Perhaps it is good timing as I am over-committed at school and beginning to dream up this Urban Hymnal, but sadly, my joy in leading worship has waned greatly in the past few months. I am very grateful to have had a place to serve with my gifts and to learn what it is to lead a team and congregation, I am also frustrated and disillusioned by the consumption that I have witnessed, engaged and fostered. There is an overwhelming assumption that if something is not growing it is dying. As an artist I am constantly plagued with such fear. After three years of performing in the rock community my band was still drawing the same numbers and I felt the sting of failure. A failed artist will often doubt their work and worth, and may in turn, seek to better their craft or, retreat into anemic, glossy pop. I have glossed up my fair share of worship. The urge to get in-and-out unscathed; to entertain with efficiency and excellence. Not good. And next year everyone will flock to a different church with a cooler building, younger pastors and a hipper, glossier sound. This is the cost of church-as-a-product.

How do you provide integral worship without indulging the parishioner as a consumer? How do you both attract and send out? Church should provoke and draw, convict and comfort. It is juicy meat and it is bad tasting medicine. I am learning that a worship leader must wear the prophet's hat at times. It grieves me when I realize that mine has sat on the shelf--still got the ol' tagger on it.

And of course, this Urban Hymnal liturgy service could become an even more extreme perversion of consumable church/worship; a detached, unaccountable, hedonistic display of artists doing their own thing. May we surround ourselves with prophets who will call us on our perversions.

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Climber says it like so: "Always Right".

I've wondered how music preference influences one's engagement/enjoyment of worship? I would argue that in our vastly splintered and music savvy community, one's musical tastes are more significant factors--with regard to finding a church body--than a pastor's teaching style. On the other hand, I can't name a single friend who attends a church because the worship is wonderful and the pastor stinks. I have most certainly witnessed the opposite.

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no, I do not claim to like all kinds of music. I do like them Nords