I`m gathering some resources that we may use on Sunday as part of the Global Day of Prayer and came across this video -

You may not think of it this way but I’m pretty sure that most of us spend time in front of an audience every day. That audience could be your family, your friends, your co-workers, neighbours, a board or committee. Maybe the audience is a congregation for worship leaders or pastors. Maybe your audience is mostly online through your blog or twitter. Whoever you are, there are areas in your life where you have an audience.

Every Sunday I stand in front of an audience of hundreds of people who come from all over our region to gather together and worship. Each of those people come with different expectations and experiences from that past week, month, year. Each of those people are coming on that Sunday morning for different reasons – it might be because Sunday morning is a core piece of their spiritual growth, it might be because they are so wiped out on life that they just need some lifting up, it might be that this is the day that they’re giving God one more chance. Whatever their reason, something made them get out of bed and decide that instead of the countless other things they could be doing that morning, they were going to get in their car and make their way to church.

Why is it important to remember this? As a leader with an audience, you need to remember that part of your preparation must include this question – what do they want to hear? What is it that people are expecting to hear from the people who are getting “voice time” on Sunday morning? What are the kinds of things that they are waiting to hear from you?

As leaders, our role is certainly not all about telling people what they want to hear. There is enough of that – politicians, car salesmen and pastors are notorious for doing this and it’s not at all what I’m talking about. That person who walks through those doors on Sunday morning does not need you to simply blurt out what you think they need to hear.

What they do need, however, is to hear the things they are expecting in an unexpected way. If I was a preacher, I’d repeat that. People need to hear the things they are expecting in an unexpected way :)

Worship leaders – you have an incredible opportunity and responsibility to speak in to the lives of people who are gathering on Sunday morning. If you’ve spent considerable time thinking about and practicing the songs you are going to sing, why are you not spending considerable time thinking about and practicing the words you are going to say? Is your job on Sunday morning to simply sing the songs and get out of the way? No, it’s not. Your job is to lead worship – the songs are a tool to accomplish that. Your words are also part of leading worship, so use them well.

Want some specific things to help you begin to think about this?

• Think about how you’re going to open the service – and no “Good morning, let’s stand to worship – here we go!” is not enough. And don’t be the one who walks out and tries the “Good morning! .. .. .. Well.. let’s try that again – gooood morrrrrniiiinnngggg!” That just tells the congregation you are nervous and unprepared. Yes people are in the room and have gathered for worship but put some brain time into a couple of intelligent thoughts that will help remind them of what we are doing when we gather together.
• Realize that you shouldn’t speak between every song but if you ARE going to speak, make sure that what you say is relevant to the song before and the song after AND that the focus of your words is leading people in worship rather than pouring out your artist’s heart for 10 minutes all over a bunch of people who are getting tired of singing.
• Remember that you are leading worship not just leading songs. If it’s just about leading songs, why are you up there? There are much better singers and musicians who could be leading the songs on video. If all you’re doing is closing your eyes and singing the song, you are not leading worship.

This post is actually the prelude to a second post which will be coming soon but I thought it would be worthwhile to get some of these thoughts out first.

What are your thoughts? Worship leaders – do you spend time thinking about what you’re going to say? Do you talk too much? Not enough?

You may be familiar with the Catalyst Conference movement and all the cool stuff they’re up to. One of the new things they’ve just launched is the Catalyst Music Project. While I’m not crazy about the 18-page publishing contract that the winner has to sign, I do think that they are on to something very, very cool.

Check it out here – www.catalystmusicproject.com

We believe there are new anthems and worship songs being written on the hearts of our generation across this nation and around the world. This is a call to leaders who have a vision to share these songs with the body of Christ.

If you follow my twitter you know that I’ve been really excited about something called WorshipRises – I’m intrigued by some of the things Aaron is saying in this video and how much it resonates with some of the things going on in my own heart and mind right now. I’m excited to see the steps of this journey as Catalyst begins to uncover some of what God is doing in and through worship leaders around the world.

“Sing to the King” by Billy Foote & Charles Horne is a very simple song of declaration that’s pretty easy to teach and sing. If you are a church that’s going through a bit of a worship style transition and looking for a song to bridge from some older, more traditional songs to newer, contemporary songs then this could be a good pick. The melody is easy enough for most people to pick up the second or third time they hear it and the lyrics are very straightforward.

The last time we did this song I was looking to spice it up a bit by using a click track. We’ve been using click/loop tracks for about a year and a half at OBC and they’ve become another one of the instruments in the band. We don’t use them every week but when we do they help the band play better and give another sonic layer to the song.

I normally get all my click/loop tracks from PraiseCharts.com but they didn’t have one for this song so I went on a bit of a hunt. I found that Greg over at DigitalWorship.net had posted loops to use with an Ableton Live setup. I haven’t posted about Ableton before but basically it’s click/loops on steroids – guys who are using it can do phenomenal stuff – but right now we are using the standard linear kind of loop during our services.

I took the snippets that he posted on his site and put together a beginning-to-end loop that we used last week in our services. Have a listen -

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(RSS readers you probably need to hit the blog)

The loop we used has a click track to keep our drummer on tempo with a one-bar count-in. You can download the loop here – it’s a stereo WAV file so you can separate the loop from the click.

Here’s the structure for the click -

(click only) One bar – count-in
Intro – 8 bars
Verse
Chorus
Turnaround – 8 bars
Verse
Chorus
Chorus
Turnaround – 16 bars
Verse
Chorus

I haven’t been giving much time to doing full worship confessionals over the last little while and I’m not about to break that streak tonight. So hear are my Sunday quick hits from today -

• Sunday is pretty much the only day that I don’t curse the alarm going off a 6:00 AM – I get jazzed about helping to make Sunday morning happen
• We are continuing our “Grow UP!” series – if you thought it wasn’t possible to pull nine week of gooood content out of nine verses in 2 Peter, Earl Marshall has proven you wrong
• We called a MAJOR audible between our 9:00 & 11:00 services and completely changed the order of service – I mean completely changed
• The biggest reason for that was we had people sitting & listening for too long at our 9:00 service – keeping people engaged, active and compelled is key on Sunday morning
• I wish someone would help visiting missionaries understand what congregations want to hear from them
• I think we need to be clearer with people who are giving ministry updates on what will fire up our people
• We baptized a high school girl today – beautiful example of INVEST and INVITE being lived out in relationship, now seeing this girl IGNITE and IMPACT – it is a beautiful thing
• INVEST, INVITE, IGNITE, IMPACT – our 4 I’s of ministry strategy helping us to achieve our vision to Transform Our Region, Transform our world because of our mission to glorify God by making disciples who love God completely and others sacrificially
• We only did two songs in our 11:00 service and – guess what! – it was still engaging, authentic worship
• Don’t believe the lie that you need 6 songs and 25 minutes in a worship package to get people to a place of worship – use every moment of your worship set properly
• I had this mental conversation during one of the verses in our 11:00 service – “Oh. You’re here today? Well, that’s interesting. And you came with her? Wow. Very cool. God, You know what’s going on – make it happen.”
• Songs we did this morning – Unchanging by Chris Tomlin, Here I Am To Worship by Tim Hughes, It Is Well (9:00 only) and then just a verse/chorus meditation of May The Words by Tim Hughes

Lots of you end up on this site because I’ve talked about “The Shack” several times – both about my interaction with the book and about my interaction with William Paul Young, the author. Paul was in southern Ontario last week and was part of a show on CBC called “The Hour” hosted by George Stroumboulopoulos. George has become a very well-respected journalist in Canada and I love his interview style.

If you want to see the interview (it’s less than 13 minutes) you can see it here – http://www.cbc.ca/thehour/videos.html?id=1124988848

After you watch, I’d love for you to come back and drop your thoughts in a comment. Here are mine -

• .George is a fantastic interviewer. He gets to the heart of the matter very quickly and knows enough of the story & context to come off sounding well-informed and intrigued by the answers.
• .Paul has heard every question in the book over the last couple of years and has an answer ready for every one of them. He has become very experienced at the interview thing.
• .I am amazed and excited that a book written for this guy’s six kids has opened these kinds of doors for spiritual discussion. Agree or disagree, like him or not, Paul’s book has given the church new opportunities to talk about the gospel with those who have questions. Are you taking that opportunity??
• .What is the deep, preconceived, misguided notion of God in my own life that I need to get rid of?
• .Big thought on this one – there is NO WAY that CBC would have given this guy 15 minutes of airtime 10 years ago. No chance. Pretty awesome that he was given that opportunity to declare Jesus is the Word of God, that God is existent as the Trinity and that He is exceptionally fond of each of us. That is very cool.

I can’t remember where I saw this posted first but it is too brilliant to not share. Seriously – genius!!

Avery, my 3-year old, is pretty much in love with Taylor Swift and at every possible opportunity is asking if she can listen to “the Juliette song.” She hasn’t heard this yet but I think she will be a big fan!

“Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.” -John Updike

Hillsong United is coming to Toronto next month and the folks at Unite Productions are giving away some tickets. The response to the HU band is incredible every time they come to Toronto and lots of you are ending up at my site looking for Hillsong United info. So – here you go!

To enter the contest, click here and submit your info. The winner will be selected on May 15 and gets 4 tickets to the event on June 6.

I’ve done the liveblog thing a few times using ScribbleLive and LOVE it – that is a great app for capturing thoughts in the moments, pulling in tweets from people who are in the room and a quick, easy way to help people track along with an event you are attending. But.. What if you are at an event you’d like to liveblog but can’t take your computer? Wouldn’t it be great to somehow connect WordPress and Twitter to let liveblogging happen?? Well, now you can!

Does this sound like an infomercial pitch yet?? :)

There’s this great WordPress plugin called Twitter LiveBlog that works beautifully – I put it to the test last week when I was at an event with Bill Hybels. You can check out my liveblog post from that event here.

Basically it works like this. Install the plugin and update all the settings with your Twitter account info. To begin a new liveblog post you simply send //NLB// (title) as a tweet from your phone or Twitter app. Whatever you put as “(title)” after “//NLB//” will become the title of your new liveblog post.

Begin sending tweets through the event. Let people know that you are liveblogging and you may be tweeting more often than you normally do. The tricky part is sending updates that will be helpful and relevant to BOTH your Twitter and blog audiences.

When the event is done, send //ELB// as your last tweet and the plugin will know that you are finished. Voila!

If you’re on Twitter, you can follow my updates at @chrisfromcanada

It’s been a while since I’ve posted with a recap of Sunday morning but I’ll try and do some catch up. Today was the second week of a 9-week series we’re doing called “Grow UP!” The content of this series is from 2 Peter 1:3-11. Yes, 9 weeks focused on a 9 verse chunk of scripture. And these are 9 verses full of some GOOD stuff.

Here’s our outline -

Because of Your Love – Paul Baloche – G
Great Things – Matt Maher – G
Sing to the King – Billy Foote – E
Mother’s Day focus
Announcements/Offering
Child Dedications
Communion
My Hope Is Jesus – Hillsong (CD with video)
Jesus You Are Worthy – Brenton Brown – C
Message – 2 Peter 1:5
Prayer

Some of my thoughts after today’s services -

• People came ready to sing today and the combo of that with some good leadership from Rebecca helped things get real focused, real quick! The two opening songs work really well together (same key, similar progressions) and had some good energy to get things going. “Sing to the King” is a new one for us and people picked it up quickly.
• Earl took some time to honour moms today and did it with sincerity and meaning. Our service was NOT all about moms (it was much more about Jesus and the work of the Spirit in our lives!) but we did take some time to show moms our appreciation.
• Lots of visitors for child dedications this morning. We are a church with lots of young families and lots of babies (we had 25 babies born in a church of 500 a couple of years ago!) and dedicating kids is a significant thing for us. We are still working out exactly the best way to do this in a way that is significant and memorable – I’d love to hear how other churches are doing child dedications.
• Today was the third Sunday in a row that I wasn’t leading. It’s the longest I’ve gone in my time at OBC without leading and I didn’t like it. The scheduling just worked out this way but I don’t want to do that again. Going four weeks between being the voice of our worship ministry isn’t ideal.
• Orangeville is not a university town so when our talented, musical high school students graduate we lose them (and other churches GAIN them!) for 8 months or longer, depending on whether or not they actually come home to mom and dad for the summer. I connected with a bunch of our university students who are back home and excited about playing this summer. That pumps me up!
• We closed our service by asking people to prioritize spiritual disciplines in their lives so that they are training (not trying) towards spiritual growth. We gave opportunity for people to stay and pray after the service if they wanted and several did – it was amazing to see people that we as leaders have been praying for over the last several months or years taking some time to talk to God about their own spiritual growth. I think today was a landmark day for some people at OBC.
• This series is right up Earl’s alley – it’s a great meshing together of some of the things that have been happening in his own life over the past couple of years and he’s got the opportunity to be sharing some of that right alongside with what scripture has to say about spiritual growth.

Check our more posts like this at Sunday Setlists