But the title of this post says “Order of Worship,” doesn’t it? Well I think this is an area I’ve been learning much lately- the intersection of the worship leader’s personal life and the structure of the main Sunday worship service.  On one hand, you don’t want the Sunday to be a 1:1 representation of everything a worship leader has experienced that week.  But the truth of the matter is that God has ordained people to lead His people, and people go through stuff.  If God has ordained a pastor of any sort, there’s going to be some carry-over, and if we don’t affirm what God is doing with us, we could miss out on what God has been doing through us.  And being a leader, we have some sort of responsibility of making this known. So it can be tricky, and I’m still learning, but there’s some kind of intersection here.

And that’s where the title of this post comes in to play.  When setting up this worship service, I am still working through all that God has taught me, and here’s how I’m trying to keep my feet in both arenas. In the scriptures read and the songs sung, I’m trying to bring home the idea that we must experience God’s love- and this love reaches deeper than what we give credit for.  When we realize and experience His love, we are now able to take this to others. This is my attempt to navigate those waters this Sunday:

Call to Worship: Psalm 8 and its focus on God’s glory shining brightest when we have our glory.

Song: Famous One
Reading: Psalm 139:1-5, In our darkest moments, God is able to spend an infinite amount of time to bring restoration to our most broken parts.
Confession: from the 1689 London Baptist Confession, on prayer.
Song: Come, Ye Sinners
Song: The Power of the Cross
Reading: Matthew 11:28-30, Come stand before Jesus who is our rest that penetrates to all parts of our being.
Songs: Here I Am to Worship / Famous One reprise

Offertory: There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood (I didn’t pick this, but it worked out great!)

Sermon Text: John 4:1-15 (The Woman at the Well)
Sermon Theme: Because Jesus Christ came into the world on a saving mission for nothing less than the whole world, we should come to know His Messiah by faith and to make him known with winsome zeal.

Response in Song: Let My Words Be Few, standing in the presence of an awesome God.

One of my surprises was that, even though it was written in 1897 and is a kind of allegory of the Christian life, in many places it is subtle and not a slap-you-in-the-face-with-the-author’s-ideas type of thing.  There are other books that I read that inspire me and resonate deeply within me- the Lord of the Rings trilogy by Tolkien, C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce, among others.  And Dracula is right up there with them.

Count Dracula is kind of an anti-Jesus.  Jesus came from above, Dracula comes from the ground. Jesus came to bring light to men, Dracula comes to bring darkness.  Jesus and Dracula have power over nature- Jesus uses it to calm the seas, Dracula uses it to create disruption.  Jesus came that we may be clean, Dracula seeks to infect people with death.  Jesus’ blood brings life, Dracula’s blood brings death.  And the list could go on and on.

Another interesting aspect of the book involves those who are confronted with Dracula.  They are all strong, Christian people with separate lives that each could easily retreat to.  But even the strong believer experiences pain and struggle.  And they cannot turn away from this darkness or act as if it never existed.  They pursue it to end the darkness, though it may cost them their lives.  And they each have a uniqueness that the others don’t have, they each have their specific role in conquering this inhuman evil.

There will be more specific posts on this in the future, and I’ve planned on writing an EP inspired by the novel, so far there are 2 songs written.  I’ll also be posting those in the future as well.

If one were to analyze (over-analyze?) this piece, these would be my thoughts (but I didn’t go into this piece wanting to create this idea, this is kind of me attempting to analyze my work as if I’ve never heard it before, post-production):

The guitar riff could be seen as our life- we start out with no memory or experiences, become mature and (some drums enter) create memories and experiences.  As we progress in life, it does get more complicated (adding the second group of drums), and though we are still ourselves (the guitar riff unchanging throughout), the overall total melody is different.  As we grow older and older, aspects of life might not be as complicated for we can sort out and discern experiences better, but remnants of our past experiences stay with us (back to the simplified drum beat with reverb).  Then, when our life is over (the guitar stops), our experiences and memories live on after us with those who we’ve had these experiences with.

[See post to listen to audio]

An aspect of holy war that I think is interesting is God’s use of means.  During the exodus, God is the one fighting the Egyptians, throwing the waters over their chariots.  But later on Israel gets direction on how to carry out holy war. When the Israelites attack the Amalekites, God uses Israel to do the actual fighting.  The victory in both examples (against the Egyptians, against the Amalekites) depends on faith in God.  So the ends stay the same- God determines the outcome, but in holy war, God uses Israel to carry out His purposes.

This can really help to inform us on our freedom.  We often think that freedom is living without constraints (hello, Sartre) but true freedom needs limits.  True freedom is being able to express who who really are.  If we are in love with someone, we feel free, free to be who we are without reservation.  But this love does put contraints upon us, we now think of the other person and their needs sometimes at our expense.  We have constraints and limits, but limits in themselves don’t necessarily inhibit freedom- indeed, they can free us.

Freedom has no better illustration than in jazz.  There will be plenty of posts in the future about our freedom and jazz music (hello, Begbie).  But here’s the basic idea: the soloist has room to create music when proper limits are put upon him/her. Limits such as tempo, tone, rhythm, key, etc.  There will be more specific posts on this to come.

So let’s not think that boundaries are fundamentally opposed to freedom.  If one does not have boundaries, one doesn’t care about anything, and actions must all be arbitrary.  But if one has the right boundaries, one is free to be who they are.

And God actually wants this- he ordains this use of means to carry out His end.  We have creative power to build up His kingdom.  Although it might be lacking in emphasis, this is the common reformed and Calvinist view of our lives.  God ordains the ends, yes, and he also ordains us to carry out the means.

So holy war and music might have more in common than what we think.

This is not just a funny juxtaposition, but I believe contemporary Christianity can learn a lot from the past hymns and current death metal.  Today during my chapel talk at my school, I was going through Psalm 51.  In this psalm, David takes some time dwelling on his sin- the first 5 or 6 verses are just filled with darkness and despair and grief over his current condition. For example, in verse 3 he writes, “my sin is ever before me.”

In the contemporary church when we talk about sin, we don’t often leave much room before going to forgiveness.  How often do we dwell on our sin, realize that it is “ever before us”? Probably not too often.  Instead of bringing up forgiveness as if the word was connected to death or sin, I think we would do well to dwell on our humanity- our fallen, dirty, disgusting humanity.

The main reason for this is not morbidity in itself, but it is to see how far down in the pit we really are- because of that, how far down our Savior had to reach to get us out of the pit, ultimately we see a Savior bigger than one who is applying band-aids.  He’s providing life to the dying- to those who are dead.

And dwelling on the cross in all its wretchedness gives us a picture of the length our Savior went to secure a people of his own.  We love the fluorescent-lighted, happy-grinning, thumbs-up giving Jesus, not the down-trodden, spat-upon, cross-bearing, bleeding Jesus. We (myself included) can easily turn Christ’s death on the cross into a joke.  By recognizing its bloody reality, we get the real picture of hope- the death of death in the death of Christ (probably the coolest name for a book ever).

So let’s learn from death metal, as we above all people get hope from something that seems hopeless- death and spilled blod. And go out there and do a hardcore version of “There is a Fountain Filled with Blood.”

I was getting annoyed at having multiple sites for a single personality, I had photo.gregwillson, blog.gregwillson, then gregwillson.com.  One of the cool aspects of these multiple sites was to be able to mess with more than one design, but this was just too nutty, and I wanted to create more of a centralized site. Now everything is gregwillson.com/music or gregwillson.com/photodesign, etc.  This will hopefully make more sense for everyone and be easier for me to keep track of as well as force me to be more cohesive in my design ideas. I also didn’t like splitting up my music and my thoughts, as they have always been close together in my mind, so maybe this will create some cool crossover.

As for the two and a hal years of old posts, this is an attempt to start afresh! Looking back at when I first started doing the blogging thing, I really had no idea what I wanted to do, I just knew I wanted to do something.  This new design is not just cosmetic: the focus will be on theology, music and their intersecting paths.  Of course I’ll be adding personal stuff and random stuff, too, but there is a real trajectory now.  And if you are really itching to look at some old blog post, you can go to the butt-ugly old site here: gregwillson.com/old.  Additionally, for what I think are some more important posts, like the musical compositions dealing with theology through music, they might end up on the Resources page (which isn’t done yet).  Actually, not a lot of things are done yet, but as long as Tropical Storm Fay keeps me at home and out of work, I just might get a functional site up sometime soon.

If you have any thoughts or ideas for the site, I’d love to know!

2 options: 1- get bit by an existing zombie and become undead. 2- buy some clothes from local thrift store (recommended).

Prepare your instruments of destruction: hammer, pocket knife, lighter, scissors and Dremel tool (not pictured). Must use game face.

Don’t forget to play dress-up! Uh, I mean, figure out where your destruction will occur. Or something.

Some before and after shots of zombie destruction.

Don’t forget your claw marks in there. Use liberal amounts of your favorite shade of red paint for blood. And you can’t forget the makeup…

…or the fellow undead.

Now spend countless hours learning the dance to Thriller, rewrite the lyrics to create an ironically funny song about the end times (including nerdy tribulation jokes), and act like a fool for your entire church:

And because you want another angle:

I’m sure there will be more pictures/video to come.

[See post to listen to audio]

[See post to listen to audio]

[See post to listen to audio]