A friend of mine is designing the first iPhone/iPod app specifically targeted to worship leaders and is looking for some input from you. Check out the survey and let him know what would be helpful –

Can you help us launch the first iPhone app geared towards worship leaders?

We are just about to go into some expensive design and development,
and we need some insight from our worship leader friends. (forward
this to those you may know lead worship and have an iPhone/iPod

Could you complete a quick survey for us-it shows a stripped down
version of our upcoming iPhone app, and we need your feedback/ideas.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=VoF0LXQT0mP_2bHdWNDXXUng_3d_3d

You can sign up to receive updates at www.songsuggest.net

Justin at Between Two Worlds has posted an incredible collection of recordings from Southern Seminary’s Institute for Christian Worship.

I won’t post the list here – go check out and list and spend some time with some of these recordings. What an incredible resource!! There are more lectures posted on the main site but here’s a list of people linked on Justin’s blog:

• David Peterson – author of “Engaging With God”
• John Frame – this guy’s name came up twice last week in conversations and this is number three!
• Harold Best – very well known and his book “Unceasing Worship” is incredible
• Michael Card
• Keith & Kristyn Getty
• Stuart Townend
• Bob Kauflin
• Kevin Twit
• Jason Harms

What are you waiting for?? Go, go, go!!

Choir isn’t something that we normally do at OBC but I thought we’d change this up a little this year and put together a worship choir for our Easter Sunday services. We opened it up to anyone in grade 6 & up and there’s no requirement on previous singing ability. My gut told me that we would get enough people interested in being a part of this that there would be a solid group of singers who would join our band for the services on that morning.

Well tonight we had our first rehearsal and had 40 – FORTY!! – people come and sing. I know that 40 isn’t a huge choir but for us trying something new it was pretty encouraging. Like I said on twitter tonight, I’m really glad that we decided to do this and I’m really glad that we’ve got five weeks to practice before the big day :)

Thanks to a shipping issue, I wasn’t able to give our choir the actual parts they’re going to be singing but instead I just printed out the hymn charts from CCLI and we ran through those at practice. We rehearsed four songs tonight which will be part of our service -

• Hosanna by Paul Baloche
• Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone) by Chris Tomlin
• Revelation Song by Kari Jobe
• Mighty To Save by Hillsong United

We’ll be adding a couple more songs to this list but doing that much was a big chunk for us to chew on tonight – especially ‘Revelation Song’. I told the group when we were done that this is not an easy song and even if we were doing it with one of our bands we would need several weeks of rehearsal to pull it off. I was very encouraged to hear them sing tonight.

So here we go. A new adventure for me and for OBC – we’ll see how this turns out but it will definitely give me some material for blogging over the next several weeks :)

I’m going to post more about this tomorrow or Tuesday but let me just say that the first step in the public launch of our new “connection process” was a massive success. Massive. Making the changes that we made for this Sunday are going to have big implications in the spiritual growth of our church. I am already very, very excited for next Sunday.

So we’re making some changes to Sunday morning that I’m excited about. We are still going to be focusing on gathering together to worship, to hear from God’s word and to encourage one another but the structure of Sunday morning is going to be changing a little bit for a few reasons.

To start, let me talk about what is typical for us right now. Our services run about 75-85 minutes and we do two identical services on Sunday morning. On a normal Sunday, this is what our service would look like - 

15 minutes – Opening/Gathering worship – call to worship, upbeat songs, scripture
10 minutes – Community – Announcements, offering, Q&A, congregational prayer
10 minutes – Worship continued – leading towards the message
40 minutes – Message – applicational preaching as part of a series of Sundays usually focused on a book or specific theme of scripture
10 minutes – Worship response – typically one or two songs, maybe some sort of interactive response 

If you’re part of a “typical” evangelical church then your service probably looks something like that too. We might change things around – add some time to one section or another, break the message in to sections with some worship response in between, etc – but as a general rule that’s a pretty good template for what Sunday morning looks like for us.

Over the past few months we’ve been talking about some stuff behind the scenes which started out as a discussion about how we help people move further along in their walk with Christ. As a church our mission is “to glorify God by making disciples who love God completely and others sacrificially.” That is the reason we exist. If we’re not doing that then we are wasting a whole lot of time. We are not called to be a social club, a counselling agency or a catalog of programs or services – we are called to make disciples of Christ who are increasing in their love for God and in their love for people. Because of that calling, we have to do everything we can to help people along in that journey – including on Sunday morning.

I won’t explain our new “connections process” in this post but let’s just say it’s having lots of impact in places that we weren’t anticipating – including in the design of Sunday morning. Starting this week we will be changing the layout of a typical service and it will look more like this - 

30 minutes – Worship – call to worship, creative expressions of worship, scripture
40 minutes – Message – applicational preaching
10 minutes – Response – this will include our “community” aspects – offering, prayer, Q&A – as well as a very focused opportunity for everyone to commit to taking a “next step” in their walk with Christ

Personally, I am super excited about this but there are three things in particular that I think are worth mentioning - 

1. 30 minutes of worship – This will not be easy for our people at first but I am PUMPED about this. This will give us the opportunity to move away from a “music is worship, worship is music” mentality on Sunday morning. Having this much time to fill will give us the freedom to be much more expressive in terms of the artistic presentation of our times of worship on Sunday morning. 
2. “Next Steps” – By being intentional about communicating the importance for all of us (not just spiritual seekers or new Christians) to be taking steps in our walk with Christ we again communicate the mission of the church as well as the need for worship to continue out of Sunday morning.
3. Implications – Don’t think that this doesn’t change things. There are lots of things to consider when making a change like this (even though it seems very simple) so we have had to make sure that we can clearly communicate the HOW and WHY and not just the WHAT of this change.

On Sunday during both of our services we did a church-wide survey where we asked people a bunch of yes/no questions which were all centred around the 4 I’s of our identity series – invest, invite, ignite, impact. We will be using this as a baseline to see where our church stands in terms of things like sharing their faith story with people who aren’t followers of Christ, whether or not people are able to express their love and worship of God on Sunday morning, whether they’re reading the Bible and praying on their own during the week, etc etc.

We’re excited to see the results and will be sharing them with our congregation later this spring. I’ll get a copy of the survey and post it here for those who would be interested in checking it out.

We got a quick demo this morning of a new thing called CCLI TV. Basically it is a video site with three channels.

First Take – New songs from artists and labels.
Instruct – Video workshops on practical topics for worship leaders.
Open Mic – New worship songs from churches.

I can see this being a big hit and very succesful IF they are able to keep the quality of submitted videos for the Open Mic channel high. I don’t want to have to wade through loads of bad homemade recordings of bad songs to find something that would be worth using at my church. I’m assuming they’ll do a top 10 list or most commented or something to keep the best songs accessible to lots of users on the site.

Go check it out – they’ve already got a bunch of videos there and you may find something really useful.

We’re doing a fun thing next month called “So You Think You Can Sing”. The idea is to do some training with our existing worship team vocalists but also give an opportunity for people in our church who enjoy singing to learn some stuff to help them along.

Do you enjoy singing? Want to pick up a few tips that will help you sing better? Come out to OBC on Saturday, March 1 from 9:15 – 11:30 a.m. for a singing workshop that will be hosted by Chris Vacher and Hannah Campbell. We’ll have a fun time of singing together, and we’ll learn how breathing, posture and support all help us to sing better. This is not a workshop for “the pros”! If you love to sing and want to have a fun time singing with others, please join us. The workshop is free, but you do need to register.

It’s going to be fun and helpful at the same time – and I’m sure we’ll get some new vocalist prospects as well!

I got an email yesterday from PraiseCharts.com and dig some digging on their site. They’ve recently released click tracks for popular worship songs to go along with their piano/lead sheets and also orchestration for some stuff. I bought the click/track loop for “Everlasting God” and had some fun playing around with it yesterday – I think people are going to find these really helpful.

I didn’t listen to the click and compare it to the CD arrangement but I’m assuming that they used the original as their guide for the loops & click. I have a bit of a tough time locking myself in to a pre-assigned arrangement like I have to do when I use a loop track but this one (and I’ll assume that the rest are equally as good) is done really and I could see us using one or two of these a week in our services.

Like any click/loop track, the file is in stereo. If you pan the audio hard to one side you’ll get only click and no loops. If you pan it hard to the other side you’ll get only loops and no click. If you haven’t used click before the idea is that you send this stereo signal to the board and have it split to two channels – click in one channel, loops in the other. Your sound guy can then send click through monitors (you sort of have to use in-ears to make this work) to your drummer and send loops to monitors as well as to your main speakers. Obviously, don’t have him send click to the mains – your people will be wondering what that weird sound is and they’ll start looking to see who’s playing the castanets! :)

I know some bands where ALL of the players like to have click, I know other bands where ONLY the drummer wants click. You have to play around with it and see what works best for you. I know that when I’m leading and I’m thinking about playing guitar and singing, I don’t want click – I leave it up to my drummer to keep us in time. If I’m playing on a team as either a guitarist or piano player but not singing, I like to have some click just to really settle in to the groove and work closely with the drummer.

Ok so how do you actually run the click track during your service? There are probably 3 main ways -

1. Have the loop/click tracks on a CD with a numbered track list close at hand. Have a CD player that is either accessible by your drummer or by your main sound guy if he really knows the band and you really, really, r-e-a-l-l-y trust him! When it’s time to play a song in your set that has click and loops, they can just hit play on the CD player and let it run. Obviously the downside with this is that sometimes CD’s skip, sometimes CD players get knocked over, sometimes a wrong button is pushed, etc etc – lots of things can go wrong!
2. The second way to do it would be the same idea but instead of using a CD, use an iPod. Load all of your click/loop tracks into one playlist and before your service starts you can just make a custom playlist of the songs that you are using on that day. If you are in a band that travels for lots of events you may want to have a standard 30- or 45- or 60-minute set that you are really familiar with and you could have playlists on your iPod for each of those different sets. Again it would be up to your drummer or sound guy to operate the iPod during the service. Of course this takes some preparation and practice – you have to make sure that everyone knows what song is coming next, everyone needs to be ready as soon as the count-in happens, etc.
3. The third way (which is probably most common now) is to run loop and click tracks from a laptop on stage. Again, same basic idea as using an iPod but the ability to use more tracks and customize exactly what is happening when increases this way. If you are familiar with any kind of multi-track software you know that you could have, for example, 16 tracks worth of backing material for a particular song – some drum loops, keyboard tracks, synth pads, maybe even some BGV’s – and depending on the setting that you’re actually playing that day, you may not need some of the tracks. By just muting or unmuting certain tracks you can really customize the loop to suit your situation. This method is probably a little overkill for what most worship teams are looking for but if you’re wanting to use loops on a regular basis you should check it out.

So yeah – check out PraiseCharts.com and their click tracks. If you’re interested in exploring this idea of using clicks and loops in your worship services you’ll find some good material there to work with.

I’ve had the opportunity to be emailing back and forth with Mark Waltz from Granger Community Church over the past little while and thought I’d pass along the story I told him about our amazing first impression when my wife, my oldest daughter and I visited Granger on our way back from Chicago.

My wife and I had the pleasure of visiting GCC back in June of 2006. I had made the trip down to Willow for the arts conference and on my way back decided to visit a few churches that we had been following. It was Father’s Day weekend and GCC was in the middle of the iPod series – I think the message that day was on iLove but I’m not 100%. I think it’s important to note that this was my first Father’s Day as a dad, our first trip away as a family and our first time leaving our daughter in the care of total strangers at another church.

Anyways, we had our 8-month old (at the time) daughter with us. We came in to the building and found a check-in station. The guy there asked for my last name and when I gave it he said “Chris?” I was a little surprised that I was already in your database but he asked if I was on the GCC mailing list and said that all of that info is connected. That was pretty impressive.

A nursery volunteer met us at the check-in station and brought us downstairs where we met some other volunteers before heading up for the service – which was fantastic. That was the morning that one of your music guys sang “Fix You” – gave me chills.

After the service we got Avery and then had a quick tour thanks to some of your production guys. We thanked them, grabbed some lunch and headed back to the hotel. When we went to get her ready for her nap she needed a diaper change. Okay – this is the good part!! :) On the back of Avery’s diaper was a bright pink sticker that said “I’ve Been Changed!” with a time and the initials of a volunteer. This sounds really silly but that was the most impressive thing of our visit to GCC. The amount of care, concern and intentionality that sticker communicated was through the roof for me as a new, overprotective dad.

As I said before, that small sticker impressed me so much that it is still the main thing I talk about when GCC comes up in conversation. I’m sorry to say that it wasn’t the lights or the video screen or Mark’s preaching or the coffee or the greeters or any of that which impressed me the most about GCC – although how you guys use all of things is incredible. It was the care for my daughter communicated through a silly little sticker that really showed the heart behind what you guys do.

Ever had a really great first impression?