Tolerance for Boredom

We took some Chinese students to the "traveler's Christmas Eve service" tonight. The music was the old carols put to a slightly different tempo. Everybody caught on pretty quickly.

At the end of one song the lead singer took the last two words very slowly. Everybody else sang at the expected speed. Mismatch, and not in a good way...

I propose that one of the characteristics churches should look for in music leaders is a vast tolerance for boredom.

You, and all the popular singers of the past decades who cut Christmas albums, are able to jazz up the old familiar tune with some new musical twists. That's nice. If you plan to involve the congregation in singing, you have to let them know what to sing and when. You've heard that version of that song hundreds of times; you probably feel like WalMart employees hearing the music loop for the 325'th time today. I'll bet you're bored.

I know what boredom can do. I remember planning a Bible study by collecting all the obscure details around a passage. That was cute, but what I thought was illustration was just clutter unless the point of the passage came first. We'd all read it before, but it doesn't hurt to cover the basics again.

"But what's the point of all my training if all I do is the same old stuff?" It's not about you; not about me.

If we're going to serve at all, we have to be willing to be bored.