Good, Good Father | Connecting to God Through Music

 Danny Best is a newly appointed campus pastor at Christ Fellowship in New York City, a multi-site church out of Florida. Danny shares his moving experience at the GLS this last August, when Brian Houston used music to help people connect more deeply with God.

This past year and a half since we planted here has been one of the most challenging times of my life. Our organization as a whole doesn’t have a lot of experience with church planting so it is new to everyone. It’s easy to feel like what we’re doing isn’t working. It doesn’t always look ‘successful’ and we feel very alone a lot of the time. We are separated from our parent organization by thousands of miles, and with all the fantastic things going on down there with new buildings being bought and opened, hundreds coming to Christ on a regular basis and tens of thousands in attendance, it can feel a bit disheartening to us having 80-90 people at church on a regular basis, celebrating our small victories. I think God is using this time to break some performance things in me, redefine what faithfulness looks like and deepen my idea of what trust is.

Though I am also a musician, I don’t always connect with God deeply through worship. In recent years, my connections with God have tended to be more cerebral in nature, but this past year I have had difficulty connecting with God at all…until recently.

I stumbled upon the song Good, Good Father and something broke loose inside me. That song has been on repeat for me lately, and that is not something I tend to do often. Then to hear about that practice when he was with Brian Houston at the Summit in August was a very emotionally moving time for me.

I am realizing that God connects with us in different ways during different seasons. The session with Brian Houston gave me permission to pursue God in a new way. As soon as I saw where he was going with that segment, I was sure that the song Good, Good Father was going to make the list. To have set aside that time to talk about music connecting with the heart, and  use that song specifically was confirmation to me that God was using different means to get to me in this season of my life. Interestingly, it was connecting with me about trusting God through this difficult season we are going through as a family as we plant this church in very infertile ground. Even as I type this, I am having trouble holding back a flood of emotion.

What connects with me the deepest is that God is a good, good Father. The process that my wife and I have been going through during this season is harder than we expected. The progress is slower than we expected. It has been frustrating, emotional and lonely, and I battle feelings of inadequacy regularly. This song reminds me that I can trust the process that God has us going through. He is good and knows what he is doing with us, with His church, and with these people. He is GOOD. It also levels my feelings of inadequacy because it reminds me that above all else, I am His child, and I am loved.  What I DO for God is not what matters, but it’s who I AM to Him.  I know that is a simple truth, but when it sinks in, it is very moving.

My dream for our church community is that our hope would catch fire. This city is full of people chasing after things that will never satisfy and sadly, many who go to church look just like everyone else. I would love our church community to be so radiant with joy and peace that they stand out like beacons in the night. My hope is that we would then be able to draw others in so that they can know what they are truly searching for. My dream is also that people would find a home. This is a city of millions of people who are almost like orphans here. It can be the most crowded, lonely place in the country. People feel very alone and they need community. I pray that we could be a place where people can belong—that they can find the deep community that we were born for. My biggest prayer is that I would be deeply soul satisfied with whatever God wants what we are doing here to look like. That I would have passion and vision to carry this forward no matter the cost, no matter the outcome, and that in doing so, it would be always well with my soul.

I have found that I have needed to give myself freedom to allow my relationship with God to change and develop over time. I have learned that the disciplines that allowed me to stay healthy and connect with God in previous seasons might not be what God uses to connect with me in new seasons. I have also learned that though times are very challenging, things often don’t look the way I expect, and that following what God has called me to often costs me far more than I thought it would, I can trust my Father in heaven and the process that he has for me.

He is a good, good Father.

Listen to the song Good, Good Father.