Senior Pastor of The Sanctuary Covenant Church, Efrem Smith serves close to 1,000 people with the vision to be an urban, multi-ethnic, relevant, holistic, and Christ-centered community. He is an internationally recognized leader, speaker, and consultant on diversity and multi-ethnic issues. Smith has held leadership positions in both church and parachurch organizations such as the Boys and Girls Club of America and Fellowship of Christian Athletes. He is the author of numerous articles and books, including The Hip Hop Church.
- “I’m an artist acting like a pastor…”
- 1 John 3
- The wonder of Beloved worship.
- We need to use our artistic gifts and passion within the experience of worship from the identification of the Beloved.
- We lead, we serve… in worship… use our gifts God has given us, but use them and serve and lead from the identification as being God’s beloved.
- We can’t contain God’s love… we can’t keep it to ourselves.
- There’s something different about us than just our artistic gifts.
- What does it mean for us to serve, to lead, to use our gifts, rooted in our identity in Christ?
- Use your artistic gifts as an extension and expression of God’s love.
- There was a time when worship wasn’t about performing for an institutionalized, consumeristic Christian church.
- There’s something powerful when we truly express our worship out of our identity as the beloved of God.
- Blues music is the difference between singing out of belovedness and brokneness.
- There’s a deeper root and understanding for why our gifts our needed for the advancement of God’s Kingdom.
- There’s a need for people for people can use their gifts to bring anointing where there is addiction, bring freedom where there’s bondage, belovedness where there is brokenness.
- Why are you using your gifts? Use them to expand and express God’s love in a broken world that the lost might be found.
- Worship must be connected to a movement of freedom and reconciliation.
- We see preaching as some scientific, systematic, exegetical process… how can we look at this story of drama, love, redemption, song and betrayal as stagnant?! We need rhythm!
- “You don’t need to be black, but be something expressive!”
- Preaching is an art form.
- If we could recapture the idea that preaching is an art, then we can embrace the idea of art in the church.
- Storytelling at its best, from God’s word, is an art.
- Beloved in the Greek is about 2 words being intimately connected together:
- agape – unconditional, compassionate love of god. We don’t deserve it, did nothing to earn it… and is most expressed through Jesus.
- agapao – to be loved and be loving, simultaneously (1 John 4:7)
- God is loving us, and this love empowers us to love others.
- We must utilize our artistic gifts, rooted out of an understanding of God’s love.
- We don’t need production meetings or worship design meetings, we need meetings to remind us that we are here and we are loved by God and that His love can be extended through our artistic gifts.
- We must be reminded we do what we do because the only difference between us and “that artist the church is talking about” is that one is using their gifts out of belovedness and the other out of their brokenness.
- We have to come to terms with how the ridiculing of the arts in the church has impacted artists.
- When we know we are God’s beloved and not people’s property, we are free to use our gifts.
- Freedom will show itself through our art and will be set free.
- We need free expressions of who God really is… not institutionalized religion.
- How is freedom and reconciliation really expressed?
- God has placed artistic gifts within us that God, through His love, pull them out, that the lost might be found and the hurting might be helped. God wants mercy, compassion, healing and reconciliation to be expressed through our gifts.
- We must build beloved communities of artists that have the space and room, not to just perform and use their gifts, but have their brokenness to be replaced with belovedness.
- We don’t just need platforms, we need spaces and places with others where our artistic gifts are affirmed.
- We need a monthly day alone with God.
- We’ve got to explore the cultures in our contexts and find where people are expressing themselves and their art out of brokenness and show them how to use their gifts as the beloved.
- The arts ought to be a Kingdom-advancing movement.
- The African impala has the ability to stand still on all fours and jump over 8 feet high, as high as 13! It can go 30 feet out! If it can’t see where it’s going to land, it won’t jump… it has no faith. It will only jump where it can see… which is why it doesn’t jump over 3 foot zoo walls.
- God has given us gifts… what’s the 3 foot wall in front of us that we aren’t trusting God helping us to overcome? What’s keeping us from going higher and further with the gifts God has placed in us to advance His Kingdom?
- Kris Kross said, “Jump, jump!” … Cypress Hill “Jump up, Jump up, Get down, Jump Around!”
- We’ve got to jump… take our gifts the world.
- Don’t sit in religion, get up and jump!
