To our dear and faithful readers:
Please forgive our absence in posting over the past few weeks! We promise to begin posting powerful and helpful articles and ideas again very soon.
Our ministry team here at Next Level Worship is releasing this week the largest and most comprehensive resource we have ever compiled. It is called 30 Days of Renewal. It is a major church-wide emphasis on personal worship and corporate praise.
Because of this major release, all of our time has been consumed in putting the many different resources — teaching materials, DVDs, online resources, etc. — together.
Blessings!
Dwayne Moore
President, Next Level Worship, LLC
ATTN: All who love great praise and preaching!!
We just got the following email from our dear friend, Charles Billingsley. (As many of you know, Charles wrote the Foreword for Dwayne’s devotional study, Pure Praise.) Don’t miss this great opportunity tomorrow (Saturday, June 6) night!
Tomorrow night, Saturday, June 6 at 6:00 PM Eastern Time, the Trinity Broadcasting Network will air a special, one-hour edition of “Praise The Lord” from Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, VA. The featured speaker is A.R. Bernard and I will lead the congregation in powerful praise and worship with several of the songs from my new, soon to be released CD, God of The Ages.
Please don’t miss the opportunity to join us for this awesome service, Saturday, June 6 at 6:00 PM. I know your heart will be blessed.
As many of you know, we have been asking prayer for Tucker Beam on this site over the past couple years. Tucker’s story of 3 cancers in his 9 short years has gripped our entire community and made ripples around the world.
Sunday morning, May 31, 2009, Tucker Beam won his final battle with Leukemia. He went home to be with Jesus around 1:00 AM. His amazing story of faith and courage has been chronicled at his Caring Bridge site. Go here to read his life-changing story.
His Homecoming Service will be Wednesday morning at 10AM Central at The Freshman Campus of Hoover High School in Birmingham, AL. His viewing will be Tuesday evening from 5PM until 8PM at The Freshman Campus of Hoover High School. Click here for the link.
His Caring Bridge site has had over 350,000 hits. So needless to say that hundreds, perhaps thousands, are expected to attend the viewing and funeral of this little man who has forever left his legacy on our hearts and lives.
Dwayne is now Twittering almost daily about worship and life in general! If you would like to follow Dwayne, simply click here: http://twitter.com/invitations/find_on_twitter
Then enter his username, dwayneamoore, and select the Follow button.
It’s that simple! Thanks for following!
I’ve had my Blackberry Pearl for close to a year. I have been on Facebook for about 6 months, and I started Twittering in earnest a couple months ago. I must say I am feeling quite well-connected and socially relevant! In fact, it’s hard to imagine life without them now.
Please hear me say that I am not opposed to any of these, and I still intend to enjoy their vast benefits. But I have noticed something different about me since I’ve gotten so attuned to staying “connected.” I am constantly thinking about them. I have to check my phone every 10 minutes to see if the little red light is flashing, which indicates that I have a new email. If I’m separated from my phone for more than a few hours, I start having withdrawals! And I can’t wait to read when someone comments on my Facebook wall. I actually find myself sitting around wondering who else I need to follow — or who else might follow me — on Twitter!
All this demanding (or yielding) of my attention to social networking has started adding up to something I didn’t see coming for me : clutter, distraction, and frustration. I can certainly see why Keira Knightley said what she did about the internet. The Pirates of the Caribbean star said: “I hate the Internet. I find it dehumanizing to constantly check emails or social sites which have become so fashionable.” Read more…
Governor Sarah Palin
We need to pray for Governor Sarah Palin and her family. God has elevated her to an extraordinary place of influence through her selection by Senator John McCain as his running mate for Vice President. (My article in this week’s edition of Rick Warren’s Ministry Toolbox, titled The Law of Divine Elevation, sure seems to apply to Governor Palin!)
This video was taken from the Wasilla Assembly of God Church in Wasilla, Alaska. The church’s website has been taken down due to heavy traffic after Governor Palin was selected by Senator John McCain as his running mate.
We believe this is an important video for Christians to watch and it is presented here courtesy of Wasilla Assembly of God Church. The church website states:
“Governor Palin did attended Wasilla Assembly of God since the time she was a teenager. She and her family were a part of the church up until 2002. Since that time she has maintained a friendship with Wasilla Assembly of God and has attended various conferences and special meetings here. This video is the message she spoke in June in Wasilla , Alaska.”
Click here to watch the video of Governor Palin.
Hello everyone!
We are back from Botswana. Thank you for your prayers during our mission trip to Gaborone, Botswana, Africa. It was an amazing time! I had the privilege to teach several worship seminars to both college students and worship leaders in that country. Also, I got to do an open-air concert at Open Baptist Church. Close to 1200 people attended and 7 trusted Christ as Savior that evening!
We have a backlog of posts to do on our blogsite, so look for ‘em to start coming your way beginning next week!
Worshipping Him,
Dwayne
The following is a quote from C. S. Lewis’ book, Mere Christianity (HarperCollins, 1952). It needs no preface or explanation…
There is one bit of advice given to us by the ancient heathen Greeks, and by 
the Jews in the Old Testament, and by the great Christian teachers of the Middle Ages, which the modern economic system has completely disobeyed. All these people told us not to lend money at interest; and lending money at interest — what we call investment — is the basis of our whole system…Three great civilisations had agreed…in condemning the very thing on which we have based our whole life. (p. 85)
(So how does this relate to worship, you ask? A worshiping people — who worship Him in a God-honoring way, that is – are a prudent people who listen to wisdom….)
Below is an excerpt from a newspaper article that just came out this morning. It is an encouraging and powerful story of how love for the risen Christ is still more important to some young people (and older people!) than their own personal comforts. Go here to read the entire article.
BANGOR, Maine – The early arrival of Easter this year may have numbed the bodies of Maine’s Christians, but it did not chill their spirits as they gathered in churches, on hilltops, along riverfronts and in school gymnasiums to celebrate their risen savior.Aurelia Snow, 17, and Jamie Snow, 14, huddled together Sunday morning at the base of the landmark Thomas Hill Standpipe that overlooks Bangor. Their eclectic Easter garb included four layers of pants, shirts and socks each, topped off with their winter coats and blankets off their beds.As the sun peeked over the horizon about 6:30 a.m., the girls and more than 70 other worshippers celebrated the light Christ’s Resurrection brought to the world.
“Christ the Lord is risen today. Alleluia!” members of two of Bangor’s oldest Baptist churches sang as a cold wind found its way up pant legs and inside zippered down coats.”Sons of men and angels say: Alleluia!” they continued, accompanying the song with a crescendo of stamping feet as the mercury crept toward the 20 degree mark. Read more…
Dear friends,
Sorry I’ve not posted anything in the past few days. I’ve been hidden away in the hills of Tennessee going back through every week of the worship study. Group Publishing’s senior editor has requested that we get our final edits to her by this weekend. (Group is releasing our worship study, Praise More Powerful, under the new title, Pure Praise, this coming December, 2008.)
Thus, Elizabeth Jones (my literary agent’s editorial director) and I have been busy tweaking every word and phrase. God has blessed me with two of the best editors in the business! No doubt the Lord knew needed I all the help I could get! :)
We’ll try to get back to our 2 to 3 posts per week starting in the next couple weeks.
Dwayne
One of my church’s praise team members’ son has just been diagonosed with a dangerous bone cancer in his leg. Tucker Beam is only 7 1/2 years old. He is already a cancer survivor from when he was 1 year old. However, the doctors have told his parents that this recurrence may be even more dangerous.
Incredibly, Jason, Tucker’s dad, continues to sing every Sunday with our praise team. Jason told me on the phone the other day that since the diagnosis and the onset of this horrible storm in their lives, he wants to sing praise to God ”more than ever.” I honestly don’t know if I would have that much faith and that much passion to praise after such news.
Please pray for Tucker Beam. You may even want to donate to that family. They are about to endure some 40 weeks of treatment. Thus, Tucker’s mom will not be able to continuing teaching. And Jason may have to miss some days at his landscaping job to stay with Tucker in the hospital.
To learn more about Tucker and how you and your church can help him and his family, go to www.caringbridge.org. Then look for “Visit a caring bridge website,” and type in tuckerbeam (one word, all lower caps).
Thanks ~Dwayne
Yes it’s true. Our website woes continue here at Next Level Worship! We appreciate those of you who have not given up on our site. Your patience is greatly appreciated! Thanks especially for the kind words and emails to let us know you are missing our articles and updates.
We are reluctant to post new articles because of some serious bugs that are still not resolved. Two things to be precise:
- For reasons unknown to us, some of the text throughout the site now looks like strange symbols and gibberish! This is quite distracting to our readers (and embarrassing to us).
- Our “pretty permalinks,” as they are called, have stopped working. Thus, you may find that some of the links on our site do not work. Also, search engines can no longer notice us because the article link titles are listed as numbers rather than as the actual names of each article. Our weekly hits have suddenly gone from thousands down to hundreds! If our new articles can’t be promoted out there through the search engines, we are hesitant to post them.
Bottom line, life is not without its problems! And our little issues stated above pale in significance to all the good things our Lord is doing in and through this ministry. So we will forge ahead and try to get these things fixed ASAP.
Meanwhile, let’s all just keep loving Jesus and focusing on Him rather than the frustrating stuff of this earth and cyberspace!
If you have logged on to our site anytime in December, you may have wondered why we haven’t posted anything since November 29th. Our normal output is two – three articles per week! Well, that is because on November 30th some sort of trojan somehow attacked our site and disabled our ability to post any articles or updates! In fact, no one could even register for our blog and registered members couldn’t get in their admin section!
A huge debt of thanks to Chris Viola, our resident tech guru and the video/web guy at our church, who poured many late night hours into searching down and repairing this annoying and crippling problem!
As for now, all our plugins have been deactivated. So for the time being, you won’t be able to do things like listen to audio sermons or watch videos. Apparently, at least two of the plugins had become infected and were fouling up everything else. We are going to update and reload the plugins ASAP which should get everything back to running condition.
Thanks for your patience!
The NLW Team
I had the privilege to visit the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte, NC last week. It is a place filled with information and inspiration about Dr. Graham’s ministry over the past 60 years.
As I went from room to room of this interactive and visual walk through godly history, the Holy Spirit spoke very strongly to me. He reminded me of the priority I used to place on witnessing and living my life first of all to show others the way to heaven. Dr. Graham’s recorded voice (and the Holy Spirit’s still, small voice) kept saying to me, “There is nothing more important than evangelism and leading others to Christ.”
I get that – or at least I used to…
I remember when I would take gospel tracks with me everywhere I went. I remember not so long ago when I would ask my restaurant waiter if I could pray for him/her and would leave a track with my tip. I remember in middle and high school the excitement I had over sharing my faith with my friends. In fact, I would deliberately make friends with guys just so I could help lead them to salvation in Jesus. I recall on many occasions literally sobbing and crying out to God for my loved ones and friends. Once, I invited my cousin who never came to church to a revival service. During the invitation the Lord told me to go back to her and ask her if she wanted me to go with her to receive Christ. It was a scary thing for a 6th grader, but when I obeyed, my cousin got saved. Read more…
Finally, after two years of waiting, praying and diligently searching for a publisher, we have signed a contract with Group Publishing in Colorado! They plan to release Pure Praise (formerly titled Praise More Powerful) in the United States and in Canada in December of 2008. They also plan�to promote Pure Praise�in some of their other international markets, including Australia and the UK.
Even as I�type these words, the bent-up emotions of such a long journey of faith and effort come pouring out onto the keys. Many of you have followed us throughout this waiting and hoping period. You have prayed for me and my family and for God to open the exact door at the exact time to the publisher He wanted for this study. I thank God for my wife and boys and for each of you who have encouraged me when I grew impatient and discouraged.
I also feel�great�gratitude toward my literary agent, David Sanford, and his fine team. I have known from our very first conversation that God would use David to lead us to whom He wanted. And so God did use him. David has believed in our study and the impact it can make from the first time he read the manuscript. He never lost heart even after so many “no’s” from other publishers along the way.
Group has an incredible reputation for producing life-changing Bible studies and books. Most recently, they have published a Bible study by Coach Tony Dungy, called Quiet Strength. Another amazing study series they publish is based on Discover God by Bill Bright. Their authors also include Leonard Sweet and Erwin McManus, to name just a few.
To God be all glory!! – Dwayne
