Vote for Isabelle!

Thanks to my beautiful wife I’ve got 3 incredibly beautiful daughters – Avery, Emerson and Isabelle. Our youngest, Isabelle, needs your help on her way to doing a photo session with our friend (and unbelievable photographer, Gillian Gauthier). We’ve been bugging everyone we know to vote for her and now it’s time for me to harass my blog readers!!

So – if you’ve got two seconds to spare, head over here and vote for Isabelle. She would definitely appreciate it!

James MacDonald – How to Close a Service

Some great words from James MacDonald on how they put together the closing minutes of their service –

Hillsong United in Toronto – June 6th

Hillsong United is coming back to play in Toronto on June 6th at Ontario Place & Molson Amphitheatre and people are excited about it – holy smokes! I have been getting tons of web searches landing on my blog with people looking for more info.

Here’s how much I know about the Hillsong event in Toronto -
Saturday, June 6th in Toronto
Artists: Hillsong United, Bluetree, Group1Crew, This Beautiful Republic, Hello Kelly, Turn Off The Stars & Nathan Finochio.

The event is being run by Unite Productions – great guys who do awesome events. You can get more info at their new website – www.uniteinworship.com – or buy tickets directly at iTickets.

UPDATE: Joshua Seller is the worship director at Harvest Bible Chapel in Oakville, ON and let me know about a great offer they’ve got going:

Harvest Bible Chapel in Oakville, ON. is offering a free Front Row ticket to the United Live Concert with the registration for the young adults conference “Ignite” that is taking place that same weeekend in Toronto.

Check them out on facebook “harvest young adults”

Contact Joshua for more info.

Planning Center MP3 Attachments

I know lots of you use Planning Center but you`re getting worried about the attachments you`re uploading and whether or not you`ve got enough room in your account to keep uploading mp3 attachments for new songs. I`ve come up with a way that will let you buy some time – I`ve been using this solution for a couple of months and so far, so good!

Watch this video – the resolution is good enough that you should be able to fullscreen it and get a better sense of what I`m doing. Sorry I went through it really quick – I`ll be happy to clarify anything if you`ve got questions after trying it yourself.

iTunes – www.itunes.com
Tunebite – www.tunebite.com
Dropbox – www.getdropbox.com
Planning Center Online – www.planningcenteronline.com

There you go. Did you try it? Did it work? Questions?

Lectures on Worship

Justin at Between Two Worlds has posted an incredible collection of recordings from Southern Seminary’s Institute for Christian Worship.

I won’t post the list here – go check out and list and spend some time with some of these recordings. What an incredible resource!! There are more lectures posted on the main site but here’s a list of people linked on Justin’s blog:

• David Peterson – author of “Engaging With God”
• John Frame – this guy’s name came up twice last week in conversations and this is number three!
• Harold Best – very well known and his book “Unceasing Worship” is incredible
• Michael Card
• Keith & Kristyn Getty
• Stuart Townend
• Bob Kauflin
• Kevin Twit
• Jason Harms

What are you waiting for?? Go, go, go!!

OBC – Easter Choir Practice

Choir isn’t something that we normally do at OBC but I thought we’d change this up a little this year and put together a worship choir for our Easter Sunday services. We opened it up to anyone in grade 6 & up and there’s no requirement on previous singing ability. My gut told me that we would get enough people interested in being a part of this that there would be a solid group of singers who would join our band for the services on that morning.

Well tonight we had our first rehearsal and had 40 – FORTY!! – people come and sing. I know that 40 isn’t a huge choir but for us trying something new it was pretty encouraging. Like I said on twitter tonight, I’m really glad that we decided to do this and I’m really glad that we’ve got five weeks to practice before the big day

Thanks to a shipping issue, I wasn’t able to give our choir the actual parts they’re going to be singing but instead I just printed out the hymn charts from CCLI and we ran through those at practice. We rehearsed four songs tonight which will be part of our service -

• Hosanna by Paul Baloche
• Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone) by Chris Tomlin
• Revelation Song by Kari Jobe
• Mighty To Save by Hillsong United

We’ll be adding a couple more songs to this list but doing that much was a big chunk for us to chew on tonight – especially ‘Revelation Song’. I told the group when we were done that this is not an easy song and even if we were doing it with one of our bands we would need several weeks of rehearsal to pull it off. I was very encouraged to hear them sing tonight.

So here we go. A new adventure for me and for OBC – we’ll see how this turns out but it will definitely give me some material for blogging over the next several weeks

re:create – Communion Photos

One of the hilights of re:create this year was our eucharist service which was led by Ian Morgan Cron. The whole experience was heightened by the creativity of John Voelz and some others who put together some amazing visuals to help enhance the spirit of worship.

A couple of weeks ago I asked if anyone had photos of what John & his team had put together and the response was great. I’ve received permission from the people who provided these photos that they are able to be shared. If you’d like to download a zip file of all of them, click here.

A few samples of what I’m talking about – beautiful!

Dirt Conference

If you’ve been involved in worship ministry for any length of time then you have certainly been bombarded with endless promotional material for countless worship conferences that will be “ministry-changing, life-altering, brain-busting” and just plain necessary for your ministry to thrive – or even continue!!

I’m sure you’ve been to more than one conference where you appreciated what was happening but realized immediately that there was just no way that you would be able to bring any of that home or even come close to the kind of production, musical quality, technical wizardry or all around awesomeness that you are witnessing. I know that I have been to that kind of conference and left more depressed and discouraged than anything.

But.. There is good news. It seems like the tide of what conferences are all about is changing. If you’ve been hanging around the blog for long or following me on twitter then you know the kind of impact that re:create has had on my life – both because of the content of the conference and also because of the quality of the relationships which have sprung from it.

I think there is a similar conference that is launching this year that I wanted to tell you about. It’s happening in Little Rock, Arkansas in November and is called Dirt . How awesome is that?? Haha.

Now, don’t let the fact that it’s happening in Arkansas discourage you I’ve been following the guys who are doing this for a while and I am sure that it is going to be an incredible time. I just came across the info a few days ago and I’m trying to figure out if I can make it work to get down there.

So check it out – dig around the site a little bit and get a feel for what they’re trying to do. There is some awesome stuff happening and I think this conference is going to be nice breath of fresh air compared to everything else out there.

Stage – truss help?

We are putting the final touches on our building project and stage renovation. I have one piece left in the stage puzzle and that is figuring out some kind of metal truss system for the back wall of our stage. I thought it was a bit complicated to explain in a post so I recorded this quick video.

Let me know if you have any ideas!

Spring forward!

Don’t forget – save the daylight this weekend!

HT: LifeChurch

Songs about discontentedness

This Sunday we are starting a new series called ‘The Great Correction’ where we’ll be looking at the wanderings of the nation of Israel and how some of their questions and responses have much to teach us about our present economic, political and social climate. One of the themes of this series is ‘discontentedness’ so I put word out to my twitter peeps today asking for a little help and they did not disappoint!!

I’m sure you will agree that discontentedness is not a common theme for our modern worship repertoire but some great ideas came back. We definitely won’t use all of these songs over the course of this series but there are some very good starting points here.

By the way, I wasn’t even sure if ‘discontentedness’ was even a word this afternoon but, yes, it is! Hooray!

By the way, again, if you’re on twitter you can find my updates at

The original question on twitter: Hey twitter worship peeps – I’m looking for songs that talk about discontentedness. Any ideas jump to your mind?? Is that even a word??

The collection of replies:
Tim Hughes – Take The World
John Mayer – Something’s Missing
David Crowder – All I Can Say
Hillsong – Made Me Glad
Matt Redman – Heart of Worship
Bethany Dillon – You Are On Our Side
Matt Redman – You Never Let Go
Bethany Dillon – Hallelujah
Sanctus Real – I’m Not Alright
Matt Redman – Blessed Be Your Name
Brian Doerksen – Light The Fire Again
Other ideas given (either common songs or I don’t know the artist):
Move Me Again
I Will Never Be The Same Again
Do It Lord
Great Is Thy Faithfulness
I Will Praise Him Still
Be Still My Soul
A Mighty Fortress Is Our God

Many thanks to these twitter friends:
@sethprimm
@milepost13
@friarbuck
@edblonski
@bunchosmittys
@mandythompson
@kimbontrager
@jarrodmorris
@deanlusk
@mandythompson

My favourite reply came from Dean Lusk with his suggestion of “I’m So Worried” by Monty Python. Ha!!

U2 – NLOTH ‘Most Thoroughly Christian Project To Date’

Lots of people have been fascinated with Bono’s obsession with quasi-religious language in lots of his music and there are lots of songs in U2′s library which can be taken as epic anthems of faith. With the release of their newest album yesterday, one of the first questions for many people was ‘Does the trend continue?’

After watching their incredible performance of ‘Magnificent’ on Letterman last night, I came across an article this morning that describes ‘No Line On The Horizon’  as U2′s ‘most thoroughly Christian project to date.’

“Like the last two albums, No Line is much more overt in its Christian rendering of the world, what with lyrics like ‘Justified until we die/You and I will magnify/Oh, the Magnificent’ from the album’s second track,” commented Steven R. Harmon, an associate professor of divinity at Samford University’s Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Ala.

“Yet what qualifies this album as thoroughly Christian is not so much its pervasive biblical/theological images as its overarching eschatological vision,” he wrote Friday in a music review featured by the Associated Baptist Press.

The Christian themes in U2′s music have been widely recognized since their 1981 album, October, which was ranked as No. 41 on CCM Magazine’s 2001 list of the greatest Christian music albums of all time. Also included in the list was the group’s 1987 album, The Joshua Tree.

The article has some good stuff to say – check it out.

If you missed U2 last night on Letterman, here’s their performance – incredible! (Make sure you put your mouse over that little up arrow and click the HD button to get really nice video quality.)

U2 – Magnificent

Bono and the boys just killed it, again, on Letterman. Bono got his preach on doing ‘Magnificent’ off their brand new album, No Line On The Horizon.

Read the lyrics – tell me this is not a modern psalm:

Magnificent
Magnificent

I was born
I was born to be with you
In this space and time
After that and ever after I haven’t had a clue
Only to break rhyme
This foolishness can leave a heart black and blue

Only love, only love can leave such a mark
But only love, only love can heal such a scar

I was born
I was born to sing for you
I didn’t have a choice but to lift you up
And sing whatever song you wanted me to
I give you back my voice
From the womb my first cry, it was a joyful noise…

Only love, only love can leave such a mark
But only love, only love can heal such a scar

Justified till we die, you and I will magnify
The Magnificent
Magnificent

Only love, only love can leave such a mark
But only love, only love unites our hearts

Justified till we die, you and I will magnify
The Magnificent
Magnificent
Magnificent

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