Worship at The Launch

A little over a month ago, I started a job leading worship at 1st Presbyterian Church of Champaign's new SW Campus, fondly referred to by some as "The Launch".
This is an exciting place to be and it's great group of people. Part of what is exciting is that this community is into worship. It's a community that's wants to do whatever is needed to connect with God, together. On Sunday mornings, this means we try to have an environment where it doesn't feel so much like a performance as it does a community activity. This is something we strive for, and this means we are going to try things. I thnk it also means that sometimes things work, and sometimes they don't. But isn't that how life is? When we take risks, sometimes they work out the way we hoped and other times they crash and burn. The beauty is, either way we are doing this for God, and He loves us. Maybe that takes some of the pressure off. Maybe the real danger is letting our worship become routine.

We also want to be a community that worships in truth. That means that we don't want there to be a disconnect between the things we sing about and talk about on Sunday and the things we do the rest of the week. Nobody here is perfect, everyone makes mistakes and messes some things up, and we don't want to deny that, but we do want to say that we really don't want the way we live on Sunday to be different from the way we live on Monday. We don't want to talk about loving people on Sunday and then ignore the very people we claim to love the very next day. We want to learn how to serve people, we want to connect with the people that are in our lives. We don't want to isolate or be isolated.
Jesus hung out with all sorts of people, so we want to hang out with all sorts of people. Jesus had compassion on people in need, so we want to show that same compassion. Jesus showed grace, so we want to show grace. When we get together on Sundays, we want it to be a celebration of who God is and what He is doing in our lives and the lives of those around us.

This is the journey that we are on, and the Launch is sort of a starting place. Our goal is not to have the snappiest little worship time that we can; it's to be transformed--it's to be people who love the way that Jesus loved.