celebrity

No one is immune from celebrity culture these days. Sadly, not even us. It’s not necessarily the A-listers, although there are many that pass through (or reside in) London. London certainly loves its celebs – there are usually double page spreads in all the free dailies. Jude Law and Kevin Spacey are permanent residents. They’re always filming some latest iteration of Harry Potter around the city. The Beckhams are always popular fare. They even care about pseudo-celebs of the Paris Hilton variety, socialites with no claim to fame other than the fact that they’re socialites. For those of you who want an example, those aforementioned dailies often contain updates on the goings on in the life of Peaches & Pixie Geldof (that’s right, our reaction was ‘Who??’ as well) or Alexa Chung (again, who?!).

All of this may seem distasteful to you, but the truth of the matter is, there’s probably someone out there that you revere on a celebrity level. Whether they’re actually famous is irrelevant. No one else may have heard of them or care, but you’d be thrilled to be in any kind of proximity to them. It could be a professor, a scientist, a philanthropist, an author, a poet, an artist, an athlete, or even a cartoon character (oh the days when meeting Mickey was a dream come true). Deep inside, you know this to be true.

So why the discourse on celebrities? Well, one of these past weeks, we restarted our visits to various London churches by attending a service at HTB. HTB stands for Holy Trinity Brompton, and is a church that is located just down the street from Harrod’s. Like many churches in England, the service is held in a wonderfully historic building. Some among you may know that HTB is the church where the Alpha course was started. If you didn’t, but had happened to see some of the video clips, you would have figured it out when a familiar character (i.e. Nicky Gumbel) came out to lead the prayers.

Before this, though, we were treated to a wonderful time of worship in song. And wouldn’t you know that the worship leader happened to be Tim Hughes, who is the worship pastor at HTB. Tim Hughes is a worship leader and songwriter. We happen to sing a few of his songs (Unchanging, Everything, Here I am to Worship) at church in Toronto, although we didn’t include any at our wedding (sorry Tim). Now, being involved in worship ministry ourselves, we know you’re not supposed to be distracted with anything the worship team does or, in this case, who is actually on the team; the focus is supposed to be on God and Jesus. Of course, that sort of goes out the window when you’re worshipping on a regular Sunday with Tim Hughes.

Remarkably, though, it wasn’t really all that much of a distraction. In fact, Teresa wasn’t even sure it was him, other than to notice that the leader had a really great voice. We were both able to worship very freely and focus on God. Perhaps it was because most of the songs were familiar to us. Perhaps it was because the worship in song was in a musical style to which we were accustomed. But we felt completely free from worrying about our surroundings and were able to let go in a way that we haven’t been able to since arriving in London, and that includes our visits to Hillsong London.

So now we’re going to go into a little more detail including maybe some technical stuff for those of you who are involved in worship ministry. We sang songs we were familiar with. Some were written by Tim but there were others that weren’t too, including Mighty to Save (which we did sing at our wedding). They weren’t all medleys, but there were a couple of completely seamless transitions; the ones that weren’t complete medleys were still very smooth. The team consisted of Tim who led while playing an acoustic guitar, a bass guitar, a keyboardist, a drummer, two backup vocalists and a trio of strings (2 violins and 1 viola by our reckoning). While this may seem like a fairly full team, it’s not something that is unimaginable for our church to pull together (particularly given the popularity of string instruments among Chinese Canadian parents).

The cool thing that we noticed was that, even though they had a well-known worship leader, the set wasn’t perfect. Don’t get us wrong; it was still very well executed. But the drummer sped up every now and then. The string trio had its own leader (first violin, we suppose) and they sort of did their own thing; they faced each other in a closed circle and didn’t seem to pay too much attention to what everyone else was doing. And the two backup vocalists seemed nervous and were unsure of what to do at times in terms of body language.

But that’s great, you see. While we all want our worship sets to be perfect because our God is perfect and worthy of it, we never really get it right. Sometimes we’re not even close. And then you watch a Hillsong DVD maybe, or listen to some Chris Tomlin or Tim Hughes tracks, and (as the discouragement settles in) wonder how they do it. The truth is they don’t. Not all the time anyway. And God’s grace covers that; sometimes we think that’s just how He’d have it. We’ve just aptly finished reading 2 Corinthians 4:7 in Bible study. The core of worship is about showering our praises on God. Not Tim Hughes, not us, not any worship leader. And sometimes, when we miss an intro or play a wrong chord or sing a wrong note, it’s a gentle reminder that it’s not about us at all. And when we realise that, then we’ve come closer to what true worship really is, and God is pleased with that more than any number of 'perfect' worship sets.

Joel Houston: check. Tim Hughes: check. I wonder what Martin Smith and Matt Redman are up to...j/k.

As a note, we have noticed that the English tend to sing songs in ridiculously high keys. For the musically inclined among you, our worship team typically plays sets in the keys of D and E (our two favourite keys); most songs here are sung in A or B. Eek indeed. We’re either going to come back with Mariah-esque vocal ranges or no voice at all. =/