Jordan Rippy

Usually my weekend begins on Saturday night around 10pm. About that time we’ve wrapped up service, packed up, and the band is on their way to Chilli’s for some queso dip and bottomless chips. This weekend’s a bit different.

• Friday - 6pm-9pm Set-up and practice

• Saturday - 4:30pm Soundcheck / 7pm service

• Sunday Morning - 8am soundcheck at Greenway Church in Orlando / Two services at Greenway.

• Sunday Night - 5:30pm soundcheck at Access in Lakeland. 6:30pm service.

I spent the last couple of days in New York leading worship for a conference. I was supposed to lead Thursday night, Friday morning, and Friday night. I led on Thursday night, but got food poisoning and spent Friday throwing up all day (8 times). Nothing worse than being sick and out of town. I finally got to bed about midnight and then woke up 4 hours later to catch the red-eye to get me back in time for church Saturday. Let’s just say I’m not feeling 100% and I’m looking forward to my Sunday and Monday off.

I just finished Emerging Worship by Dan Kimball. Really enjoyed it. I was required to read it a couple of years ago for school, but I didn’t finish it. Anyway, this post is not about the emerging church, it’s about a great book on worship. I really like Kimball’s focus on holistic ministry and multi-sensory worship. I love books that challenge me to think more creatively about worship and leadership. Kimball also has a lot of great things to say about intergenerational relationships and consumer Christianity.

• “Church is the people of God on a mission. (1 Corinthians 12:27; Acts 1:8)”
• “It is dangerous to elevate the [worship] gatherings over true spiritual formation.”
• “We only dishonor the people in a local church and risk creating backlash when we blindly use someone else’s model’.”
• “Biblically, it is important to cultivate intergenerational relationships among believers (Psalm 145:4).”
• “Never mistake motion for action.” - Ernest Hemingway
• “A core value of Vintage Faith church is that we can’t explain what happens with the church by the methodology we use. It can be explained only by the Holy Spirit’s involvement.”
• “Being organic is not being unorganized and chaotic. Anything organic and living is the opposite of random.”
• “Emerging worship expresses love and adoration for God through creativity mixed with theology and artistic expression.”
• “The desire is to avoid developing a dependency upon a person in the worship gathering (or a dependency on a certain personality or style of teaching).”
• “We need time to allow the Spirit to convict or encourage our hearts after the message-rather than rush out the door. We need times where we can intercede for others or get on our knees to confess our sins.”
• “May we never allow the creative design of worship gatherings to push Jesus to the sidelines.”
• “We have lost intergenerational relationships in church by keeping everyone in segmented into programmatic departments.”
• “A sign of unity in a church isn’t if they know the senior pastor, but if they have the same DNA. It isn’t about a person; it is about Jesus Christ.”
• “We have a holy responsibility to decide how money is spent as an act of worship.”

This is the last post about our night of praise, I promise. I wanted to take several posts to show you all of the different elements we incorporated into the night. We incorporated various expressions of worship for three main reasons:

1. The church should be more creative and less limited in worship.
2. Involving everyone makes the night less of a worship concert and more of a community night of worship.
3. Using art, photography, and writing stations allows the church to capture what God is doing within the community of faith.

In addition to the artists, photographers, and musicians who participated in the night of praise, we also invited the congregation to write what they felt God speaking to them throughout the night. We had a large table set up with a long piece of craft paper and tons of markers. People were able to write as the Lord spoke to them. It was interesting to see a lot of common themes in what was written.

I believe that the church should be the most creative place in the world. With that in mind we incorporated artists into our night of praise. We had to two artists in our church up front painting and sketching during worship.

Crystal - Painting

Final

Sarah - Sketching

Final

Tonight was all worship at church. I am so excited because we did some experimenting with having people paint during worship…It was phenomenal. It will definitely become a regular occurrence around Victory @ Sarasota. I’ll post some pics of the art and of the evening in general when I have them. Until then, here’s our set from tonight:

• Dancing Generation - D (Redman)
• Your Grace is Enough - A (Tomlin)
• Endlessly - E (Desperation)
• All I Need - E (Springer)
• Marvelous Light - B (Hall)
• How He Loves - C (McMillan)
• God of this City - C (Tomlin)
• Chasing - D (Desperation)
• Here in Your Presence - D (New Life)
• Always - D (United)
• Hosanna - D (United)
• Chasing After You - D (Stockstill)
• Everlasting God - D (Brown)

This set is brought to you by the key of D

We had a fantastic Easter weekend at church. We had a our regular service on Saturday night and then we had a Sunrise Service on the beach to celebrate Resurrection Sunday. We had about 200 people at the Sunrise service. There were a bunch of people from church bit we also had a lot of people who just wandered up from the beach. The Sarasota Herald-Tribune covered the event and ended up putting it on the font page of today’s paper. They also did a photo expose on their web site. Gotta love that free advertisement!