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Worship – what worship has developed into confuses me. It is the thought that worship is only done on Sundays that has become funny and cliché. How this thought of worshipping only inside the walls of the church in the form of singing and sermon on the weekends is beyond me. Could it be due in part to our individualistic culture and the loss of community in today’s church? The thought that we are only worshipping on Sundays is an argument we’ve all probably heard before, and yet we seem to be doing nothing about it. I wanted to share the idea of a visionary leader who worships God with everything that he/she has (Mark 12:30), what a true visionary looks like, and how they will have an impact on the church culture.

At Cornwall Church we sing and play a song by Todd Agnew, called Romans 12:1, which was written directly from a letter addressed to the Romans in which the Apostle Paul made the urging plea for people to “offer bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God”, calling it our “spiritual act of worship”. Calling people to no longer conform to the world, Paul asks for a renewal of our minds and to witness transformation within ourselves. Only then will we find God’s will – “his good, pleasing, and perfect will” (Romans 12:1-3). Once we have found God’s will in our lives, we must not keep it for ourselves, for we are called to let our light shine before others (Matthew 5:14-16) and proclaim repentance and forgiveness and to be witnesses (Luke 24:44-49).

Here is where the idea of a visionary leader takes place. A visionary leader is not someone who boldly faces the future in order to see what God is doing in the church. Instead, a visionary worship leader looks to history to see what God has done in order to build the future. Whether looking at their personal history or the church’s history, a visionary is able to teach and aid others with worship in a variety of ways, beyond Sunday morning or Saturday night, creating the spiritual worship as Paul had mentioned.

My hope is that we will consider our worship of God in a more serious light beyond ourselves, and so I wanted to leave us with these questions: What are we learning either historically or personally and how are we applying it to our personal worship of God and/or aiding others to live a life as described in Romans 12:1? Also, are we looking behind us in order to teach others, or are we simply facing forward waiting for somebody else to show us God’s will?

Peace,
Ron