Yesterday the Charlotte Observer included an article on our church's 'Hope in a House of Blues' series. It was in the Lake Norman neighbors section. The writer did a nice job capturing what we are trying to do. Here are her questions and my written answers in full.(if you're looking for the blogs I mentioned in church yesterday, they are the last two before this one - scroll down to 'God Never Speaks' 1&2)
1) How did the idea for Hope in a House of Blues come about? ANSWER: Our Sunday services are always organized as 4-6 week long 'series' covering a particular subject. In a planning meeting Kyle Dillard, our worship arts pastor, simply blurted out, 'what if we experimented with four weeks of combining blues-music-as-worship, the blues in peoples’ lives, while you teach what the Bible says about suffering.’ Year after year, we never run out of material – the blues in this world and in our lives are so ever-present.
2) How does the series use art and music to connect spiritually with people?ANSWER: We use this series to point out the fact that art and music are inherently spiritual activities, allowing us to express both the human spirit and our desire for God in ways different than prose or rational discourse. We aspire to be part of a fresh movement to recapture the vitality of the arts for the purpose of worship. Blues Music simply does connect spiritually with people. Our first guest artist, Mike Farris, stated that when he plays the blues based on the American slave worship experience, even naked pot-smoking hippies at the Bonaroo Festival get quiet, tearful, and deal with God in their soul. This year’s visual art includes paintings in our lobby by residents of the Urban Ministry Men’s Shelter in
3) How would you describe the experience of attending a Hope in a House of Blues concert? ANSWER: The experience is usually surprising first and foremost, because every year we fuse the music, visual arts, worship environment, and Bible teaching differently, hoping for something that is more like transformative spiritual performance art as opposed to typical church expectations.
4) Is there any preaching/teaching that goes along with the concerts? ANSWER: Yes. Every year I choose a book of the Bible that addresses the collision of human blues with the love of God. This year, I am teaching the book of Lamentations, which is a set of five ancient Hebrew poems expressing anguish over the destruction of a city, a nation, and individual lives.
5) What do you hope people will experience/take from attending a Hope in a House of Blues event? ANSWER: I hope people will experience the presence of God in this fusion worship. And I hope we will each learn new facets of God’s wisdom for handling the pain and suffering in our lives, as well as being agents of God’s hope to everyone we know who’s currently living in their own House of Blues.
6) How did last week's concert go? ANSWER: Great.
7) Any other comments about Hope in a House of Blues? ANSWER: We constantly experiment with a concept of ‘ancient/future worship’ at
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