Definitive
Posted by chrispope | Filed under Uncategorized
Down 3 runs in the bottom of the ninth, two outs, bases loaded: it’s the set up every little boy dreams when he is imagining his future glory. He is always the batter in the sticky situation, ready to take the big swing, connect, and win the game. But what about the other 3 guys on base? What about the pitching change in the seventh that saved another run? What about every little thing that happened in the rest of the game?
Life-defining moments happen more often than we realize. It is more familiar to hear people recollect one decision, one circumstance, one moment that defined a life. We talk about songs that defined a generation, a person who defined an era, an action the decided a decade, or any cut-and-dry instance that cause such ripples that would turn into waves. But I contest that these big happenstances are not what depicts change, rather they indicate change.
These exact moments seem to be apexes more often than turning points. Especially in 21st century America, we delight in talking about how much can happen from so little, and it isn’t surprising that this is the social atmosphere created. I have a lazy generation; we would rather inherit than earn. Our focus is no longer on the process but instead the product. Oddly enough, I see this in football very clearly. Coaches and teams that are focused on process are still confident in failures and humble in victories. If you travel the road of growth and development you won’t encounter much traffic; the highway of achievement-focus is polluted and congested with most people.
Christians look for this immediate, revolutionary moment in their life too, and with better reason. Belief in Christ instantaneously justifies a believer. The work is completed. Where we falter is in the walk of sanctification. Take note that while the cross was the final act, Jesus made every little step in route important. Our lives, marriages, jobs, friendships, and every thing in between is defined by how we act in the small moments. It’s the little things that change the compass so that the big events can happen.
We need to focus on every aspect of our lives. We can’t survive off the high moment and assume the ecstasy will sustain us until the next high. Instead we need to be good stewards of the small things so that we can be good stewards of the big ones.
Point of Music
Posted by chrispope | Filed under Uncategorized
Somebody pointed out an interesting article to me recently about church worship music. The basis of the article was to bash contemporary-style music; the only purpose of modern church music or a “rock” sound was to get people in the door. The article continued to state that the use of “I”, “us”, or “we” takes away from the purpose of the music of bringing God glory.
Largely, I agree with the article, which I may post later. The primary purpose of our church worship music is to glorify God, absolutely. But I have a couple thoughts on the matter, especially since we do the contemporary “rock” music at City Church.
1. A style of music does not define if it glorifies God. It isn’t that country and Way FM glorifies God, but rock doesn’t. Sinatra does, Cash doesn’t. This is the same line of thought that produces legalism: that only certain forms glorify God rather than a heart behind it. I don’t care if you play reggae, dub-step, or scream-o (but if you do, make sure I’m not around), if your heart behind it is to glorify God, then I think God accepts that. Worship isn’t a “show” issue, it is a heart issue. See Rom 12:1-2 and let me know if worship is exclusive to hymns.
2. The article pointed that the lyrical content should be Scriptural, about Scriptural truth, or singing Bible verses. I agree, but I think there is a disconnect from Scriptural truth and contemporary music. Just because it is modern doesn’t mean it is not Scriptural. If that is the case, pastors shouldn’t tell personal stories to open sermons or use modern-day parallels to better explain Biblical principles. Jesus came in a time period where is parables made sense, his clothes and occupation were uninspiring, and his relationships applicable. If Jesus came today, he would speak the language of his location, he would wear the clothes of his culture, and he would talk in parables that were of today. Through divine means, Jesus spoke in ways that still make sense today, but our culture is different. Contemporary music done well in church BOTH portrays Scripture as well as interacts with current culture.
3. To think that using certain words would minimize the glory of God is ridiculous. Singing “Give me Faith” or “I need you” doesn’t minimize the glory of God, but rather, in a Luther-esque approach, minimizing ourselves often maximizes God’s status in our lives. If we individually worship an audience of one, God, then why not state our brokenness? We do in prayer. There are songs of lamentation biblically. Depravity should be a part of every Christian’s vocabulary to some extent.
In the same way, art, dance, and music can all be worship. So can our jobs, relationships, and families. God never intended worship to be exclusive to hymns up to the 1700s, nor contemporary rock, nor just Sunday mornings. By stunting ecclesiology growth we fail to best reach 2012 by reverting to the early 1800s church culture. We believe in everlasting truth, ever-changing culture. Traditional isn’t better than contemporary. Nor is contemporary better than traditional. We can’t constrain what is acceptable to God. Only He can.
Local Church
Posted by chrispope | Filed under Uncategorized
The local church is the answer that the new testament gave for the world. Jesus gave His sermon on the mount not to one person, but to a body of people.
One of our pillars at City Church Tallahassee is “In community, not alone”. The Christian life was intended to be shared in fellowship in a community. While this does include Christian community, it is not exclusive to it. Our community, if meant to be a “light on a hill” needs to be seen in public. We should engage our local environment, especially non-Christians. Why? Because Jesus did.
Being in community means that the directives given to Christians, those adopted by God, sons of God, and all the like are for all believers, and, all believers should be in church community locally. If someone is saying they don’t like any church and don’t think you have to be in church to be a Christian, they are ignoring directives from the Book of Acts. Church is a good thing, so is church structure. We need to understand the commands the Bible gives for Christians (church members) and church leaders.
But it still seems exclusive. People think you can be a Christian and not a member of a church. While you may not be a member of a church for a season (season=5 Christian cred points), you should be seeking to engage, join, and serve a local church body. The whole “die to yourself daily” thing doesn’t really correlate with executing personal preference.
We should seek to live a life that mirrors Jesus, not ourselves. That means that our “hard-wiring” to be introverted, be only around comfortable Christian community, or be only around partying non-Christians is really a sin nature and not the intent God has for our lives. We aren’t called to convenience, but called to perfection.
Check out this awesome article by Kevin DeYoung, a reformed pastor from Michigan on Justification and Sanctification.
Scrutiny
Posted by chrispope | Filed under Uncategorized
Everyone’s a critic; you can’t escape it. Look at Tim Tebow. In Tallahassee, among Christian circles, he is the most polarizing figure possibly in America. At the heart of it, people choose their hate for UF over their love for Christ. Does it boil down to much more? Practically, Florida State football supersedes God. But in Tallahassee, or potentially any college town, this is the big trial. How can you turn the eyes of a man from one thing to the cross? We preach. Not just our local pastor, but each called to follow Jesus.
Now consider yourself. I would say that you choose something meaningless over God often. Being in leadership involving church music, I see this all the time. Everyone who has ever listened to the radio thinks they have superior music knowledge. Everyone in the audience has an opinion on the music, and sadly it will often dictate where someone goes to church. This is retarded. How are you going to choose something of eternal significance just by how a church band plays “In Christ Alone”? We are excited at the talent and musician pool we have at City Church, but realize our central and primary focus is to lead people to sing praise and support our pastor in pointing people to the cross.
Thankfully, music isn’t the only area of worship, regardless of how we speak like it is. But regardless of your calling, you will receive scrutiny. I would say that scrutiny isn’t a bad thing, depending on where it is coming from. If it is from a Pharisee, I’d say you are doing your job. Religious people tend to get pissed off and jealous at Christ working through someone that isn’t themselves. Judge your scrutiny and pick who’s opinions you trust.
Hire Slow. Fire Fast.
Posted by chrispope | Filed under Uncategorized
This is a saying that Dean has said regarding dating relationships often. When we enter into a relationship, we should spend good deal of time exploring it before we commit and “hire”. We also must avoid hesitation to get out of negative relationships and “fire”. I agree with all this advice about relationships, and wish that I wasn’t a hard-way-student of life.
I also wish I could apply the notion of “Hire slow, fire fast” to other aspects of life, especially future planning. I always seem to misuse goals/plans/dream and create them into synonyms. I forge a dream, then make it my goal, and have all my steps along the way become plans to achieving that. Are we really supposed to dream and leave it alone? Should our goals be the only attainable future ideals? I think the “hire slow, fire fast” principle plays a premier role in all of this.
When considering a dream, are we creating fantasy? The first step in actually winning your dream is to create one that you are convinced you can do, but also one you want to do. As Christians, our dreams should reconcile with the Bible and play a part in the restoration of our world to mirror the Kingdom. Our dreams should have the chief goal of glorifying God, not receiving some level of fame for yourself. But if these criteria are met (and you can still have and achieve a dream without these if you aren’t a Christian), are you really sold out to your dream? Are you going to do what it takes to get there? Most dreams are only longevity of work away from fulfillment.
Hire slow, fire fast only works in acquisition of a dream. It seems easy after considering “what I want to be when I grow up” that our minds change easily. But when something locks into place, and focus is set, we can no longer be slow to start and fast to end. This is similar to relationships as well. Hire slow, fire fast is great advice for dating, but in a marriage there is no firing ever.
So pick your dream, take time, make it right. The goal and work part are coming up next.
Song Writing Retreat
Posted by chrispope | Filed under Uncategorized
City Church band went to a beach house for the weekend for a song writing retreat. We got back last night and it was an awesome experience. We did a lot of work and almost finished one song based off Psalm 86, as well as getting starts on several more tunes. The important part of a song writing retreat isn’t to write songs, but to propel song writing. It is important that we don’t consider this the only time to write, but the benefits of continuing to write are far reaching. Our hope and goal is to start incorporating some of the originals to our church very soon.
As we began talking about writing songs, I gave our band a charge. Our words, especially, should meet a certain criteria. Musicality and melody should come secondary to making sure our songs are pleasing to God, not just man.
Creed – This is a set of church beliefs, and if we are writing songs for our church (and we are), we want to make sure we fit our church creed. While we don’t recite the Apostle’s Creed every Sunday, Dean has set a vision of radical and redemptive Christian lifestyle that we want to follow, namely the Gospel. We strive to have the Gospel message in our songs.
Truth – The songs have to be Scripturally centered and accurate. Our lyrics should hold up against Scriptural scrutiny. This is especially easy to do when talking about Psalms or the Gospel. We want to accurately portray the character of God in our songs. Why would we sing praises to God about a character that isn’t His?
Balance – While we will be unbalanced in singing praises to God (as opposed to writing a song from God’s point of view which is weird) we do want to be balanced in what our content is. God didn’t reveal Himself to be all-grace or all-truth, but rather His character is all-inclusive all the time. Balance is maybe the most difficult of the four criteria to achieve.
Clarity - This is the most crucial aspect of song writing besides truth. We can’t write a song that needs a theologian to give a 10 minute explanation after we sing. Our song needs to be easily understood, from band to congregation to friends who don’t know Christ. This is another avenue to present the Gospel, not just a push for fame.
Didn’t Know I Could Do
Posted by chrispope | Filed under Uncategorized
Perry Noble wrote an interesting blog recently on categories of people on a staff. I find it more challenging to figure out what kind of staff member you are opposed to a leader. As a leader, feedback is often showcased in outcome. Doing music, that metric could be quality of sound, lack of mistakes, or amount of people worshiping God. Since I can’t peer into the hearts of a congregation, the band uses mistakes and quality to gauge how we do.
Side note: you will always find 5 people who HATE the songs and 5 people who LOVE the songs. Can’t get strung up on that.
Conversely to being a leader with it’s array of indicators, being under leadership only has one way to see if you are doing well: vision execution. I am a piece of the working machine that is striving towards the vision of my leader. And it is hard to tell how that is going, especially in music. I said from the beginning of this blog, which was all erased, that my goal in music is simply an avenue of worship (among many in a worship service) and to not be a distraction. We do cool covers and power ballad church songs, and it is all in an attempt to push the vision forward.
Noble says such an accurate statement in his blog with, “It is a powerful thing when the people believe in their leader…it is even a more powerful thing when a leader believes in the people he has been given stewardship over.”
Both sides of the coin are equally important. My team will not do their best without support, encouragement, and sacrifice from myself. That doesn’t exclude them from rebuke or correction, but it has to be an absolute understanding to earning respect. Likewise, I act the same if my leader characterizes those traits.
This upcoming weekend we will be doing a song writing retreat where I hope that our band is brought together as a family, as well as producing homemade songs for our church body. Vision starts from the top down. I want to execute my leader’s vision, and I hope my team, in turn, does as well.
Not fruits
Posted by chrispope | Filed under Uncategorized
I think the Bible is clear about not judging non-Christians. I also think the Bible is clear about judging Christians: by their fruits. We live in a day and age where any form of judgement is swiftly opposed, but that is not the case of the Scriptures. 1 John makes clear arguments for knowing Christians by their love. Galatians talks about the fruits of the Spirit, and seeing fruits cleaves knowledge that the Spirit abides in a person.
But too often Christians get down on themselves for the wrong reasons. It seems as if many like to add to the fruits which the Bible already gave. Two of these I see most commonly appointed in addition to the Bible are efficiency and reward.
Starting with the later, Christians love to reward themselves. We are fans of constant celebrations, vacations, time off, parties, cakes, etc. These are all good things, and in many cases necessary things for the sake of sanity and not getting burned out. But feeling entitled to these things is the wrong mentality. Let’s look at the promises for Christians. We are to deny ourselves and carry our crosses daily (Luke 9:23). We are to live as Christ and consider death as a gain (Phil 1:21). We are called to die to ourselves constantly (Matt 16:24-28). Why, then, do we think we deserve such frequent reward? Again, going on vacation isn’t bad, but if we don’t get a vacation over spring break why do we feel like we have been stabbed in the back? As sinners, all we deserve is death, pain, and agony. Only in Christ do we ever get relief. The beach cannot replace the Spirit.
Conversely, it is common for Christians to get down on themselves because they aren’t efficient. They work hard and don’t get the outcome they think. Input doesn’t always mean output. Somebody who is ahead on their work isn’t more holy because of time management. Some personalities work longer and achieve less. Achievement isn’t a fruit of the Spirit. Stewardship is a calling we have from Jesus, but is the servant who brought 10 talents more holy than he who brought 4? No. They were both given different amounts, and stewarded what they could. It was the one who did nothing that was scorned.
We are all given a different number of talents. It is not for us to complain or compare to those who have a different number. You can always find someone better and worse than you at any area. It, instead, is about doing what we can with what we have. Taking the blessings and faults we are given, and improving. We should judge ourselves by our progress, not perfection, because perfection can’t be achieved on earth. So be encouraged, and look at the Bible for how to improve and judge yourself and others, not culture.
True Missions
Posted by chrispope | Filed under Uncategorized
I think we can all agree that there is a common misconception about “missions”. I have said previously that too many people consider missions to be entirely intercontinental and not nearly enough of where we live. We live in dire times where missions are always away in a far off land speaking a different language, but never enough of where we live.
But there is an aspect of missions these “international missionaries” are grabbing for when they refuse missions when they return home. They are more concerned with people of another language than of their own.
But that is exactly what missions should be.
As Christians, we speak a different language than those who are not. We must approach these people who do not understand our vernacular, culture, way of life, and beliefs. But too often, people think their missions is going across a spoken language instead of a spiritual language. This is not what Christ has called for his followers.
If we engage Spanish speakers but are not talking across spiritual boundaries, we are not missionaries, we are on vacation. The same goes for anywhere in the world. Yes, these people need Jesus, but so do people in your home town. The problem doesn’t lie in the place, but rather the people we choose to engage. If we are doing campus ministry but only involve ourselves with people of the same spiritual language, we are in subculture, not on mission. If we attend church on Sundays but never bring the Gospel message across spiritual languages, we are observers instead of followers.
We need to change our mindset. Different spiritual languages over different spoken languages. I don’t care where you are, but go to someone who speaks a different language in their soul and teach them yours.
Competitive Christian
Posted by chrispope | Filed under Uncategorized
The Christian is called to, “outdo one another in showing honor.” This is a pretty hard concept to think about on many different levels, but the one that seems most peculiar, especially in light of the cultural Christianity of America, is this idea of competition. Our youth groups are renown for giving everyone a “fair chance”. Christian sports leagues are about giving everyone an at-bat, equal minutes on the field, or equal reps at the foul line. The high school “praise band” has to involve everyone who wants to sing, regardless if they hit pitch or sound like a tortured cat. So why is it that in society we are called to “fairness” (which as humans we have almost no perception of) yet we are Scripturally called to be competitive in showing honor?
This passage this comes from is in Romans 12. Are we, dare I say, called to compare ourselves to each other? How else can we outdo each other in honor? Philippians 2:3 says we are to do nothing out of rivalry or conceit. So how then are we to outdo one another? It’s honestly hard to think about absolving both ideas. I also think the idea of competition is taken far out of context, with many “men” thinking that competition is the way they prove masculinity.
Here are a couple check points for making sure your competition is good, because you should be competitive. Jesus was. He desires all come to know his name. He wants to be worshipped above all else. Thousands came to know his name at a single instance. If that isn’t competitive, then you have an inaccurate definition.
1. You compete without desiring your name to be made known. If you compete for bragging rights, you probably aren’t focused on God’s name being made big. If your local church is more concerned about people recognizing the pastor, band, or church name rather than Jesus, your competition is selfish and sinful. That being said, there is no shame in having huge church numbers, good production, and some flair if it brings people in so that they leave knowing the person of Jesus.
2. Your attitude continues to show fruits. So many relegate to obscenities, anger, and ungodly behavior when they compete, especially in sports. We cannot control emotion, but we can control action. If you compete and your behavior is sinful, then you need to reassess why you are a competitor. It is probably frustration that you are not achieving or reaching for your own self, rather than understanding that God’s name is good enough that it shines through defeat. This isn’t a reason to compete with less fervor, but rather to compete well.
3. Team player always means on the field. This is a touchy subject for some, and is often agreed with until you or your kid is the one playing supporting role. In the same way many say that even the janitor has an important role in the body, likewise in competition some people aren’t going to play a stand out role. Some people will be team managers instead of starting point guards. Some people will be 2nd string to MVP quarterbacks. Some will be voices in a crowd instead of in front of a mic on stage. This isn’t demeaning. It isn’t shameful to attempt those goals and not make them. Character is always built through the process, never through the achievement. Being competitive enough to try is often the big step God wants you to make.
