway Worship back in the day, you’ll remember this space usually explored some recent experience or spiritual reality I was dealing with at the time. I wrote out of the space of what I was living.
I don’t expect this blog will be any different.
But I do expect the content to be totally different because what I am living right now is nothing like any of the life experiences that have come before. At the end of August in 2023, I stepped away from leading a worship ministry in a church full-time to relocate nearer our family with the hopes I can somehow use these years of experience to help worship ministries and leaders of all kinds. So far, it’s been quite the adventure with no clue as to how it’s going to go in 2024.
Stepping away from gainful employment has revealed some interesting things about myself. Here are the top three:
It was easier to be generous when I knew I had new income coming.
I found more of my identity in what I was doing than I wanted to admit.
My professed trust in God had some conditions I was not fully aware of.
There is more, but I think you get the point. My next three blogs are going to unpack each one of these.
Now, I may not be working through a curriculum that will end in another degree to put on the wall, but make no mistake, I’m back in school.
One of my favorite pastors, Tommy Vinson, used to say, “You never fail God’s tests – He just keep giving them to you over and over until you learn what He’s teaching you.”
Sharpen the pencils, roll up your sleeves, and turn down the noise.
School is back in session.
