Innerkip Presbyterian Church in Woodstock, ON (right in the heart of southern Ontario) is an evangelical church looking to hire a contemporary worship leader. The only information I could find on the church is located on the town’s website here but that page has a phone number and email address where you can follow up for more info.
As things on the blog have aged (and, honestly, as twitter has become my main connection point with other worship leaders) I really haven’t spent much time talking about my family here. You may be a read of the blog and not know that my wife & I are the proud parents of three incredible girls or that we are expecting our first boy in September. When the baby arrives, we will have 4 kids under the age of 5 – you can pray for us!
On April 28, 2007 we got to meet our second daughter, Emerson Paige. She has brought so much joy to our family – her jokes, her silly voices, her dimples, her big-as-the-moon brown eyes. I can’t imagine life without her and consider her to be an incredible blessing from God.
Today we celebrated Emmy’s 3rd birthday. We woke her up and congratulated her on the big day. We sang songs and danced around her bedroom, making sure all of our neighbours heard that it was Emmy’s birthday! Tonight we had Emmy’s favourite dinner – pineapple pizza, from scratch! – with homemade cupcakes and blue icing for dessert. We sang happy birthday, told Emmy how much we love her and how special she is to us and then we opened some presents, gifts from mom & dad and also gifts from some friends. Nana made a special appearance by phone during dinner to give Emmy a special birthday message.
At bedtime, I told Emmy again how much I love her, how happy I am that I get to be her daddy and how thankful I am that God has given her to our family.
Emmy on the day she was born. Little angel.
At about 18 months. Check out those dimples!
Emmy has the most incredible big brown eyes, just like her momma.
This is just after her 2nd birthday.
I took Emmy and her big sister Avery out for ice cream on Monday night.
Look at those pearly whites!
Tony Morgan posted info on a worship leader job opening at West Ridge Church near Atlanta, GA. Have a look at the post and send your info along to Tony if you think your interested. Here’s the quick recap of what they’re looking for:
Specifically, we’re looking for someone who will lead worship primarily at our current campus and periodically at the new campus.
I offered to take the role, but, besides not being able to sing, they said I didn’t meet these expectations of the role. We need a…
- person driven with a passion for worship and a calling to serve the local church
- leader who instinctively knows how to recruit, develop and shepherd staff and volunteers
- gifted musician and vocalist with the ability to create charts, arrange music and communicate effectively with other musicians
- team player that enjoys collaborating and leading others to produce excellent worship environments
- highly creative individual who is motivated to dream of new and innovative ways to connect with a diverse culture
- person able to multi-task and manage details related to producing excellent worship services
If you’re a participant in blog-world or twitter-land you are probably familiar with Carlos Whittaker (blog|twitter|viral video) so you have likely heard that his album “Ragamuffin Soul” (taken from the name of his blog) has released today around the world. We did a giveaway of his EP back in January and I received a copy of the full CD from the good folks at Integrity a couple of weeks ago. There are some good songs here.
In reality, though, this isn’t an album about great songs or catchy melodies or insightful lyrics. This is an album about a movement, about what God is doing in and through the life of a very unique man and his family. I was talking with a friend a couple of weeks ago and I said to him that it seems like Los has this incredible ability to step in to poop-filled situations over and over again yet always come out smelling like roses. In the four years that I’ve known him through re:create I’ve seen that scenario play out a bunch of times.
So.. don’t buy this CD because it’s a bunch of great songs or because you’re looking for the next worship hit, buy this CD because you believe that God works through ordinary guys like Carlos and that he is going to continue bringing the light of Christ in to poop-filled situations involving people who need to hear about the hope, the grace, the mercy, the compassion of our God.
After Easter we launched a new 4-week series at OBC called “Kingdom Seeds” (we got the title from some great series art we found over at PowerpointSermons.com). We’ve been looking at different episodes from the book of Luke and how an encounter with Jesus leads people to radical generosity, in so many ways.
Here’s what our service looked like on Sunday -
Sunday, April 25, 2010 – “Kingdom Seeds”
Luke 20:1-4
Song of Hope – Robbie Seay Band – Bb
Jesus You Are Worthy – Brenton Brown – C
Responsive Reading – Colossians 1/Philippians 2
In Christ Alone – Keith Getty & Stuart Townend – D/E
Message – “Extravagant Generosity”
All Because of Jesus – Steve Fee – A
Three things from this past Sunday -
You can find more posts like this over at TheWorshipCommunity.com.
Here’s a quick look at the Top 10 lists of songs on these two popular websites, based on the worship songs that churches are singing in their weekend services:
I think for a while the general feeling was that the SongSelect list (particularly the middle and last third of the Top 100) is a pretty dated list that is influenced by lots of small churches still doing songs from the late 80′s and early 90′s. Interesting to see that the top 3 on each list are identical (can you say cha-ching!) and that 8 of the 10 songs appear in both lists.
As a worship director, I use both of these sites pretty regularly.
We have a subscription to both CCLI & Planning Center and both sites get used almost every day in my work. I use the CCLI site to print chord charts and lead sheets, collect copyright information on songs we are playing and also to find songs that other churches are using through the Top 100 list.
We have used Planning Center for about 3 years and it has become our main planning and programming tool for our Sunday morning services. We use it for scheduling musicians, planning services, distributing chord charts and tracking what songs we’re doing at OBC. I also use the community feature to see what songs are being done in other Planning Center churches around the world.
Tomorrow I’ll be leaving my family and heading down to beautiful Nashville, TN for about 36 hours to launch the first WorshipRises (blog|twitter|facebook) recording sessions. I am pretty excited about how this has come together and what will come from this work.
(For those who are new to the discussion, WorshipRises is a new movement of Canadian worship pastors/leaders committed to developing worship resources for & from the Canadian church.)
The details for this have come together very quickly and we’ll be recording three new songs while we are there, all written at our March 23rd songwriting day in St. Catharines, ON. These songs came out of group writing sessions from 3 or 4 people and will be released together as part of a digital EP later this summer. The three songs we’re recording are “Everlasting Light” (written by Drew Brown, Bob Cottrill, Luke Holst and Keith Sparrow), “Maker of my Heart” (written by Greg Sykes, Andrew Walker and Joshua Seller) and “Holy Are You Lord” (written by Marty Lewis, Toyosi Awesu, Michelle Pyke and William Walker). All three of these songs are singable, memorable and will be a great addition for churches who are looking for new songs from Canadian worship leaders.
So how is this all coming togethere? Here’s the quick version -
For the past little while, my good friend Marty Lewis has been building relationships with some guys in Nashville who are passionate about supporting things like WorshipRises. After several discussions, the plans got put in place for us to take our songs down there and have them help us out by assembling an incredible group of talented musicians to track these songs. These dudes are serious players and I can’t wait to hear what they’ll do with these songs.
After we’ve tracked the instruments this week at OmniSound Studios in Nashville, we’ll come home and have some of our singers meet up with Andrew Horrocks at AME Studios in Kitchener to record the vocals. It will be this awesome mix of really talented Nashville musicians and really talented Canadian singers coming together to produce these songs.
If you’re the kind of person that’s interested in seeing who’s involved in a project like this, here are the names of the guys that we’re working with down in Nashville this week -
Justin Johnson (producer)
Paul Mills (mix)
Jerry McPherson (electric guitars)
Blair Masters (keys)
Matt Pierson (bass)
Chris Rodriguez (BGVs)
Carl Miner (acoustics)
So.. how can you follow along? Here are a few ways -
1. Connect with the Facebook page here – www.facebook.com/WorshipRises
2. Follow along on twitter @WorshipRises OR check the #WorshipRises hashtag
3. We’ll be live streaming some of the Nashville sessions at UStream
It might go without saying but, of course, we’d love for you to be praying for what’s happening. Our heart and dream in all of this is that God would be honoured and that the church would be given some new songs to sing. Pray for that to happen!
My friend and WorshipRises compadre Joshua Seller (blog|twitter) is releasing his new EP today and I really want to encourage you to check it out. Joshua is the worship leader at Harvest Bible Chapel in Oakville, ON and has become a good friend this year. He has a heart of gold, a love for the church and a real desire to see people of faith expressing their love for Christ through worship.
Check out this video to learn a bit more about Joshua and these songs -
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One really neat thing for me is that a song I co-wrote with Joshua called “Worship Rises” has been recorded for this EP. You might have seen my post a couple of weeks ago about a new thing that has been going on for the last little while where we’ve been gathering worship pastors/leaders from all over Canada to write songs for the church and “Worship Rises” is one of the songs that has come out of those sessions. We’ve been singing it at our church and the response has been fantastic – you can download a chord chart at this link if you’re interested in learning the song for yourself.
So check it out – Joshua Seller’s EP “Passionate Reverence” available on iTunes in Canada and the US.
Vicky Beeching (blog|twitter) is releasing her new CD “Eternity Invades” tomorrow and we’ve got 5 copies to give away. Check out this video to learn more about Vicky, her ministry and this album:
So since this CD releases tomorrow let’s make this a 24 hour giveaway, shall we? Entries will be open for the next 24 hours only and I’ll choose FIVE winners at 5:00 eastern tomorrow afternoon.
How do you enter?
1. Leave a comment on this post and tell me why you’re excited about winning this CD. Lots of comments are great but it will still only get you one entry in the contest
2. Post about the CD and the giveaway either on your own blog or twitter – make sure you include a link back to this blog when you are posting! Post a link to your post as a second comment and you’ll get entered TWICE in the contest.
Easy as that! Good luck! If you don’t win but are still interested in buying the CD, you can find all of the info you need at Vicky Beeching’s site – www.vickybeeching.com
UPDATE: Congratulations to Shannon Lewis, James Hanson, Gord Millar, Mike Vickers and Octavian Vlaicu on winning copies of the CD. I’ll get you connected with the good people at Integrity and they will work out the details to get you the music. Thanks for entering, everyone! And thanks to Vicky Beeching for stopping by and leaving a comment as well as tweeting about the giveaway.
Here is a responsive reading we used on Easter Sunday at Orangeville Baptist Church. We took the traditional Paschal greeting and added some resurrection scripture to it. Great way to start our services together.
Leader:
Christ is risen
Congregation:
He is risen indeed!
In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. 1 Peter 1:3
He is risen indeed!
Jesus has come that we may have life, and have it to the fullest. John 10:10
He is risen indeed!
If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! 2 Corinthians 5:17
He is risen indeed!
God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him. Acts 2:24
He is risen indeed!
Christ is risen
He is risen indeed!
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