Wired for Worship: Week One

The idea of "worship" has come up a lot in my own life lately, and it's threaded into Holy Cross and the kids there, and I think it's really cool. One of my favorite parts about being in Kids ministry is how much God grows me and changes me while He teaches the kids through me. I'm both taught and teaching, and it's what makes my "job" (really? that old Mark Twain quote floats through my head) so enjoyable. Life with Christ isn't easy, but it's certainly exhilarating! So, lately the threads have all been weaved to worship. It's so rarely studied in our culture and the question is hardly ever asked, but what is worship? I don't even think I've begun to uncover the answer to that question.

The kids have started wanting to stay upstairs for the music (and even the sermon sometimes... tell me that's not cool!) on Sunday mornings. We're all for letting the kids worship upstairs and engage in the music and the prayers, but kids are kids and sometimes the fidget fairy comes and takes over. So the question was, how do we ingrain in our children the idea of what worship is, why we do it? How do we teach them to worship the God of the universe? I'll confess that at first my thought process was, "I have to teach on worship? Uhhh." Not anymore.

I went off to Catalyst last week, and Louie Giglio was talking about the magnificence of God, and the heart that worships Him. He posed a question along the lines of, "what would you like to see happen in your church, that if it happened, would completely change the face of your ministry?" I thought about the question long and hard, and the answer was simple. I want to see our kids actively worshiping God. I don't want them to just be bystanders and students of the Word, I want them to be living, breathing worshipers of who God is and what He can do in their lives. But how do we get there? How do we foster that in our children?

I picked up this book called "Wired for Worship" by Louie Giglio. He's got little devotionals that go with it, where he takes a Psalm and you have to circle the characteristics of God. I started doing that, and it hit me. Of COURSE, in order to worship we have to KNOW the God we're worshiping. People worship all sorts of things. If you want to find out what you value most and what you worship most, look at how you spend your time. You worship the place you spend your time. With that in mind, we realize that none of us really KNOW the God we worship, or at least not the way we should. So, before we can teach the kids to worship God, we have to teach them who God is and why we should worship Him.

Yesterday, we worked on finding out who God is. I started out by asking, "Who is God?" The kids had a hard time answering that question (wouldn't you?). Then we played two songs. The first was Wonderful Maker and the second was You Are Holy. We looked at each of the characteristics of God in the song (father, counselor, Emmanuel, friend, savior, Messiah, Living God, Maker) and looked up bible verses that went with each of them. By the end, the kids were so impressed by who God is that they could hardly contain their excitement. Then, we defined worship as being our response to God's greatness. The last line of You Are Holy is, "and I will live my life for you." We talked about how THAT is true worship.

I'm excited about where this season is going and how the kids (and myself) are going to learn to worship God in a new, powerful, more genuine way. Louie talked about how we have to show the face of Christ on our faces. Show people what heaven looks like through our faces. He used the example of Extreme Home Makeover. After everybody yells, "MOVE THAT BUS!" what do you see first? You don't see the house. You see the people's faces. You see the house pictured on the faces of the family. And that's how we should be. If the magnificence of Jesus Christ and the magnificence of heaven were on the faces of our kids, that would change the face of our ministry.