I wear plaid. I'm a blogger.

During a meeting with several other Cincinnati area worship ministers last week we got to talking shop about Christmas/Christmas Eve services; who was doing them, who was not, how many and what time. I was intrigued (neither positive nor adverse reaction) to find that roughly a third of the churches represented were not having any kind of Christmas Day services, even though Christmas morning is a Sunday this year. Yet there was one leader (Reggie) who said that their church has a Christmas morning worship service every year regardless of whether it falls on a Sunday . Initially this shocked me. How could this be? Why  would this be? Why have a church service every Christmas? Why not stay home and eat cinnamon rolls and open presents like the rest of America? Reggie said many of the people who expect this from his congregation are not native North Americans. Initially Reggie was against the idea, but once he realized how many people from his congregation wanted  to have a Chr...

A friend of mine sent me a link to a song called " Falling Into You " by Hillsong Young and Free . This group of musicians intentionally creates music for younger believers and everything they do is designed to engage young people on their level. Chances are when you watch the music video there will be many things you really like about the video...along with many things you will classify as " not my style ." Am I right? Here's what struck me in particular about this music video: the backing vocals are singing their little hearts out...and you can't hear a single note they're singing. You can hear that there are other people singing other than the lead, but there is no clear distinction of voices. Maybe we are just hearing the crowd sing along, maybe it's the backing vocals, maybe it is a pre-recorded layer of backing vocals...either way, it seems that the vocalists on stage are there predominantly to provide a certain atmosphere. They dance, they m...