15 years later…and we are…back…sort of…well, almost, anyway.
What happened to worship.com? Where have y’all been?
Well…in short…we started a family! If you’ve been with us a long time, and some of you have, you noticed that we’ve been through quite a few changes over the years.
In the mid-nineties, the early days of the internet, we were a fast-growing aggregator of content from a variety of sources on all aspects of worship. We experienced tremendous growth in those days, even though our primary emphasis at the time was helping churches and ministries launch websites. It was through that work that we connected with the folks at Passion Conferences, and eventually worship.com became a Passion 268Generation channel where it remained until the mid 2000’s.
That’s when we began our family. We needed to scale things back on our end at the same time Passion’s growth was taking it to even higher levels. So we retreated to our new life as a “Mom and Dad”, with occasional posts from ourselves and others. And part of being Dad meant I disappeared even further into the corporate world for benefits and pay capable of supporting a family. But if you’ve ever had little ones…well, you know. Time is at a premium. So between the demands of making a living, serving and teaching at our local church, nationwide business travel and all the school, sports and music activities of youngsters, worship.com took a back seat and was all but abandoned for quite awhile. I mean, really, it went into the trunk, pulled out from time to time to clean out and vacuum, and then go back in. So not much has happened at worship.com in 15 years except for the occasional burst of posts or music videos. Our email even quit working (and still doesn’t!) as our systems and hosts have upgraded and changed technical requirements multiple times over the years as well.
Now, fast forward 15 years and overnight, it seems, our kids are teenagers. One is leading worship on worship teams here and there and the other is studying apologetics and cheerleading. Time is opening back up for us…we are far from empty nesters but as they have more independence, we do as well. And what we do teach aligns better now with worship.com than it did when we were teaching preschoolers and children.
The world has changed a lot since then. I mean, a lot.
Social Media has become a web unto itself. We used to post excerpts from articles and link to the original article for our readers to continue to read. Much of what we used to post would, now, be more appropriate for facebook, twitter or instagram. Those social media platforms were in their infancy at the time and didn’t work as well as they do today. So we won’t do much of that going forward.
YouTube has grown and now has essentially a presence all to itself. People don’t need us to post every video that gets released– you can do that yourself by subscribing directly to the channels, as we do.
Church, culture and ministry have changed as well. 15 years ago we were writing about being missional and contemporary in our approach to worship and ministry. We still do, and still will, but some of the words we used back then don’t have the same meanings today as they used to. Some of the folks in the evangelical world didn’t stop at tearing down man-made structures, and progressed into a steady deconstruction of Christianity itself, turning it into something that resembles Christianity but really isn’t once stripped of the divinity of Christ, the authority of the Bible, and the legitimacy of holy sexuality.
Strange days indeed.
So where does that lead us to in the future with worship.com?
First, we remain commmitted to “theologically informed worship.” That means that rather than post links to every video out there, we will occasionally post songs we find helpful, as well as semi-frequent clips of selected worship songs from church worship services we think will help brighten and encourage your day.
Second, because worship is more than music, we will also include content related to culture, trends, ministry and leading worship as we believe that it all comes together as an act of worship and to worship Jesus, you have to know Jesus.
Third, we want to direct you to good resources that we believe are helpful in terms of worship, culture, and ministry. We will be amping back up our reviews of books and interviews of authors and artists, as time permits.
And fourth, we’ll begin to write more content ourselves encompassing all areas of cultivating a lifestyle of Worship.
Hopefully along the way we will begin to get some bugs worked out of the technology, slowly but surely, both here and on social media platforms.
So in the future you can expect fewer posts, but more carefully curated content and thoughtful commentary. We would appreciate it if you would share our posts when you see them if you find them helpful. Our facebook social media presence nearly stopped growing at around 7,000 when facebook started charging to distribute content to our followers, so organic spreading is the only way to increase visibility and reach, and resume growth. And when you do so, you are also facilitating the reach of the biblical resources our visitors encounter when they exit worship.com.
If you’re one of our thousands of subscribers who have hung with us, thank you. If you are back after a hiatus, welcome back! And if you’re new, we look forward to bringing you along for the ride.
Blessings!