Together my beard and his hair make a full red-head

This past Sunday I opened up for Aaron Gillespie. He is a man after God's heart and is using his credibility with the youth to lead them to the cross. I respect him incredibly and he has impacted my life greatly since I was in highschool. We had the opportunity to sit one on one and talk about the beautiful and ugly things about the church today for over an hour. After funny stories of him surfing with Joel Houston and what worship songs are working well at revealing things about the Lord to the congregation, we talked about the hard stuff. He shared with me that the main thing the church is lacking as a whole is integrity and transparency, then how we need to go about fixing it.

He is a worship leader at his church and is actually pursuing worship this coming March with his new album on BEC records. He shared that we as worship leaders need to stop teaching obedience and do it ourselves. His goal in life is to see the common man worship Jesus and that is a beautiful way to put it. But we cannot lead others into worship if we are not first living it. He urged the importance of being honest with your congregation. To not complain, but to be honest with them when you don't feel like worshiping, to tell leaders in your band when you mess up, to not come to them from a fake place, but a transparent heart.

he couldn't urge enough that there is not success in numbers or in hands raised but in THAT 1 lost sheep coming to the Lord. These are the things we need to be rejoicing in. We need to set the bar as the leadership of the church so that that church goer can follow. I questioned myself plenty. Am i honest with my congregation? Am I transparent with my struggles? Am I basing success off numbers? To be honest, I'm guilty as ever. Just the questions alone gave me enough responsibility to change and I hope to do so.

I learned much more from him and these things I learned from Aaron I will take with me for a long time to constantly check myself. We continued to talk about personal struggles and what the Lord is doing in our lives before he had to run. This is what the church needs to be. Not just sermons, not just music, not just buildings with administration, not that this stuff is bad, in fact it is very much needed, but we are called to more. We need to be people loving each other and talking, sharing, praying, being transparent, and holding each other accountable.

I could go on for days but I'll let us chew on this for a while. A lot of the time we were talking he was in a pink and green 80's jumpsuit leaning on a trailer. thought you should know. But don't judge, it was Halloween ;)