Loud Faith in a Noisy World

"You who bring good tidings to Zion,
go up on a high mountain.
You who bring good tidings to Jerusalem,
lift up your voice with a shout,
lift it up, do not be afraid;
say to the towns of Judah,
'Here is your God!'"

These were the songs of my childhood:
"Tiptoe, tiptoe in God's House"
"The Lord is in His Holy Temple, Let all the earth keep silent before Him..."
"Be still and know that I am God"

Looking back on that experience, and those songs in particular, I'm curious.  Were we really that difficult to manage? These songs are almost hypnotic in their nature, soothing, soft and simple.  They were sung with one aim in mind, silence.  I'm not bitter, and as the father of three little ones, I understand the need for silence, but I wonder if we haven't made it hard for a generation to heed these words from Isaiah.

I wonder, is our problem in the church today that we have too many loud people who don't know when to be quiet, or is the greater issue that we have too many who remain silent when something needs to be said?  The call from Isaiah is a call to boldness. 

The truth is, we live in a noisy world.  This old line from a Rich Mullins song rings true: "The stuff of earth competes for the allegiance I owe only to the Giver of all good things."  The air is saturated with the sound of commercials and advertisements.  For a generation with headphones permanently in place, music all too often isolates us from the ones we love instead of uniting us, but our world is in desperate need of good news.  A noisy world is in need of a loud faith, a cry from the mountain top that our God is here.  May God grow in us at Broadway a resolve to raise our voices above the noise and give a world of overwhelmed teens and their parents the good news.  Our God is here, and He deserves to be heard.