Jon Jolly

I meant to post this on Sunday afternoon, but the internet’s been down at home! Sunday’s Thanksgiving Service was fantastic with the band sounding really great! It was Lea’s vocals and strong harmonies that really help lift the whole tone, but all real credit must go to God for inspiring us all to praise him.

If you’re interested we actually only played 4 songs in the end:

• Beautiful One - Tim Hughes
• Oh Happy Day - Tim Hughes
• Holy is The Lord - Chris Tomlin
• Oh Praise Him - David Crowder Band

The best part of the service for me was the dedication of little Cora Star Debnam. It was an especially moving experience to watch two parents cry tears of joy over their new baby. That’s real thanksgiving.

Tomorrow is Sunday 1st October and Arun Community Church is having a thanksgiving service. It just so happens that I’m on the rota to lead worship for the meeting and have spent much of the day with a guitar in hand, trying to choose a set of songs that reflect what I believe God wants to do tomorrow!

As I’ve said before, I absolutely LOVE to worship. It’s one of those things that just captivates and inspires me so I take the responsibility quite seriously. What I’ve found today is that it can be very hard to find songs that fit in with a particular theme. After a bit of trawling across Google, I’ve found a few websites that allow you to search for a particular theme or subject in a song, yet often I (or the church congregation) aren’t familar with the song results they return. The other option is software packages. The church have tried a few different worship programmes over the years yet none are that satisfactory or available to me on my home computer!

So that just leaves me with pages of song books and print-outs. It’s quite time consuming but I actually appreciate looking at each song individually and deciding if it will fit into the mix. The list I’ve prepared for tomorrow is:

• Beautiful One - Tim Hughes
• Happy Day - Tim Hughes
• I Will Dance (Undignified) - Matt Redman
• Oh Praise Him - David Crowder Band
• Holy Is The Lord - Chris Tomlin
• Everything/Consuming Fire - Tim Hughes
• My Jesus, My Saviour - Darlene Zschech
• See his Love - Tom Lockley
• Praise Him You Heavens - Russell Fragar

My concern with this list is that although they are mostly around praising God, they are not specifically about thanksgiving - the theme of the morning. It’s not a major problem as I guarantee we won’t get a chance to play all of these and I usually end up swapping things around as God does His thing. Maybe I’ll post the actual playlist tomorrow afternoon to see how it differed!

It must have been about 10 years ago when I first realised my true love (Kirsty was 2 years later). Having been brought up in a Christian family I’ve always known God in my life, but I distinctly remember spending many hours as a teenager in loud, passionate worship events like Cutting Edge and coming to an understanding of what He has asked of me: to be a worshipper.

Music really stirs me and I listen to a wide variety. I even play guitar a little and write some songs, but I don’t feel my job is necessarily to be a ‘Worship Leader’. God has called me just simply to worship Him however I can; through music, writing, praying or just walking through life with an awe and wonder for His character. I absolutely LOVE it! However, in the daily grind of life I can tend to let my passion slide a little and it takes me some time to realise all over again what He wants from me as a worshipper.

My life has been so busy these last 2 months that I’ve had to reassess my workload and lifestyle just to spend time with the people who matter to me. This painful process of pulling back, saying “No” and turning people away has been a steep learning curve where I know I’ve let people down. Now I’m not there yet as Kirsty will tell you, but in all this hurt and disappointment has been the unexpected outcome of finding space for God again. I wasn’t aware that I’d pushed Him out, but I’ve found new meaning in the words “Coming back to the heart of worship”.

At SLAM on Thursday, we hosted a ‘worship night’. It was a strange and humbling experience, leading 35 teenagers in worship. With many non-church kids and some apathetic church kids too, we were thrilled to see the Holy Spirit turn up and touch their lives in a very tangible way, three making first time commitments to Jesus! It seems that James 4:8 is scarily accurate: “Come near to God and he will come near to you”. I can’t wait for church tomorrow as we have the priviledge of leading the congregation in worship. It’s gonna be great!