I have been asked to write an article on the tension and the interaction that occurs between being the Worship Pastor at The Gathering, and being in a serious rock band on the side. It's fitting then, I guess, that I am beginning the writing of this essay while sitting in a bar. I'm at The Greenroom, a bar located in Seattle's renowned music venue, The Showbox. My band Mindhead is playing here tonight.

Worship vs. Rock Star.
First off, all truth be told, I am not a rock star. I haven't sold 1,000,00 albums, opened for the Stones, played Hollywood Bowl, or been on MTV. The concept of being in a band that plays clubs, bars, youth camps, and the occasional festival and simultaneously being the one in direct oversight of worship at a local church is baffling to some. I can totally understand that. I hear questions like, "what does the light have to do with darkness?" Or, "how can you put yourself in a place that God clearly would not approve?" And even on the practical side, "Aren't you tired on Sunday morning?" There are many things that appear on the surface of this strange relationship to be contradictory, paradoxical, out of balance, or in tension...whichever way you want to call it, there's a discussion that can be really useful in our understanding of what worship is. I hope that I can do that conversation some justice in this article.

However, being simultaneously a worship pastor and a rock band member, are not that different from each other. The two actually help each other out. They take different forms, for sure, but it's kind of like conversation. At work, you most likely talk to people differently than at church. Is it because one is absolutely sinful and the other is fully redeemed? No. It is a question of context. At church, we have an invisible connection tying us all together as a family, as the body of Christ. We have Jesus Christ in common, and our conduct, conversation, and interactions naturally should reflect that when we get together to worship Him. At work, Jesus is still Lord, but the entire office is not there to worship God. All people have to work, not all people live in the understanding of Christ's redemption of us humans. Therefore, our workplaces don't naturally have the common bond that we have when we gather to worship God at church. The way we talk in the two places is different.

It's the same way with the band. We are the same guys leading worship on Sunday that we are on stage on Saturday night at the club. Do we act different? Yes, we do. Why? Because the purpose is completely different. Sunday, we all gather together for a unified purpose - to worship God together as the local church - corporate worship. When Mindhead plays a concert, the purpose is much more varied. People may come for entertainment or to a getaway as far as I know, but it is not for the purpose of corporate worship. We like to be up front with this, so that there's no confusion. It is popular today to have "worship gatherings," which I'll expand on in a little bit, and one can never really be sure what is actually going on at these things. With Mindhead, we know that it is better for people to understand what is going on, so they don't get a strange impression. For the most part, people know we're Christians, and they also know that a Mindhead show is not a worship service.

Having said that, I should explain what Mindhead is like in a little bit more depth. The band assembled for the first time in February of 2000 for the purpose of a benefit concert. The church had booked me for a show as a solo artist, I had never played solo before, and didn't feel like starting, so I called up the core of my worship team to be my band. The show came and went, and we decided to book more...and we haven't stopped since. The four of us realize that we have a unique bond in this band, which I believe has everything to do with our roots of leading worship together.
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Now, I'm going to try and describe our music. I think it's important for the purpose of tying everything back together later on in the article. This is a weird thing for a band member to try and do, usually we read other people's opinions and descriptions. I've never had to write something about my own work, so this could be strange. I'm going to do my best to be as objective as I can, but remember, I am in the band.

Mindhead's sound is somewhat a mix of Alternative, Indi, and Pop rock; with some folk influences thrown in there for good measure. It's not punk or hardcore, our manager likes to classify us in a very definitively objective manner, "Creative Modern Rock." We've been compared to the Beatles, Eliott Smith, Radiohead, Nirvana, Travis, R.E.M., Coldplay, and many others.

One of my biggest values as a songwriter is the lyrics. It has always made sense to me that if I'm going to say something that could be heard by a lot of people, then make the point clearly, and say something worth taking to heart. I am not like Anthony Keetis, of the Red Hot Chili Peppers who can sing songs with words like, "Can I smell your gasoline? Can I pet your wolverine? On the day my best friend died I could not get my copper clean." The man has a funny way of putting random words in songs. I'm not like that. Others, like Bob Dylan, tell amazing stories of peculiar people. I'm not really like Mr. Dylan either. I'm not a very good story teller.

My greatest goal with lyrics is to communicate something deep to people, to get them to think a little bit. I tend more toward abstractions, but I try to do it in a way that people relate with. What I do is take one part of a story, one thought, one idea and I put it under the microscope and explore the far reaches of it. This enables me to let the thought determine the content and the delivery. It's a sort of poetry-driven approach, I guess, and somewhat similar to the process of expositional preaching. However, if people comment on one thing the most about songs that I write, it is the lyrics. Somehow, I'm able to communicate deep things to some people. I've had young kids comment on the way the lyrics spoke to them, and I've had older people, often the parents of the younger fans, offer similar thoughts; it's very strange. This broad communication is one of the most exciting things to me. It reminds me that God not only uses Mindhead, but also that this calling in my life continues to bear fruit.

Worship.
How do we define worship? I think worship can basically be defined as this: God initiates and we, in turn, respond in an appropriate manner. God has always called his people to love Him above all else, and our duty in response is to love him with all of our heart, soul, strength, and mind. This is worship, and it encompasses every little aspect of our short and small existence while we walk on earth. I would like to start off with this definition of worship.

We sophisticated, and intellectually advanced modern people have painted the concept of worship into a corner. Through the last few decades it has become defined as God's people getting together to sing songs in adoration of our God. While this is one part of it, I would say that it is more the decorative rose on the icing of the cake. The advent of the popular christian music genre called, "alternative worship," has only furthered the assumption and done much to remove worship from the church, and place it in a perpendicular venue. This means that it intersects with the church but doesn't necessarily have the same direction in mind. One problem is that it moves corporate worship away from any direct church authority or oversight, leaving the participants, or spectators, subject to any weird theology that may rear its ugly head during the production. Without Elders in authority, who are charged with the duty of protecting the flock from false teaching, many of these young people get fed poor theology that may, in fact come from a good heart, but nevertheless, an uninformed mind, or even worse, an overemotional and irrational, deceived mind. Jesus says in the book of John, "...true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit and must be worshiped in spirit and in truth." While entire books are written on John 4:24-25, all I am going to say about it here is that we must have proper knowledge of God to worship in truth. The worship gatherings do not place themselves in the best position to facilitate proper knowledge of God. And this is just one scenario.
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Another scenario is more from the perspective of the spectator and is what I'll call the "pseudo-worship" scenario. This happens when people believe they've just participated in one of the most "anointed" experiences ever, when what actually happened was they spent $25 on a concert that made them feel good. It works like this: people come from all over the place to attend the worship gathering. They come, they worship, they go home. They paid the ticket price to get in, and that's it. Nothing else was offered other than their time to be there. People leave feeling "the anointing," or feeling like they just experienced some powerful worship. They may have, but I would argue that they may have simply encountered some powerful music (if they're lucky). Two questions arise in result: Is worship about our personal experience? If this encounter is worship, and worship is responding to God in an appropriate manner, why channel it outside of the institution that God established as the proper venue for corporate worship?

What begins to take shape, is the idea that proper corporate worship occurs in the church, under the oversight of Elders. But, what then of all those musicians whose music doesn't seem to fit?

Band meets Church.
This all comes together. First off, God equips all of us with some sort of gift or talent to use for the His own glory and benefit of the saints. 1 Peter 4:10-11 says, "Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God's grace in its various forms. If anyone speaks, he should do it as one speaking the very words of God. If anyone serves, he should do it with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ." Here exists a challenge for everybody. Your church needs you. God gave you your personality, your talents, and your gifts to be used for His glory, and the benefit of the saints.

For me, I have been playing in bands for a long time. I have been in all types of bands, I have written hundreds of songs, and I have played in tons of different venues. From the musical standpoint, it would follow, that I should harness that experience for the glory of God and the use of the saints. So I write songs, I arrange them, and I do my best to make sure that they are theologically sound so that the people at The Gathering can worship both in Spirit and in Truth. This, as far as I can see, is faithful stewardship of what God has given me.

If this is true, then it should be done, "with the strength that God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ." This is the point of intersection with creativity. The church has largely allowed itself to be lazy in terms of creativity and settled for downright crap. I can't tell you how many cookie-cutter, hotel lobby-type churches I've set foot in and wondered why we can not exert ourselves a little bit to bring art back into the church and offer God the best of our creativity.

At the Gathering, we really believe that we should do our best to be creative and offer God our best. From the decor of our building, to the powerpoint slides, to the candles, and the music - all of it comes from an acknowledgment that we are created in God's image - creative.

This principle hits both the band and our worship services the same way. With the band, we're able to experiment with things that we wouldn't be able to ordinarily inside of a worship service. For instance, in clubs, we can be as loud as we dang well please!! Thank God for the clubs!! We have a sort of freedom to try stuff that we can't do on a Sunday due to this limitation. The creative process is allowed a bit more flexibility and we are allowed the opportunity to figure out ways to incorporate the sounds that we make in the club into the musical delivery of the songs we sing in a worship service without the guitars turned up to 11. The result is a unique worship service that is innovative, and creative on many levels.
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Songs are written, rewritten, and revised as much as we want them to be. Our goal, in all of this is to use the best of our gift to Glorify God. Therefore, we offer the best of our creativity. In doing this we further explore the gifts God has given us, and are able to continue the cycle of creativity and worship.

Tension.
Being in a band that is also the worship team is awesome. The creative process is truly unique, and I don't think that we'd be do the things we do at The Gathering without this relationship. It is also one of the most difficult relationships one could have. We've had to wrestle with some serious questions over the years. What if Mindhead saw any success? We've have talked with many record labels and haven't yet signed a contract. There are many reasons for this, one being that we're not willing to simply drop our lives just to be in a band. Most people dream about it, but they don't know what goes into it. Endless touring, absence from the local church, and the fact that there is very little compensation. It is a fact that, even in "successful" bands, the members are far from seeing anything close to the actual figures that their CD sales bring in.

On the practical level, for the unsigned band, the big issue is time. How much time spent practicing, recording, playing shows, booking shows, doing photo shoots, etc... It is consuming. It takes a lot for a band to even get to the point for booking agents to take them seriously. We have discovered that we need to be very mindful with our time, to make sure that things don't get out of balance. A band can quickly turn into an idol, and that is something that must be realized by anybody, especially the band members. We all can picture in our heads those annoying rock stars that are so puffed up and full of themselves...I can tell you that there are many within the Christian industry who are the same. People on stage find their pride under a subtle and constant attack, and it is a very slippery slope to becoming a vain, self-absorbed, prideful person.

The tension hits from every direction. Just yesterday I got an e-mail from some fan questioning, "I thought you guys were a Christian band?" I honestly have no clue what this guy was referring to, but the questions arise like this quite often. Many of our brothers and sisters don't understand why we play in bars and clubs. A lot of our brothers and sisters in the bars and clubs don't understand why we play in churches. But we know, and that is precisely the point. It should be like this in any ministry. We need to be intentional, to understand our own heart and motives. If we are not, and if our steps are incidental, then we show that we don't have much of a plan, and aren't using the strength that God gives. We are perhaps not only not serving to the best of our ability, but we could be, in fact, hindering others who are making a solid and faithful effort.

I have seen worship influence band and band influence worship. There is always some sort of ebb and flow between the two. One isn't better than the other, but both seem to aid each other. The band becomes more of a venue for sharing the gospel, and our corporate worship becomes more creative. There is a refining process that is taking place and I am very grateful for a church that allows the freedom to embark on it. The result, on both sides, is deeper worship for both the individuals in the band, and our greater church body.