3 Song Mini-Set

I know that I haven’t done a worship confessional in a while but I wanted to fill you in on something that worked GREAT this past Sunday. Normally we do two extended sets of worship during our services but for a few reasons we only had time for two songs plus a chorus tag or something like that added in between.

Thematically, we were focusing on the grace of God and we were able to establish that pretty strongly in the first set through songs and a responsive reading. We got to this second set and I wanted to move people from a place of grasping the GREATNESS of God and moving them to thinking about the GREATNESS of His grace. And yes – I had two songs to do that :) No problem, right??

So here’s what I did -

First, we tore the band down. Instead of our set up from the first set – guitar, bass, drums, four vocalists – we had me on acoustic, one of our singers with a shaker and our drummer. The other singer and I were sitting on stools on the front edge of the stage with our drummer in the centre behind us.

We started the set by leading the congregation in prayer – giving them a chance to thank God for who He is and what He has done in their lives this past week then moving to a time of confession and expressing our dependance on Him. Out of that we moved straight in to “Everlasting God” – this song is a huge favourite of ours and it goes over very well every time we do it. We started and finished the song with the pre-chorus section – “Our God, You reign forever/Our hope, our strong deliverer” – just to emphasive our dependance on God.

From that we moved in to the chorus of “For The Glory Of It All” by David Crowder. This is a song we’ve done a few times but by just repeating the chorus we made a quick transition from the big-ness of God coming to earth, to be among us, for His glory.

Oh, The glory of it all is You came here
for the rescue of us all
that we may live for the glory of it all

Oh You are here with redemption for us all
that we may live for the glory of it all

Awesome. Such a simple declaration of the greatness and the glory of God coming to earth for His own glory and so that we may also experience the fullness of who God is.

Out of that song we went straight in to “The Wonder Of Your Cross” by Robin Mark. This song is new for us as a congregational worship song but almost everyone was familiar with it when we started doing it a few months ago so it goes over HUGE every time we do it. And this Sunday was no exception. We moved the lead vocal from me to the female singer just to give a different sound and it was incredible. The little instrumental melody line that happens in the intro is also a variation on the theme that happens in “Everlasting God” so it worked together great.

We also did all 3 of these songs in the key of A so I didn’t have to worry about any key changes, etc during the whole run.

Okay – recap -

• Prayer
• Everlasting God – beginning and ending with the pre-chorus
• For The Glory Of It All – chorus only repeated twice
• Wonder Of Your Cross – female lead vocal

It was one of those beautiful moments where we were able to move people intellectually and emotionally very quickly while creating an environment that really encouraged people to respond in worship. And that is exactly what they did! At both services we had people sitting at the beginning of this set and at the first service only a few stood but the expression of worship in the room was unreal. At our second service people were standing with hands raised and were in genuine worship as a response to the GREATNESS of God and His grace.

So there you go – I know that sometimes you don’t have much time for singing but you still want to do something that will have lots of impact. That’s an example of somethign we tried which worked really well.