During my six years at Faith Community, I played an difficult role. Before I talk too much about that, though, I want to give a little background of where I was before Faith Community.

When we started attending Faith Community six years ago, I was 24, and for fifteen years had attended a sister church in Doraville. That church was failing, and we were down to around a dozen members. We worked towards selling the building to the Korean church that had been renting on Sunday afternoons (which had a thriving ministry, whereas ours was going nowhere).

For fifteen years, I had seen our pastor and worship leader supress their natural talents, and lead worship on Sunday mornings using a very traditional style - piano and organ. But on Sunday nights, they would just be themselves, and it was country gospel. And they were really good at it. Too good for the Atlanta suburbs, really, but when the Doraville church was planted in the 60's it was still on the edge of rural. But during the late 80's and 90's, it was smack dab in the middle of the suburbs.

It always bothered me that they never played guitar on Sunday mornings. This was not a rock band, mind you, this was just good old country pickin' and grinnin' kind of stuff. But it was awesome - heart-felt, incredibly talented, and very worshipful. As youth, Britt and I always tried to push for them to play more guitar on Sunday mornings, and to get a drum set to fill out the country sound - and we were even ready to learn how to play - but the response was always the same. It would be too much for the older folks, and they basically deserved to have a church home they could come to, where they could be comfortable.

It wasn't until we were at about 20 people, our pastor had moved to Alabama, and the piano player moved away, that the worship leader finally gave in and used his guitar to lead worship on Sunday mornings - simply because there was nothing else available. By that time, it was too little, way too late. I began my first movements into worship leading during those days, on the Sundays that our worship leader was out of town - which was a lot towards the end, as he eventually moved back to Tennessee for family reasons.

As we finished there, God gave me a vision of how I should proceed if we had started something new, or if we merged with Faith Community, which was something we were considering.

Why continue playing hymns in an old style? Why not play the same songs, and just play them in the style you're most natural with?

At the time, the "modern" worship movement was still building, and hadn't really appeared on my radar. I never cared much for the "praise and worship" movement of the 80's and early 90's. The songs were just, well, too cheesy for me. So it was obvious to me - continue playing hymns, just play them with a modern twist.

That was where I was, just as we were making the decision to join forces with Faith.

Labels: church, life