You may know the Seinfeld clip where Georges dad, Frank, explains his families tradition of ‘Festivus’, his made up celebration replacing Christmas. He feels out of his place at Christmas, like it does not include him, so he makes up his own.

I felt this way a little when attending large worship conferences, where churches with seemingly unlimited resources can make you feel like your average church is totally inadequate, unable to participate in worship. They don’t mean to, its just some churches live in a far different reality to average churches.

Our Church, Inglewood Community Church, has been through quite a journey in its worship. We have been through the worship wars, and more, and find ourselves in a pretty hopeful place. We feel part of our churches mission is to dispense hope and practical ideas to churches who are like us, average churches.

We are really excited to partner with Vose Leadership on this event. Michael and Monica O’Neil will both be presenting some excellent material at this conference as well as myself and Pastor Jess Magowan.

You can register here ‘Worship for the rest of us”.
Worship For The Rest of Us

Is it any wonder that we have been through worship wars in church.
Such a powerful thing. God is ‘jealous’ of us. Jealous that we worship Him, alone.

As I hear stories of nasty personal things being said to worship leaders, it does make me wonder. Fortunately we have no such issues at Inglewood, despite what may have happened in the past.

Remember, worship is a spiritual background. The stakes are high. Our God is a jealous God.

This year at our annual get away we managed to get some good fishing in. It has not been great in years gone by, but this time we tried a different spot.
This spot was accessible only through some reasonably serious 4wd tracks and beach work.
One of the seriously important things to do is let the tyres down. Especially in the lighter Suzuki. Plenty of power, but not much weight in the body. That helps and hinders sand driving. A heavy Landcruiser will naturally ‘balloon’ out the tyres. The lighter Grand Vitara will not. So a tyre setting of around 15 made a huge difference. It helped the engine not work as hard as we ‘floated’ over the sand.
It was fun judging the tide as well. The particular beach we had to drive along for about 20 minutes before entering the bush track to get to our beach was chopped up, very light and airy soil. However near the water it was much harder. Problem was there was a significant bank of sand. So you had a choice. Drive near the water, where is was harder, or drive near the bush where the sand was really boggy. The only time you could drive near the water was when the tide was out sufficiently so you could access the harder stuff.
On the way back from one great fishing trip my friends Landrover went back before the rest of us. He got through, but in his own words ‘it was a bit dicey’ there for a while!

Lots of fun, fish and sand.

Get the feeling Elevation has been listening to Hillsong Young and Free in their latest worship song. Really enjoy this.

From personal experience I know that often after a great time, perhaps a spiritual high, can come a real low time.

It is amazing how we just wont allow ourselves to own that. To recognise it.

To take time to breathe out. To not be hard on ourselves.

Our Church, Inglewood Community Church, has finally moved into our newly renovated building.

Here is a video one of our people did up showing the progress.

In our individualistic version of the Christian faith we have lost something of the sense of corporate responsibility we see demonstrated in the Israelite Faith.

“But Israel violated the instructions about the things set apart for the Lord. A man named Achan had stolen some of these dedicated things, so the Lord was very angry with the Israelites.” Joshua 7.1

Here the whole nation is held to account because one person had sinned. His sin…in taking that which God has asked the people to ‘set apart’ for Him….led to the death of 36 of his fellow Israelites. There is something in this.

When we live our Christian faith in isolation, not taking responsibility for our role in the community of faith, the whole Church suffers.