What about the other?

For the next few weeks I will be preaching on spiritual disciplines. Last week was Bible study, this week is prayer, then fasting, meditation, tithing, and worship. For this week's service, we reorganized the order so it would flow with the theme. We're using the simple "PRAY" breakdown:

Praise and thanksgiving
Repentance
Ask for others
Yourself

In that vein we are trying to make all the music, prayers, and elements fit for each of those sections. I talked with our praise team singer about what my thoughts were and what I was hoping for for their music selection for each of those areas. Both she and I had an extremely difficult time finding a song for "ask for others". There are lots of songs about "me" "my" and "I" and how God works with the individual. But there were a scarcity of songs that ask for others. Sure, there are those songs that ask for help when I help others. But not so many that actually deal with praying/blessing/asking for others.

As I thought about (and stewed over) it, I couldn't help but think "no wonder the church is insular and belly-button focused". We know how much power music has in the faith life of someone, the words of a song often become more ingrained and more frequently used than those of scripture (you can see this when people believe there were cows at the birth of Jesus but in the scriptures there is no mention of "cattle lowing" despite the ever familiar words), so then why would it be any surprise that people become overly focused on their individual walk with God and not that of others when the music they hear and sing day in and day out has little to do with the other? I wonder what it would do to the spirit of testimony/evangelism/witness if more of our music focused on praying/asking/blessing others...it would be a regular reminder that my faith walk is strong not because it serves me, but because it blesses others.

In the meantime, we're turning to Yolanda Adams and her song "Be Blessed" to stick with the theme of the day and truly ask for others.