Jodi-Renee Adams's Page

Hello, darkness, my old friend / I've come to talk with you again / because a vision softly creeping / left it's seeds while I was sleeping / and the vision that was planted in my brain / still remains / within the sound of silence.

Very few poet-songwriters of the 1970's could paint word pictures like Simon and Garfunkel. I'm still not sure if I can find one that feels more true and tangible than the idea of the "sound of silence." Immediately,… Continue

Scary confession: I don’t really like going to church. Even my church - you know, that one that I pastor. I wake up on Sunday mornings at that ol’ 5:30 am rooster crow and have to wind myself up for the morning ahead with a small ball of something in my stomach resembling weariness and an “i-don’t-wanna” attitude. Don’t get me wrong...I’m always so glad, so ridiculously grateful once I get there and things start moving; once the liturgy starts rolling off our tongues, the music takes that myster… Continue

[This is a re-post from a blog posted in September 2008. After spending this last week with so many great people discussing worship as narrative, this seemed like another appropriate piece to add to the conversation. Can't wait to hear your thoughts!]

It is Thursday, and I am heading down to the inner-city middle school my
daughter attends to direct and nurture a fledgling after-school choir program. You know the story. No funding means no art and music. Then what follows: academic achi… Continue

I think I need an Albus Dumbledore. You know what I mean: a dignified, velvet-dressed wizard to speak epiphanies into being and the occasional incredibly random statement from time to time, just to keep me on track and at peace with myself. I'm pretty sure they don't sell those at Sharper Image, but if they did I'd be lining up. This wisdom from the great Professor is one of the most oft-referenced sharpie scrawled post-it-notes clinging to the front of my idea journal..."The time is yet coming… Continue

Eight hundred years ago, imagery was one of the most commonly used assets of the Church in worship. Serving a congregation of mostly illiterate worshipers meant that the "worship leader" had the heavy responsibility of commissioning art and imagery that would teach without words about the grand luminosity of a GOD who was also as close as our next breath. Even in our literate age, we find that words still fail to communicate the "bigness" of themes and ideas in the same way that an image or a sy… Continue