For the last year or so I’ve been dreaming about what it would look like to be involved in a movement to bring together worship pastors/leaders from all over Canada to develop worship resources for & from the Canadian church. That dream has been born in something we’ve been calling WorshipRises.

You may have heard me mention here on the blog or on twitter about some co-writing I’ve been doing with friends – the bigger story is that we have been pulling together worship leaders from all kinds of churches to write songs for the broader church. This has been quite the adventure and people from coast to coast are excited about this.

Tomorrow, we’ll be gathering over 30 worship pastors/leaders together in St. Catharines, Ontario for our next WorshipRises songwriting day. Men, women, younger, older, black, white, hispanic, conservative, charismatic – and everything in between. This is going to be a gathering that is an incredible reflection of God’s Kingdom and the uniqueness of the church in Canada. Our hope and prayer is that we would be writing songs that would give a voice to our congregation, inspiring and allowing them to worship God in Spirit and in Truth.

Pray for us. Pray that God would unite hearts. Some of us have written together before, some of us are great friends, some of us will be meeting for the first time in about 9 hours. Pray that our desire would not be to lift our own talents and abilities but to lift up the name of Christ. Pray that our eyes wouldn’t be turned to the flashiest lyric or the funkiest chord but would be turned to Christ, our strength, our shelter, our redeemer.

You will be hearing more about WorshipRises in the weeks and months to come. There are several conversations happening that will lead to some very exciting opportunities for these songs and for the church in Canada. Everyone involved in this is through-the-roof excited and we can’t wait to see what God is going to do in us and through us as we stay faithful to His calling.

If you’re interested in following the journey of our songwriting day tomorrow, you can follow any of these twitter accounts or just set up a twitter search for the #worshiprises hashtag. There will be lots of good conversation flying around tomorrow!

Last summer there was a video that went a little crazy, viral-ing its way around the world. Have you seen it? It’s the one where a brave, shirtless soul is dancing all by himself on a hillside at some music festival. There’s a crowd sitting on the grass near him, most of them chuckling at the dancing guy, impressed with his moves but unwilling to join in.

Until..

The first follower.

Derek Sivers put together a 3-minute video with some beautiful insight into what may be descriptive for a new era of leadership, helping us to get a better understanding of followership, as well. You can read the transcript of this video here –

We’ve been working our way through the first three chapters of the book of Romans since Christmas at OBC in a series called “Good News for Bad News”. Our hope is to make it through the entire book over the next several years.

Curious about Paul’s main topics in Romans? Not too hard to figure it out when you look at this visualization of the text from that book –

God, Christ, law, sin, faith, righteousness. Sounds about right.

Ever wonder what it looks like when thousands of ecstatic Canadians celebrate winning the Olympic gold medal in hockey? A little like this –

I was watching the game with a few friends and when Sidney Crosby scored the winning goal there might as well have been a thousand of us crammed in to the basement – we went nuts. What a game, what a day, what an Olympics!

O Canada!