I’m going to take a pause from reporting on our recent Japan Worship Mission trip to share something exciting – the launch of a new podcast called “I Can’t Believe It’s Worship”!
In some ways, this is a sequel to our mission trip story. As I mentioned in earlier posts, one of the things we did during our mission trip was a daily Bible study at 6.30 am every morning. Even when our team split up for 2 days, we would read and text each other our thoughts.
I was reticent to do it at first – but Lester Sim was so enthusiastic about studying the Bible that he threatened to do it on his own if nobody showed up. As team leader, I wasn’t about to be outdone in the holiness stakes by this young upstart, so I reluctantly obliged.
What became apparent however was that our collective experiences, understandings and previous readings enriched the experience, and gave us greater insight than had we tried to understand the texts on our own. And it sheets home this reality – that the Christian faith (very much like its roots in the Jewish faith) is best done in community.
Certainly, in the context of Western individualism, we have been taught to treat our faith as a “personal faith”; that Jesus is a small Jesus who lives in our hearts; that prayer is to be done “in the closet”; and that devotion is our “quiet time” between us and the Lord. On the contrary, as Pastor Dan shared last Sunday at Faith Community Church, discipleship is best done in community, as in Acts 2:42, where it was evident that the believers gathered to listen to the apostle’s teachings, to fellowship, to break bread and to pray.
In fact, when we did the Bible study, not only did we garner new insights which we may not have achieved individually (for one thing, I would probably skim over parts of the text if someone else didn’t encourage me to pause and look deeper), we actually had a lot of fun. Whilst we treated the Bible with due reverence, we also cracked jokes and laughed amongst ourselves. Lester and I realised we shared a similar sense of humour and in the course of the trip, our teammates started to encourage us to do a podcast.
Of course, it was natural that we would make the podcast about worship and worship ministry, which is what we are both passionate about.
What I hope will appeal to listeners is that we are both amateurs – people who volunteer in ministry but spend most of our waking time in our paid vocations – Lester as a high school maths teacher, and I as a law firm owner. We don’t have platinum albums; nor we do we go on worship tours and charge for tickets. We just serve in our local church. And so what we teach will hopefully be more approachable and relatable – birthed out of ordinary experiences like 95% of worship ministers in their respective churches. We don’t have the pressure of making record sales or being swamped by adoring fans.
Please have a listen and give us feedback on things we can do to improve, or ideas you have for future episodes.
Some of our upcoming episodes will include:
- What is Worship?
- What does it mean to worship in Spirit and Truth?
- The different expressions of Biblical praise
- The role of music in worship
- How to build a worship team
- How to run effective rehearsals
- Studies of critical passages on worship in the Bible
And if you enjoyed it, please feel free to “follow” and tune in to future episodes!
The Worship Revolution 