My pastor’s thoughts

Yesterday we took the morning as a staff and went to a local camp/retreat centre to spend half of our day in prayer. Like most churches, September and October are crazy months for us so we wanted to get away and spend some time to pray and also speak words of encouragement to each other.

My pastor, Earl Marshall, posted some of his thoughts on our time together here.

Yesterday (Tuesday) we took an entire morning to talk and listen to God about our relationship with him and each other. Perhaps this does not sound like such a revolutionary idea for a church ministry staff but there is so much activity that creeps into the daily and weekly life of a church that can get in the way of fundamental spiritual disciplines.

This was a good life moment for me. One that was very much needed.

A few highlights from my space . . .

Having Justus Miwanda with us. Justus is our partner with International Needs Uganda. It has been an absolute joy to get to know this man of God over the last few years. He is an answer to prayer for our church as we have prayed that God would help us transform our world and now we are able to do so in Uganda. Justus prayed with and for us. I was reminded again of what God is doing in our church. It was like he was part of our ministry staff. I suppose that is how I see him now. Part of us and we of the ministry in Uganda.

Reflecting on the words of “Take Time to Be Holy” encouraged me especially of God’s continued guidance in my life. What a great reminder.

Having the ministry staff pray over me. There is not a week that goes by and I am reminded of how blessed I am to work with such a talented, gifted, committed and called group of people. And if some of you are reading this what blows me away the most is how jazzed you are about being with one another. This team is amazing and I am blessed to be able to be part of this family.

Do you love working for your boss as much as I do?

Links

My wife is out with my little skunk gathering some candy so I thought I’d take some time on catching up on blog stuff. Here are some links to some neat things I’ve found this week across the internets.

• Polaroid Gallery – pretty sweet way to display photos
• Complete Christmas – this is a collection of videos from WorshipFilms.com and is priced really well at $49
• North Point Production – after seeing this video I wanted to find some other NP stuff and came across this site
• 110+ Resources For Creative Minds – Carlos posted this earlier in the week and I haven’t had tons of time to dig through it but I’m sure there is some amazing stuff here
• “Be Our Guest” – I’m responsible for the connections ministry here at OBC (greeters, ushers, welcome centre, etc) so I was excited when Kem blogged about this book
• Creative Xmod – Jordan posted about this neat little piece of equipment at WorshipTrench.com and it is definitely on my shopping list

Worship Leader Wednesday

Jeff at ConsumingWorship.org has posted an interview that he did with me earlier this week.

Head on over and stick his blog in your RSS feeder – he’ll be posting these interviews every week and should be a great way of seeing what other worship leaders are up to at different churches.

Thanks Jeff – I appreciate your willingness to serve the worship leader community by doing this.

Link – http://www.consumingworship.org/?p=236

Halloween

Last year Avery was Winnie The Pooh. This year she’ll be a skunk. Last year wasn’t too exciting cause she had no idea what was going on except for the fact that everyone thought she was pretty cute! Now that she’s 2 she’s a little more jazzed about the whole dress-up thing.

We decided to do a test run of the costume this morning. Sure enough there were some tears and some “I don’t wanna!” but in the end everyone was happy and she’s pretty excited about doing “hallaweeeeeen” tonight.

Being the little sister, Emerson gets to inherit the Winnie The Pooh costume. I’m sure she’ll love it!

Are you dressing up?

My favourite thing about worship confessionals!

Okay I think this is what I love most about worship confessionals.

Joe, Nathan, Billy and I all did “Everlasting God” this week. As far as I know that wasn’t planned – unless the three of them decided to do it and left me out of the joke!

I know that with thousands of churches meeting on Sunday and a somewhat limited pool of songs that there will inevitably be churches who are doing the same songs as others just by default but it’s pretty cool to think that the church in Florida, Indiana and Ontario and around the world are together using the same words to express their love and devotion to God.

Pretty cool.

10b4 Video at North Point

Carlos blogged this so I’m sure it’s been around the world and back several times but I thought I’d post it here for posterity’s sake.

I love the idea of using the pre-service time to communicate information. I am a believer that announcements and communications are a part of church life so they should be part of our Sunday mornings but using the time before the service starts for this kind of info does a few things, I think – encourages people to get on time, conveys the importance of beginning on time, establishes the tone of the morning very early.

North Point video guys – well done!!

(I’m not sure if the video will show up in your RSS so you’ll have to head to the blog.)

You Americans and your dollar.

Wow. I just got back from the bank. I had a cheque in US dollars to deposit – want to make a guess at how much your mighty dollar is worth??

Haha – basically! You Americans have had so much fun with us Canadians and our lousy currency!! Well just so you know one American dollar is now worth 93 cents Canadian. WHAT??

Who wants to buy some loonies?

Good things for traveling artists to know.

Jeff at ConsumingWorship.org has a great post with lots of great information for people who are bringing their music ministry to churches. Here’s a few points:

• In today’s modern, internet based communications world, please make sure you include an email address for me to contact you or your agent. Why should I bother picking up the phone and charging a long-distance call to my church when you could easily be contacted via email if I am interested?
• If you contacted me last year, and I said I was not interested in your ministry making an appearance at our church, and gave specific reasons as to why I did not think your ministry would “fit” our “format,” please don’t contact me again the next year and ask if I’ve changed my mind. It is doubtful you have changed your format, so I’m still not interested.
• Make sure your ministry has a website with mp3s of your demo music available for download. Sometimes, especially when you send one of those little mini-discs instead of a full size CD, I misplace your demo before I can give it a good listen. If I can’t listen to your demo, I’m not interested. Spend a little money, and start up a simple web site (even a Wordpress blog) so that I can reach you in yet another way. In fact, save yourself some money and reduce waste by only offering mp3s and forget making demo CDs. It would work, trust me.

You can read the rest of the post here. Thanks Jeff!

Worship Textfessional – October 28, 2007

This was morning was, in a word, adventurous. Here’s how things ended up going -

Sunday, October 28 – “Follow Me”
Lord Most High – E – Don Harris & Gary Sadler
Announcements/Offering
Prayer
No One Like You Lord – E – Robin Mark
You’re Worthy Of My Praise – E – David Ruis
Here I Am To Worship – E – Tim Hughes
Everlasting God – A – Brenton Brown
Message – “Faith, Forgiveness, Repentance”
My Jesus I Love Thee – D->E – Featherton & Gordon

Okay. So why adventurous? After having practiced on Saturday morning, run through songs and soundchecked on Sunday morning, play our walk-in song and do my little welcome, I hit the very first chord of the very first song and this happens -

It was incredible. Guitar players, picture this! I’m playing in the key of E and I break my D string. WHAT?? Not only that but the bridge pin holding my G string jumps out a little bit and the G string actually jumps across the neck and is now sitting in the slot where the B string goes. Yes – crazy. In all my years of playing guitar I have never had that happen and I still have no idea what I did to make it happen.

Needless to say we had to start thinking quick. Thankfully we had another guitar player on the team – she was able to carry the first song and instead of doing two songs in our opening set, we just got through the first one and then moved in to the announcements section. That gave me some time to grab another guitar (I wasn’t wanting to chance it again by just re-stringing the guitar I was using!) and get everything set up.

So of course our mixes were totally off for the next set and not only did we have to deal with that but all of a sudden there was a ridiculous amount of distortion – NOT on purpose – on my vocal. Crazy.

Anyways – major props to our A/V team!! They had what I like to call a “learning experience” today and we can look back on it now and it will make for a good story The other really neat thing that happened is that the congregation had the sense that something was going on (although most had no idea the extent of what was happening) but really responded by kind of rallying around us as a team and singing louder. Our middle section of worship was probably one of the time that people have been most engaged in worship in my time here. Several people came to me after the service and said that. Pretty cool what happens when things don’t go as planned – although I much prefer the planned route, to be honest!

Looking at the songs, you may not get the connect between the themes and the core of the message – faith, forgiveness, repentance – but our big push today was on trust. So establishing that God’s faithfulness is like no other, that He is trustworthy and then moving through a time of proclaiming our trust in who God is and closing with “Everlasting God” where we say together that we will wait on God but know that He is everlasting. We closed the service with me on piano leading the congregation in “My Jesus I Love Thee” – nice way to end and give people a chance to reflect.

Okay – so there’s a long confessional. I’m hoping to move these to video shortly but more on that later.

How did Sunday go for you?

Fred’s happy.

http://scores.espn.go.com/ncf/recap?gameId=273000061

Right?

Songwriters’ Forum

Today was tons of fun. We had practice this morning to get ready for our services tomorrow and this afternoon I hosted a forum for people in our church who are interested in songwriting. Craig Douglas, worship pastor at The Meeting House in Oakville, and Joel Auge, an incredible songwriter and worship leader that you will be hearing about later this year, came to co-host the day with me.

We had about 20 people altogether and covered some really good material. This was very much a “Songwriting 101″ type of an event and the main purpose was really just to gauge the interest level with people in our congregation.

Here’s some of the topics we covered today:

• Song structures – Verse/Chorus, AABA, AAA
• Taking songs from inspiration to completion
• Importance and value of co-writing
• Writing while living “in the valley”

All in all it was a great day. We had an awesome range of people there – jr. and sr. high students, adults, worship team members, people who are creative but not musical – and I think we’ve begun moving down a road that is going to bring some musical blessings to our congregation. I’m excited about that!!

A couple of resources I used to put the content together were “God Songs” by Paul Baloche and Jimmy & Carol Owens and a DVD from Vineyard Worship called “Songwriting For Worship.” If you’ve got people in your congregation who are interested in learning more about songwriting for congregational worship, these two spots are good places to start.

How are you developing songwriters in your church?

This one’s for Billy!

Hey Billy this post is for you!

Link – http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=229

Ten Illegal Job Interview Questions
#1: Where were you born?

#2: What is your native language?

#3: Are you married?

#4: Do you have children?

#5: Do you plan to get pregnant?

#6: How old are you?

#7: Do you observe Yom Kippur?

#8: Do you have a disability or chronic illness?

#9: Are you in the National Guard?

#10: Do you smoke or use alcohol?

Hopefully they really don’t ask you numbers 5 or 7 – if they do, run!!

(via Kottke)

Worship Textfessional – October 21, 2007

Sunday was good. We’re in a series called “Follow Me” looking at what it really means to be a disciple. The main idea of the whole thing is that “a disciple disciples.” So we learn and we teach. We mature and we model. We’re having lots of fun with this stuff right now.

Here’s our song list -

Your Name Is Holy – E – Brian Doerksen
Amazing Grace (My Chains) – E – Traditional & Chris Tomlin
Centre – E – Charlie Hall

Enough – G – Chris Tomlin
Hungry – C – Vineyard UK
Message – “Are You Coming?”
Jesus Paid It All – Bb – Traditional & Kris Stanfill

iTunes Mix is here.

Service flow was pretty good. We had one of our newer leaders lead the service on Sunday and he is growing alot in actually leading people in worship rather than just leading the songs. We’ve had lots of discussions about that around here lately and it’s now starting to translate into action which is always exciting to see.

It was the first time we’ve done “Jesus Paid It All” and although the verses and chorus were pretty low we had to do that so that people would sing that new chorus. And boy did they sing!! After the third verse and chorus we just hung on the Bb (rather than doing the I – IV – ii – IV progression) and did the new chorus (“Oh praise the One…”) twice through while just hanging on the Bb. If you listen to the Passion version it’s the same way they do it. We thought it would be a good way to introduce it so that we could build out of it, switch the progression and repeat the new chorus again. We stayed in that section (“Oh praise the One…”) for a while and then brought everything down and went back to a real acappella section and did the “Jesus paid it all…” chorus one more time. It killed!

I’m actually pleasantly surprised that our congregation has also responded really well to “Centre.” It’s the only Charlie Hall song that we do regularly because his stuff can sometimes be a little bit quirky and not always accessible for a congregation used to hymns and older praise stuff. Small steps This week when we did “Centre” the bridge was the real hilight – “We lift our eyes to heaven/We wrap our lives around Your life” – people sang it out and it really set up the rest of the service leading in to the message on Christ’s invitation to all of us to follow Him.

Are you coming?

I love blog friends.

What’s this that came in the mail for me today?

Looks to be like some sort of recorded video product!

Blog friends are the best!

Thanks Mark! Now Avery and I can rock out a little more. Sweet.

Tower Of Power – live!

Last night I went to a great theatre in Kitchener with one of our drummers to see Tower Of Power in concert. I’ve been a fan of this band for about 15 years and this was the first chance I’d had to see them live. In a word – incredible!

To think that some of the guys in this band (Emilio on the far right, ‘Doc’ playing the baritone and David Garibaldi the drummer) have been together for 40 years is amazing. 40 YEARS!!

‘Iron Mike’ is the guy second fromt the left playing trumpet. They told us last night that his apartment burnt down in the California wildfires (and he also mentioned he was pretty upset about his motorcyle exploding in the fire!) and they asked people to pray for him. Not sure of the spiritual state of the guys in the band (although the new guitar player Mark Harper has had tons of involvement in the Christian music industry) but they asked for prayer for Mike and his family so I’ve been praying for them today.

What are you going to be doing for the next 40 years?

Re:create wins again.

So last year I went to this conference in Nashville called re:create which really was the catalyst for me to start blogging and I’ve met a bunch of folks thanks to being down there.

A little while ago Elevation Church posted about looking for ideas for the Christmas series. They just posted the results and they’ve decided to use a series suggested by a re:create attendee, Tonda Solomon, from Ridgeview Community Church in Franklin, TN. Very cool!

Hate Facebook?

Try this!

If you’re on Facebook you can find me here.

( via Tony McCollum)

PWArchive.com Top Songs List

Billy posted about this last week and I thought I’d pass it along as well.

PWArchive.com has a list of the top songs that people have requested on their site each month. Read Billy’s post about why this is better than CCLI’s top 25 or top 100 lists.

 

What’s on your list?

It’s beginning to smell alot like Christmas.

So we’re only a couple of months away from the big day.

What are you doing for Christmas?

Not sure what’s in the water up here..

..but I’ve received three compliments today from folks in our church on how well things are going with our worship ministry.

I suppose that means the sky will start falling sometime next week!

What are people telling you? 

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