Redemption Boulevard A Multicultural Worship Ministry » Vision

Are you preaching to the choir?

Peter Park — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 13:00:40 +0000

I think many of us in church ministry, especially in multicultural worship ministry, can sometimes feel like we’re telling the same message again and again. But isn’t this why we come to hear the Word being preached every Sunday?

We need constant reminders of the call to which God has given His people. So, if you feeling like you’re preaching to the choir, I encourage you to continue doing so.

My worship team will tell you, at least I hope they would, that we keep digging deeper into the Word to learn more about God’s heart about bringing the nations together to worship Him. We’ll hit on cultural competency, racial reconciliation, gender reconciliation, etc.

The better understanding your team and your Church has about God’s heart the more effective our ministry will be in giving glory to God.

I want to leave you with 2 Timothy 3:16, which says:

All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right.

I pray that the God of endurance will give you continued conviction about the things of His heart so that you will continue to put His Word in front of your congregation.

Blog post by Peter Kihyun Park

These can become buzz words unless…

Peter Park — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 13:00:32 +0000

Setting the vision of what God wants is a tremendous challenge. I know how hard it can be to talk about multicultural Church and multicultural worship can be. But it’s so important to lay a SOLID BIBLICAL FOUNDATION for why it’s so important.

Unless we are active in leading our teams and the congregation in digging into the Word actively, intentionally, and repetitively these words will quickly become buzz words:

1. Multicultural church
2. Multicultural worship
3. The gospel
4. Racial reconciliation
5. Community
6. Being Authentic
7. Jesus

In my experience, I’ve come to see how important it is to keep at the forefront WHY we’re doing what we’re doing. Why else are we pursuing and doing these things?

For His glory? I hope so. I pray that it becomes your reason.

Blog post by Peter Kihyun Park

Should I explain it, introduce it, etc.?

Peter Park — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 12:00:19 +0000

Over the past year as I’ve been leading worship at Aldrich one of the things that has come up is why I tend to greet, explain what we’re doing in the service, or introducing the reason why I picked a particular song. Things I say include:

“Good morning everyone. Let’s stand together and worship the Lord.”
“Let’s continue to worship the Lord in song.”
“The reason why I picked this song this week is because…”

The reason is pretty simple: WE’RE STILL TRANSITIONING.

We’re only a couple of years into becoming a church that’s striving to become more multicultural. And I’ve only been there for a year helping with that process.

I think the worship team wants to be able to include elements from other cultures without explaining things. Part of that is because they want to have more time to play music. Part of that is because they have a vision of where they feel the Lord may be leading the congregation.

This is where I’ve been reminding the worship team that we need to take BABY STEPS. I spend a lot of time with the team in Scripture about why we’re doing what we’re doing. We spend a lot of time as a team going over songs in other languages and styles.

Where the worship team spends 2.5 hrs. at practice with all these things the congregation gets about 30 min. of what we’ve learned together. So, you can see there’s a little bit of a gap there.

I don’t believe in the philosophy that as long as the worship team is worshiping and understand what’s going on that this is good enough. When the worship team steps up to serve on Sunday morning we have the responsibility of bringing the congregation along with us as we worship. And this means we need to actually LEAD and TEACH them about worship.

This doesn’t mean we’re taking the place of the preaching, absolutely not. But the worship team plays a role in those things under the authority of the pastor.

So, should I explain it, introduce it, etc.? I think it’s important to do so if we want to cast the vision of multicultural worship to the whole congregation and not just the select few on the worship team.

Blog post by Peter Kihyun Park

Keeping the vision of multicultural worship simple