Shaggy Worshiper

This is one of the most creative ways I’ve seen the gospel portrayed. If you’ve never seen this before, you might want to grab some tissues before you press play. In fact, even if you have seen this before, you still might want to grab some tissues.

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One thing that we, as leaders, cannot do enough of is assisting those in the next generation, (no, not that next generation,) to rise up. This applies to all areas of life as far as I know: in churches, worship teams, businesses, learning how to be real men or women… No matter where we are, or what we’re doing, chances are that you’re not going to be doing or leading the same people the same way for the rest of your life. Things are always changing. People come. People go. You might come and go. But as a leader, it’s always important to be intentional about building up those who are going to come after you.

This last year has been bodacious as far as the band I’ve been able to lead at our junior and senior high youth groups. I’ve been blessed with a team with amazing musical talent and a heart for what we get to do every week. The only problem with this is that two of them are seniors and are leaving in a couple months to go to college out of state. Now, we’re in the position of building and raising up the next students to plug into the band and be a part of it for the next year.

How do you do that?

I’m not 100% sure. I don’t think there’s a twelve-step program for doing that. But I think it all begins with being intentional about it and not waiting around hoping someone will come along and be a clone of who is in the place now. It’s about taking those who are next under your wing and teach them, show them, push them, to listen to them, and adjust to them.

We’ve started the process of raising up the next musicians for our youth band. We’ll probably make mistakes. Okay, we’ll definitely makes some mistakes. I know I’ve already made some. But, this is a process and a cause that we need to invest in.

What things have you done or have people done with you to help raise up the next generation?

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A lot of people in the Christian music sphere probably know that the David Crowder Band released the first single last week for their upcoming album. The song they released is called How He Loves. Less known among the Christian music community is that the song originally written by John Mark McMillan. The story behind the song was that a great friend to John, and fellow youth leader, prayed one morning to God and said that if it would shake the youth of the nation and start a movement, he would give his life that day. He died that night in a car wreck. The next day, this song was written. Now, this song has really built up a lot of momentum since it was written. I believe it has received the biggest boost from Kim Walker and Jesus Culture version. We even played last August at one of the Heart of Worship events at Community Covenant.

Now, the thing is that the newest version of the song, released by the David Crowder Band, changes up one of the lines of the song. The lines that originally sang, “So Heaven meets earth like a sloppy wet kiss” got changed to “So Heaven meets earth like an unforeseen kiss”.

Now, copyright law allows very small, minor changes to songs so that they’ll better fit the circumstances in which the song is played. And, this is a very minor change, it’s one word during a verse. But, defining a kiss as sloppy and wet makes it seem very different than unforeseen.

In regards to this specific song, I love the original lyrics. I love the imagery of Heaven just showering love on the earth, and to me, unforeseen makes it seem like a polite peck on the cheek that people sneak in on a first date; which is not the way God feels about us. He’s absolutely crazy about us and wants us to know it! So now, my question to you is a two pronged question.

Which lyric do you like better in this specific case? (Sloppy wet, or unforeseen.)
And, are you okay with changing of lyrics of songs? (Or do you hold to the belief that it was written that way for a reason?)

I’m hoping that we can get some differences in opinion going here and that’ll lead to good discussion on the subject.

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p.s. Here’s a video of John Mark McMillan sharing the story behind the song and then singing it.

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I’ve been blogging consistently for about a year now and have moved the location around from iWeb, to Shaggy Worshiper, to dustinpetersen.com. I loved blogging under Shaggy Worshiper a lot. This place had a certain feel, a certain swagger to it that I really liked. Then I accidentally broke the site while upgrading to the latest version of WordPress last fall. After breaking my blog and losing all of the content on it, I decided to start brand new and purchased dustinpetersen.com to use. It was okay blogging over there, but it felt like something wasn’t quite right; I’m not quite sure what it was. I think that part of it was that it felt a little to “me centered” seeing as how the site was my own name and that I didn’t feel able to blog and talk about worship, and music, and God stuff the way I was able to at Shaggy Worshiper.

So!

All that to say that as of now, I’m moving the blog back over to www.shaggworshiper.com. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for the last month or so and it feels like this is the right thing to do. So those of you who link to, or have dustinpetersen.com in your feed reader, please change it to point to Shaggy Worshiper so you can still keep up with everything going on.

I’ve been able to import all of the content from the other site to here, so all of the videos, pictures, and posts from dustinpetersen.com can now be found here. There might be a few quirks with the imported content like links pointed in the wrong direction, but if that’s the case, let me know via comment or email and I’ll fix it asap. And like any move, it takes a few days to get everything where you want it to really feel like home, so things may change a little bit look and feel wise, but after that it should be in a pretty set.

Welcome back to Shaggy Worshiper.

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