One Song

I recently re-watched Walk The Line, the biography of Johnny Cash. I love the now famous scene where a young, before-he-was-famous Johnny Cash plays a song for music producer Sam Phillips. It’s a gospel song that sounds like every other gospel song on the radio. Phillips challenges Cash, saying:

If you was hit by a truck and you was lying out there in that gutter dying, and you had time to sing one song. Huh? One song that people would remember before you’re dirt. One song that would let God know how you felt about your time here on Earth. One song that would sum you up. You tellin’ me that’s the song you’d sing? … Or would you sing somethin’ different. Somethin’ real. Somethin’ you felt. Cause I’m telling you right now, that’s the kind of song people want to hear.

One of the greatest temptations for pastors, and especially church planters, is to start and lead the same church every one else is starting and leading. It’s the easiest thing to do. It’s been done, you know what it looks like, it’s successful. Why not just copy and paste?

Why not? Because that’s not the song God put in your heart or gave you to sing. Because He gave you something different, something real, something you feel deep inside. Now you have to find it. It would seem easy, after all, it’s inside you. But it’s not easy, because there’s all this stuff outside us that clutters our thinking.

Sometimes we need help finding our own unique vision, and that’s what I love about the book Church Unique and the ministry Auxano, who I just started speaking and consulting for last month. If you’d like our help in working with your church to find the song God put in your church to sing, let me know.