Don’t ever believe the lie that “old songs” have nothing left for the church today.

“…for my reward is giving glory to you.”

For those of you playing at home, you may or may not know that we are anxiously awaiting the birth of Vacher child number four. We’ve got 3 girls and are excited (I think) about bringing home a boy.

If things don’t go on their own, my wife will be induced Wednesday morning. You can be sure that pictures will be soon to follow.

(And, no, I won’t be posting many labour updates from twitter but you may want to follow along – @chrisfromcanada)

Many of you have been following the story of WorshipRises (facebook|twitter) over the past year or so. You’ve heard about our songwriting days, the EP that was released in July and how churches all over North America are singing these songs written for the church by Canadian worship leaders.

From the very beginning, my heart in all of this is that WorshipRises should be a national movement with national impact. I didn’t want WorshipRises to become a Canadian thing that only happened in Ontario :) I know how much you westerners love stuff like that! Ha!

So.. what’s next for us?

On Monday, October 25 we will be hosting our next songwriting day, gathering together Canadian worship leaders to write songs for the church. This will be the fifth time we’ve run an event like this and this one is going to be very different than the previous four. Instead of hosting one event in one location, we are stepping out in a huge way and we will be running EIGHT events across Canada on the same day.

We have had conversations with worship leaders all over Canada who want to be part of these events but because of travel, budget, etc they haven’t been able to attend the events in Ontario. We think it’s time to make these opportunities available to more people across the country who are passionate about God, about the church and about worship.

Here are the cities where we have confirmed events -

• Ajax, ON
• Waterloo, ON
• Barrie, ON
• Stoney Creek, ON
• Chatham, ON
• Moncton, NB
• Winnipeg, MB

If you’re keeping score (and can count) you’ll notice that list only have seven cities. You are right. We are still hopeful that we’ll be able to add one more event out in western Canada.

What are some of the dates and details you need to be aware of if you are interested in participating?

Registration? When is that?

• Final event cities and venues will be announced the first week of September
• Registration will open at 9 AM Eastern on Wednesday, September 8
• Registration is free, attendees are responsible to cover transportation and meal costs for the day
• Registration is limited for each site so be sure to register early

Who can attend?

• WorshipRises songwriting days are designed for Canadian worship leaders who are passionate about the church and seeing its members engaged in God-focused, Spirit-driven worship
• Please pass this email to other worship leaders who you think may be interested in attending

We definitely have the sense that this will be a significant day for the movement of WorshipRises but also for the church in Canada. Our prayer continues to be that God would unite the church in Canada and that our entire country would be flooded with worship.

UPDATE: Registration is now open. You can get signed up here – http://october25.eventbrite.com

The last four Sundays of our Romans series has been spent in Romans 8 and it’s not hard to figure out why. This chapter is jam-packed with incredible theology and is deserving of deep study.

Consider for a moment the implications of any of these snippets taken from Romans 8:

• there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus
• if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness
• those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God
• the Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children
• our present sufferings are not worth comparing wtih the glory that will be revealed in us
• hope that is seen is no hope at all
• we hope for what we do not yet have
• in all things God works for the good of those who love him
• if God is for us, who can be against us?
• it is God who justifies
• in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us
• …nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Those are all taken from a single chapter of Scripture! How could we NOT give several weeks of emphasis to this passage??

Here’s what our service looked like on Sunday -

• Welcome/Announcements
• Q&A w/ Paul Sadler, our global ministry partner in Japan
• Call to Worship – 1 Chronicles 16
• Jesus, You Are Worthy – Brenton Brown, Don Williams – C
• Our God – Chris Tomlin, Matt Redman, Jonas Myrin, Jesse Reeves - A
• In Christ Alone – Keith Getty, Stuart Townend – E
• Message – Romans 8:31-39 “When You’re Under Attack”
• Our God – Chris Tomlin, Matt Redman, Jonas Myrin, Jesse Reeves – A
• Everlasting God – Brenton Brown, Ken Riley – A

A few hilights from this past Sunday -

1. It was great having Paul Sadler, his family and some Japanese students here with us this weekend. Paul & his family are ministering in Tsukuba City, Japan and are global ministry partners of our church. We love what they are doing in a place that is very resistant to the gospel. Having them here this weekend to encourage them and hear an update was great for our church family. Also great to have Paul preach on Sunday morning and share some thoughts from this incredible passage of Scripture.

2. I’d been holding on to “Our God” from the new Passion album for a while, knowing that it would fit perfectly with the service this Sunday. I was right – people were definitely familiar with the song and really sang out. To teach it, we started with the bridge – “If our God is for us, who could ever stop us / If our God is with us, what could stand against.” We repeated that line with a little space in between four times so that people were familiar with it. We then hit the intro, to the verse and chorus a couple of times and then back to the bridge. When you’re teaching a  new song, don’t feel you always have you teach the chorus first.
3. I began our songs by encouraging our church to think about what it means to ascribe glory to God. We see that phrase a few times in Scripture – “Ascribe to the Lord the glory due His name.” This ascribing is not about bragging, beating our chests, frothing at the mouth with how great our God is compared to all of those other gods out there but is instead about lifting God up, increasing His greatness, making Him known with the hope that one day the whole world would know of our God’s greatness, majesty, strength and power. I read several verses of 1 Chronicles 16 as a way of demonstrating what this ascribing looks like. The songs we sang, the prayers we prayed together were all examples of ascribing glory to God.

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You can read a bunch more posts like this over at TheWorshipCommunity.com

I wish I was savvy enough to do one of those cool “this is what’s coming!” screenshots that gets everyone excited about a new design.. but I’m not. Actually it’s because of my design un-savvy-ness that I’m using the Standard Theme to rebuild the blog from scratch and bring a whole new design to this bad boy.

Coming soon – even without the super slick screenshot of awesomeness.

SongSuggest is an iPhone app written for worship leaders by worship leaders. I’ve got it and use it fairly often. I blogged about it a while ago and encouraged you to check it out. Apparently, you did – with 12,000 downloads this year they have released a desktop version of the app so that everyone can have access to it.

Check out this video -

If you want to get a copy of the desktop app (available for Windows, Mac and Linux) the link is here – http://bit.ly/cbsavS

Lighthouse or Yacht Club. Both?

We released the WorshipRises EP last month and we are very encouraged to hear how many churches are singing these songs on Sunday morning. If you’ve got the EP and are looking for resources to help lead the songs with your band at your church, our friends at PraiseCharts have what you need.

There is a page setup with chord charts and lead sheets for the four songs from the EP and you should find what you need there.

Last week I had the chance to attend a satellite location of the Willow Creek Association Global Leadership Summit (say that five times fast!) and really enjoyed my time. The content of the sessions was great, the venue was perfect, the hosts were very kind and the guys I got to with were top notch. If you’ve spent any time on twitter in the last few days, you’ve definitely seen the quotable moments from the talks by Tony Dungy, Andy Stanley, Jack Welch, Bill Hybels or any of the other great speakers.

(Quick way to find some great Summit hilights is to search for the #wcagls hashtag on twitter and see what pops up.)

I don’t want to re-hash everything that happened during the two days because you’ve likely experienced it yourself or you’re sick of hearing about it from people who were there. So.. Let me give you three quick hilights and then talk about what really impacted me.

1. Bill Hybels can bring it. Even in a talk where he’s focusing on four simple leadership concepts he is able to dig deep and have solid impact.
2. Jeff Manion can preach. His leadership sermon from Numbers 11 was one of the best I’ve heard – and the meaning was probably increased for me since we had worked through that passage as part of a sermon series here about a year and a half ago.
3. Daniel Pink gets it. I had seen a couple videos of him giving talks before but I was really impressed with his ability to deliver content in a way that is engaging and memorable.

Okay.. so what was the bigger takeaway for me? The thing that I’ve been thinking about the last few days is how engaged the audience at my satellite location was with the content being provided by video. We were watching people speak or sing on a screen and yet the interaction between the audience and the presenter was very similar to what I would have expected if the content was being presented live.

During the singing, the crowd sang along. When the song got loud, the crowd got loud. When the song was done, the crowd clapped just like the live audience. During the talks, when the speakers got fired up the crowd would shout back their encouragement. During a couple of strong moments, the crowd actually cheered and clapped when the speaker made a great point. At the end of the talks, the speakers got a nice round of applause while they went back to their seat.

I don’t think that we should dismiss this too quickly or just accept it as normal. But.. think about it. This HAS become normal.

We have become so used to interacting with content on a screen that we now treat it in a way very similar to content that is presented live right in front of us.

Even though we know the band can’t see us clapping for them, the speaker can’t hear us cheering them on or thanking them at the end of their talk with applause, we go ahead and do it.

So  here are a couple of questions that I’m left with after this -

1. As a video audience, do we interact with the screen content in this way so that we feel included in the event in the same way that the live audience does? Is it about making ourselves part of the genuine experience?

    

2. For churches who use video (either as a satellite location or with online experiences) how are you leveraging the emotional connection that the audience is feeling with your content so that follow-up/next steps happen in the same way they would for the live audience?

In all honesty, this was the biggest takeaway for me from the Leadership Summit this year. As tech-oriented as I am, I was very much surprised by the willingness of the crowd to have this emotional investment in what was being presented in the way that they did. There is, of course, the whole discussion about the need and importance of having what’s presented on screen being high quality, engaging and relevant – and the need for that is probably higher than it is for a live audience.

Anyone else attend a Leadership Summit site and find the same thing? I’d love to hear some more thoughts on this.