My wife and I popped down to Gunwharf Quays on Saturday for the grand switching on of the Christmas lights. Well, it wasn’t that grand and it wasn’t that slick, but the lights did go on – and I suppose that is something. To be honest, that is not really why we went. A friend of mine who is the worship pastor at Family Church here in Portsmouth told me that their youth band was playing as part of the festivities and so we popped down to see what all the fuss was about.

Well, let’s be honest – the youth band were definitely the best thing about the event – but that wasn’t hard! The music they played was phat, busted style, Hillsongs worship music and was needed as it was absolutely freezing! The guys and girls who played made a good band – they worked well together, they knew their tunes and had a lot of confidence up there. The music wasn’t all that slick – quite a few mistakes, but that actually didn’t seem to matter.

The thing that I really took away from it was that everyone up there was having an absolutely brilliant time. They were passionate about what they were singing about and they were not afraid of showing the entire of Gunwharf Quays that they meant it. In a world where young people are often portrayed as being couch potatoes who don’t really care about they world around them, these guys really broke the mould – in fact it the mould was in tatters on the floor by the end.

It reminded me of a blog post by a mate of mine on his site Three Days. He was trying to work out in his head why events like Soul Survivor was so popular with young people. His conclusion was passion – the people up front were passionate about Jesus and didn’t mind anybody knowing it. And that is what these guys did. Certainly gave me as a worship leader something to think about…

The bible is rammed full of God using ordinary people to do absolutely extraordinary things. My wife and I watched the film ‘Night at the Museum‘ the other night – and while not entirely my kind of film the main edge behind the story is that Larry, the main guy had the lost the belief that ordinary people could do extraordinary things – and of course, Hollywood helps him to overcome that.

I’ve been thinking recently about the whole being ordinary thing – especially in relation to being a worship leader. There are many worship leaders out there who we’d class as a bit extraordinary and are very well known and very well respected and I think that while that can be a great encouragement to many I can sometimes find it a bit of a discouragement as it serves as a reminder of the fact that many of us, me included are oh so ordinary. There does seem to be a stack of people out there who are hankering for that opportunity to become an extraordinary worship leader like Matt Redman or Paul Baloche, whose music is used as an aid to corporate worship throughout the world and get invited to lead at very large and very prestigious gatherings of God’s people. It seems to boil down to the fact that a lot of people think that you are a good worship leader, or you have ‘made it’ if you have ascended to those dizzying heights.

This is all put into perspective for me when I hear someone like Matt Redman talk about things like this – because, from what I can see, the man does not ever view himself as a ‘great’ worship leader or someone who has ‘made it’. For him it seems he is doing what God is allowing him and providing him opportunity to do and ensuring that his heart is right every step of the way. In a sense it must actually be really hard for people like him sometimes to be ‘ordinary’ with God as every time he leads worship there are probably 80,000 people in the congregation telling him he is not!

Again for me it comes down to heart: if your heart is to be the most prolific Christian songwriter the world has ever know and get as much international acclaim as your ego can muster then I don’t really see much room for God to be glorified in that – as it is all about you. However, if your heart is to be someone who serves God in all they do and is happy and content to do the small things God has given you to do (as well as the huge) then that is where God can break in and make something extraordinary out of our ordinary.

I think for me that is where I need to keep my heart in check – as I sometimes can get on with the small things in the hope that God will lavish me with bigger things in the future. Man that attitude stinks! When did I get so important that God needs to do anything for me?! If we are truly people with a heart after God and a passion for His worship then it doesn’t matter whether we are leading six people into worship or sixty thousand – God can use an ordinary heart like that for extraordinary things.

One of the things I really want to do on this blog is keep track of (and keep myself motivated to write) new songs that I am writing. The song here is one that I’ve been working on for a while and have finally got round to recording for my own records.

It is a song that came from my heart of wanting to express a little about what we do when we meet together and sing songs of worship. Often it can get overlooked as to why we sing at church – we just do it. I wanted to express here why I think it is important, why I do it and what I want to express to God when doing it.

I wanted to try and write something quite congregational here – as often my songs tend to be a little hard to sing. So we have some simple melodies and reasonably straightforward chords too.

Anyway, here is a recording of it – my first in Pro Tools (I am a die-hard Logic fan you see!) and it sounds OK – if a little tame and unadventurous. Plenty of time for that though…