Welcome to Part 2 of Terry’s interview at Consuming Worship.
Terry Foester
What I love:
Good music, leading worship, expensive guitars made of nice wood, listening to my kids talk, talking to my wife, drinking coffee (especially with my wife). And I love to see people lifting up the name of God to the high places of their lives, in song and in relationship.
What I’m good at:
Shopping - I know lame for a guy, but I am the king of finding good deals. I’m especially good at getting free stuff and making travel arrangements. Like right now, I’m trying to win a dream home on HGTV…I’m feeling pretty good about it.
I’m also good at researching things, and keeping up with people. I love hanging with friends.
What I’m not so good at:
Doing two things at once, I’m the typical guy in that way. In fact, don’t try to talk to me right now while I’m typing this – because it will be as if we never talked.
My two best original quotes:
Turn up the silence
I’m not trying to point the finger at you, unless the you is me.
Guilty pleasures:
- Getting my hair cut and styled at the salon…
- Adding “bullets” to my ‘to do’ lists
- Expensive guitars made of nice wood
Describe your process for planning a worship service:
Both of our pastors are really good at planning out the sermon series and themes in advance. I usually start by talking to our pastor about the main point of the sermon and we also discuss if there is anything unique about the order of worship. Then I pick songs that support the theme and focus for the morning. After I select the songs, I start to play through them and see what flows. Then I put together the details before the rehearsal. At some point in the process, it’s important to give things over to God. I usually get to a point after all the planning and after rehearsal where I say – “God this is our offering to you, we’ve prepared as best we can but we’re not going to hold onto it anymore.” Then when things don’t go as planned Sunday morning (which often they don’t!), we can be more confident that we have put all things in his hands. One thing that always surprises me about worship is how God is often glorified through the unplanned/unrehearsed aspects of worship.How do you teach new songs?
When we teach a new song, we do it two weeks in a row, skip a week and then do it again on the 4th week. This approach has really helped people learn new songs. We will often do a new song as a prelude/performance before we have the congregation sing later in the worship service. Just this past Sunday we taught Remedy this way. We are very thoughtful about incorporating new songs – making sure they are something that our congregation needs to sing and that they are different in theme and style from our bank of songs. Nothing against Chris Tomlin – I believe he’s a huge voice of the church – but if you’re not thoughtful about selecting new songs you’ll end up with 10 Tomlin songs. It’s great to see so many writers and worship leaders writing songs for the church today. My pastor once mentioned that in some ways there are still new psalm’s to be written.
We probably teach about 10 new songs a year – almost 1 a month.
Here are the new songs we’ve taught over the last year:
- Remedy – David Crowder
- When I Think About The Lord – Shane & Shane style
- Our God Saves – Paul Baloche
- Mighty To Save - Hillsong
- You Are So Good To Me – Waterdeep/Third Day
- Before the Throne of God – Old beautiful Hymn that was new to us
- Center – Charlie Hall (with “Turn You Eyes” tag)
- Give Us Clean Hands – Charlie Hall (a beautiful confessional song)
- My Savior My God – Aaron Shust
- Hosanna – Paul Baloche
We plan on teaching God of This City next week.
Please include a sample worship set list and/or service order:
Worship block leading into Communion
When I Think About The Lord
Kindness
Amazed
You Are So Good To Me
Communion
Center – during bread
Take My Life – after cup
Closing
Mighty To Save
Do you write music for your congregation?
No, although I do tend to write sappy love songs for my wife and kids. Nothing that can really be sung in a corporate setting, or outside of my house for that matter. I do record my personal worship sessions – mostly personal prayers that tend to be pretty somber. But there are a few times that I’ve found a repetitive vibe of personal worship that’s been amazing. God has spoken some pretty intimate things to me and I’ve spoken some intimate things to him in my personal worship. That’s where I’ve pushed myself in a creative way most. Sometimes my wife will look over at me while I’m full on in worship, and she’ll say “What was that?” But there are other times when I feel really inspired by God, and he gives me a song for a day.
When you look back decades from now, what do you hope to see you’ve accomplished as a worship leader?
Man, I really really hope my kids are in a place where they can truly and whole-heartedly worship God. I hope I can teach them how to worship over the years. We have the neatest thing going on with two families that are involved in our worship teams at church. There are two families where the parents and grown adult children still work together on the worship teams. It is a huge inspiration to see a dad and his two sons planning and leading worship together, it’s a beautiful thing. I would love to be in a place that I get to worship with my kids in that way. Both of these families have inspired me to raise a family that worships together.
Beyond that, I hope I can say that I’ve gone for it with God. It’s easy to hold back (so I don’t look silly), sometimes that’s good but as worship leaders – we need to be chasing after God in every single area of our lives – and teaching/showing/leading others to do the same. So I hope that I accomplish that in my life – that I would hold no part of myself back from God. That’s what true worship is all about.
I hope I get a chance to mentor other worship leaders.
I also hope I get a chance to be part of ushering in the Kingdom, God willing.
What are your predictions for the future of worship?
I think there is a sweeping movement right now where people are connecting worship and justice. I think this will continue and will lead into a season of intense worship that focuses more on prayer & fasting and taking the hard things to God in worship, rather than rock music. I just have this sense that we’re coming up on more reflective/somber days.
What is one thing you wished every worship leader knew?
How to worship God. Sometimes we get a too focused on teaching or leading or showing others how to worship – and the smooth transitions – instead of getting caught up by the Glory of God ourselves.
Tell us about your eating with the homeless? That’s the number one thing that drew me to your blog in the first place. How did the idea come about? How do find who to eat with? Do you just walk around under the bridges and stuff and find someone to invite to eat? I think it is one of the most extraordinary personal ministries I’ve encountered.
A good friend (Ben) and I would meet together each week to talk about the books we were reading together. At the time, we were reading a book called The New Friars by Scott Bessenecker and Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne. Both of these books inspired us to get involved with something on the streets of Wilmington. Ben had the brilliant idea to simply take homeless guys out to lunch. So that’s what we started doing. It’s been 8 months since we started and it’s been amazing. We started by doing it every other week – but things are intense now and it’s too much fun so we do it every Wednesday now.
Yes, we basically walk around and ask people (that look like they could use a meal) if they would like to go to lunch with us, on us – no strings. We’ve discovered where to go to in the city, and we’ve been able to develop real relationships with some of these men. We’ve taken a few guys out several times and have been able to help them in other ways.
We always (at some point during our lunch) ask, “Hey man, what would help you?” I remember when we asked Eric this question, he said “I need cash, a lot of cash”. We just started to laugh, and said we needed cash too. But another guy (Charlie) said “I could use a warm jacked and a pair of boots for the winter.” Hey, that’s something we can do. So we’ve been able to help meet needs in that way. We’ve also had a couple of very spiritual encounters where we had the chance to pray with our new friends.
One of the reasons I write about our little encounters is because I’ve been struck by how amazing some of these people are. I had so much judgment towards homeless people before I began. Now, there is no doubt that there are very good reasons that a lot of these guys get themselves in this situation - and a lot of that has to do with the bad decisions that they make. But I make a lot of bad decisions too - and I’ve finally realized that I could be homeless someday. There are some things out of my control that could absolutely make me homeless. It’s true. That statement is so true that I could be homeless some day. My kids could be homeless some day. It’s true - any one of us and some of us reading this might absolutely be homeless someday.
After realizing this, there’s nothing I can do but jump in and help. Ben and I have realized that there are lot of great services and ministries that meet the daily needs of these men and women…but one thing that at lot of the guys need is just some time with a “relatively normal” person. Some time with someone that’s functioning in society, has a job, a home and kids - is involved with friends, a community and a church - and someone that will sit across from them and say – “hey we’re in this together, in this world together”…
And like every other serving thing I’ve done - I’ve taken away so much more than anything I’ve given - I wasn’t expecting to get so much from this experience.
So far my sacrifices have been small – a few dollars and some lunch breaks. But I’m just now starting to get into the hard sacrifices of giving. I’m getting emotionally involved with the lives of some of these men. Then I turn around and walk away and go back to my abundant life. But I think of them at night as I lay my head down on a ‘real goose down’ pillow…these are the things I’m dealing with now - and I’m not real comfortable with the struggle - because the next thing will probably involve bringing (one of these guys) into my home - then I need to think about my wife and kids….the further we get into this the more complicated things get. The questions of “why?” don’t go away – but that doesn’t stop us.
I could go on….but this is where my wife would tell me to stop talking – I’ve probably already said too much (like every good worship leader).
Thanks again to Terry for his answers to this week’s questions. I encourage you to check out his blog, especially his writing about eating with the homeless: Greylias.com
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