A Blast From the Past!

I recently found an article on the Zoe Group website that brought back a flood of memories and made me shout "Amen" all at once. It's called "Heart of Worship: Gen X and was written by none other than Randy Gill.

That name may mean nothing to you, but it means a great deal to me. I first met Randy through a friend who had been in the Metropolitan Detroit Youth Chorus (MDYC) with me and was then going to Michigan Christian College (now Rochester College). She invited me to a concert the chorus was doing at a local church and she introduced me to Randy. The rest was history. At that time I was all but set on going to another very remote, small college in the middle of corn country, but once I met Randy I knew I wanted to be in his chorus.

A good bit of what I know and understand about worship and leading singing I learned from watching him and being around him about 6 days a week. He never took worship lightly, even 20+ years ago, his song leading was "cutting edge" and listening to him in chorus practices on tours you knew he had a fire for his Lord that could not be contained in boring, ritualistic service. I could lead singing before I met him (thanks to people like Cecil and my mom), but just being around him took me to the next level and the next.

His article addresses something that I have referred to here ("Church Music Part IV - Our Kids"). Our kids DO think differently than we do. For example, for us, it was enough for us to spend some time on the phone with a best friend. For my son, he "talks" to 2, 3, 4, 5 or more AT A TIME on his computer using "Instant Messaging". These are not kids from school (for the most part), but kids he met at camp, or at a youth rally or from short trips to Michigan. It's not as simple as saying that they are the "MTV Generation", because (here's a secret), they are not. Most of them stopped watching MTV (or never did) a long time ago.

Randy is right, they don't think linearly and even though I couldn't get my hands around it (or start to) until I read his article, I already knew that. I talked about it in another article called ("Spontaneous Part One"), we have to find some way to come to a happy medium of organization and spontenaety.

Do I have the answers. I think not, but I'm going to continue looking, in fact I'm going to look harder. I may make some mistakes, but I would rather make mistakes of action than make the big mistake of inaction.

Thanks Randy.