My Experience as Youth Pastor

Ok this can be completed many different ways but I'm focusing on worship songs that are totally vague about Who we are worshiping. I was in service yesterday and the second song we sang was new to me. I listened the first time through and then started to sing the second time through when I decided the song must have been from a deleted scene in Lord of The Rings the Two Towers. I assume this is where it was from based on the line that referred to the trees clapping their hands (at which point we did this special clap). The song never mentions God or anything remotely close to God. This got me wondering several things that made it simply impossible to sing along.

Why are we singing songs from Lord of the Rings? I understand that we love Tolkien and the quasi Christianesque sort of story that is being told. He was good friends with CS Lewis and so is the literary equivalent of U2. Still, I read Psalms and I'm pretty sure that we have plenty of material before we have to worry about the Ents clapping their hands.

What does it sound like when the trees clap their hands? We did this faster triple clap thing, but the Ents spoke so slow it could take days to say, "How how's it going?" I'm thinking we should slow way down and be like claaaaaaaaaaaap ……………………………………………………………………… claaaaaaaaaaaaaaap ……………………………………………… haroooooooooom.

And what ever happened to the Ent wives? That always drove me nuts. Tolkien must have had ADD or something because he totally tossed in all this random stuff that he never followed up on. Of course who am I to complain about ADD when I'm laughing to myself in the middle of service wondering about the Ent wives.

In closing this is my train of thought during that song the best that I could transcribe it. Things in my head are significantly more disjointed than this with various trains of thought randomly jumping into the flow of consciousness, but I think the overall point is well represented. The song did not actually mention Ents I just imagine giant clapping trees as Ents because I'm a geek.