Monday, December 11, 2006

Worship

Worship is the heartbeat of God. He rejoices when we take time out of our lives to make a display that we desire his presence. It’s amazing how much worship is wrapped around culture. While God accepts many styles of worship, the worshipper feels more or less connected based on the style. This gets very specific. Most peoples worship through music of some sorts. Reading through “All the World Is Singing” showed how culture forms the basis of worship. Many times when a missionary gives the good news to a people group, the message is packaged in a Western form of logic, vocabulary and individualistic connotation. Same goes for worship music and church style. Many times a new church will look like one from the West: 25 minutes of hymns or guitar/keyboard based music, and a 45 minute sermon. Other cultures prefer drums, gongs, and local instruments in timing and rhythms that sound weird to westerners (for an example go to Heart Sounds International). Other cultures listen to bible stories for hours at a time and get frustrated with westerners who can only preach for an hour. From this book it was amazing to see how much joy the local believers had when they could worship God with their own idiom and style of music. Some described it as “God was speaking to their heart, using their heart language.” The church was then more prepared to evangelize their own community. They would go through out the villages playing their new songs and the villagers would stop what they were doing to come out and listen. This is so much better then us as missionaries trying to use our methods. Reading the book gave me a taste of what heaven would be like. Revelation 7:9-10 says, “After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, "Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!"”. I can’t wait to be praising God in the key of G with 4/4 timing, right beside someone else dancing to an African drum, next to someone from a Muslim background reverently bowing before God.

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