Graham Kendrick's New Blog

Posted by Graham Kendrick on 26 April 2010 | 1 Comments

Are you on the worship team or the missions team? While you ponder that question, I happen to be tapping this out on my laptop whilst waiting for my flight back to the UK, and sitting opposite me is Steve Thompson who has been MD’ing the band we shared with Paul Baloche at a conference in Virginia. The relevance of that information will be made clear in a moment. So, are you on the worship team or the missions team? Names and categories are necessary, but in an age of specialisation they can easily become compartments, and we start to think; ‘Oh that’s nothing to do with me’. In fact we are all on the worship team, and we are all on the missions team. Happily, I believe that the walls of these compartments are coming down, judging by the number of worship musicians who can be found ‘missioning’ anywhere from local schools, to music venues, to fund raising for charities to parking themselves in foreign parts to teach, train, mentor and relieve poverty - whether it is their daily employment or otherwise. I can remember the moment when the walls of my compartmented thinking were toppled. The preacher knew his church history, and was recounting how in the Europe of the 1700’s a disparate group of religious asylum seekers found refuge on the estate of one of the aristocracy, one Count Zinzendorf, and set about forming a community dedicated to living out the authentic Gospel. They became known simply as Moravians; the name of the area they settled in, and are regarded by many as the pioneers of the modern mission movement. They are also famous for establishing continual prayer – it lasted for around one hundred years! In an age without modern transportation, medicines or communications they travelled to remote places with the message of Christ, where many of them paid with their lives, or buried their loved ones. One day, two young Moravians, far from home, stood at the rail of the sailing ship as they sighted the island of St Thomas in the Caribbean. Their mission was to bring the gospel message to the slaves working on the plantations, and they had agreed that if necessary they would sell themselves as slaves in order to get among them. The story goes that one turned to the other and in a few short words summed up the passion that drove them to this point, words that became the motto of their movement, the words that forever put worship and mission in one embrace for me: ‘That the Lamb who was slain might receive the reward of his suffering’. Their worship of Christ ignited a desire to offer him much more than their prayers and Moravian hymns, but to bring to him the fruits of his costly mission from heaven to earth, the people the Father loved so much that he sent his Son to die for. In this way their worship overflowed into what we call mission, but for them it seems that it was all the overflow of worship. So to the relevance of telling you that Steve Thomson is sitting opposite me? In the early nineties I was with Steve in the Czech republic, not far from where the Moravians had lived, teaching at a worship training event. I told this story, which Steve had not heard before, and his face lit up. ‘You’ll never believe this’ he said. ‘As a young man my father came to faith in Christ on the island of St Thomas – in a church founded by the Moravian missionaries!’ I then introduced the locals to one of their distant spiritual cousins. Join the dots!