Napier Baptist

I have been doing some preparation for a forthcoming worship team retreat. It'll be a time when we try to expand our understandings of worship together. I came across this piece of advice that the pastor of Fivehead Baptist Church in England (I know, Fivehead is a bizzare name for a church - sounds like some sort of evil beast coming out of the sea in a Sci-fi movie!!) gives to their worship leaders: "Do not pray that God enables us to put ‘all the troubles and hardships of the week to one side’, thus leaving us free to worship Him. To do so is to drive a wedge between our worshipping life and our real life. Our Sunday worship is not an escape from our real life, it is an expression of it, and an opportunity to transform it."

I've also come across this quote from Gerald Manly Hopkins, Poems and Prose quite a bit recently:
"It is not only prayer that gives God glory, but work. Smiting on an anvil, sawing a beam, white-washing a wall, driving horses, sweeping, scouring, everything gives God some glory if being in His grace you do it as your duty. To go to communion worthily gives God great glory, but to take food in thankfulness and temperance gives him glory too. To lift up the hands in prayer gives God glory, but a man with a dungfork in his hand, a woman with a slop pail, give him glory too. He is so great that all things give Him glory if you mean that they should. So then, my brethren, live."