No Easy Answers with Mike Bellanti
May 1, 2026 · 35 min · 10 segments
Mike Bellanti sits down with Tara Tess, Director of Worship and Communication at Northbrook Church, to explore a question many of us think we know the answer to… but may have reduced too much. Is…
So I want you to imagine you're out at some dinner party or something, and you're surrounded by people you don't really know, and they're not really church people.
And you introduce yourself, they say, what do you do? I'm the Director of Worship and Communication.
How would you answer the question, if someone asked you, what is worship, without using churchy language?
If you're listening, you might want to jot that down, thinking about worship in those terms.
I think that neatly segues into a passage of Scripture we've been talking about.
We were just talking about it before we started recording, and that's Romans chapter 12.
Romans 12 talks about offering our bodies as a living sacrifice, which at first, if you're not familiar with what that means, it's actually Old Testament language.
It's a reference to the Old Testament sacrifice in which priests would sacrifice animals before God, which obviously we don't do anymore because of Christ, but instead we're to offer ourself as a living sacrifice.
If you wouldn't mind reading that, I mean, then let's think, when we read that passage, how does that... reshape what it means to worship.
It says, do not conform to the pattern of the world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
So I want you to imagine you're out at some dinner party or something, and you're surrounded by people you don't really know, and they're not really church people.
And you introduce yourself, they say, what do you do? I'm the Director of Worship and Communication.
How would you answer the question, if someone asked you, what is worship, without using churchy language?
If you're listening, you might want to jot that down, thinking about worship in those terms.
I think that neatly segues into a passage of Scripture we've been talking about.
We were just talking about it before we started recording, and that's Romans chapter 12.
Romans 12 talks about offering our bodies as a living sacrifice, which at first, if you're not familiar with what that means, it's actually Old Testament language.
It's a reference to the Old Testament sacrifice in which priests would sacrifice animals before God, which obviously we don't do anymore because of Christ, but instead we're to offer ourself as a living sacrifice.
If you wouldn't mind reading that, I mean, then let's think, when we read that passage, how does that... reshape what it means to worship.
It says, do not conform to the pattern of the world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
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