Reprise

Okay, I'll put in another post for the evening.

After dinner, I went back to Poplar Heights Baptist for the Wednesday night college ministry service. I really enjoyed it. It was mostly about the praise and worship; they had a pastor there, but he mostly just made a quick speech telling students that they need to join churches and putting in a good word for Poplar Heights. Apparently, they have several different things planned for Wednesday nights, from actual services with messages and service projects to concerts and game nights, but they all have praise and worship planned. I really like that aspect of it.

Good corporate worship is going to be a big part of my finding a church. There are elements of Christian thinking and some Bible study involved in lots of aspects of classes here, and student Bible studies and many other such things. Besides that, while I'm sure not everyone fits the category, there are so many good Christian people here that one would actually have to work hard to forsake the assembling of the saints together, as we are told not to do in Hebrews. So one of the biggest criteria for me in finding a church is going to be good corporate worship.

As I've had to clarify many times after saying the wrong thing, I'm not talking about a particular style of worship music, but the attitude that goes into the selection of songs or the attitude of those leading the worship. I've criticized church songs in the past, not because it was too upbeat to be a hymn or too slow to be a contemporary praise song, but because it distracted from the whole point of worship, which is to glorify God. A lot of times, you'll get a song that praises the act of coming to church, which is all well and good as a nice happy song, or you'll get a song about some deep spiritual message that should be applied to living, which is great and makes for some very good contemporary Christian songs on the radio. In either case, though, it's not worship. C.S. Lewis once wrote that one would not even notice the perfect worship service, because all the focus would be on God.

Have you ever been in a worship service and experienced that strange phenomenon of hearing the worship music balance? I know, that phrase alone doesn't make much sense... Have you ever been completely sure that the whole of the sound was something much better than the sum of its parts? Granted, there could be a few really talented musicians in a crowd, but you also get people like me, who can't sing at all, or even the completely tone-deaf, and somehow, it all works out to a nice sound. It's as if the worship - honest, God-centered worship - triggers a sort of automatic harmony in the group. Actually, that really may be the case, since, after all, we - and our voices - were made to praise God.

The college ministry had that sound tonight.

I love it here.