the Requiest

Based on an excellent wiki at the company which hosts my websites I was finally able to get ScribeFire to login to my Wordpress site.  Apparently it was a combination of settings in my .htaccess file and setting my ipaddress as an allowable external connection to my mySQL database.

Jenn over at A Small Faith asks,

What is the appropriate response someone on a worship team should give when people stop you after church and say “Worship was great today!”???

While I can understand the direction that a question like this is coming from I think the question is difficult to answer without knowing the exact way in which the thank you was delivered. In reading some of the comments I believe that’s the question most are raising when answering this.

One of my long time friends is the lead guitarist on our churches praise team. Being in a somewhat stodgy reformed church my question hasn’t been so much about thanking them for the hard work they do, or for playing a piece of music that helped prepare me for worship, or moved my heart from the tedious tasks of every day living to be centered towards God – no my question has to do with clapping after a particularly moving piece.

If your Adult, Youth, Childrens, Bell – Choir, Praise Team, Organist plays/sings a piece of music which far surpasses anything they’ve done before, moves the entire congregation to joyous tears and simply blows your socks off, should you or shouldn’t you clap?

And getting back the real point of Jenn’s question; are you clapping directly for the members of the band/choir, or are you clapping for their God given abilities? I’ve certainly been mindful of this when I have clapped in the past, but I think we can get a bit too hung up on this. It appears to me that our pious reactions while in the pew, surrounded by our fellow congregants far out weigh our reactions as soon as we get of church and get stuck in traffic on the way home to lunch.

But like Jenn, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this matter.

Peace,
Rong