Good times with good friends

I’ve had the opportunity to spend some good times with friends – new and old – this week. I’m an extrovert – not the extreme kind but the kind of extrovert that gets energized and refreshed when I spend time with people who have similar passions and life goals. Being with people who remind me of the things I’m passionate about gets me fired up!

On Monday I got together with Carey Nieuwhof, the lead pastor at Connexus Community Church, and before we knew it we had spent 3 hours talking about life, ministry, family, Canada, culture and smashing guitars. Carey is crazy passionate about reaching the people of central Ontario with the gospel and they have had a “do whatever it takes” kind of year to do that. I’ve posted about Connexus a couple of times here but you should check out the story of what God has been leading them through the past year – re-visioning ministry, leaving their denomination, raising a crazy amount of money to be able to launch two campuses simultaneously, it’s been a pretty wild ride.

Last night I had the privilege of spending some time with my friend Janette and the worship volunteers at Waterloo Pentecostal Assembly. Janette is an old friend – we met in university and led worship together for years at different events, she was one of my wife’s bridesmaids and she sang at our wedding as well.

I invited my friend Dan to come and play drums with me last night and that was awesome – Dan is also a good friend who I’ve known for several years. We first met working at camp together in high school and eventually we found ourselves touring all over North America in a band which was our full-time gig for a few years. If any of you have been in a band and had the opportunity to tour, you know how unique and memorable that experience is. Now that we’re all married, buying houses, having babies, working real jobs, etc it’s harder to get together with everyone so nights like last night are really special.

We spent some time last night together in worship – Janette has organized a series of “worship vision nights” for her people. Leading people who are natural worshipers is always a cool thing – it makes my job easier in some ways and harder in others. It’s easier to engage them quickly and get them focused but it’s harder to move them beyond worrying about the sound, the transitions, the mistakes, etc. It was nice to spend some time in the middle of the week being reminded of who God is and responding to that through worship.

I closed the night by working with some of their musicians and talking about how they can make songs sound differently – sometimes bands get in a rut where they structure all of their songs the same: guitar/drums/bass intro, bring in the vocals on the verse, build it up in the chorus, pull back in the verse, build back up for the chorus and end with a couple repeats of the last line. While the songs may sound good musically, the audience is going to grow tired of it pretty quickly. So we talked about different ideas for arranging songs – moving intros around, “stacking” instruments rather than everyone playing all together at the same time, using dynamics, and remembering that just because you’re on stage doesn’t mean that you need to play every single note of every single song. Remember – “the music happens between the notes!” Great quote.

So that has been my week. Very energizing. Something I need with two young kids at home and another on the way :)