Ah Paris!

 Ah Paris in the Spring Time! Oh wait, that isn’t really France, it is only Las Vegas… or is it?  Hard to tell isn’t it?  I’m actually at a SAP conference this week in Las Vegas, so alas, I am afraid that is not the real thing. It is a pretty good imitation though, I must say.  Much of what you find here is not the “real thing”, but rather a very good copy of something spectacular. Don’t get me wrong, the grandness and speckle of the strip in Vegas is a quite a site in itself and something that ends up being unique to only Vegas. It is quite the paradox, that a place built on copying and immatating attractions from other places (from the pyramids of Egypt, to the NYC skyline, to Italy, France and other spots in Europe), the Vegas strip can create it’s own unique look and feel.

Some of you might think I’m off my rocker, or maybe I have been in the desert too long, but when you think about it, isn’t what we do in our worship services on this side of heaven, a kind of poor imitation of the “real thing”?  I can’t help but think that each church and local body has it’s own look and feel, but we are all trying to see and feel something that we will only know in true form when we are standing before Christ on the throne of heaven and proclaiming, “Worthy is the Lamb!”

Just because we may be different from each other in our style of worship or that we maybe far inferior from the “real thing”, doesn’t mean we should stop or that we should strive to all be alike. I think that would not be want God wants of us. He wants us to give Him everything we are. He made each of us unique and different.  It would be impossible to take any collection of human beings and get a congregation with the same personality and style of worship. I think that is the way he designed it and I don’t think we should deny it.

We should celebrate our uniqueness as individuals and as a church body. There is no magic formula for “success” in church worship, other than being open and real before our Creator God and giving Him all of our worship. This is sometimes lost in the fray of trying to keep up with trends in technology and culture. I don’t think that means we ignore those things, it is just that we must be careful not to put them above the God we are trying to serve!

Anyway… back to the desert!