Have you thought much about why you sing at church? I mean, have you thought personally about why you sing?

‘Cause its easy, I think, to come to church and just go along with the flow… so when the band gets up, and the words appear on the screen, you just do what everyone else is doing, and join in. But its never really a personal choice. Do you “choose” to sing along with everyone else?

I’d love us to be a fellowship of Christians who all “choose” to sing to God for each others benefit each and every week. I’d love you to make that choice this Sunday. I’d love to see you speak and sing every word that comes up on the screen to God with your whole heart. This is something I’ve personally been trying to do more and more. So I thought I might share a tip that’s helped me.

Stop looking at the words. Look at the screen as little as you can, even if it means singing with your eyes closed.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t sing the words! Please sing the words on the screen along with everyone else! But I personally find that if I keep looking at the words, I end up only making the sounds, and I forget to “mean” them (a bit like 1 Cor 14:14-17 ). However, when I try to look away from the screen, and try remember the line, or the whole verse, I (strangely) find that I “mean it” so much more. I find myself singing with more authenticity when I sing them from memory.

It might not work for you, but trying to sing with my eyes off the words has helped me mean what I sing more. And I pray that helps my brothers and sisters around me to sing with more meaning too.

Last night the UniChurch Magnification Team came together and we did a whole lot of thinking about what we’d like the Sunday UniChurch ‘Event’ to be. We asked ourselves the question: “By God’s grace, what would we want a believer and a non-believer to think and feel about UniChurch as they get in their car to drive home on Sunday night?”

We came up with lots of great answers, but let me just summarise what we decided we want UniChurch to be in 3 points.

• We want the meeting to be sincerely challenging because of the gospel
  We want humble, sincere people to present the truth of the gospel with pure motives. We don’t want to put on a show pretending that the gospel is amazing and huge and great… We want the meeting to reflect the huge-ness of the gospel in every aspect.
• We want people to feel appropriately comfortable
  We don’t want people to have any reason to feel awkward, or embarrassed, or confused about anything that’s going on in the meeting… No matter what we do in the meeting; Singing, praying, clapping, silence, listening, reading aloud. We want to do it all in such a way that people will feel very comfortable. Even as we tell them the uncomfortable gospel, we want them to feel comfortable.
• We want people to have found the meeting strangely enjoyable
  People will walk into UniChurch with lots of preconceived ideas and anxieties, but at the end of the night, we want them to have actually enjoyed it. We want them to look back at the past 2 hours of their life and - even if they’re not believers - feel it was so worthwhile being there.
  

Series: Looking into the lights #1, Looking into the lights #2

In the previous post in this series, we posed the question “Why would we use lights anyway? What’s it meant to help?” I wonder if the answer is “everything”. But I want to be careful how we say that.

See, we need to hold on to two seemingly opposing truths.

1. God, and only God, can soften people’s hearts to hear the gospel and respond appropriately - if God chooses not to soften someone’s heart and move them to respond appropriately, they can not and will not receive the gospel nor respond to it. (John 6:44; Acts 13:48; Rom 9:16; 1Cor 1:25; 1Cor 2:14; and so on)
2. We must make every effort to speak the gospel clearly, effectively, sensitively, faithfully, and helpfully. We must try and remove all hindrances to Christians and non-Christians hearing the gospel and responding to it. In other words, we must endeavor to make hearing and responding to the gospel easy and even enthralling for people. (Rom 10:14-15; 1Cor 9:19-23; 1Cor 10:32-33; 1Cor 14:23; Col 4:4; and so on)

Although these seem quite different, we need to believe both of these things at the same time. If we hold #1 stronger than #2, we’ll end up ostracising people and doing things in ways that suit “us” and say things like, “We don’t need to change how we do things… if God wants to save people he’ll do it without us!” However, if we hold #2 stronger than #1, we’ll end up thinking that God’s sovereignty is limited by our efforts, and that the gospel is insufficient without worldly wisdom and human power. A tendency to either side is wrong.

So what does this have to do with lights? Everything!

Do we need to use lights for people to hear the gospel and respond with their lives?
#1 tells us “No, God can grow his Kingdom in the dark if he so chooses!”.

Could we use lights to help make our gospel centred meetings effective and enthralling for people?
#2 tells us “Yes we could! Discerning use of lights might help people feel more comfortable and relaxed, or more thoughtful and reflective.”

Will using lights mean that more people will become Christians and Christians will understand the depths of the gospel more?
#1 tells us “No”, and
#2 tells us “We hope things like lights will help the kingdom grow!”

Do you see how we have to hold both of these ideas together? On one hand, we don’t have to do anything, its all up to God! On the other hand, we must do all that we can, and work hard to make the gospel “attractive”. An old friend of mine calls this “Being creative with everything, except the truth!”

I think the measure of how we use things like lights and how we run our groups and church meetings is our prayer. Prayer is where #1 and #2 come together! Prayer is where you say, “God, we think it’ll help people if we do things this way… Please use our humble feeble efforts to draw people to you in Christ! Amen”.

So, before my next post about lights, why don’t you leave a comment and tell me how using lights could have a good effect on a meeting’s “feel” and “experience”. In other words… by God’s grace, what does using lights “do” to a meeting, that would be good?

Series: Looking into the lights #1, Looking into the lights #2

Lights have never really been big in our thinking at HBC. I remember having a conversation with someone at UniChurch in 2002, and saying that we’re keen for music to be good at HBC, but we’d never ever have “lights”.

Looking back, I think that was a bit naive. The fact was, we did have lights… the lecture hall we were meeting in had big ugly fluro lights all over the ceiling. They lit up the speaker, and the screen, and the audience, and the blackboards, and the walls, and everything! (…and all with exactly the same amount of light mind you!)

I think the real issue was, we never really thought we’d ever be able to do anything about it.

But now that we’ve shuffled the way we organise serving at church, it is something we can think about. Those in the Magnification team are concerned about how our meetings feel, and what things make our meetings work. So they’ve got the time and the opportunity to think about using lights in our church meetings.

And so, over the past few weeks, we found out that there are some lights available for us to bring and use at UniChurch …and we realised that there were some lights already at Lambton High School that we could use. So we’ve been trying some things out.

But, why would we even consider using lights at all? Is it meant to help? Help what? I’ll blog about that soon, but I’m interested to hear your thoughts as to why or why not…

Renew Newcastle was founded to help solve the problem of Newcastle’s empty CBD. Renewal of the city is what this organisation is all about. This is a good thing for our city.  It will be great to have the centre of Newcastle resurrected and brought back to life.  However, it is only temporary and superficial (not that it claims to be anything more than that).

As i was thinking about Mission I realised that this is what we ought to be praying for - renewal.  Titus 3:5 says

he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit,

Beofre or after each of our meetings, this is what we will be praying for - renewal in the city of Newcastle that can only take through the active work of God the Father and God the Holy Spirit.  Come along and join us as we ask God to renew Newcastle.