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TechnoratiBC: You actually have got a set coming up pretty soon, right?
Edwards: Yes, I have a set at two o’clock. It’s in few minutes.
BC: And what it’s like preparing for this kind of worship?
Edwards: So the team meets 30 minutes ahead of time, and we have a briefing. So for today’s set, we’ll meet at 1:30, and we’re doing a set called worship with the Word. We have 4 different formats – we have worship with the Word, we do a devotional/prophetic worship, and we do intercession. So the 2 o’clock set is worship with the Word, and we’ve taken a passage – right now we’re going through 1 John. So our worship is broken up into six different cycles, and we sit in our briefing, and we go down the cycles, and we kind of know what songs we’re going to do, and out of the songs, we go into a spontaneous singing around 1 John. So kind of what we’re doing is we're having a dialogue around a scripture, but we’re singing it instead of speaking it, and it’s so much fun! So we’ll take one chunk of 1 John, like one or two verses, and one of the singers will sing it. And then we have a prayer leader who jumps on a phrase like ‘God is light,’ and the prayer leader will declare, ‘God is light,’ and all the singers will just start singing around that, kind of interpreting what it means that God is light, and we’ll cross reference and just throw in a bunch of different scriptures. So we just start singing spontaneously of what means that God is light, and we’ll stay on that theme for a little while, and then we’ll go to the next phrase, and then the next phrase, and we’ll move through the whole passage during a two-hour period. So that’s what we do with worship with the Word.
So preparing for that, we just talk about the text, and we talk about a little bit about music. But we mostly talk about the text, and we have kind of a Bible study before we go out there so we’re the same page. I love worship with the Word. It’s one of my favorite outlets.
BC: That sounds really interesting. I think for most people they have this kind of distinction in their worship between music and listening to or meditating on the Word, but you guys have put it together. What is the importance that you see in putting these two together?
Edwards: Well, using music and using the Word of God and combining the two is, I think, one of the most powerful realities on the planet, because we are made as musical beings. Our spirit is musical, and when we awaken our spirit and then we sit in front of the Word of God, It comes alive. The language of the Word of God gets written on our hearts at a level that doesn’t just come by listening. So in this kind of atmosphere, first we’re awakened with the music, so our spirits are alive. And then we’re looking at the Word of God and we’re singing it, so it’s going through our being. We’re actually saying it, and it’s getting written on our heart, it’s changing our emotional chemistry, and it’s changing our life view. We’re understanding the Scriptures in a way that we wouldn’t just by sitting and listening to a preacher – although I love listening to preachers as well. The Word is such a massive part of flowing in the prophetic even, because sometimes the Holy Spirit is saying something, but if you don’t have the language for it, you can’t express that. And the language the Holy Spirit uses the best is the Word of God, and so learning the Word of God and getting the language of the Bible in your heart, it gives you the tools. And so when it comes time to prophecy, when it comes time to write a song, I go to the piano to write a song and I have all this language because I’ve done so much worship with the Word. I have a language, I have the Scriptures, I have an understanding of the Word that I wouldn’t have had without those hours in the Word, singing with a team. Continue »
