This looks pretty interesting – Uncover the Color.

From their website:

Uncover the Color is a collection of artists committed to creating high quality art in a wide variety of visual, auditory and live media. Whether in a worship gathering, in print or part of an original project, we believe that art is meant to reflect the deep creative heart of God. Our artists seek to challenge The Church into deeper expression and authentic experiences through a renewed depth in the creative process.

Our website features a combination of completed works, elements for use in your original works, services and training tools – all designed to help you do what you do more effectively.

My friend Joshua Seller has been working on a live hymns album with his church Harvest Bible Chapel this year. Here’s what Joshua had to say about this project -

We are excited to release Harvest Bible Chapel’s second live worship project capturing 11 amazing hymns of our faith.

The vision behind this project was to align with our year long theme, “Equipping the Saints”. The past year as a church, the goal was to not only know what God’s Word says, but apply it to our lives in such a way that we actually grow in godliness. Growing in godliness begins with a right view of God and that includes worship. This project was recorded with the hopes that it would become a rich resource for you and your family as you sing back to God what you have come to know through His Word to be true. And in singing biblical, theologically correct truths back to Him you can know your times of worship will be meaningful as He has intended worship to be. The hymns are a great place to find some of the greatest truths and the best part is these truths can be sung at anytime. Its our prayer that this album would be played, replayed and pass down to your family as you grow in godliness.

I’ve got five copies of this CD to give away. I’ve been listening to it for the last week or so and these guys have done a great job. I think you will really enjoy these songs! To be entered in to the draw, leave a comment here and let me know what your favourite hymn is. You can get more entried in the giveaway by posting something to twitter or your blog or facebook – just leave a second, third, fourth comment with links to where you’ve posted it.

Good luck! We’ll draw a winner one week from today, June 2nd.

UPDATE: We have our winners! Congratulations to Dan, Jonathan, Erin, Mark and Aaron on winning the CD! Thanks to everyone who entered. Another giveaway is coming very soon!

As a follow-up to this last post I thought it might be helpful to post a video from Bluetree (facebook|twitter) telling the story behind their song “God of this City” -

A couple of weeks ago this blog rolled over the 100,000 visitor mark. I have no idea if that’s good for a blog like this or not but the point is that there are more than a few of you reading this and I think that is awesome! Thanks for encouraging me along the way, helping me to learn, pointing me in new directions. Looking forward to seeing where we go next with this whole thing.

PS Contrary to previous reports, there will be no free Tim Horton’s given in celebration of this monumental occasion. Anyone who objects to that can come visit me in Orangeville and I’ll take you out for coffee. Deal!

This headline on CNN.com grabbed my attention this week: “Christian band: We were spared death by Myanmar general” I’ve been a fan of Bluetree for a few years (if they are new to you, you may not know that they are the original writers of Chris Tomlin’s “God of this City” and their version is pretty incredible, too) and I was amazed to hear what they went through on a recent trip.

Bluetree’s lead singer, Aaron Boyd, added  a video to the band’s facebook page and you can watch it here – http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1337823690637

All in all, this is a pretty incredible story. It’s hard to believe that this news isn’t spreading through twitter/blogs/facebook a little faster than it has. Why not grab those two links and post them where people can find them?

We are in a pretty sweet season at OBC and our Sunday mornings are hitting a really nice groove. We’re not satisfied, of course, with just letting things go well but it is definitely encouraging to have bands that sound good, tech people who know what they’re doing, and services that bring glory to God.

Here’s what we did on Sunday -

Romans 5:12-21- “Pandemic”
You Are – Mark Roach – F
Holy Is The Lord – Chris Tomin – G
Meet & Greet/Announcements
Congregational Prayer
Romans 5:12-21
What The Lord Has Done – Reuben Morgan – C
Psalm 51:1-3, 10-12, Psalm 32:1-2, 10-11
Worship Rises – Joshua Seller & Chris Vacher – A
Message – “Pandemic”
Jesus Paid It All – Kristian Stanfill* – Bb

Overall, we were trying to make a few things happen in this service: 

• Last weekend we ended with a real tone of celebration and in our call to worship I encouraged people to continue in that. You may not have heard “You Are” before but if your church likes to sing Tomlin or Matt Redman, you should definitely check out Mark Roach‘s music. 

   

   

• The passage from Romans that we were focusing on led us to spend some time in confession during our service. We had our pastor come and lead our congregation in prayer and then read the passage he was preaching from – we don’t always do this. We sang two songs between that spot and his message and as part of that section we read together from two confession psalms. I had people take a few moments and reflect on that last verse of Psalm 32 and meditate on the words – “Rejoice in the LORD and be glad, you righteous; sing, all you who are upright in heart!”

   

• The end of our service was just a great opportunity to respond to this truth from Romans 5 that our righteousness is from Christ alone, not from our own good works, our own keeping the law, not even from our faith in Christ – our righteousness is a “free gift” given by God for our good and His glory. “Jesus Paid It All” was a great song to close our service and people definitely made the connect from the truth of that passage to the truth of the words.

   

Great morning. You can read more Sunday recaps like this over at TheWorshipCommunity.com.

*I realize that Kristian isn’t the writer of this song but it was his version that we played. Most people would be familiar with the original hymn and this version has an extra chorus added by Alex Nifong. You can find it on the “Everything Glorious” CD from Passion.

On Monday a bunch of friends gathered together at my house to pray for the ministry of WorshipRises (facebook|twitter) and dream about what might be next with this unique bunch of artists. I’m privileged to be a part of this group and can’t wait to see what God is going to do next.

The first big “next” thing is that we’ll have four songs available for you to hear very soon. Very soon. Check out the facebook page or the twitter account to get the latest info. You can also fill in your email info below and we’ll get you details as soon as they’re available. We promise to not sell your private information to the facebook mafia.

Here’s video of my friend Joshua Seller singing a song that he & I co-wrote together:

This song “Worship Rises” has become the anthem for a movement of worship pastors/leaders across Canada who are writing songs together to share with the church. We will be releasing a 4-song EP (including “Worship Rises”) very soon and I can’t wait for you to hear the songs.

Until then, you can get more info on WorshipRises here –

Facebook – www.facebook.com/WorshipRises
Twitter – www.twitter.com/WorshipRises

Here’s a preview of the upcoming Hillsong live album “A Beautiful Exchange” –

Additional resources for this song here – http://fm.thevillagechurch.net/blog/worship/?p=168