CCCC Choir

We need your voice to help fill out our Choir here at CCCC.  I know there are a lot of people out there that LOVE to sing, but would never consider getting up in front of the entire church and sing a solo into a microphone - - that's why we have the choir.  The choir is a place where you can let your voice be heard...along with a bunch of other people!

There is no audition necessary.  Just come to the rehearsals every other week and then sing at the services when they are scheduled.  We will use the choir to help lead worship at Christmas Services,  Easter Services, a couple of Gatherings a year and a few other Sundays a year too.

How do sign up?  I'm glad you asked!

Email our choir director and let her know you are interested and she will set you up.  Her name is Lara Fulcher and you can email her at Lara260973@hotmail.com .

Hope to see you at the next rehearsal!

Ballew-A-Palooza

Clear Creek Community Church will be hosting a benefit concert we are calling BALLEW-A-PALOOZA to raise support for Lowell Ballew and his family as they prepare to leave for the mission field in Bolivia.  Lowell has faithfully served Clear Creek Community Church for over 11 years, and we want to send he and his family out with bang.

Join us as we play our favorite classic rock, 80's, country and top 40 hits.  All proceeds will go to the Ballew Mission Journey Fund to help cover the expenses of moving the Ballew family to Bolivia and support them in their mission work there.  Invite your friends and neighbors to be part of this fun night of fellowship and ROCK N ROLL!

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Date:  Friday March, 26 

Time: Doors open @ 7:00 PM 

Location: Egret Bay Auditorium (Map)

Tickets: $10 Click here to order online. 

Don't wait to get your tickets at the door! Tickets supplies are limited.

How To Build An Idol

The title of this post creates an interesting concept for us to think about.  How To Build An Idol.  Well, it's a lot easier than you think.  People do it all the time and they don't even realize what they're doing.  I came across this video put together by Cam Huxford, who is another worship pastor from Mars Hill Church in downtown Seattle.  It's an interesting look into the life of a musician and how he struggles with idolatry.  Maybe you can relate.

What Style Of Music Do You Listen To The Most?

If you've been around Clear Creek for any length of time you know that we utilize a variety of different styles of music in our corporate times of worship.  We want to reach as many people as possible and we also like to stretch people in how they use music to engage with God.  I will probably take another post to talk more about worshiping God with different styles of music - but in this one - I want to hear from you.

What style of music do you listen to the most?  Please take part in the poll below.  You can pick only one, and don't pick Christian unless it REALLY is what you listen to the most - no brownie points handed out here!  If there are two selections that you think are equal then flip a coin and make your selection.  If you don't see your style there...well...then your out of luck this time.  The poll will close Friday evening, February 26th at midnight.

Thanks for your participation!

What syle of music do you listen to the most?

Idol Killer

Usually when people hear the word idol they think of some small little statue made out of stone, placed on an altar in some archaic temple, and located in some third world country.  Pictures of Indiana Jones crawling through some dingy dungeon come to mind.  We think about tribesmen dressed in little pieces of clothing carrying spears and paint covered faces.  They dance around a fire and offer a sacrifice to an idol that represents some deity they've created hoping to appease their god and somehow obtain some benevolence from that god towards them.  We look on actions like these from our superior, westernized, educated and technologically savvy viewpoint with much disdain and snobbery.  WE would never bow to an idol like that.  WE are sophisticated and successful.  WE have no need of making actions like these a part of our lives to obtain some reward or be found in our gods mercies.  WE would never worship an idol!

I disagree.

WE do it everyday!

Sure, we may not have paint on our faces and spears in our hands, but we worship idols nonetheless.  You see - we were created to worship.  God designed us to be worshipers.  The right question is not "do you worship?" - but rather what/who are you worshiping?  Isaiah 43:7 says that we are created for HIS glory.  Which means that every action we make, every word that comes from our lips, every thought that moves through our brain - it is all to bring glory to God - it is all to be an act of worship.  So you can see where the problem arises.  There are many actions we perform and many words that come from our lips that DO NOT bring Him glory.  Therefore, we can conclude that if we are not worshiping God in those moments then we must be worshiping something or someone else.  WE are giving glory and worship to something other than God in those moments.  We are worshiping an idol!

It's in those moments that we might as well pull out a piece of wood and grab our swiss army  knife and start whittling away at our newly created idol.  Well, we don't really need to do that now-a-days.  Our culture has taken care of that for us.  Those idols of stone and wood are a little to obvious and old-school.  We've replaced them with ones that are easily camouflaged and culturally acceptable.  If we could whittle one out of a piece of wood today it would be in the image of a dollar bill, a beautiful scantily clad woman, a diploma, a Lexus, a corner office, our smartphone, or even our kids.  You see - we've gotten pretty smart about how we worship our idols without seeming to be worshiping idols.  We let these things grab the affections of our hearts and turn our gaze away from our creator, the one who deserves all of our worship; we, instead, worship created things!  We let these things determine where our energies are spent, how our time is allocated, and what our affections will pursue.  We will make sacrifices to our idols so that we might gain some benevolence from them.  Some fulfillment.  Some joy.  Some peace.  Some happiness.  But we always end up making greater and greater sacrifices and we find less and less of what we desire.

We've misplaced our worship and our lives are a mess because of it.

The only way to correct this is to worship God.  And by WORSHIP I don't mean having Chris Tomlin show up at your door with his guitar to lead you in Kum-Bah-Yah.  Rather - I mean what the Bible means by WORSHIP.  1 Corinthians 10:31, I think, leaves little doubt as to what WORSHIPING God looks like.  "So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God."  You see -  God does not receive worship from His people only on Sunday's between 8:30am and 12:30pm.  No!  He EXPECTS worship 24 hours a day, 7 days a week!  EVERYTHING that we do is to be done in an act of worship to Him.  It all can be done to bring Him maximum glory.  And the only way to move your affections from your created idol to the Creator God is to move God to the center of your life and make living out 1 Corinthians 10:31 your daily goal.

I struggle with this on a minute by minute basis as I'm sure most of you do as well.  But we must fight the good fight and not allow the idols of this world, which are waging war against our souls, to come in and steal away the glory that belongs to God and God alone.

Come EVERY week to Clear Creek Community Church during this series, AMERICAN IDOLS, and let's learn how to worship God with our entire lives.

Enough Suffering

My above title was purposefully going to be a reference that I was going to move away from the topic of suffering. Brad Loser, our worship pastor, has done a great job with the two previous posts on the topic, not to mention the great messages that Bruce Wesley and Yancey Arrington have been teaching us in our “Tough Stuff” series that is about to conclude. But as I sat down to begin to write this blog, my cell phone rang. My mom let me know that my uncle, her youngest brother (early 50s), has cancer and has been given roughly 6-9 months to live, that’s if he decides to do chemo. Without chemo, not sure what that would do to the estimate.

So I sit here, wondering, how do I try to eloquently and creatively talk about music/worship and move away from the topic of suffering when currently it’s staring my family in the face?

You know, as much as I love music and singing and leading worship, and as much as this is a blog about music and ministry - there is no music, there is no ministry without the gospel and the saving grace of Jesus. I have to be honest - I don’t know that my uncle is a believer. I don’t know that any of his family is. And while it’s not my attempt to try to “figure that out” so to speak or come to some definitive conclusion, the question weighs heavily on my mind and my heart and I know that I play a part, or at least I should be.

The truth is no matter how diligently I work and prepare to lead people in worship, no matter how well I try to sing or play, I can’t, nor ever will be, able to save someone’s soul. Not my uncle. Not my own. No one. The reason I say that is because the power in what we do has to be - can only be - Christ IN us. And I should be more grateful and humble for the truth of that than I am.

But to be honest, that’s just a whole lot harder. And one reason I think it’s hard for us in particular is we musicians (and I would say creative types overall) can fake a lot of our involvement on sheer talent alone. And to make matters more confusing, ours is an emotive craft: we cause people to feel, to experience, to escape – in essence we can, by our own abilities, make it “feel” like the Spirit. And yet, the true power of Christ is nowhere to be found. I confess I have been guilty of this more times than I want to admit, and I sorrowfully repent of that.

So here I still sit. Thinking about my uncle. Thinking about my family. My church. My community. And music just isn’t what comes to mind. Although I love it so.

Prayer. Falling on my face in humility. In surrender. In repentance. In worship. In intercession. That’s what I need to do. What I must do. Vigilantly. Constantly.

Who knows… maybe that’s what will make me a better musician. A better worship leader.

Keri Lilley

Singing Our Suffering

If you were to take a stroll down Scott street near downtown Houston this weekend you would find yourself walking past a little hole-in-the-wall cafe called Etta's Lounge.  There's no sign on the door, there's no lighting to tell you that you have found it - but there is something else to let you know you are at the right place.  Through the open door the soulful sound of a growling saxophone, the lamenting cries of an electric guitar and the sorrowful sound of a man singing fills the air.  It's captivating and hauntingly beautiful.  As you stop and listen something deep in your soul begins to resonate with this sad sorrowful music.  Emotions pushed down from the hectic pace of life begin to seep up from your gut.  The trials and tribulations in which you live now find a voice in the music filling the air.  Your head begins to nod and you feel yourself agreeing with the chords and the rhythm, and though you've never met the people playing or singing you feel as though you've known them your whole life.  It's the blues!

It's not a new style of music.  The structure and form and the instruments have certainly changed as the years have gone by, but the message has never changed: This ol' life is hard,  The whole world is against me, When is the sun gonna shine on me again?  Some of the lyrics change to reflect specific circumstances, the melodies have different variations and people sing them in different keys, but as soon as you hear the first few notes and words -  you know they're singing the blues.  In fact you don't even have to hear it sung, you could just read the lyrics and you know that this person has the blues.  You know instantly that this person is dealing with some serious suffering and the only way for their soul to find relief is to sing.

Ironically - people have been singing the blues for thousands of years. Let me introduce you to one of the first people to sing about their suffering.  You're not going to find this tune on the top 40 R&B charts - this one is found in the Bible.  In fact it's not just one song - it's a collection of a lot of songs.  It's the book of Psalms.  Psalms is a collection of songs written for the people of Israel to sing when they gathered to worship God.  About half of the Psalms were written by King David - who is described in that same Bible to be a man after God's own heart (1 Samuel 13).  The songs that this man wrote were inspired by God and recorded forever as God's Word to us in the Bible.  This means that we would do well to study these songs and take care to implement their message into our own lives and our own times of worship.

Most people generally think of the Book of Psalms as a collection of Praise Songs. Songs that declare the Glory and Majesty of God - and they are partially correct. The Psalms do help us worship God in the splendor of His holiness and majesty - but if that's all we get out of the Psalms then we are guilty of ignoring the other half of the message of that book.It's that people have the blues!

A careful study of the book of Psalms reveals that praising God is the ultimate destination, but most of the Psalms do not begin with praise.  What first shapes these songs is not praise but pain, not joy but grief, not communion but abandonment, not intimacy but isolation, not love but betrayal!  The songs usually start with the blues!  Isn't it interesting that God thought it necessary to teach His people how to weep before He taught them how to praise Him?  I think we spend most of our time worshiping together focusing on the goodness and grace of God and too little time singing our blues.  We've moved away from the biblical precedent God gave us - sing the grief, sing the suffering, and THEN sing My praise.  People connect with the blues because it's a song about their life.  Everyone gets disoriented when suffering comes along - some of us try and live in denial and just continue to try and worship God as though there's really no tension between us, some of us give mention to the pain, but then move to praising God as quickly as possible, refusing to embrace the pain; and others hold it in as long as they can until they find the courage to deal with it, but even then it's in the privacy of a counselors office or in the confidence and security of a trusted friend.  Seldom do you ever see it displayed publicly, let alone in a house of worship.  But to read the psalms is to find all of these approaches unthinkable!

David had no problem confronting God when life's circumstances seemed contrary to God's promises.  In fact, it was David's trust and security in God's promises and in God's unfailing love that prompted him to voice his feelings of dismay and doubt and even betrayal.  God recorded this for us to learn from.  One of the most important aspects about these songs is that they all begin through the doorway of honesty.  If  we are not willing to go through that door when we worship  we will not grow in our understanding of what worship is.  Our growth in worshiping God will be stunted, our praise for Him will be lacking the depth and richness that only comes from the soul willing to embrace suffering honestly and openly before God.

So singing our suffering is not only normal - God expects us to do so!  I know I need to grow in this as I'm sure some of you reading this do as well.  Our society and culture is not one that promotes dealing with suffering and pain openly - but as Christ followers we do not take our cues from culture but from God's Word!  Get those vocal chords warmed up....

Looking forward to singing the blues with you!