Founded in 2011, WorshipMob is a community of worshippers in Colorado Springs that has an ever expanding global following. But despite all that, it’s the local that matters the most. We asked founder and producer Sean Mulholland to tell us more.
I had been visiting many church services after being devoted to a particular one for eight years. I felt like God was opening my mind to all of the talent and passion in His many isolated church communities, and that they would be incredibly blessed to meet each other and both musically inspire and spiritually encourage one another. I already had a music studio, but I dreamed of capturing an extended and uninhibited worship session with both audio and video. I wanted a real conversation and relationship to unfold, between God and His kids (us).
Even though it took a crazy amount of financial investment and technical work, I wanted to attempt two things; professional quality audio and video as well as a very spontaneous, unorganized approach so that beautiful inspired moments could occur. I wanted us to play a song that we all love, and then just let it evolve - to see what happens, what God inspires in us both musically and lyrically. By the end of the first year, about 30 people from 10 different churches were involved, and each year since has continued to expand. Today we’re at over 200 people from over 40 local churches, though it’s really not about a package or a business plan. It's about discovering that there is so much more to intimacy with God than any of us see, unless we allow the time, space, and culture for it to come out.
The impact has been incredible. I think the videos display what happens when our hearts begin to open and freely engage in intimacy with the Father. We see fear completely demolished. We see open hearts displaying love, joy, peace, and so on, and we actually begin to understand that Jesus destroyed the power of the sin cycle, and gave us a much more potent weapon - God's Love and real heart-level compassion - where performance and self-improvement lose ground to encouragement and validation.
In the process we can speak hope and faith into each place in a person's journey, whether their path has been like ours, or something completely foreign to our experience. The spiritual refreshing that we get actually fuels us for the coming week, and we’re finding that when we commune with Him for extended periods of time weekly, like we do, we experience God's love and acceptance in ways like never before. This makes every other crutch or poison we turn to in our lives pale in comparison to our experiences with Him.
If you take a look at certain churches you can see that there’s a strong link between fear and a lack of unity. When people get oppressive, when they start shaming, blaming, comparing, measuring and judging it’s not from God, but usually our way of protecting ourselves from repeating some past hurt or other. We put up walls of protection that make us operate in an exclusive manner, yet I think everyone could benefit from a more inclusive view of the body of Christ.
One thing we have learned is that God's love is way greater and more encompassing than we realized and doesn't have the boundaries and stipulations we often assume. When we think about God's desire for His children to love even their enemies, how much more is His desire for His children to love and encourage one another, building each other up and working together in the body.
These last four years since WorshipMob started have changed my faith dramatically. In fact, it has been literally resurrected. I've learned to trust God's love. It's not a trust where I believe He'll give me what I think I want, or protect me from tough things or times, but rather that He actually cares about me, and each of us, deeply. He'll use any joys, frustrations and sorrows to continue to grow each of us closer to Him, at a heart level.
He loved us enough to create us, and then gave us the freedom to decide to love Him back, or go our own way. For those times when we go our own way, and eventually turn back, we find Him patiently waiting, with His arms ever open to us. He's a good Father, and He doesn't give up on us.
One last thing. I’ve learned that even if our intent is to honor and encourage people through ministry, it's way easier to hurt people than I had realized. Our words are truly swords, and they can literally empower towards life, at a heart-level, or cause spiritual/soul damage. Words that seem relatively harmless to the person speaking them can emotionally hammer another person, amplified by their past abuse, manipulation, or neglect.
We are called to not only express words from our viewpoint, but care enough for the person receiving our words, that we are dealing with misunderstanding and injury in real time - and doing our best to not allow harm. Jesus' sacrifice for us is so extraordinary because it encourages us to do the same as He did - empowered by His love, through the Holy Spirit - to do the exact opposite of what the world economy would say.
Where the world system says "You get what you deserve", "pay what you owe", "work harder to beat the competition", and "survival of the fittest/strongest", the kingdom economy points to what what Jesus did - and encourages us to be inspired by Him to do likewise - "Give what is undeserved", "Forgive debts - (emotional & physical ones as well)", "work hard to serve others", and "the strong lay down their lives for the weak".
The amazing thing about the kingdom economy is that when we start to internalize our Father's love, we start living out these compassionate works, easily, and then we can literally feel God filling our spiritual bank accounts. It makes our heart full to let go of comparison and criticism, and pick up and carry the wounded hearts around us. It's what Jesus did, and what Jesus inside us LOVES to do.