On my way to re:create

For the fourth year, I’m heading down to Nashville to be a part of re:create. Being involved with this group of people from all over the world has been incredibly inspiring for me personally and has had a great impact on my own ministry.

Randy Elrod has become a good friend and an inspiration and I’m looking forward to seeing him later today.

Want to follow along with what we’re doing at re:create? There are a few ways -

1. I’m planning to liveblog the sessions here and will hopefully have time to add a few blog posts as the week goes.

2. We’re using #recreate10 to tag our twitter posts. You can follower my twitter feed here – @chrisfromcanada
3. There’s some info on the re:create site here – www.recreateconference.com

One of the cool things I’m looking forward to this year? I’m sharing a hotel room with a Saints fan – he’s going to be in a great mood when I see him today!

Vicky Beeching – new EP preview!

Vicky Beeching is a favourite worship leader of mine, all the way back to “Yesterday, Today & Forever”! She is getting ready to release her new EP through Integrity Music on February 16 and we’ve got a preview of one of the songs just for you here at the blog.

This is “Blessing And Honor (Be To Your Name)” – although, using the good Queen’s english, as I’m sure Ms. Beeching would do, this is actually “Blessing And Honour (Be To Your Name)” –

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RSS friends – you might have to hit the blog to hear the audio

Blessing And Honor
Words & Music by Vicky Beeching, Jonny MacIntosh and Sarah MacIntosh
© 2010 Integrity Worship Music | Thankyou Music (Admin. by Integrity Music, Inc.) | (Admin. by EMI Christian Music Publishing)

The air is filled with angels
Who speak and shout Your name
The atmosphere is changing as eternity invades
And suddenly above us the floor of heaven breaks
As Your Spirit falls down we will say

Blessing and honor glory and power
Be to Your name be to Your name
All of the praises throughout the ages
Be to Your name be to Your name forevermore

One day we will see You shining like the sun
Face to face with beauty
Eye to eye with love
Standing with the elders we will throw our crowns
At the feet of Jesus as we shout

You’re the Alpha the Omega
The Creator and Sustainer of all
Yes You are yes You are

Want a free chord chart for this song? Of course you do! Here you go.

Looking for more info on Vicky Beeching? Here are a few places to start –

www.vickybeeching.com
www.twitter.com/vickybeeching

You can hear the other two songs from Vicky’s EP over the next couple of days at these two blogs –

Monday, February 8 – www.chrisfromcanada.com
Tuesday, February 9 – www.klampert.com
Wednesday, February 10 – www.fredmckinnon.com

“Understanding Faith & Church Trends”

The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada is touring the country making a presentation to Christian leaders where they are presenting some trends and statistics that relate directly to the church community in Canada. I attended the event in Toronto with a couple of other guys from our staff team and was fascinated by some of the things presented.

Although (or maybe because..) I’m an artist to the core, there is something about graphs, spreadsheets and colour-coding that just speaks to me! Several things jumped out at us during the presentations, giving us lots to talk about on the way back to Orangeville as well as the days following, but let me show you two stats that I think have lots to say about the church, social media and our opportunity to reach people where they are.

Here’s the first one -

 

 

And the second -

 

 

Okay. So why do I find those two graphics fascinating? If you are on staff at your church, where are you spending advertising dollars? If you do spend them (and we do, although not tons) then it’s probably in a couple of places – the church directory in your local paper, maybe a radio ad and then some special newspaper advertising for events or programs. If your church is a bigger congregation in a bigger market maybe TV advertising even play in to it.

So check the numbers. Where are advertising firms NOT spending their money? Newspaper, radio, TV. Where do churches generally think advertising? Newspaper, radio, TV. The ad firms know better than the churches – that’s not where the people are. Those three forms of media are either losing audience or losing audience attention. Got a PVR? Then you know that commercials just aren’t part of your TV experience anymore. When was the last time you actually decided to go to an event because you saw an ad in the paper?

But.. The opportunity is here to make some significant changes. Check where ad agencies ARE spending dollars – mobile, email, online. Why are they doing that? It’s where the people are. You’re trying to reach people, aren’t you? So why not focus some of your advertising attention on the places where those people actually are rather than trying to shout at them in a place where they are not!

I’m not here to tell you the “how to” of making this happen. Want to learn about social media? Go ask some students in your congregation. They will tell you. And don’t laugh off their suggestions – like the ad firms, they will generally know better than you.

Alright.. So what about the second?

The second graphic is interesting to me because it asks the question “Where would/should/could we put the ‘worship service’ in this little diagram?” Well.. where would you put it? Where would you LIKE to put it? Do you see the concept – richness vs. touches? I love the diagram and we are spending some time at OBC talking about how social media/networking will play a role in helping us to make disciples.

Three questions -

1. How is your church actively engaged in advertising and networking in places where people already are?

2. Have you made some decisions to stop advertising in certain ways? Should you?

3. How have you increased the richness of your worship services in a way that left lasting impressions on people?

Let’s hear it in the comments.

Looking for more info on this stuff?

Evangelical Fellowship of Canada – www.efc-canada.ca
Centre for Research on Canadian Evangelicalism – www.evangelicalfellowship.ca/crce
Church & Faith Trends – www.churchandfaithtrends.ca

“Recording 48 Tracks with Studio One and the FireStudio”

If you are thinking about doing any kind of live tracking of your church services, you need to watch this video from PreSonus to see how you can do it without spending a ton of cash. These are solid products and pretty straightforward to use. We are hoping to install a similar system to this (24 channels instead of 48) to be able to live track our services on Sunday morning.

SongSuggest – iPhone app for worship leaders

Check it out – SongSuggest is the first iPhone app built specifically for worship leaders. This comes from the guys at WorshipApps and is a pretty handy tool if you are looking for a resource to help you make decisions on worship service content.

For the sake of being honest, you should know that I received a free copy of this app in exchange for the review but I would definitely be willing to pay the $4.99 price tag from the iTunes app store on this one.

Find it in the app store by clicking this link – www.worshipapps.com/ss – or search for “songsuggest”.

Worship Confessional – Sunday, January 31, 2010

Sunday, January 31, 2010 – “Good News for Bad News”
Romans 2
Call to Worship
Glory to God Forever – Steve Fee & Vicky Beeching – Bb
Everlasting God – Brenton Brown – Bb
Worship Rises – Chris Vacher, Joshua Seller & WorshipRises – A
Offering/Announcements/Meet & Greet
Congregational Prayer
Message – “False Sense of Security“
How Marvelous – Charles Gabriel – F
Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone) –  John Newton/Chris Tomlin – E

Three things about this past Sunday -

1. Last week I asked if you would pray for our church. If you did, keep praying – people are being confronted straight up with the truth of the gospel and we know that it is only the Spirit that changes hearts.

    

2. We had to be a little flexible in our response section this week. I originally had planned to do Amazing Grace first and then key change from E to F up to How Marvelous. Now, a half-step key change isn’t always the most elegant thing but we made it work. After hearing from Earl Marshall with some more info on how he was going to end his message we decided to flip the two response songs – so that meant a key change of one half-step DOWN.. yikes. But.. we made it work. We took time at practice to work through the chords of the key change and it came off beautifully.

   Because we were flexible in the layout of our service even up to Sunday morning, we were able to bring more focus to the service and really tie our response songs to the close of Earl’s message.

3. This week marked the beginning of Operation ClapClap and it was very successful. I will blog more this week about Operation ClapClap and what it is we’re trying to do – we’re having fun with this one!

I’m back on the Sunday Setlists train – have a look at what other worship leaders are doing at their churches.

Hear “We Will Worship” from Carlos Whittaker EP today

Carlos Whittaker (www.ragamuffinsoul.com|@loswhit) released his EP “Ragamuffin Soul” this week through Integrity Music and the thing has been going a little bananas. Sure it’s only $1.98 to pick up these three songs but the guy hit #1 on iTunes in the US for the Christian/Gospel genre and made it up to #47 (that’s the highest spot I heard) on the entire iTunes chart. That is a pretty incredible feat for a guy with no real touring history, award-winning songs, etc etc etc.

Integrity Music wants to continue getting the word out so they asked if I would stream the third song from Carlos’ EP here on the site today and offer you a chord chart download. So.. here you go!

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“We Will Worship”
by Carlos Whittaker & Jason Ingram
(c)2009 Integrity Worship Music (Admin. by Integrity Music, Inc.)/Sony/ATV Timber Publishing (Admin. by Sony/ATV Sounds LLC)/Windsor Hill Music/West Main Music

We fix our eyes on You You are God alone
We fix our eyes on You You’re our only hope
For all we have to lose is our very souls

Save us from these comforts
Break us of our need for the familiar
Spare us any joy that’s not of You
And we will worship You
Yeah we will worship You

Satisfy us Lord in Your unfailing love
Satisfy us Lord that You would be enough
We have nothing here let Your kingdom come

Hallelujah hallelujah
Hallelujah hallelujah

Want free chord charts for the songs on the EP? Just a little clicky clicky and you’re on your way. Hit the SHARE tab and you’ll find what you’re looking for.

There are three songs on this EP and you can hear all of them right now -

1. “Jesus Saves” on FredMcKinnon.Com
2. “Rain It Down” over at Klampert.Com
3. “We Will Worship” at ChrisFromCanada.Com

Videos for Worship

Someone (sorry, I don’t remember who!) linked this site on twitter and I thought it was pretty interesting. If you do any kind of “mood” or architectural projection in your sanctuary or if you are just looking for some video content to use in your worship services, check out this channel on Vimeo – Videos for Worship. Very cool.

Here are a couple of examples –

Check it out. There is some very, very good stuff here. Awesome to see people producing incredible content and then sharing it for the benefit of other churches.

Great work, guys!

Carlos Whittaker – Ragamuffin Soul EP

Okay, so it’s not available on iTunes in Canada but if you live in the US you’re able to buy this EP today from fellow re:create peep Carlos Whittaker. You may be familiar with his blog – www.ragamuffinsoul.com – but you should check out these songs.

Here’s a short video that tells some of the story behind these songs and why Carlos is excited about them –

If you’re looking for chord charts for the 3 songs, Carlos has posted them on his blog here – www.ragamuffinsoul.com/music

Worship Confessional – Sunday, January 24, 2010

Sunday, January 24, 2009 – “Good News for Bad News”
Romans 1:21-32
Call to Worship
All The Earth Will Sing Your Praises – Paul Baloche – E
All Because Of Jesus – Steve Fee – A
This Is Our God – Chris Tomlin – E
Offering/Announcements/Meet & Greet
Glorious – Paul Baloche – C
Worship Rises – Chris Vacher, Joshua Seller & WorshipRises – A
Message – “My Moral Compass“
Worship Rises – reprise

Worship leaders, you will know what I mean when I say that Sunday was very heavy for me. If you are familiar with the words of Romans 1 and the words of these particular verses, you can bet that people were confronted in very direct ways with the truth of their own sin and their need of salvation through Christ.

I got home on Sunday and I was wiped – just very, very tired. I know that this is what happens to me when there is significant spiritual activity happening around men – unfortunately I didn’t recognize it in the moment on Sunday morning, it only became really evident to me in the afternoon because I was able to read the signs.

Pray for us. Pray for our church. Pray that God would move in mighty ways and that the hearts of people would be softened and opened to the gospel of Christ. There are people here who desperately need to come to know Christ. Pray for them.

WorshipTogether.com Training Conference

WorshipTogether.com is hosting a training conference in Kansas from April 12-14. Looks like a great event with some great people involved.

Anyone planning on attending?

 

John 1:29 – ‘the scapegoat’

We wrapped up our “His Glory Appears” series on December 27 by talking about the implications of John the Baptist’s proclamation of Jesus being the Lamb of God, come to take away the sins of the world from John 1:29. As we were talking about ideas for the service, I suggested that we could film part of the message at a local goat farm.

After a few phone calls and gathering some people with the right equipment, we set off to spend a couple of hours with our new friend Eric the farmer and some of his goats. We had a great time putting this video together and the response from our congregation was that it was very helpful in bringing home the point.

Here’s the video we used -

If you’re thinking about exploring the use of video with your church, don’t be scared! Don’t feel like you have to go “all in” right from the bat with full video messages, HD cameras, big lighting and major editing. For this shoot, we used four people (including Earl on screen), two cameras (our church owns a Canon HV20 and we also used a similar camera belonging to a friend), 90 minutes or so of filming, 3-4 hours of editing and a bunch of awesome goats.

Does this mean we’re video experts? Heck no! But it does mean we’re willing to try new things (or at least “new for us” things) to help communicate with our people.

Don’t be afraid! Give it a shot!

“Just Come Home” – video from NewSpring Church

Are you kidding me?

Worship Confessional – Sunday, January 10, 2010

Well it’s been a real long time since I’ve done one but I’m back with a worship confessional. We started a new series after Christmas called “Good News for Bad News” – we are working our way through the first 3 chapters of the book of Romans. If you are familiar with these chapters, you will know why the title makes sense. Good news, indeed!

Here’s how our morning looked at Orangeville Baptist Church -

Sunday, January 10, 2009 – “Good News for Bad News”
Romans 1:8-20
Opener – Song of Hope – Robbie Seay Band
Announcements/Meet & Greet
How Can I Keep From Singing – Chris Tomlin – G -> A
Jesus Messiah – Chris Tomlin – A
Your Grace Is Enough – Matt Maher – F
Communion
Lead Me To The Cross – Hillsong United – E
This Is How We Know – Matt Redman – Bb
Message – “I Am Not Ashamed“
How Can I Keep From Singing – Chris Tomlin – G

Three things from this past Sunday -

1. It was a Chris Tomlin morning but I’m fine with that. Don’t freak out about playing several songs from the same artist – there’s only one person in your whole church will realize it and they won’t be bothered by it. Those songs work together well because they have the same writer – similar feel, similar lyrical direction, etc. Don’t do it every week but don’t be afraid of going with it if it makes sense.

2. We had some important info to communicate to our people. We didn’t want to break up the flow of the service from the songs to communion to the message. So we opened our service with an upbeat, high energy song (Song of Hope) and then did our announcements in two separate sections with our meet & greet right in between. That whole opening section took about 10 minutes but it was worth it – the things we needed to communicate to our church family deserved that time.
3. There were beautiful moments of worship during “Lead me to the Cross” at both our 9:00 and 11:00 services on Sunday. It’s hard to describe what those moments are like but you know that you’re in them when they happen. People focused on the cross, remembering the sacrifice of Christ and the new life that we have because of Him.

Hope you’re having a great week. Stay focused. Keep going!

 

John 1:29 – “the scapegoat”

As part of Earl’s message on Sunday, December 27th we showed this video to illustrate the concept of the scapegoat. We were finishing up a series through the first chapter of John and wanted to help people get an understanding of Jesus “taking away” the sin of the world.

This was a great way to help people get the point. We never would have been able to do this live in the room, the shoot was fairly straightforward and thankfully the goats were very cooperative!

Northland Church – “In The Light”

I was talking with a friend from my church the other day and he said “So, I bet that since you’re connected with all of these other worship leaders around the world through your blog and twitter that it must be hard to get stuck in a rut?” I had to tell him about a time not too long ago where I was very much in a rut with our Sunday morning services and needed to do a bit of soul searching (and Scripture searching) to get things moving.

But.. I get the point of what he is saying. Our connected-ness has allowed for inspiration to flow freely from artist to artist, church to church, all over the world. As an example, someone linked a video this morning on twitter and mentioned that they were impressed with the choir lighting and mics. I watched the video, appreciated his comment and then started looking through some other videos that the church had posted, leading me to this one –

Beautiful. Simple. Poetic. The talent is undeniable and the execution of the moment is bang on. As a nice little package, pretty inspiring to see what this church in Florida is able to do with a spark of an idea and some incredible talent.

YouVersion Bible Reading Plan – convert RSS to email

Lots of people are jumping on board the YouVersion Bible Reading Plans right now and one question that has been coming up is how to get those daily readings delivered to your email inbox. Right now on the YouVersion site there are three options – visit the site every day, use a mobile app or have the content delivered by RSS.

Want to have the daily readings delivered right to your email? Check out this video and follow a few easy steps to make it happen -

Here’s helpful step-by-step instructions to go along with the video -

1. Go to www.youversion.com and create an account.
2. Click on the “New Reading Plans” button and find the plan you’d like to follow this year.
3. Look for the orange RSS icon, right-click and copy that RSS feed address.
4. Go to www.notify.me and create an account.
5. On the “Sources” page, paste the RSS feed address you copied from YouVersion and select email as your preferred platform.

Inside Out Worship Conference – Barrie, January 30

Some of you Ontario worship folks may be interested in this. I’ll be speaking at the Inside Out Worship Conference on Saturday, January 30 at Emmanuel Baptist Church in Barrie, ON. The conference is sponsored by Heritage College (they’ll also be running a similar event in London on February 6) and the list of speakers and topics looks pretty solid -

• Vocal, Drum and Guitar Techniques
• Sound Reinforcement
• Service Planning
• Tips for Worship Leaders
• Creating Flow
• Finding and Introducing New Music
• Giving Music Expression

A few of the speakers who will be there -

• Jody Cross – worship pastor at Harvest Barrie
• Paul Turner – worship pastor at Emmanuel Baptist Church
• Andrew Walker – music director at Connexus Community Church
• Chris Deeves – creative arts director at Lakeside Church in Guelph

I’ll be teaching the “tips for worship leaders” seminar during both of the morning sessions, so if one time slot doesn’t work for you, hopefully the second one does. Looking forward to a great day with some great leaders and hoping to get inspired on a bunch of different levels!

If you’re interested, you can register by calling 1-800-465-1961. Registration is $40 until January 15 and $50 after that. Group rate of $35 is available for groups of 5 or more from the same church. More information available here.

Audrey Assad – Winter Snow

Lots of you have heard this song already because it’s on Chris Tomlin’s new Christmas CD (and if you haven’t got that yet, you are missing out!) but I wanted to share this with you. We did this song last Sunday at OBC and everyone loved it.

This is “Winter Snow” by Audrey Assad (web|twitter)- enjoy!

REPOST: Christmas Eve service ideas

I know lots of you are looking for Christmas Eve service ideas right now. I know because the Google search stats for this post are going through the roof I thought I’d make it easy for lots of you and repost this, basically a detailed recap of our Christmas Eve service with links to some resource. Hopefully it’s helpful for you!

The original post – http://www.chrisfromcanada.com/worship/christmas-eve-service-breakdown/

Normally I do my best to give you some thoughts related to Sunday morning and a bit of a confessional of how things went. This week I want to do something a little different. I know that there are lots of you who are looking for very specific ideas at certain times of year – Christmas Eve, Good Friday, Easter Sunday, etc – so I thought that I would give you a breakdown of our Christmas Eve service with some explanation of every single element.

If you are looking for Christmas Eve service ideas, hopefully this is helpful for you!

We did two Christmas Eve services this year – both of them were identical in content, lasted about 60 minutes and were family-friendly. We tell people that kids are welcome to come but we have no childcare. Because we know that kids will be in our auditorium, we program the service a little bit different from Sunday morning – the whole service moves unannounced, there is more sitting/standing than normal, we don’t have any silent prayer, etc etc.

Having said all of that, here is what we DID do for Christmas Eve this year -

Theme
Our theme for the service was “A King Is Born” taken from the verses in Matthew where the Magi come to Herod in search of the one who has been born “King of the Jews.” We bought pre-produced banners and invite cards from SermonView.com which helped with our set design and in our word-of-mouth advertising. They were a great company to work with and the finished product which came from them was awesome. We bought two of the “A King Is Born” banners and one each of the “Follow the Star” and “Journey Afar” banners. We hung the banners along the back of the stage and used the customized invite cards at all of our December services and events, encouraging people to take them and invite friends and neighbours to come out.

Stage
We normally don’t go big on set design and staging at OBC, mostly because we are a multi-use facility and our Sunday morning worship happens in a gym. But for Christmas Eve we normally put up some decor, flowers, candles, etc etc. In terms of staging our band, we had two different setups. For the opening Christmas songs we had three singers out front and a band with piano, keys, bass and drums. For the middle section, I moved off piano and played guitar and we also brought two readers on stage for the scripture passages.

Service
Here’s what our service outline looked like -

Welcome & Intro
Advent Reading – Luke 1:26-33
Lighting of Christ Candle
O Come All Ye Faithful
Hark The Herald Angels Sing
Angels We Have Heard On High
What Child Is This
Reading 1 – Matthew 1:18-25
Come Worship The King with video
Reading 2 – Luke 2:8-14
Emmanuel
Video – God Is With Us
Joy To The World
Message – Our King Has Arrived”
Silent Night

Details
I’d love to give some more detail on each of these elements. If you are looking for a complete pre-packaged service to use on Christmas Eve, feel free to use this as a template. We found that the balance of songs, video and reading worked great for us this year and the response we have received has been very positive.

Welcome & Intro
Usually it is a good idea to set up the content and theme of a service like this so that people are on track right from the beginning. We had one of our staff members welcome people (we get lots of visitors on Christmas Eve), remind them to turn off cell phones and then read the passage from Luke where the angel Gabriel comes to Mary and explains that the baby she will carry is from God – that he will be great, the Son of the Most High and that His kingdom will never end. Right from the beginning of the night we wanted to hit on our theme – “A King Is Born”. We then lit the centre candle, representing that Christ has come and is in our midst.

O Come All Ye Faithful
We did this song in G and did all three verses. The arrangement was pretty traditional and we used a lead sheet that I got from CCLI SongSelect. A great opener to a Christmas Eve service and very familiar to people whether they are regular church-going folk or not.

Hark The Herald Angels Sing
We dropped down to the key of E for the next three songs. The traditional arrangement of this song is pretty technical, lots of accidentals and relative chords but we decided to go with a simpler version musically and used an arrangement from our friends at PraiseCharts. I’ve been using lead sheets and click tracks from these guys for about a year and they always do good stuff. The big change we made from this arrangement is that we didn’t do the bridge. But it was really nice to have the simplified chords where the melody really came to the foreground.

Angels We Have Heard On High
We used another arrangement from PraiseCharts on this song which is based on the Third Day version of the song. I really liked the simplified verses and how the melody of the “Gloria” carried really nicely in this one. It was a simple arrangement that was easy on the band – especially the bass player! – compared to the traditional version.

What Child Is This
Up to this point in the service we had people standing so we got them to sit for this song. Such a great melody and incredible words. One of our vocalists, Rebecca, was featured on the first and third verses and did a great job. No tricky stuff on the arrangement for this one – we did it as traditional as you can and just let the melody and words ring out. Beautiful.

Reading 1 – Matthew 1:18-25
Here is where the service took a bit of a transition. We had been completely participatory up to this point but we shifted to a bit more of a presentation here. We had two readers come and tell part of the Christmas story, beginning with the passage in Matthew. We made sure that we chose people who were confident and could speak well and we had them come early to check their mics and read through the passages for us.

Come Worship The King with video
Okay – this one is going to take some explaining. There is a great CD that came out this year called “Glory Revealed” – if you don’t have it, buy it. It is good stuff. One of the songs on the CD, done by Michael W. Smith and Shane & Shane, is this song “Come Worship The King” taken from Jude 25 – “to the only God our Savior be glory, majesty, power and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forevermore! Amen.” The song is beautiful and, again, fit perfectly with our theme. We did this as a performance song but I wanted to have a visual element included in the song so that people were not just listening but watching as well. I did some hunting online and found this great video called “He Is Here” – it was perfect! We muted the audio from the video and played “Come Worship The King” live – it is amazing how some of the scenes in the video match up with the lyrics of the songs. It was a perfect element of our service.

Reading 2 – Luke 2:8-14
As soon as the song/video was finished we went straight back to the scripture readers and they did their second reading.

Emmanuel
This song by Hillsong was, again, perfectly in line with our theme of “A King Is Born” and was pulled off beautifully by two sisters from our church who were home for Christmas. They did a beautiful job on this simple song and conveyed the power of the lyrics incredibly.

Video – God Is With Us
This was the only video-only element of our service and was used as a buffer out of the “presentation” portion of our service and back to the “participatory” elements. Again, I found this one at WorshipHouseMedia and it did a great job of reinforcing the idea that our king has come, that God is with us.

Joy To The World
If you watch the video, you might be wondering how we transitioned from that element to Joy To The World. We had Rebecca, one of our vocalists, do a quick transition asking people to stand and reminding them that because God is, indeed, with us, we can sing with joy. We did this song in C and used an arrangement from the PraiseCharts peeps based on the Casting Crowns version from their recent Christmas album. The arrangement was simple enough to learn quickly but had some nice musical moments that made the song work really well.

Message – “Our King Has Arrived”
Our pastor does not speak long on Christmas Eve but he makes every moment count. I appreciate what he has to say every year to help people really appreciate the momentous occasion of Christ, the Son of God, coming to earth to dwell among His people. It is a significant event which must be celebrated well!

Silent Night
This is the hilight of our Christmas Eve service every year and has become a great tradition. We always close with this song by candlelight. Our pastor will finish his message, light a candle off the Christ candle we lit at the beginning of the night and then the flame of the candle is passed to the congregation. We place candles on every chair so within a few minutes our entire auditorium is completely dark but lit up by hundreds of candles held up around the room. It is an amazing sight and those of us on stage get the best view of it all! We normally do Silent Night in Bb and use a very simplified, traditional arrangement. At the end of the song we go back to verse 1 and do it completely a cappella. Hearing peoples’ voices fill the room with the sight of the candles and the emotion of the moment is a pretty incredible thing.

So there you go. That is all there is to know about our Christmas Eve services. I could give a bunch more info on stage layout, lighting cues, transitions, etc and if that stuff would be helpful for you please just ask. Every situation is unique and you’ll have to figure out the best way to pull this off if you’re going to use this material but I’d be more than happy to fill you in on how we did some of that stuff.

The response that we’ve had since Christmas Eve has been pretty powerful – lots of people making comments about the impact of the service, how the whole experience really worked together and how God used the music and the readings and the message in great ways. Also some stories of people who were visiting and taken back by the content and how it was presented. We are praying for relationships to continue and for God to continue to use what we are doing for His glory. What an awesome privilege!

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