We're all a bunch of scallywags

I was at a concert at the Molson Amphitheatre in Toronto on Saturday. It wasn't just any old concert where you listen to the artist, shout & yell & scream, lose your voice & your hearing, fall in love with the band, and then run out & buy the t-shirt.

This was a Hillsong United concert. A worship service. A three hour (8pm-11pm) concert which included all those things I mentioned above, but also included somewhere in the neighbourhood of 12,000 young people praising God. It was really neat.

From what I gather, Hillsong is a community church in Sydney Australia (the single largest church in all of Australia - so big it has its own leadership college). Hillsong United is the praise & worship band from the church and they are so widely popular that they now go on world tours and end up in places like Toronto.

Honestly, they're good. But they work the worship service formula: start with high energy songs to get the crowd warmed up, throw in a prayer or some words of wisdom, sing some more loud songs, bring out the high-energy youth speaker with the great sermon, guilt 3/4 of the crowd into thinking they need to respond to an altar call, sing an hour's worth of quiet reflective songs, then when we all think its just about over, pound the crowd with some more high-energy songs to rock out to and send them all home happy & smiling! They really are good! Just... predictable.

Anyway... One of the girls in the band used the term 'scallywag'. And, as much fun as it was to hear her repeat the word in her Australian accent, she made a good point that the church is full of misfits & scallywags who don't have the answers, and who don't have it all together, and who are generally messing up left, right & centre, and are ultimately banking on God's grace & love to get us all through. The church is far from perfect because the church is full of scallywags. I forget that sometimes and expect the church to be perfect, and then it disappoints me because it doesn't live up to my expectations. Scallywags. Remember that.