 |
| Worship at our Women's Conference |
Over the years I have been familiar with some "seeker-friendly" churches that asked their people not too get too emotional during worship and do things like raise their hands in praise. How silly - right? Here's why, from James MacDonald's Vertical Church:
"Ritual church, tradition church, felt-need church,
emotional-hype church, rules church, Bible-boredom church, relevant church, and
many other iterations are all horizontal substitutes for God come down, we all
get rocked and radically altered, Vertical Church. The problem is you can’t
fake glory. You can’t manufacture it, or manipulate it, or manifest it at will.
Only God Himself can bring glory into a church, and when He does, communities
get shaken and lives get changed, and the fame of Jesus Christ curls
continuously upon the shore of human hearts like a Hawaii 5-0 wave. Church is
supposed to be a tsunami of glory every Sunday, and that is what we gather for.
Push out of your mind your concepts of church as community, church as mission,
church as evangelistic tool, or church as instruction in Scripture. Church can
be all of those things with great power if God is in the house. Vertical Church
points to a new day where God is the seeker and we are the ones found. In
Vertical Church God shows up, and that changes everything."
- James McDonald, Vertical Church, K104
In this kind of church true seekers will find what they are seeking: viz., God.
This is a church where God is the Seeker and the people are found by him.
