“Recording 48 Tracks with Studio One and the FireStudio”

If you are thinking about doing any kind of live tracking of your church services, you need to watch this video from PreSonus to see how you can do it without spending a ton of cash. These are solid products and pretty straightforward to use. We are hoping to install a similar system to this (24 channels instead of 48) to be able to live track our services on Sunday morning.

Videos for Worship

Someone (sorry, I don’t remember who!) linked this site on twitter and I thought it was pretty interesting. If you do any kind of “mood” or architectural projection in your sanctuary or if you are just looking for some video content to use in your worship services, check out this channel on Vimeo – Videos for Worship. Very cool.

Here are a couple of examples –

Check it out. There is some very, very good stuff here. Awesome to see people producing incredible content and then sharing it for the benefit of other churches.

Great work, guys!

John 1:29 – ‘the scapegoat’

We wrapped up our “His Glory Appears” series on December 27 by talking about the implications of John the Baptist’s proclamation of Jesus being the Lamb of God, come to take away the sins of the world from John 1:29. As we were talking about ideas for the service, I suggested that we could film part of the message at a local goat farm.

After a few phone calls and gathering some people with the right equipment, we set off to spend a couple of hours with our new friend Eric the farmer and some of his goats. We had a great time putting this video together and the response from our congregation was that it was very helpful in bringing home the point.

Here’s the video we used -

If you’re thinking about exploring the use of video with your church, don’t be scared! Don’t feel like you have to go “all in” right from the bat with full video messages, HD cameras, big lighting and major editing. For this shoot, we used four people (including Earl on screen), two cameras (our church owns a Canon HV20 and we also used a similar camera belonging to a friend), 90 minutes or so of filming, 3-4 hours of editing and a bunch of awesome goats.

Does this mean we’re video experts? Heck no! But it does mean we’re willing to try new things (or at least “new for us” things) to help communicate with our people.

Don’t be afraid! Give it a shot!

“Just Come Home” – video from NewSpring Church

Are you kidding me?

John 1:29 – “the scapegoat”

As part of Earl’s message on Sunday, December 27th we showed this video to illustrate the concept of the scapegoat. We were finishing up a series through the first chapter of John and wanted to help people get an understanding of Jesus “taking away” the sin of the world.

This was a great way to help people get the point. We never would have been able to do this live in the room, the shoot was fairly straightforward and thankfully the goats were very cooperative!

Northland Church – “In The Light”

I was talking with a friend from my church the other day and he said “So, I bet that since you’re connected with all of these other worship leaders around the world through your blog and twitter that it must be hard to get stuck in a rut?” I had to tell him about a time not too long ago where I was very much in a rut with our Sunday morning services and needed to do a bit of soul searching (and Scripture searching) to get things moving.

But.. I get the point of what he is saying. Our connected-ness has allowed for inspiration to flow freely from artist to artist, church to church, all over the world. As an example, someone linked a video this morning on twitter and mentioned that they were impressed with the choir lighting and mics. I watched the video, appreciated his comment and then started looking through some other videos that the church had posted, leading me to this one –

Beautiful. Simple. Poetic. The talent is undeniable and the execution of the moment is bang on. As a nice little package, pretty inspiring to see what this church in Florida is able to do with a spark of an idea and some incredible talent.

YouVersion Bible Reading Plan – convert RSS to email

Lots of people are jumping on board the YouVersion Bible Reading Plans right now and one question that has been coming up is how to get those daily readings delivered to your email inbox. Right now on the YouVersion site there are three options – visit the site every day, use a mobile app or have the content delivered by RSS.

Want to have the daily readings delivered right to your email? Check out this video and follow a few easy steps to make it happen -

Here’s helpful step-by-step instructions to go along with the video -

1. Go to www.youversion.com and create an account.
2. Click on the “New Reading Plans” button and find the plan you’d like to follow this year.
3. Look for the orange RSS icon, right-click and copy that RSS feed address.
4. Go to www.notify.me and create an account.
5. On the “Sources” page, paste the RSS feed address you copied from YouVersion and select email as your preferred platform.

Audrey Assad – Winter Snow

Lots of you have heard this song already because it’s on Chris Tomlin’s new Christmas CD (and if you haven’t got that yet, you are missing out!) but I wanted to share this with you. We did this song last Sunday at OBC and everyone loved it.

This is “Winter Snow” by Audrey Assad (web|twitter)- enjoy!

REPOST: Christmas Eve service ideas

I know lots of you are looking for Christmas Eve service ideas right now. I know because the Google search stats for this post are going through the roof I thought I’d make it easy for lots of you and repost this, basically a detailed recap of our Christmas Eve service with links to some resource. Hopefully it’s helpful for you!

The original post – http://www.chrisfromcanada.com/worship/christmas-eve-service-breakdown/

Normally I do my best to give you some thoughts related to Sunday morning and a bit of a confessional of how things went. This week I want to do something a little different. I know that there are lots of you who are looking for very specific ideas at certain times of year – Christmas Eve, Good Friday, Easter Sunday, etc – so I thought that I would give you a breakdown of our Christmas Eve service with some explanation of every single element.

If you are looking for Christmas Eve service ideas, hopefully this is helpful for you!

We did two Christmas Eve services this year – both of them were identical in content, lasted about 60 minutes and were family-friendly. We tell people that kids are welcome to come but we have no childcare. Because we know that kids will be in our auditorium, we program the service a little bit different from Sunday morning – the whole service moves unannounced, there is more sitting/standing than normal, we don’t have any silent prayer, etc etc.

Having said all of that, here is what we DID do for Christmas Eve this year -

Theme
Our theme for the service was “A King Is Born” taken from the verses in Matthew where the Magi come to Herod in search of the one who has been born “King of the Jews.” We bought pre-produced banners and invite cards from SermonView.com which helped with our set design and in our word-of-mouth advertising. They were a great company to work with and the finished product which came from them was awesome. We bought two of the “A King Is Born” banners and one each of the “Follow the Star” and “Journey Afar” banners. We hung the banners along the back of the stage and used the customized invite cards at all of our December services and events, encouraging people to take them and invite friends and neighbours to come out.

Stage
We normally don’t go big on set design and staging at OBC, mostly because we are a multi-use facility and our Sunday morning worship happens in a gym. But for Christmas Eve we normally put up some decor, flowers, candles, etc etc. In terms of staging our band, we had two different setups. For the opening Christmas songs we had three singers out front and a band with piano, keys, bass and drums. For the middle section, I moved off piano and played guitar and we also brought two readers on stage for the scripture passages.

Service
Here’s what our service outline looked like -

Welcome & Intro
Advent Reading – Luke 1:26-33
Lighting of Christ Candle
O Come All Ye Faithful
Hark The Herald Angels Sing
Angels We Have Heard On High
What Child Is This
Reading 1 – Matthew 1:18-25
Come Worship The King with video
Reading 2 – Luke 2:8-14
Emmanuel
Video – God Is With Us
Joy To The World
Message – Our King Has Arrived”
Silent Night

Details
I’d love to give some more detail on each of these elements. If you are looking for a complete pre-packaged service to use on Christmas Eve, feel free to use this as a template. We found that the balance of songs, video and reading worked great for us this year and the response we have received has been very positive.

Welcome & Intro
Usually it is a good idea to set up the content and theme of a service like this so that people are on track right from the beginning. We had one of our staff members welcome people (we get lots of visitors on Christmas Eve), remind them to turn off cell phones and then read the passage from Luke where the angel Gabriel comes to Mary and explains that the baby she will carry is from God – that he will be great, the Son of the Most High and that His kingdom will never end. Right from the beginning of the night we wanted to hit on our theme – “A King Is Born”. We then lit the centre candle, representing that Christ has come and is in our midst.

O Come All Ye Faithful
We did this song in G and did all three verses. The arrangement was pretty traditional and we used a lead sheet that I got from CCLI SongSelect. A great opener to a Christmas Eve service and very familiar to people whether they are regular church-going folk or not.

Hark The Herald Angels Sing
We dropped down to the key of E for the next three songs. The traditional arrangement of this song is pretty technical, lots of accidentals and relative chords but we decided to go with a simpler version musically and used an arrangement from our friends at PraiseCharts. I’ve been using lead sheets and click tracks from these guys for about a year and they always do good stuff. The big change we made from this arrangement is that we didn’t do the bridge. But it was really nice to have the simplified chords where the melody really came to the foreground.

Angels We Have Heard On High
We used another arrangement from PraiseCharts on this song which is based on the Third Day version of the song. I really liked the simplified verses and how the melody of the “Gloria” carried really nicely in this one. It was a simple arrangement that was easy on the band – especially the bass player! – compared to the traditional version.

What Child Is This
Up to this point in the service we had people standing so we got them to sit for this song. Such a great melody and incredible words. One of our vocalists, Rebecca, was featured on the first and third verses and did a great job. No tricky stuff on the arrangement for this one – we did it as traditional as you can and just let the melody and words ring out. Beautiful.

Reading 1 – Matthew 1:18-25
Here is where the service took a bit of a transition. We had been completely participatory up to this point but we shifted to a bit more of a presentation here. We had two readers come and tell part of the Christmas story, beginning with the passage in Matthew. We made sure that we chose people who were confident and could speak well and we had them come early to check their mics and read through the passages for us.

Come Worship The King with video
Okay – this one is going to take some explaining. There is a great CD that came out this year called “Glory Revealed” – if you don’t have it, buy it. It is good stuff. One of the songs on the CD, done by Michael W. Smith and Shane & Shane, is this song “Come Worship The King” taken from Jude 25 – “to the only God our Savior be glory, majesty, power and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forevermore! Amen.” The song is beautiful and, again, fit perfectly with our theme. We did this as a performance song but I wanted to have a visual element included in the song so that people were not just listening but watching as well. I did some hunting online and found this great video called “He Is Here” – it was perfect! We muted the audio from the video and played “Come Worship The King” live – it is amazing how some of the scenes in the video match up with the lyrics of the songs. It was a perfect element of our service.

Reading 2 – Luke 2:8-14
As soon as the song/video was finished we went straight back to the scripture readers and they did their second reading.

Emmanuel
This song by Hillsong was, again, perfectly in line with our theme of “A King Is Born” and was pulled off beautifully by two sisters from our church who were home for Christmas. They did a beautiful job on this simple song and conveyed the power of the lyrics incredibly.

Video – God Is With Us
This was the only video-only element of our service and was used as a buffer out of the “presentation” portion of our service and back to the “participatory” elements. Again, I found this one at WorshipHouseMedia and it did a great job of reinforcing the idea that our king has come, that God is with us.

Joy To The World
If you watch the video, you might be wondering how we transitioned from that element to Joy To The World. We had Rebecca, one of our vocalists, do a quick transition asking people to stand and reminding them that because God is, indeed, with us, we can sing with joy. We did this song in C and used an arrangement from the PraiseCharts peeps based on the Casting Crowns version from their recent Christmas album. The arrangement was simple enough to learn quickly but had some nice musical moments that made the song work really well.

Message – “Our King Has Arrived”
Our pastor does not speak long on Christmas Eve but he makes every moment count. I appreciate what he has to say every year to help people really appreciate the momentous occasion of Christ, the Son of God, coming to earth to dwell among His people. It is a significant event which must be celebrated well!

Silent Night
This is the hilight of our Christmas Eve service every year and has become a great tradition. We always close with this song by candlelight. Our pastor will finish his message, light a candle off the Christ candle we lit at the beginning of the night and then the flame of the candle is passed to the congregation. We place candles on every chair so within a few minutes our entire auditorium is completely dark but lit up by hundreds of candles held up around the room. It is an amazing sight and those of us on stage get the best view of it all! We normally do Silent Night in Bb and use a very simplified, traditional arrangement. At the end of the song we go back to verse 1 and do it completely a cappella. Hearing peoples’ voices fill the room with the sight of the candles and the emotion of the moment is a pretty incredible thing.

So there you go. That is all there is to know about our Christmas Eve services. I could give a bunch more info on stage layout, lighting cues, transitions, etc and if that stuff would be helpful for you please just ask. Every situation is unique and you’ll have to figure out the best way to pull this off if you’re going to use this material but I’d be more than happy to fill you in on how we did some of that stuff.

The response that we’ve had since Christmas Eve has been pretty powerful – lots of people making comments about the impact of the service, how the whole experience really worked together and how God used the music and the readings and the message in great ways. Also some stories of people who were visiting and taken back by the content and how it was presented. We are praying for relationships to continue and for God to continue to use what we are doing for His glory. What an awesome privilege!

10 Free Christmas Worship songs

The fine people over at WorsthipTogether.com have put together a tasty little Christmas treat for all you worship leaders who are starting to freak out that Christmas Eve is only a few sleeps away! They’ve put FREE sheet music online for 10 songs that you can use this year for your Christmas series or Christmas Eve. Check it out here – www.worshiptogether.com

The songs they’ve featured -

• Emmanuel (Hallowed Manger Ground) – Chris Tomlin
• All Creation Sing (Joy to the World) – Fee
• Sing – Josh Wilson
• Born in Bethlehem – Third Day
• Here Is Our King – David Crowder Band
• Glory in the Highest – Chris Tomlin
• Silent Night (Emmanuel) – Matt Maher
• Joy Has Dawned – Keith Getty & Stuart Townend
• Love Came Down – Ben Cantelon
• Born That We May Have Life – Chris Tomlin

There is some goooood stuff here! Thanks Worship Together folks!

Video – Listening Skills

One of the big steps in maturity for a musician is learning how to listen. Listening skills are just as important as playing ability and this video talks about how it applies to worship teams. Lots more good stuff like this over at www.musicademy.com –

Worship Rises – video

Over the past several months I’ve been part of a group of Canadian worship leaders and pastors who have been getting together to write songs “for & from the Canadian church.” This has been an incredible opportunity for all of us and, on some level, I can’t believe that it’s actually working the way that it is.

One of the songs that came out of our first songwriting day together is called “Worship Rises” – it’s a song that I co-wrote with my friends Joshua Seller and Kevin Pauls. The beautiful thing about this song is that we have named this collective of writers WorshipRises so this song has become a bit of an anthem for everyone involved in this project.

Our hope is that these songs will be released to the Canadian church as a resource for worship leaders and congregations, that God would be honoured and glorified by these songs and that the Canadian church would find their own “worship voice”, knowing that God is doing very unique things in her midst.

Here’s a video of Joshua introducing “Worship Rises” at his church, Harvest Bible Chapel in Oakville, Ontario, this past Sunday –

YouVersion Live

The incredible Digerati team at LifeChurch.tv announced another huge step in online engagement for churches – YouVersion Live. Lots of info online and here are the hilights –

From YouVersion.com –

• Share content on mobile devices during live events and services.
• Invite interaction through polls, notes, prayers, giving, and more.
• Share results and include feedback in your communication.
• Get people actively involved in the message.

From Swerve at LifeChurch.tv -

Here are the details:

• Communicators will be able to share content on mobile devices and get live feedback during an event. Think message outlines and notes, polls, questions, prayer requests, online giving and more.
• Almost anyone with a mobile device will be able to participate and respond—any web-enabled phone will work, as well as the iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, and any laptop or computer with an Internet connection.
• It will be easy to use. To set up your experience ahead of time, you’ll have your own simple admin area where you can drag and drop each element that you want to be a part of your event.
• It’s an extension of YouVersion.com and the Bible App. Since millions of people are already using YouVersion, you’ll have a head start on introducing this new tool to your congregation, organization, etc.
• Not only will people have an engaging way to experience your message live, but they’ll also be able to take it with them on their mobile device and refresh themselves on the the content wherever they are.
• It will be completely free.

From the YouVersion blog –

A pastor would love to be able to get his congregation more involved in his message, ask questions and get answers, survey the room with a simple poll, give them an easy and natural way to take notes on his talking points, and maybe even give them a follow-up thought with a blog post or YouTube video as they’re leaving. And, in a perfect world, they’d be able to keep all that information in a place they look every day so they can refresh themselves on what he spoke about.

When YouVersion Live launches, this pastor will be able to do all this (and a little more) by simply dragging and dropping in a super-simple dashboard on YouVersion.com. During a service, his congregation will pull out their web-enabled phones, open up YouVersion (either on the mobile website or a native application), read the Bible, take notes, ask questions, submit prayer requests, answer polls, find links to external content (event details, blog posts, videos, etc), and give online. Before they leave, they’ll be able to send all that great content to themselves (or a friend) via email for future reference.

Screenshots –

And the icing on the cake? Here’s a quick video from John Saddington over at ChurchCrunch.com talking with Tony Steward from LifeChurch about YouVersion Live and why they’re so excited about it –

I’m excited to see the full release of this. Pretty awesome to see massive changes happening in online engagement in the church – praying that God uses it for great advances in His Kingdom.

Worship: Reverence vs. Relevance

An interesting link popped up in my twitter feed today – LifeWay is putting together a one day event they’re calling “Worship: Reverence vs. Relevance.” They’re bringing together Ed Stetzer and Mike Harland (I don’t know either dude personally but I’m assuming that lots of people will take their opinions on the matter very seriously. I’m familiar with Ed and his work, haven’t heard of Mike) to duke it out on the issue and I’m sure there will be lots of good, biblical insight in the discussion.

Here’s a little blurb from their website describing what the day is about –

Never before in the history of the church has there been as great a divide among pastors about what it means to “worship” in church. Feelings have been hurt, the work of the Gospel has been hindered, hearing aids have been blown and staff members have been fired over controversies that the rest of the world just looks at and folds their arms over. At the heart is the question: do we need worship ministries that are in the world, but not of it, or that are of the world, but not in it? What fulfills the calling of scripture?

If you’re interested, you can register for the webcast which happens on September 1st at 2:00pm CST (I think that’s 3:00 my time?) and it looks like it’s free. I’m intrigued by the topic and look forward to hearing about how it plays out on September 1st.

Worship Confessional – Sunday, August 9, 2009

We began a new series today at OBC where we’ll be spending the new five weeks walking through the book of Psalms – getting a new perspective on what’s written, how it’s written and how we should read the book. The series is affectionately being called our Psummer Psalms Pseries around the office

Here’s our service outline this morning -

Intro Quotes
Sing – Josh Wilson – A
w/ Psalm readings
Forever – Chris Tomlin – G
Hosanna – Paul Baloche – G
Great Is Thy Faithfulness – C -> D
Message/Communion
Jesus You Are Worthy – Brenton Brown – C

We tried something a little different this morning and did a bit of a presentation-type call to worship at the beginning of the service. Right when we hit 10:00, the band began to play “Sing” while the quotes from the post below played through on the screens. When the quotes finished up, we did two verses and choruses of the song before two people came up on stage to read verses from the Psalms which talked about the people of God singing praise to Him.

Shout with joy to God, all the earth!
Sing the glory of his name; make his praise glorious!

Psalm 66:1-2

 

Say to God, “How awesome are your deeds!

So great is your power that your enemies cringe before you.

All the earth bows down to you; they sing praise to you,

They sing praise to your name.”

Psalm 66:3-4

 

Sing to the Lord, you saints of his; praise his holy name.

For his anger lasts only a moment, but his favour lasts a lifetime;

Weeping may remain for a night,
but rejoicing comes in the morning

Psalm 30:4-5

 

Sing praises to God, sing praises;

Sing praises to our King, sing praises.

For God is the King of all the earth

Sing to him a psalm of praise.

Psalm 47:6-7

 

Oh come, let us sing to the Lord

Let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation

Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving

Let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise

For the Lord is a great God

And a great King above all gods

Psalm 95:1-4

 

After those verses were read, we did another chorus of “Sing” before asking people to stand and going right into the other songs of the opening set. Again, this was something a little different from what we normally do – there were things in the flow that didn’t go perfect but overall it worked pretty well and was a good opener for our service and our series.

Some other thoughts from this morning –

• Today was the closest we’ve come to losing power on a Sunday morning. A huge thunderstorm rolled through at about 10:30 this morning – lots of thunder, lightning and dark skies outside. Power flickered off and on a few times but the new surge protection gear we installed during last year’s expansion/renovation did the trick this morning! We did lose power on our projectors at one point but they reset themselves and came back online pretty quick.
• Our numbers on Sunday morning have been up significantly last year. I don’t normally make a big deal about numbers on the blog just because they would be HUGE for some churches but they’d also be TINY for some churches. But.. year over year, we are seeing about 40% more people in our building on Sunday morning compared to 2008. We think there’s three reasons for that – it’s just a different crowd of new people who have been coming this year, the weather has had a BIG impact on people not taking holidays and, of course, the economy.
• We did something kind of fun (well, fun for me!) with “Jesus You Are Worthy” – this song is really familiar for our congregation and normally we do it as a medium-tempo song pretty close to how Brenton does it on his CD. During rehearsal we had the idea to bring the tempo waaaayyyy down – about 54 bpm! We really built the bridge – did it once instrumentally out of the second chorus and then three more times with the vocals. By the last time the band was really driving it – pretty different for a song like this but because we were using the song as part of communion it worked really well.
• One other thing we’re doing in this series is we’ve set up easels on the main floor of our building and each week we’re giving people an opportunity to respond to the message by writing words or phrases that express a Psalm-like heart response. At the end of the series we’ll gather these boards and display them on our stage as a community-written Psalm.
• If you were tracking along with Willow Creek Leadership Summit stuff, you might have seen Josh Wilson’s name pop up. I’m so glad to see him getting the exposure that he is – I was introduced to him in February at re:create, heard his song “Sing” a few weeks ago and knew that we would use it for this series. I’ll do a separate post on Josh and his music this week.

Check out more Sunday recaps and confessionals over at Fred’s blog.

Matt Redman – This Is How We Know

Hey OBC family – if you are coming on Sunday morning we will be doing this new song together. I wanted to post it here so that you would have a chance to hear it and read the lyrics before we gather.

Matt Redman is one of the great songwriters and worship leaders of our generation. We already sing lots of his songs at OBC and I’m excited about learning this one together. I came across it last week and it has helped me think through this idea of the neighbourhood of Jesus being broad enough to include those who are very different from us.

This is how we know, this is how we know what love is
Just one look at Your cross
And this is where we see, this is where we see how love works
For You surrendered Your all

And this is how we know that You have loved us first
This is where we chose to love You in return

For You so loved the world that You gave Your only Son
Love amazing, so divine, we will love You in return
For this life that You give, for this death that You have died
Love amazing, so divine, we will love You in reply, Lord

Our love will be loud
Our love will be strong
Our love shall be hands and feet
That serve You in this world
So let us stay true
And let it endure
That You will be glorified
And worshiped and adored

Jesus Neighbourhood

We’ve started a new series at OBC called “Jesus Neighbourhood” where we are looking at Jesus’ interactions with different people through the book of Luke. Here’s the intro video –

We don’t normally do intro videos like this but we thought we’d do something different for the summer and were able to use an After Effects project from RevoStock.

“Sometimes Risk Works Out”

A friend of mine sent me the link to this post and asked whether he thought something like it would be able to fly at OBC – check it out:

A year and a half ago I met a new friend named J-Griff. He has become part of our church and has an amazing gift.

He speaks a different musical language than most of our congregation and I have wanted to use him as part of our worship experiences for a long time, but could never quite muster up the courage. Then I read this post and decided that just because something might fail I have no an excuse not to go for it.

The “this post” he’s referring to is some great thoughts from Tony Morgan on the “new traditional church music” –

Only it’s as if we got stuck in the 80s. While the church still leans on a mix of rock and pop music as the preferred worship genre, our culture has shifted once again. Now, according to iTunes, 1 in 3 of the top 100 songs in the country is either hip-hop/rap or R&B/soul. My guess, though, is that you can’t name a church in the country that’s using these genres of music for worship. Why is that?

Now, before you let your “it’s-not-our-culture” bias set in, consider this. Most of the hip-hop and R&B music has been recorded by black artists. 14% of the U.S. population is black. But, remember, nearly one-third of the music purchased on iTunes is one of these two genres. You do the math. White people like hip-hop.

If you want to hear the recording that inspired this song, check out “One Way” from Soul Survivor 2008 on iTunes here.

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