Roundups from Around the Web: Thoughts on Church

So, I’ve been blog hopping again… And found some blogs worth sharing:

I thought this blog was a very interesting blog about worship. As someone who was once involved in leading worship in high school and who has experienced a number of very life influencing and touching worship experiences but who has also become very skeptical and critical of typical church worship over the past few years I found this blog and the comments related to it very interesting. Here’s my question… so I firmly believe that we should worship God with our whole lives and with the unique talents and creative gifts that God has given us so what would/could this look like in the church? I feel like in the past we have often minimized worship to merely praising God in song, but what would it look like to as a community of believers worship and praise God with a wider variety of honest, authentic, and creative gifts? What would it look like to praise and worship God with our intellect? What if praising God through music became just one of many ways in which we use the creative skills of the community to communicate the greatness of our God? Ok, enough rambling soap box… moving on…

After that I read a few blogs on women’s ministry that also got me thinking…http://blog.christianitytoday.com/giftedforleadership/2007/08/why_i_dont_do_womens_ministry.html and http://emergingwomen.blogspot.com/2008/04/cleaver-conundrums-why-i-dont-do-womens.html#comments and http://www.ellenstevens.com/?p=149#more-149 – I found these interesting and the comments revealing. Personally by the time I was old enough to really be included in women’s ministries I had already made up my mind that I wouldn’t like them. Maybe I should have given them more of a chance but really I can’t imagine myself liking the normal women’s ministry type things for much of the reasons listed in these blogs. Really I think though that most of them women I saw in the church (especially the ones who were/are heavily involved in the women’s ministries) seemed so fake to me - I didn’t want to be a part of that fakeness. But, on the other side of things I have experienced in my life the power and strength, grace and beauty that can come from a group of women opening their lives to each other and truly befriending one another - and I can say that if more women’s ministry were like that then I’d be the first to jump in.

Ok, that’s enough for now J

Rejoicing in the journey - Beth Stedman