“you’re famous”

“you’re famous”
The subject of an email from my friend Mark after seeing that Nancy Beach has blogged about an idea I mentioned at our Willow training event last week.

Remember the idea from this post?

Nancy Beach blogged about it in this post.

Are you famous?

Worship Pre-fessional – September 30, 2007

We just finished our final service walkthrough meeting and this is what we’ve got for Sunday morning:

Sunday, September 30, 2007
“The Bible: God’s Message To You”
Filled With Your Glory - F
God Of Wonders – G
Holy, Holy, Holy – D
Announcements/Offering
Prayer
This Is Our God – D
Jesus, Lamb Of God (chorus only) – Eb -> F -> G
Message – “God’s Message Is Redemption”
Video – “The Book”
Glory Of It All – A

If you think we’re doing “Glory Of It All” only because Crowder’s record came out this week, you’d be wrong! I’ve actually been planning on using that song during this service for a couple of months – good timing, Mr. Crowder!

I wonder who else is doing that song this week?

“Recently Added” to iTunes

David Crowder Band – Remedy – B+
Nice effort but nothing spectacular. The best tracks are ones we’ve already heard before.

Shane & Shane – Pages – A-
Good effort from these guys after taking some time off. “Burn Us Up” and “Before The Throne Of God Above” are hilights.

Soularize - InMotion – C
I know that you guys don’t like what’s happening in the current church worship culture but do you really think that a song called “Kiss Of His Mouth” is the way to go?

Johnny Cash – My Mother’s Hymn Book – A
No evil must ever be spoken of Johnny. Great takes on “I’ll Fly Away” and “In The Sweet By And By.”

What are you listening to?

“The Mesh”

I think yesterday was a landmark day in my life as a leader. I have not always been sure of why God has called me to certain things but it was with great confidence that I went to spend the day with some worship pastors from around Ontario, knowing that God had called me to be a catalyst in connecting these guys on that day.

About a year ago two friends approached me with some questions concerning their roles as worship pastors and how certain things were working in their churches. Out of those discussions we wondered if there was some kind of support network in place for worship pastors. What we found was that there were training and developing events for worship leaders, worship team members and church staff worship pastors but we didn’t really find anything in place that encouraged neworking, support events where worship pastors could connect, develop relationships and share the experience of being on staff at a church with worship/arts as their main ministry focus.

So we decided to dig a little deeper. Was this something that was needed? Would other worship pastors see the value in something like this? The answer was overwhelmingly “YES!”

Yesterday was our first time together. We had 14 worship pastors from all over southern Ontario who came together to meet each other, learn from each other and spend time in worship. It was a great day and I am excited to see what is next for us.

The consensus is that we will facilitate regional gatherings between now and Christmas in 4 or 5 locations in southern/central Ontario and then plan to meet again collectively in January for another day together of encouragement, questions, answers, honesty and spending time in worship without having to watch the clock, worry about transitions, the drummer’s crazy time signature, the crying baby or any of those other things we worry about when we’re leading

Are you a part of something like this?

What would Jesus do?

David Crowder Band – Remedy released today. 

Local Christian bookstore – $14.99
WorshipMusic.com – $12.99 + shipping
iTunes - $9.99
Amazon – $8.99

I don’t know what Jesus would do but I know what I did.

What did you do?

Heroes

Watched it for the first time last night. I’m not really a big TV guy – other than hockey and WonderPets – so it’s nice to have a show that I think I can call my own for the next few years.

Anyone got the DVD’s of Season 1 that they’d be interested in sending up to Canada? Eh?

Worship Text-fessional – September 23, 2007

Here’s the set list we had on Sunday -

Holy Is The Lord – Chris Tomlin – G
How Awesome Is Our God – Chris Vacher & Craig Douglas – C
Jesus You Are Worthy – Brenton Brown – C
Prayer
This Is My Father’s World – Franklin Sheppard & Mary Babcock – D
Centre – Charlie Hall – E
Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus – E
Message
Video – iBible
May The Words Of My Mouth – Tim Hughes – Bb
Announcements
Vision

You’ll see that we made one change from what I had planned to do – dropped “Salvation Belongs” and added the chorus of “Turn Your Eyes.” Worked really well.

 Two hilights from the service for me:

• Always cool to hear how the congregation will respond to a song that I’ve written. “How Awesome Is Our God” is a song that has been kicking around our church as a stand-alone chorus for about a year but when I took it to a songwriting session we developed it as a verse, added a chorus and bridge and came out with a nice little anthemic song about the greatness of God. The congregation seemed to really catch on pretty quickly and having the song come out of “Holy Is The Lord” was a good choice.
• Lots of people in our congregation really appreciate when we do the more traditional stuff and so we make an effort to include music from every generation in our service planning process. At the same time, while we are trying to value history, we are also trying to create history. So to hear the congregation pick up a song like “Centre” (not the easiest song to sing through) and actually worship while we’re doing it was awesome. I’m excited about the direction we’re heading in. Of course new songs and writing songs are only a couple of ways that we’re going to create history in this town. Another one of those ways is coming in a couple weeks – you’ll see

What history are you creating?

Here’s a link to the iTunes iMix for most of the songs we did -
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewIMix?id=264850254

Here he goes again!

I’m not convinced that he doesn’t do this simply for the sake of getting a reaction.

Johnny Cash rocks my two-year old.

I have two daughters – Avery and Emerson – and both are equally interesting, enjoyable and hilarious. Being almost two years old, Avery is really starting to blossom in to a full-blown toddler and it is awesome to watch. Right now the hilight of my life is listening her to say really funny things, like:

Planes go faster than a house.

Mom, is it windy, though?

Go church, see Papa’s gitt-ah?

This morning I was lying in bed and heard her little clock radio come on. That means my wife is getting her up. Go, Sonya! Anyways, the radio is playing away and all of a sudden some Johnny Cash comes on. In case you’re wondering, I LOVE Johnny Cash. So does Avery, apparently, because from her bedroom I can hear that she’s dancing and clapping away to the Man In Black.

Way to go, Avery Lyn! Dancing to Johnny Cash will only lead you to good places in your life

What are you dancing to?

Worship Pre-fessional – September 23, 2007

We’re beginning a short two-week series called “The Bible: God’s Message To You” and I’m looking forward to it. If you were hanging around during our “After God’s Own Heart” series you may have picked up that there are some significant heart things going on in my life and God has renewed my love for His word and for His church.

This week is all about the fact that the Bible is from God. Next week is all about the message. I’m looking forward to these two weeks – our Associate Pastor, Dan,  and Director of Youth Ministries, Kevin, will be preaching the next two weeks and then from now until Christmas things will get nuts around here – more on that next week but please pray for me and for our church! We are anticipating that God is going to do great and amazing things!!

Sunday, September 23, 2007
“The Bible: God’s Message To You”
Holy Is The Lord – Chris Tomlin – G
How Awesome Is Our God – Chris Vacher & Craig Douglas – C
Jesus You Are Worthy – Brenton Brown – C
Prayer
This Is My Father’s World – Franklin Sheppard & Mary Babcock (their CD rocks!) – D
Center – Charlie Hall – E
Salvation Belongs To Our God – A
Message
Video – iBible
May The Words Of My Mouth – Tim Hughes – Bb
Announcements
Vision

Last week Earl’s vision blurb was on the importance of Sunday morning, small groups and spiritual disciplines to ignite our spiritual lives. This week he’ll be talking about our opportunity to impact our region and our world through serving in ministry. Our vision is to “Transform Our Region, Transform Our World” (we’re a little crazy, don’t you think?!!) and the four components of our strategy to do that are

invest – invite – ignite – impact

and we believe God has given us the opportunity to do those things and we’re EXCITED about it!

What are you excited about?

“Jesus Christ”

Link – iTunes
Link – Wikipedia

“Jesus Christ” by Brand New
words & music by Jesse Lacey

Jesus Christ, that’s a pretty face
The kind you’d find on someone that could save
If they don’t put me away
It’ll be a miracle

Do you believe you’re missing out?
That everything good is happening somewhere else
With nobody in your bed
The night is hard to get through

And I will die all alone
And when I arrive I won’t know anyone

Jesus Christ, I’m alone again
So what did you do those three days you were dead?
Because this problem is gonna last
More than the weekend

Jesus Christ I’m not scared to die
But I’m a little bit scared of what comes after
Do I get the gold chariot
Or do I float through the ceiling

Or do I divide and pull apart
Cause my bright is too slight to hold back all my dark
This ship went down in sight of land
And at the gates does Thomas ask to see my hands?

I know you’re coming in the night like a thief
But I’ve had some time, O Lord, to hone my lying technique
I know you think that I’m someone you can trust
But I’m scared I’ll get scared and I swear I’ll try to nail you back up
So do you think that we could work out a sign
So I’ll know it’s you and that it’s over so I won’t even try
I know you’re coming for the people like me
But we all got wood and nails
And we turn out hate in factories
We all got wood and nails
And we turn out hate in factories
We all got wood and nails
And we sleep inside of this machine

Apparently I had a good idea!

Today was fun. Made some friends. Learned some stuff. Put some faces to some names. Good times. Say what you want about Willow but the emphasis they put on training and developing leaders so they can be more effective in the local church is done at an A+ level.

So what was my good idea? Well let me preface by saying that I hadn’t thought of posting this until Nancy Beach said it was a good practical thing she learned during today’s seminar. So I figure if she learned something, we all might as well learn something!

Lately the morale and the numbers on our A/V team have been a little low so at our ministry fair two weeks ago I decided that recruiting tech guys (or girls, thanks Nancy!) needed to be our A-1 priority. Since the typical tech guy is usually not the most forth-coming sort of person, I decided I needed some kind of bait.

So basically I took apart a small 4-channel mixer, laid the pieces out on a 6-foot table and waited. I knew that anyone coming to the table and hanging out for 10 seconds would have some kind of tech interest and so those guys would by my prospects.

I’m excited to say that in the two weeks since we did that experiment we have had THREE guys who are not currently serving in any ministry area sign up, get trained and get placed on our A/V schedule. Yesssss!!

Got any tips for finding volunteers?

Willow Creek i&i tomorrow

So I’m heading down to Kitchener (I’d say “beautiful Kitchener” but .. well .. .. it’s just not!) tomorrow for a one-day conference that Willow Creek is running for worship pastors in Ontario.

If you know me, you’ll know that learing and connecting are two big life passions of mine so I’m excited about doing both of those things tomorrow. I’m going to take my computer and see if I’m able to live blog any of the event. If you’re a reader, leave me a comment or send me an email and we’ll go for lunch or grab a coffee or something!

Worship Text-fessional – September 16, 2007

You can see our set list here – http://www.chrisfromcanada.com/?p=86

So I said that we wanted to pick up the pace this week. Boy, did we ever!! Our middle section of “Hear Our Praises,” “Everlasting God” and “Never Let Go” was killer. I had several comments after the service that people enjoyed the music and there was definitely lots of energy among the congregation.

Closing the service with “I Surrender All” was such a good call. It was great to close our “After God’s Own Heart” series with that song. Having the congregation singing words of surrender, commitment and expressing their desire to see God work in their lives was very powerful and I pray that the commitment goes beyond what happened on Sunday morning.

Doing “How Awesome Is Our God” with the band was nice. We did it as a prelude right before the service started and when you do a song with a full band and people in the room you always hear things that seem to be missing that you don’t hear when you do the song on your own. For example, the song needs a little je ne sais quoi in the little two bar pick-up before the chorus. Overall the song is pretty nice and hopefully we’ll be able to get a semi-decent recording of it done shortly.

Our senior pastor, Earl, took a few minutes on Sunday to talk through the “Ignite” portion of our strategy and explained the importance of Sunday morning, small groups and spiritual disciplines all within the context of people having a desire to see their spiritual lives ignited by God this year. Good stuff! In the coming weeks Earl will be spending some time talking about the other I’s we talk about here – invest, invite, impact.

 Here’s the link to the iMix of most of the songs we did on Sunday -

How did Sunday go for you?

Worship Pre-fessional – September 16, 2007

So I’ve been doing text-fessionals for a while and have decided to try something new. Right now it is Friday and we have just finished our final service walkthrough for this Sunday. Here’s what we’ve got planned:

Sunday, September 16, 2007 – “After God’s Own Heart”
2 Samuel 16
Prelude – How Awesome Is Our God – C
Beautiful One – C
Because Of Your Love – F
Announcements
Prayer
Vision
Hear Our Praises – C
Everlasting God – A
You Never Let Go – A
Message
I Surrender All - D

Here are a couple things we’re trying to achieve with this series:

• last week’s service was pretty heavy so we are intentionally being very upbeat with all of the music – a change of pace is nice.
• last week’s talk was on sin, this week is about God using the consequences of sin for good – “You Never Let Go” will capture this really nicely and be a solid setup for the message. We are not moving from sin to “God forgives you and now everything is okay.” This is a bit of a different approach to the forgiveness thing and I’m excited to see how our congregation responds.
• “How Awesome Is Our God” is a song that I’ve written with a friend of mine – I had this chorus-y/verse-y idea and I brought it to him and we put this really anthemic chorus on to it and a beautiful, reflective bridge and I think it will be a nice song. We’re doing it as a prelude just to get the band comfortable with the song and hopefully move it in to our regular repertoire shortly.
• Thanksgiving Sunday is only four weeks away (the real Thanksgiving, that is!) and that week will be the six month anniversary of our Celebration Sunday. Earl is taking the Sundays between now and then to re-visit a piece of our vision/strategy each week. This week it’s talking about the importance and role of Sunday morning and small groups – these fit under the “Ignite” heading of our “Invest/Invite/Ignite/Impact” strategy. I’ll do another post on that some other time.

What have you got planned?

Fred wants to help you out!

Fred McKinnon is a blog friend who is willing to help you out. Check out his full post here but this is the basic idea:

There are two forums already booming at TheWorshipCommunity.Com that allow you to post your links to your Video Worship Confessionals or your Written “Text Confessional” Set Lists, etc. Up to now, worship leaders are blogging this, and then manually going to TheWorshipCommunity.Com and posting it again, or posting a link to their blog.

Hold on to your seat … I have enabled the RSS import feature on TheWorshipCommunity.Com forums … meaning if you are blogging your set lists .. either as a “text” confessional or a “video” confessional … you can have it SYNDICATED on TheWorshipCommunity.Com.

You can see my worship text-fessionals RSS’d here

Think I should include another link in this post? Yes!

Six years later…

…and there are really only four images which stick in my mind from September 11, 2001.

What do you remember?

Worship Text-fessional – September 9, 2007

Sunday, September 2, 2007 – “After God’s Own Heart”
2 Samuel 11-12
Your Grace Is Enough – E
Amazing Grace (My Chains) – E
Video – Report from Pakistan
Prayer
Announcements
All Creatures Of Our God & King – C
That’s Why We Praise Him – C
Message
Communion
Take My Life And Let It Be – D

This weekend was pretty intense. Once again, Earl delivered God’s word powerfully. We looked at the shift in David’s life from a man who mourned over the death of his enemies and who wanted no innocent blood on his end to one who sent others to battle at the time of year “when kings go to war.” Ouch! From the adultery committed with Bathsheba David then turns into a man who is no longer focused on the heart of God but on hiding the consequences of his sin. He does everything he can – tries to convince Uriah to sleep with his wife, gets Uriah drunk in the hopes that he’ll get a little randy and when none of that works he simply has Uriah killed.

 David’s response to Uriah’s death is just mind-blowing -

“Do not let this matter trouble you, for the sword devours now one and now another. Strengthen your attack against the city and overthrow it.” 2 Samuel 11:25

Like Earl said in his message, this is the part of the story where you just want to take your first and ram it down David’s throat!!

Anyways – worship confessional time. You can see from our outline we did a grace-focused section and a praise-focused section. When I’ve only got about 10 minutes for a block of worship (about 2 songs and some intro/leading talking) I will try to keep the songs very thematic. This worked very well and people responded well in worship.

You’ll see that we did a video report from Pakistan. I was able to do a phone call this week with a man from our church who is there with his family for two months serving in a medical clinic. I recorded the audio from our phone call, edited it and added some photos and we played it back for our congregation at both services. The wonders of technology!!

How did Sunday go for you?

UPDATE: Here’s a link to the iTunes iMix of the songs we did this Sunday – link

Read this and send it on.

I know that these posts have probably come up a bazillion times in your RSS reader this week but let me add my support to what Perry & Lee are saying. If you are in ministry, read these posts.

Perry Noble – Eight Things I Think Every Worship Leader Should Know

Lee McDerment - Seven Things Worship Leaders Wished Their Senior Pastor Knew…

Next Level Worship Conference – Nov 4-6

I know some of you guys are thinking about conferences right now so I thought I’d throw this out there.

Next Level is happening November 4-6 at Muskoka Baptist Conference in Huntsville, ON which is about two hours north of Toronto. For the Americans among you, you could fly in to Pearson International Airport or even come through Buffalo – it’s not that far and flight prices are pretty cheap if you keep it in the US. I’m planning on being up there to spend time with some good Canadian worship folks.

 Wanna come?

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