Carlos Whittaker (www.ragamuffinsoul.com|@loswhit) released his EP “Ragamuffin Soul” this week through Integrity Music and the thing has been going a little bananas. Sure it’s only $1.98 to pick up these three songs but the guy hit #1 on iTunes in the US for the Christian/Gospel genre and made it up to #47 (that’s the highest spot I heard) on the entire iTunes chart. That is a pretty incredible feat for a guy with no real touring history, award-winning songs, etc etc etc.

Integrity Music wants to continue getting the word out so they asked if I would stream the third song from Carlos’ EP here on the site today and offer you a chord chart download. So.. here you go!

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“We Will Worship”
by Carlos Whittaker & Jason Ingram
(c)2009 Integrity Worship Music (Admin. by Integrity Music, Inc.)/Sony/ATV Timber Publishing (Admin. by Sony/ATV Sounds LLC)/Windsor Hill Music/West Main Music

We fix our eyes on You You are God alone
We fix our eyes on You You’re our only hope
For all we have to lose is our very souls

Save us from these comforts
Break us of our need for the familiar
Spare us any joy that’s not of You
And we will worship You
Yeah we will worship You

Satisfy us Lord in Your unfailing love
Satisfy us Lord that You would be enough
We have nothing here let Your kingdom come

Hallelujah hallelujah
Hallelujah hallelujah

Want free chord charts for the songs on the EP? Just a little clicky clicky and you’re on your way. Hit the SHARE tab and you’ll find what you’re looking for.

There are three songs on this EP and you can hear all of them right now -

1. “Jesus Saves” on FredMcKinnon.Com
2. “Rain It Down” over at Klampert.Com
3. “We Will Worship” at ChrisFromCanada.Com

Someone (sorry, I don’t remember who!) linked this site on twitter and I thought it was pretty interesting. If you do any kind of “mood” or architectural projection in your sanctuary or if you are just looking for some video content to use in your worship services, check out this channel on Vimeo – Videos for Worship. Very cool.

Here are a couple of examples –

Check it out. There is some very, very good stuff here. Awesome to see people producing incredible content and then sharing it for the benefit of other churches.

Great work, guys!

Okay, so it’s not available on iTunes in Canada but if you live in the US you’re able to buy this EP today from fellow re:create peep Carlos Whittaker. You may be familiar with his blog – www.ragamuffinsoul.com – but you should check out these songs.

Here’s a short video that tells some of the story behind these songs and why Carlos is excited about them –

If you’re looking for chord charts for the 3 songs, Carlos has posted them on his blog here – www.ragamuffinsoul.com/music

Sunday, January 24, 2009 – “Good News for Bad News”
Romans 1:21-32
Call to Worship
All The Earth Will Sing Your Praises – Paul Baloche – E
All Because Of Jesus – Steve Fee – A
This Is Our God – Chris Tomlin – E
Offering/Announcements/Meet & Greet
Glorious – Paul Baloche – C
Worship Rises – Chris Vacher, Joshua Seller & WorshipRises – A
Message – “My Moral Compass“
Worship Rises – reprise

Worship leaders, you will know what I mean when I say that Sunday was very heavy for me. If you are familiar with the words of Romans 1 and the words of these particular verses, you can bet that people were confronted in very direct ways with the truth of their own sin and their need of salvation through Christ.

I got home on Sunday and I was wiped – just very, very tired. I know that this is what happens to me when there is significant spiritual activity happening around men – unfortunately I didn’t recognize it in the moment on Sunday morning, it only became really evident to me in the afternoon because I was able to read the signs.

Pray for us. Pray for our church. Pray that God would move in mighty ways and that the hearts of people would be softened and opened to the gospel of Christ. There are people here who desperately need to come to know Christ. Pray for them.

WorshipTogether.com is hosting a training conference in Kansas from April 12-14. Looks like a great event with some great people involved.

Anyone planning on attending?

We wrapped up our “His Glory Appears” series on December 27 by talking about the implications of John the Baptist’s proclamation of Jesus being the Lamb of God, come to take away the sins of the world from John 1:29. As we were talking about ideas for the service, I suggested that we could film part of the message at a local goat farm.

After a few phone calls and gathering some people with the right equipment, we set off to spend a couple of hours with our new friend Eric the farmer and some of his goats. We had a great time putting this video together and the response from our congregation was that it was very helpful in bringing home the point.

Here’s the video we used -

If you’re thinking about exploring the use of video with your church, don’t be scared! Don’t feel like you have to go “all in” right from the bat with full video messages, HD cameras, big lighting and major editing. For this shoot, we used four people (including Earl on screen), two cameras (our church owns a Canon HV20 and we also used a similar camera belonging to a friend), 90 minutes or so of filming, 3-4 hours of editing and a bunch of awesome goats.

Does this mean we’re video experts? Heck no! But it does mean we’re willing to try new things (or at least “new for us” things) to help communicate with our people.

Don’t be afraid! Give it a shot!

Are you kidding me?

Well it’s been a real long time since I’ve done one but I’m back with a worship confessional. We started a new series after Christmas called “Good News for Bad News” – we are working our way through the first 3 chapters of the book of Romans. If you are familiar with these chapters, you will know why the title makes sense. Good news, indeed!

Here’s how our morning looked at Orangeville Baptist Church -

Sunday, January 10, 2009 – “Good News for Bad News”
Romans 1:8-20
Opener – Song of Hope – Robbie Seay Band
Announcements/Meet & Greet
How Can I Keep From Singing – Chris Tomlin – G -> A
Jesus Messiah – Chris Tomlin – A
Your Grace Is Enough – Matt Maher – F
Communion
Lead Me To The Cross – Hillsong United – E
This Is How We Know – Matt Redman – Bb
Message – “I Am Not Ashamed“
How Can I Keep From Singing – Chris Tomlin – G

Three things from this past Sunday -

1. It was a Chris Tomlin morning but I’m fine with that. Don’t freak out about playing several songs from the same artist – there’s only one person in your whole church will realize it and they won’t be bothered by it. Those songs work together well because they have the same writer – similar feel, similar lyrical direction, etc. Don’t do it every week but don’t be afraid of going with it if it makes sense.

2. We had some important info to communicate to our people. We didn’t want to break up the flow of the service from the songs to communion to the message. So we opened our service with an upbeat, high energy song (Song of Hope) and then did our announcements in two separate sections with our meet & greet right in between. That whole opening section took about 10 minutes but it was worth it – the things we needed to communicate to our church family deserved that time.
3. There were beautiful moments of worship during “Lead me to the Cross” at both our 9:00 and 11:00 services on Sunday. It’s hard to describe what those moments are like but you know that you’re in them when they happen. People focused on the cross, remembering the sacrifice of Christ and the new life that we have because of Him.

Hope you’re having a great week. Stay focused. Keep going!

As part of Earl‘s message on Sunday, December 27th we showed this video to illustrate the concept of the scapegoat. We were finishing up a series through the first chapter of John and wanted to help people get an understanding of Jesus “taking away” the sin of the world.

This was a great way to help people get the point. We never would have been able to do this live in the room, the shoot was fairly straightforward and thankfully the goats were very cooperative!

I was talking with a friend from my church the other day and he said “So, I bet that since you’re connected with all of these other worship leaders around the world through your blog and twitter that it must be hard to get stuck in a rut?” I had to tell him about a time not too long ago where I was very much in a rut with our Sunday morning services and needed to do a bit of soul searching (and Scripture searching) to get things moving.

But.. I get the point of what he is saying. Our connected-ness has allowed for inspiration to flow freely from artist to artist, church to church, all over the world. As an example, someone linked a video this morning on twitter and mentioned that they were impressed with the choir lighting and mics. I watched the video, appreciated his comment and then started looking through some other videos that the church had posted, leading me to this one –

Beautiful. Simple. Poetic. The talent is undeniable and the execution of the moment is bang on. As a nice little package, pretty inspiring to see what this church in Florida is able to do with a spark of an idea and some incredible talent.