One of the paradigms, one of the models I use, is of
The Truman Show, which I think was a great, iconic movie. Truman, played by Jim Carrey, lives entirely in this world that he was born into 30 years ago. It’s all self-contained, and at the end in this boat he suddenly hits the wall. He gets out and he sees that door marked EXIT. It seems to me that so often we’ve placed both our preaching and our understanding of worship within a very limited dome. We don’t think it’s limited. But actually we need to open that door, and it’s a big task for preachers to help.
One of the very practical issues that has intrigued me is the way in which very often the preacher, the senior pastor, has never really sat down with worship leaders in order to talk about some sense of common vision, even how they should work. I mean, when they’re appointed, say, there’s a kind of meeting of minds. It seems sometimes the preachers have been doing their thing in
Advertisement
parallel. “This is the Scripture text for Sunday, this is the theme I’m doing, go to it, make it work.”
Preaching: “You do your part and I’ll do mine.”Quicke: “You do your part. That’s what you’re paid to do and you’re good at doing it and you’re looking after the music, and I can’t do that ... .” But I believe very strongly that the senior pastor should be involved. I’ve sat and planned a service with a worship leader who had been doing this for years, and we had prayer. This worship leader said, “That’s the first time any pastor has prayed with me about the service.” So there’s a bit of work to be done, even practically; and wouldn’t it be great to have some humility on all sides in the face of the great God we serve? Just to begin to open our eyes that we’ve diminished this thing called worship.
A podcast interview with Michael Quicke is available that covers additional topics not included here; you can find it at http://www.preaching.com/media/podcasts/.
