Top 10 NEW songs of 2008

Last year at this time I told you about the top 10 songs that I had added to my music library in 2007. Here is the list of the top 10 new songs of 2008 – the most-played songs added to my library this year.

1. Shadowfeet – Brooke Fraser
2. God of this City – Chris Tomlin
3. Albertine – Brooke Fraser
4. I Will Rise – Chris Tomlin
5. How He Loves – Eddie Kirkland
6. Great Things – Matt Maher
7. Deciphering Me – Brooke Fraser
8. C.S. Lewis Song – Brooke Fraser
9. Love Song For A Saviour (remake) – Jars of Clay
10. Free Fallin’ (Live) – John Mayer

Yeah – So I was on a bit of a Brooke Fraser kick this year. Can you blame me??

Happy New Year!

Whether your 2008 was awful or epic, my hope and prayer is that 2009 is better.

“So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” -Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians.

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!

Top 10 Songs

Here are the ten songs we did the most on Sunday morning at OBC in 2008 -

Everlasting God – Brenton Brown

Mighty To Save – Hillsong United

Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone) – Chris Tomlin

Hosanna – Paul Baloche

How Awesome Is Our God – Chris Vacher & Craig Douglas

Your Name – Paul Baloche

Because Of Your Love – Paul Baloche

Holy Is The Lord – Chris Tomlin

I Have A Hope – Tommy Walker

Jesus Paid It All – Kristian Stanfill

What were your most common songs this year?

Are you using Planning Center? Go in to your songs database and click the ‘ccli report’ link. Set the dates for January 1 and Dec 31 and then copy/paste all of that in to Excel or another spreadsheet program. Sort the info by ‘Number of Times Used in a Plan’ and voila!

Worship Confessional – December 14, 2008

This past Sunday was the second week of a three-week series that we’re calling “Great Expectations” – looking at the Old Testament passages mentioned in the first part of Matthew. Last week was the Isaiah 7 prophecy and this week was the Micah 5 passage, focused on Bethlehem as the birthplace of the Messiah.

Overall the morning was a bit of a challenge to construct – we had four main sections to our service and in the beginning there wasn’t a good flor (for me) between each of them. Our morning was basically going to contain some opening worship, a section related to Advent, communion and then our teaching. The biggest disconnect for me was moving people from Advent to communion – not the most natural transition.

I spent some time talking with my pastor and we landed on the idea of walking people through Philippians 2 – a passage that talks about the birth of Christ, the death of Christ and the importance of humility in both of those events. The beautiful part of this is that humility was the main thematic thread of our whole service so I used the Phil 2 passage as my guide for putting the morning together. I also found a video from WorshipHouseMedia.com that helped make the advent -> communion transition.

Here’s what our morning looked like - 

Great Expectations – December 14, 2008
Holy Is The Lord – G
Holy, Holy, Holy – C
Advent
Reading – Philippians 2:1-7
O Little Town of Bethlehem – E
We Fall Down – E
Offering (Christmas Version) – E
Video – A Child Is Born
Communion – Philippians 2:8-10
Message – Great Things Come In Small Packages

Okay – a few things to hilight from our morning together - 

1. Holiness to Humility – Originally I had the Philippians 2 reading happening right at the top of the service but we decided to move it later to make a real nice contrast between the two songs focused on the holiness of God and the passage and songs focused on the humility of Christ. That was a good decision.
2. Christmas songs - I always find it tough to program Sunday morning using Christmas songs. My assumption is that the songs have become so familiar that people do not engage with them on any kind of level – it just becomes a bunch of words that we sing. This may or may not be true but what we were able to do on Sunday was place a song that I would normally never choose (“O Little Town”) in context both thematically and scripturally. We did 3 verses of that song, transitioned to “We Fall Down” and then moved back to the fourth verse of “O Little Town” – thanks to my friend Paul for that idea! 
3.  Transitions are important - spend time thinking and talking through how you’re going to move through different sections of your service. Don’t assume that people will always (or ever!) get it. This was one of our more “choreographed” services because I wanted to make sure that people understood what we were trying to do. In the end, our morning was very focused around the theme of humility and all of the elements pointed towards that. What could have been a very disjointed, disconnected time ended up being very cohesive.

Hope Has Answered

Give yourself three minutes, stop what you’re doing and watch this video. Amazing.

 

RSSers you might need to hit the blog to see the video 

If you haven’t seen what the folks at The Work Of The People are doing, you need to check it out.

“Immanuel; Hope Has Answered” and supporting materials was written and directed for The Work of the People by Samm Hodges of Mothlight Creative. Cinematography: Luke Ewing of Mothlight Creative. ©2008 The Work of the People

Christmas carol songbook

Our friends over at PraiseCharts have been together a Christmas carol songbook for acoustic guitar. All your holiday favourites in one nice little PDF package!

Click over to their blog here and check it out or just download the PDF here.

Gloria Patri – creeds in worship

One of the things that I didn’t include in my worship confessional this week is that we did something a little different on Sunday and used a creed as part of our worship service. We have used creeds in the past but this time it was a little unique.

I wanted to lead the congregation to take some time to spend some time praising God for who He is and for what He’s done – it fit with the theme of our morning of trusting God in the midst of our circumstances and also played off the uncertainty that people are feeling with the economic and (in Canada) political situations.

If you’re familiar with creeds (no, not Creed) then you will know the Gloria Patri - 

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, 
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

Beautiful. Great words. I took some time in our service to explain the significance of these words in light of the beginning of the gospel of John and then played an audio recording of Bach’s Gloria Patri from his Magnificat. We put the lyrics – both english and latin – up on the screen so people could follow along.

Before the song started I encouraged people to spend time in prayer when it was finished – giving God praise after hearing these words and being reminded that as God was in the beginning, He is now and ever shall be. When the song finished we gave some silent time for that to happen and then closed in prayer together. It was a good element of our worship service and the whole thing took maybe five minutes.

Something a little different for us but sometimes different is good. Here’s a video of the Gloria Patri if you aren’t familiar with it - 

It’s been quiet around here!

Yes, I know I haven’t posted much. But..

Are you on twitter?

If you are, you can follow my updates here – www.twitter.com/chrisfromcanada

If you aren’t, it’s not for everybody but check it out and give it a shot – www.twitter.com

Here’s a sampling of my favourite things that I’ve posted on twitter over the last little while - 

Back from breakfast with one of our musicians – good times! Tonight we fire up the new (tuned!) PA and new projectors for the first time.

— 

There’s an old guy who plays bass at our church. The best part of our friendship is he sends me email forwards – and they’re usually funny!

—

In a workshop with the guitar player from the Canadian Idol house band.

—

Guess what’s waiting for me at the end of my week? Leading worship up at camp with 600 jr. high kids. Should be some great twitpic material!

—

I love conversations that start with one crazy idea and lead to one amazing, totally do-able idea

—

Got a phone call from a company I hired who dropped the ball. Proactive customer service is a good thing.

—

I never would have said this before I had kids but 4:30 is a great time to go for dinner at a restaurant.

—

The Great Tree Hunt of ‘08 was a big success. Except for the fact that 2 girls hate being in the sled w a passion – screamed the whole time.

—

A/V install went well last night despite losing power to our projectors. Not fun! Everything is A-OK this morning. 

So that’s a little sampling of the kinds of things that I post about on twitter – definitely a great place to connect with other people who are passionate about the same kinds of things that you are.

Worship Confessional – Sunday, December 7, 2008

Yesterday we kicked off our Advent series that we’re calling “Great Expectations” – Earl is walking through the first couple chapters of the book of Matthew and going back to the Old Testament passages referred there.

The first passage Matthew quotes is from Isaiah 7 and in the context of the birth of Jesus the verse makes total sense but there is also another context in which Isaiah is writing. By looking at the interaction between Isaiah and King Ahaz and the three children referred to in Isaiah 7-9 we were reminded to trust in God because He is, after all, with us. The “Immanuel” referred to in chapter 9 has an immediate significance for Isaiah and Ahaz but also has a longer-term significance, referring to Jesus, our Messiah.

With all the crazy stuff going on in the world – you might not know this but basically right now Canada has no government – people need to be reminded that God is with us and that He can be trusted, so our morning was focused on doing just that.

Great Expectations – December 7, 2008
Call To Worship – 2 Corinthians 1:3-4
How Great Thou Art – G
Jesus Messiah – G
Advent Reading – Isaiah 7:10-14 
Come Thou Long-Expected Jesus – F
O Come O Come Emmanuel – Em
Message – What’s In A Name
Everlasting God – A

I was playing piano this week which gave me the chance to lead the two Christmas-y songs a little more traditionally than I would have if I had been playing guitar. Placing the songs in the context of our Advent reading & series made them fit very well in to the morning and it didn’t feel like we just stuck them in there because it’s Christmas.

Closing the service with Everlasting God was pretty much a no-brainer but it was a perfect response song for our people. Our church loves that song and they belted it on during both services on Sunday morning.

A few things I reflected on yesterday after our morning was over - 

 

1. I love the people who serve on our worship teams – seriously, they are incredible. Their commitment level is awesome, their passion for this ministry is awesome and we have a really great time when we are together. Doing this week after week wouldn’t be nearly as fun as it is because of the people I get to serve with.
2. I love my family - we had the opportunity to dedicate several children during our services yesterday, including my youngest daughter, Isabelle. It’s a great privilege to be the dad of these three girls, knowing that God has given me the great responsibility to lead them and parent them as they grow.
3. I love this time of year - I’m not really a Christmas freak and my wife is fairly fond of calling me a Scrooge. So what if I don’t like Christmas music on in my house before December? So what if I would rather wait until December twenty-something to get a tree? That really makes me a Scrooge?? What do I love about this time of year? I love that people are thinking about Jesus and are open to talking about Him. I love that people are willing to immerse themselves in the story of His birth for a little while and be okay with a bit of the mystery that comes with it. I love that there will be hundreds of people coming to our building on Christmas Eve for their annual church visit and we have this amazing opportunity to remind them that they, too, can trust God because He is with us. I love this time of year. 

 

|