What Not to Wear

I just got back from running sound at a fashion show -- What Not to Wear (not sure how long the link will remain up). For real. And it was great! Unfortunately I somehow suckered my buddy, commenter, and guest blogger Leroy into handling sound last night, which turned out to be a nightmare show from a tech perspective. Mine was easy and fun. Thank you, Leroy. I owe you a steak, and I'm glad that you finally found out that your "soft" tones will no longer allow you to wear black.

I want to commend both the SHE (ladies' ministry) leadership team at Wall Highway and Shari Braendel, the featured speaker. It was a four-hour event and I was thinking these words on the way there this morning: "Four hours??" It actually went by all too quickly, and the things that were taught were beneficial to the body of Christ (like, stop wearing low-cut tops -- it's a distraction and isn't cute), and I assume they were helpful to the ladies regarding what -- and what not -- to wear (like, no horizontal stripes on larger people).

I also got to play fun music at random. I'm thankful I took my laptop because I had a decent library of applicable bumper music: "Girls on Film" by Duran Duran, "Looks that Kill" by Motley Crue, "Who Let the Dogs Out" by Baha Men (seriously -- it worked at one point), etc. The real homerun, though, in my opinion, was having Chris Tomlin's "Come Home Running" to play at the close of the event after Shari shared her life story and encouraged a response to Christ.

I want to seriously encourage you to organize something just like this at your church fellowship. Have a look at Shari Braendel's site, and if you need info on how to organize it, contact one of the leaders of the SHE Community.

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Won't You Be My Neighbor?

This is a bit of an off-the-wall post, and I'll bet you thought it was going to be about the Good Samaritan. It isn't.

On Thursday, March 20, the would-have-been-80th birthday of Fred Rogers (of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood), Family Communications, Inc. is sponsoring "Won't You Be My Neighbor Days" from March 15 through March 20. Most of us, I'll bet, grew up with him, learning what it meant to be a neighbor.

In his honor, the company is asking, "Won't you wear a sweater on March 20?"

I think I'm going to wear a sweater.

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Dean's Big Day

There were two things that I wanted to talk about this morning and couldn't decide which to cover. As it turns out, Bill Fowler happened to cover one of them rather well in a post yesterday. A key phrase in that post: "The fact is, I saw people going through the motions because I was the one going through the motions. I was seeing what I wanted to see apparently." So I'll move on to the other subject.

This morning I asked God to work through me in every situation, whether big or small.

In one respect, the "big things" in my life are not really that big. Our innate sense of self-importance -- or mine, at least -- usually makes us see our own situations as being remarkably huge. That's natural, since the things we do, by definition, impact us before anyone else. But the world honestly doesn't hang on every move or decision that Dean Lusk makes, as difficult as that may be for me to swallow sometimes.

But in another respect, today is a big day! Every event that has happened to me in life, ever, has prepared me for this particular day. I'm reminded of the Star Trek episode "The Enemy Within," in which Captain Kirk, due to a freak transporter malfunction, was split into two people, one having all his "good" traits and one all his "evil." In the end, his passive nature couldn't survive without his aggressive nature, and vice versa. Thank goodness for Scotty. (I have this nearly uncontrollable urge to spin this off into a touching "Who's your Scotty?" post, but I wouldn't be able to live with myself.)

Now, whether we could survive without having had bad things happen to us is highly debatable. I don't have time to dig into this quite as deeply as I'd like, because there are huge, centuries-old debates about this kind of thing (generically, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" or more specifically, for instance, "How could any good come of a family helplessly watching their little girl be swept away by the sea in a hurricane?"), but I can look back and see that God has, in fact, brought about positive things in my life and in the lives of others in spite of, and even sometimes because of, the stupid, bad, and even painful things that I've done or been a part of.

Lest I forget, He's brought about positive things because of the occasional good, helpful, and not-so-stupid things that I've done in the past, too. It just seems that I don't learn as many life-changing lessons from the good stuff.

"And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them." (Romans 8:28, NLT)

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Those Perverted Lights

Last night I was talking with my son about the music at the Catalyst Conference. I commented on the guitar player's ability to use his effects pedals (echo, wah wah, "flanger," etc.) almost as instruments. We also talked about the staging and lighting, which was impressive (but didn't particularly call attention to the musicians and singers). Quite abruptly, my son said, "I wish our services were like that."

As we talked about what he said, he made the point that the various services he's attended that have been in more of what we might call a "concert" setting always enable him to focus on the worship aspect of both music and preaching, in contrast to a brightly-lit setting with less "high-powered" music.

One comment I've heard repeated by several people is that low lighting in a service gives the setting a "night club" atmosphere. But isn't that allowing a preconceived notion of a secular activity to restrict something that might be beneficial, enabling, and edifying to worshippers?

Many people who attend worship services from Sunday to Sunday -- and I'd say probably the majority of them -- are self-conscious enough to feel uncomfortable lifting their hands in worship, even if they feel the liberty and prompting of the Holy Spirit to do so. The simple adjustment of lower house lighting has the immediate effect of taking the focus off of the indivdual worshipper and removes one mental hindrance to their worship: self-consciousness.

Some might argue that the attending worshipper should not feel self-conscious about worshipping freely regardless of the circumstances. While that has some truth, there could be a number of reasons for that self-awareness other than paranoia. For instance, for better or worse, I have avoided lifting my hands because I don't want to draw attention to myself. I know this to be the case with others in the congregation, too. I should note that this runs deep with me and I still deal with it personally -- one of the reasons for my inclination to drop out of "the institutional church machine" several years ago was that I saw the lifting of hands by singers and musicians to be pretentious and showy.

I want to talk about music and performance issues tomorrow, but taking the issue of house and stage lighting only, why do we wipe out the possibility of utilizing a setting simply because "undesirables" do so in a totally different arena? (Don't get me started on why we may think certain people are undesirable...)

Potentially uncomfortable paragraph ahead (especially if my parents are reading this)... You were warned!

To draw an overkill parallel from left field, God made humans to enjoy sex. But He didn't intend for it to be abused in the twisted and perverted manner in which some use it. Are we going to just drop this whole "sex" thing because there are weirdos out there? Probably not. I would argue that we're dealing with a similar parallel here, only on a smaller and less far-reaching scale of right and wrong.

For those of you who've stuck with this post to the end, do you have any Scriptural or moral argument for or against "concert" style lighting in a worship service?

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Catalyst '07

Woo hoo! Off to the Catalyst Conference this afternoon. By definition, then, I am a young, talented, and highly creative leader. That's what their blurb says...

Will post updates, opinions, and/or general stuff from the conference beginning tonight at my MySpace blog.

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