“We know that we live in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Saviour of the world. If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him and he in God. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.”

1 John 4:13-15

I’m back home. Spent a couple of days away with the ministry staff from the church. It was nice to get away but we were all missing our families – we are in baby boom mode right now and this year three of us have had kids and a fourth staff member is pregnant! Amazing!

 We spent some good time just talking about who Christ is and what He means to us. Maybe someday I’ll post a recap of what I had to say. Great to hear everyone’s stories and to be reminded of the impact of some potentially “small” things in leading people to faith. I am blessed and fortunate to be part of a staff team that knows God and wants others to know Him as well.

Spent this morning doing some songwriting with a friend of mine and it was awesome. We’re going to do this a few times in anticipation of a songwriter’s forum we’re going to be hosting this fall. Hopefully we’ll come out of this with some songs that both of our churches can use in corporate worship.

Last thoughts. Since the service on Sunday I’ve had some more time to think about some small changes we need to make. Some are very simple, some will take some work to implement but I believe that all of them will result in making it easier for our church to focus on God when we come together on Sunday morning. I’ll post some of those ideas soon and talk through why we think we need to change a few things around.

What are you changing?

It is the end of August. We are six weeks away from the start of hockey season. Last week on the CBC one of their lead stories was on a concept design for the Toronto Maple Leafs‘ new jerseys! (HT: NHL Logos).

 To be clear, this was not an announcement from the team or a grand unveiling. This was just simply a concept design of what the jerseys might look like! (You may – or if you’re in the US probably don’t – know that all NHL teams are re-designing their jerseys to fit with the new style that Reebok has designed for them. Some are good, most are pretty lame.)

Again – this was one of the lead stories in the national news broadcast last week. I love this country!!

I am really really looking forward to this week!! Here’s why -

• Monday – hang out with my family after crossing like ships in the night for the past few days. My two-year old has become very attached to her four-month old sister and was in a pretty big funk on Saturday when she realized that Emmy was away with mom.
• Tuesday & Wednesday – head out to Niagara Falls for a two-day getaway with the ministry staff from our church. This year has been NUTS and it’s really our first time to get away together in about a year and a half. In that past year and a half three of us have had babies (well, our wives have!) and one other staff member is now pregnant. Yes, we are in a baby boom at our church.
• Thursday – I’m heading down to Oakville where I lived for a couple years and served on staff at a church before we moved to Orangeville. I’m going to be spending some time with my friend Craig who is the worship pastor at The Meeting House. Craig & I are running a joint songwriting workshop in the fall for our ministry volunteers and thought we’d set the example by doing some songwriting together. Unfortunately our time together will not include a visit to the Colborne Street Cafe, just about my favourite little hang-out spot in the whole world.
• Friday – review all of the A/V reports from our consultants to present to our building team at a meeting next week. You may or may not know that earlier this year we went through a fundraising campaign called BEYOND to raise pledges towards several things, including the expansion of our building. I am overseeing the A/V implementation team and we have been having an awesome time coming up with some creative solutions for things like – live audio/video syncing between venues, projection assistance for worship teams, lighting controls for our gym, stage design for our new North Venue, etc etc etc. I love this stuff and doing it with guys who really know what they’re talking about is awesome!!

Of course on top of all that is the regular “get ready for Sunday” stuff and the madness of preparing for the craziness that is September.

I’m going to be away for the next couple of days with our ministry staff so I’m taking some time on what is normally my day off to recap our Sunday morning. This weekend was a little different in that I had no official role to play in our service. My family was involved in a wedding on Saturday so we left all of the worship leading up to volunteers. I’ll give a recap of the service and then some thoughts from my perspective as a participant in the worship rather than as a leader.

 Sunday, August 26, 2007 – “After God’s Own Heart”
1 Samuel 24-26
All The Earth – Paul Baloche
Your Love Is Amazing – Brenton Brown & Brian Doerksen
How Great Is Our God – Chris Tomlin
How Great Thou Art – Stuart Hine
Announcements & Prayer
Shout To The Lord – Darlene Zschech
Psalm 46 Responsive Reading
Blessed Be Your Name – Matt & Beth Redman
Message
I Give You My Heart – Reuben Morgan

Good service, over all. I am still loving this series because the content is so deep and there are several layers of meaning to everything that is happening. This week we looked at the two opportunities that David had to kill Saul and his change in attitude from ch. 24 to ch. 26. Right in between is the story of Nabal (the fool) and his wife, Abigail. David learns something in that moment which causes a drastic change in his heart and re-commits him to the belief that God and no other (not David, not his men, not Saul’s men) will make him king.

As I’ve said before, I’ve got three other really solid worship leaders on my team as well as a host of other great musicians. I had no concerns at all with leaving the rehearsing and the actual service up to them - they are fantastic! It was a nice change for me to be able to sit in the congregation and not have to worry about transitions, timing, flow, etc. I could just worship!

Here are some quick thoughts -

• Really “musical” does not always equal really “worshipful”. Here’s what I mean: I caught myself a couple times during some of the songs wishing that there had been an extra bar, an extra phrase, an extra instrumental section in places to give me time to reflect on what I had just sung. While it wouldn’t have been the best musical decision it would have allowed some more time for worship.
• When we lead worship, we have to lead worship. We are more than songleaders. Songs are our tools -they are not the goal. I am reading a book right now that talks about the church turning songs into mediators – making our worship times the transcendant moments  when we draw near to God. Of course, this is heresy – it is only because of CHRIST and his blood shed on the cross that we can – with confidence!! – come near to the throne of God to bow before Him and proclaim His goodness. We simply use songs as a way to encourage people to express their praise and their worship – the songs are not the vehicle which take us to the throne room.
• It’s way too easy to make it about me when I’m leading. I often want to do the songs that the band can play best, that I’m most confident with, that are built on my theological understanding of who God is. This isn’t an easy thing to admit but sometimes the most effective tools to lead people in worship during a particular service will look very different from the effective tools to lead me in worship.

Thoughts? Comments? Reactions?

Alright – I’m on a roll! Two posts in a row!

This week we had one of our bass players, John, lead the service. This is the second time he’s led our Sunday morning and the first time was awesome too!

Sunday, August 19, 2007 – “After God’s Own Heart”
You Shine – Brian Doerksen
Lord Reign In Me – Brenton Brown
Announcements, etc
Go! Students
Better Is One Day – Matt Redman
Your Love Oh Lord – Third Day
Message
Psalm 13 – Brian Doerksen

So this week was interesting. We went through our regular planning process, met as a pastor team to work out all the details and then Saturday morning (which is when we do our full rehearsals) my senior pastor came to me with the idea of totally changing how we were going to do the response section of the service. Instead of doing a medley of “How Great Is Our God” and “How Great Thou Art” (which we’re actually doing to do this week) he had the idea of using a song that would be new to our congregation but would really communicate the core of his message – even when we’re living life in the cave, we need to trust in God’s unfailing love.

There’s a song on Brian Doerksen’s “Live In Europe” CD based on Psalm 13 and we really thought it would work great. BUT there was only about 30 minutes for me to learn the song, teach it to the band and then figure out how we were going to present it. What we decided to do was to have me come at the end of the message, play the verse a couple of times as Earl led people through the text of the Psalm. As he prayed to close that section, the whole band came up, we did the verse again leading to the chorus – big contrast in feel, lyrics, everything – and had the congregation join us.

It was pretty powerful – several people came up to me right after the service and commented on the impact of that moment.

So – lessons? Although we try to be very pro-active in our planning and we spend lots of time thinking, praying, planning and re-thinking our song selection, service flow, placement of worship elements, etc etc sometimes there is just a great idea that comes to us last-minute and we have to run with it. I’m glad we did.

Sorry for the delay – trying to enjoy the last couple of weeks before summer (it’s already turned cool-ish up here!) and the blog received much love this week just not on the posting side.

 So here we go -

Sunday, August 12, 2007 – “After God’s Own Heart”
Hosanna – Paul Baloche
Jesus, You Are Worthy – Brenton Brown
My Jesus I Love Thee – William Featherston
Announcements, etc
Communion
Jesus, Lamb of God – Dennis Jernigan
You Are – Mark Roach
Video – “Presence”
Centre – Charlie Hall, Matt Redman
Message
Centre – again

I’m loving this series. The message focused on two things – living a life after God’s own heart plays out when we believe in who God is and trust in His presence. I was going to actually link to the recording of the message from this week because it was so good but we had major meltdown in our CD recorder and lost everything. Boo.

One really nice thing we did to set the stage for the message was use a video called “Presence” (Highway Video should really change their site to allow direct linking to videos – go there and search for it. It’s based on Ps. 139:7) and we played “Centre” as the video was going. That’s not a song that we’ve done with our congregation before so we did something like a verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge thing with the band and that got the congregation to sing the chorus with us at the end.

 After the message we came back and did “Centre” again BUT took the key from D to E, had everyone stand (they were sitting the first time) and did the whole song with the congregation. Very nice.

It wasn’t intentional but our song selection this week was VERY Jesus-focused. Yes, I know – we’re always supposed to be focused on Jesus. But just look at the songs. I didn’t go into my service planning mode with the idea that all of our songs would be directly about Christ but it worked out that way and I loved it. I was able to lead people through the themes built in the songs and the fact that they were all speaking directly about Christ was awesome.

I’ve made the move from Blogger to WordPress and now to my own hosted blog.

New site – http://www.chrisfromcanada.com

New feed – http://www.chrisfromcanada.com/?feed=rss2

New look – you’ll see that I’ve moved from Blogger to my own hosted WordPress. I like some of the things that WP does differently and generally like how feeds show up in my reader when they’re coming from WP blogs rather than Blogger. Hopefully the transition is smooth and everything works like it’s supposed to!

All of the previous posts and comments have been imported. Still tweaking a couple of things and getting everything up and running but so far so good!

On Sunday mornings we encourage people to use our “Welcome Pad” – basically a little black folder where visitors can include their info, regular attenders can give us change of address info or prayer needs can be communicated to our staff and elders. Naturally, the WP becomes the easiest way for anonymous “helpful input” to our worship team.

In my time here I’ve received a few doses of helpful input such as:

• We really should do more of the traditional hymns.
• Why do we repeat the verses so many times? I’ve talked to other people and they have the same concern.
• Must someone always be playing while people are speaking or praying on stage? I’m hard of hearing!

Generally it is fairly harmless stuff but unless it’s a significant issue that has already been recognized in our worship ministry, we don’t really give it much thought. We put lots of work, thought and prayer (not necessarily in that order) into our content and presentation of Sunday morning and we don’t expect it to make everyone happy.

This week was a little different. I did get some “helpful input” but this time it wasn’t anonymous. The person (a first-time visitor from out of town) left us this comment in the WP:

Is this a concert or a church service?

To be clear, we pass the WP during our announcements, so this would have been
after our first two songs in the service which were fairly upbeat, good volume,
lots of energy.

So – how would you respond? Ignore it? Thank him for the input? Call or email
and explain the vision for the worship ministry and the Sunday service gathering
as a whole?

What would you do?

My blog-friend Victor tipped me off to a new way of describing my recap posts. Lots of people are doing worship confessionals and I felt kind of lame calling mine the same thing because they’re all high tech and fancy with their videos but I feel hip and satisfied by calling these posts worship text-fessionals, so that’s what they’re going to be.

On Sunday we started a new series looking at the life of David in 1 & 2 Samuel that we’re calling “After God’s Own Heart.” The basic premise is to take 5 snapshots of David’s life and look at the constant contrast in those stories between who David was and who the other characters are. We started this week by telling the story of Saul.

Sunday, August 5, 2007 – “After God’s Own Heart”
1 Samuel ch. 8-15
Beautiful One – Tim Hughes
Because Of Your Love – Paul Baloche
Announcements/Offering/Prayer
Doxology (Praise God From Whom…) – Traditional
Everlasting God – Brenton Brown
In Christ Alone – Keith Getty & Stuart Townend
Message
Step By Step – Rich Mullins

Our congregation is loving “Everlasting God” right now – they sing it loud, they really get in to the lyrics and the words seem to really express a place that our congregation is at right now. It’s also a song where our band can crank it up a little bit so they enjoy that. I had our piano player do more of the lead on the verses and pre-chorus and I just filled in little rhythmic things on my guitar – made for a nice arrangement and a good contrast for when we went full out on the chorus.

“Because Of Your Love” is a song that we’ve been doing for a while here and for the first time we dropped the key from G to F. I’ve been finding that the chorus (which hangs on a high D in the melody line) has been a bit high and I was wondering if it was holding the congregation back. So we dropped down a key to stay in that golden “C to shining C” range for our people and it really seemed to help.

I’m excited about the rest of this series and digging in to the life of David some more. One of the things we’ll be doing with the worship side of our services is pulling from the Psalms which parallel different parts of the David story. Right now I’m working on a song taken from Psalm 51 that we’ll be using in a couple weeks and we’ve got a few other ideas we’re throwing around.