Family Worship Songwriting Retreat

Today I'm driving with Katie Heckel and Matt King up to a little cabin in North Mississippi to spend a week eating, praying, singing, writing, and recording as a little family. Abbye Pates will be there as well and Eric Papp. Sadly, Brian Mulder from Michigan and our friend Aislinn from Vermont are snowed in and too sick to make it this week! (Insert incredibly sad face)

Still, it will be a great time to retreat and create. I'm boxing up a little recording studio setup and hauling it to the cabin for the next few days. It will be exciting to write and record a worship album this week. I have no idea what will come of our time together! We're hoping for lots of collaborative creative coolness.

Should be fun, I better get to packing since I've waiting till now to get started! Hope to have a little worship CD available sometime later this Spring though. Pray that this week will be fruitful as we get together and seek Jesus and together work to 'tell the story and tell it well' in song.

Going to Church

Today I went to church at 1:30pm on a Saturday. There were only five people there including me. Only one person had a guitar and there were no song sheets or projected slides or anything. And we only sang two songs. There was no preacher, we just read 1 Cor 2 aloud about how the Holy Spirit brings to our minds the very mind of Jesus Christ. We talked about it for a few minutes. We noticed that things that had seemed stupid and worthless in the past had actually become very precious to us and we remarked at how good and wise the foolishness of God really is. Then we told each other what we were worried about and everybody prayed for everybody else. Then we ate some food together.

I went to church at 1:30pm on a Saturday. I didn't even know I was going to go to church when I woke up today. Neither did any of the other four people who were there. We didn't have time to print bulletins or plan an order of worship. We didn't take up an offering. But we did take care of each other.

I went to church at 1:30pm on a Saturday. In Abbye and Jeff's living room. I sat on the couch I'd slept on the night before with two old friends beside me.

I really like going to church. I like going on Sunday morning in the building north of town. But that's not enough... and here's the point... it's not supposed to be enough. Sunday morning is supposed to be insufficient.

"We loved you so much that we gave you not only God's Good News but our very lives as well."
1 Thessalonians 2:8