by Stephen Dennis
Recently I had a conversation with a fellow worship musician and he was really excited to tell me that a really well-known country artist visited his church. I’m sharing his excitement because let’s be honest, it’s awesome to look out and see “this person” in the crowd.
My friend was telling me how the worship leader came up to him and said something along the lines of “Hey man, I need you to make sure you don’t mess up today, ‘insert celebrities name here’ is in the congregation!!” My knee-jerk response was, “Yeah man! I bet that was a little nerve racking having that person there.” However, I then began to think about the words that came out of my mouth. Do we as a church get unfocused due to a celebrity in our congregation? Does someone famous sitting in the crowd cause us to use our spiritual gifts with more excellence?
We’ve heard it time and time again. We’ve read it time and time again, and we say it time and time again, “Give God your very best”. However, I am challenged on the thought that maybe the church as a whole is not doing the best job of that. If all it takes is a human celebrity sitting in the congregation for the words “I need you to make sure you don’t mess up tonight” to be said, are we missing it? Are we missing the fact that no matter who sits in our seats on a Sunday morning, we should strive for nothing short of perfection every time? After all, we are there to worship the living God. The same God who sent His son to take on our burdens and to bore our pain at Calvary. Shouldn’t that be reason enough for us to do our very best every week? Do we have to wait for a human celebrity to enter the room?
This was convicting. I honestly understand the excitement that the worship team must have felt by a celebrity being there. I myself am guilty of wanting to strive extra hard to not mess up in front of certain people….but why? Why only have that attitude when certain people are around? You see, the fact that the Spirit of God is omnipresent should make us want to be the best we can be 100% of the time. We shouldn’t have to feel as if we are giving anything less than our best every single worship set. If we have this mentality for a celebrity, surely we should have it for God. This is not just applicable to worship teams. I believe every part of the Body of Christ should be functioning with 150% effort, 100% of the time.
I’m challenging anyone that reads this. It doesn’t matter what part of ministry you serve in, would you serve the same way whether a celebrity attends or not? Would you try extra hard to impress this person? Because realistically, we shouldn’t. We should be able to come into our ministry fields each week, saying that the presence of God is greater and more exciting than any human presence. In the end, He created those celebrities, shouldn’t He get more from us than they do?
