worship

How to Influence without Antagonizing: The Story Behind the Song “Hanging”

As many of you know, Substance Input Output just released a brand new live music video for our song Hanging! Click here to see it. The last few months have been quite a ride. When the Substance I/O album first released, we climbed as high as 25 on the overall iTunes Charts! There was a…
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Dancing, Flags, & Ancient Horns: How I Survived a Crazy Church Service & Learned an Important Lesson about Grace

When I gave my life to Christ, I experienced a deep sense of joy and freedom in knowing that I was loved by God and forgiven for all of the less than perfect things I had done. Truly, repenting for my past mistakes was exhilarating; knowing that I received God’s free gift of grace made…
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Meet Several of Our Newest Staff – “Substance Vision” Update!

As many of you know, Substance has been growing! Based on our recent surveys, we probably average close to 110 visitors a week. In fact, in the last eight months alone, we’ve had over 1000 new people fill out connection cards for getting involved. Not surprisingly, we’ve been very intentional about building up our staff. And for…
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Is Club Style Rap & Electronica Worship Pushing it too Far?

As many of you know, Substance is always trying to test the boundaries of church.  Over the years I’ve always been testing a new hypothesis… like:  How large can we grow our church without having offices?  Turns out that our number was 1700!  Of course I’m not saying we’re “wise” to experiment as we do. …
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Are you an American Idol Fan?

Are you an American Idol Fan? I told myself:  “Peter, you are not gonna watch that this year.”  And of course, for some reason, I got sucked in again.  Last year, the worship pastor of one of my mentor pastors got into the finals (remember Chris Sligh).  So, of course, I had to vote. After…
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