worship confessional from the road...

Just left Temecula, CA this a.m. after a great Sunday at Sunridge Community Church. The Worship Leader there, Rich Kirkpatrick (@rkweblog) and I met a few years ago at a conference in Nashville and have had many a compelling conversation about church, leading worship, pastors, philosophy, theology and so on. He's the real deal and he asked me to come out and lead at his church yesterday... so I did.

It's humbling to step into a church like his that plays 4 or 5 of my songs on a regular basis... very cool, though, too! I lead worship with a set of songs from Every Reason Why and they just figure I'm singing a bunch of songs from Rich's rotation! :) I just jumped in front of the band from there at Sunridge and acted like I was their Worship Leader for the day. Fun stuff. If you wanna see a bit of what I did out there, check out www.richkirkpatrick.com.

Later that night, I did kind of a storyteller's concert. Those have a tendency of being my favorite times of worship these days... I just grab a stool and tell stories about the songs I've written and we worship God together. It's a lot of fun, and it really gets to the heart of where the songs come from... discussion of Scriptures, stories and sometimes struggles that have elicited the lyrics I've penned.

Anyway, one of the most enjoyable parts of the whole day for me was backing up Rich, his daughter Emily and Nick (visiting from Texas) on electric guitar! Rich had hooked me up with basically the same rig Jason (Sunridge guitarist) had so we were rockin' twin gold tops and Suhr guitar rigs. I borrowed a pedal board and played lots of eighth notes :) It was a blast.

Tonight I'm at a small worship conference in Highland, CA before headed back to STL in the morning. Can't wait to be with these guys tonight, a handful of local worship leaders in SoCal... should be a great time.

Until next time...