Clemster's Playground

Thursday, February 01, 2007

Devious Pastors and New Friends

Things seem to be getting serious on the worship front for me. Two weeks ago pastor Jeremy deviously got me to lead the normal worship team on a Sunday morning. After leading a Sunday night in early January, the church asked that my group, just the four of us, lead the morning worship this coming Sunday (Feb. 4th). Because of this Jeremy had asked to me with me, but I was originally told he just wanted to talk about the song selection for the 4th. But then night I was supposed to meet with him, there was a message when I got home asking me to bring my guitar and music. Okay I thought, he wants to hear the songs. Once I got up to the church the story started changing. I arrived just before the regular worship team practice and Jeremy asked if I could stick around to teach them some new songs. "If I'm going to teach the team new songs I might as well have someone who knows the songs teach them." I still wasn't quite clueing in to what he had in mind. As he was introducing me to the full team he started making comments that made it sound like I was going to be leading that coming Sunday. So I stopped him and asked if I was hearing him right. And so in front of the group he "made his move" and stated, "Yes. Is that alright?" So basically he tried to made sure that I couldn't saw no. It was definitely all in God's timing considering my recent thoughts about the future.

So that Sunday morning Jeremy looked after the choir, teaching them parts and such. The band wasn't there for that practice, but they are legit professional musicians so they picked up the songs pretty quick. It was kind of weird not having played with them before, but they made my job pretty easy. The service went really well and I got a ton of positive feed back with plenty of questions about when the next time I'll be up on stage. I'm never too sure how to react to compliments so it was a little awkward, but there's not much I can do to stop it. My group is still playing this coming Sunday so we'll see how the church reacts to a much smaller group. The normal worship team can have a full 20 person choir at times.

Steve and I have been busy getting ready for our upcoming youth retreat. We're taking them to Camp Norland, a church camp that I grew up going to and counseled at during my summers. We were starting to get a little worried about finding some female leaders, but God brought us Valerie and Leslie for at least the weekend. The other night we took a field trip to Norland to take a look at the new changes and see how many of the rooms and such are still able to be used. Paul came along as well despite having to work on the weekend of the retreat. The five of us packed into one car so it was pretty snug, but we had a great time. Our church is going to be making some major changes to our services and volunteer groups and one of the ideas of that whatever team to serve on will be your small group. For instance my worship team would be a small group and so would our youth team. I can honestly say I'm looking forward to being in a small group with Steve, Paul, Val, Leslie, and Paul's soon to be wife Kate. Steve and I took a step back the other day and marveled that all of a sudden we seem to have a core group of friends. I'd like to say some profound statement along the lines of the payoff of being patient, but I wasn't exactly content to sit and wait for God to finally bring these people to us. Oh well. Doesn't mean I shouldn't thank God now that they are here. So yeah, thanks God!

Matthew.

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