Worship Text-fessional – Sunday, August 5, 2007
My blog-friend Victor tipped me off to a new way of describing my recap posts. Lots of people are doing worship confessionals and I felt kind of lame calling mine the same thing because they’re all high tech and fancy with their videos but I feel hip and satisfied by calling these posts worship text-fessionals, so that’s what they’re going to be.
On Sunday we started a new series looking at the life of David in 1 & 2 Samuel that we’re calling “After God’s Own Heart.” The basic premise is to take 5 snapshots of David’s life and look at the constant contrast in those stories between who David was and who the other characters are. We started this week by telling the story of Saul.
Sunday, August 5, 2007 – “After God’s Own Heart”
1 Samuel ch. 8-15
Beautiful One – Tim Hughes
Because Of Your Love – Paul Baloche
Announcements/Offering/Prayer
Doxology (Praise God From Whom…) – Traditional
Everlasting God – Brenton Brown
In Christ Alone – Keith Getty & Stuart Townend
Message
Step By Step – Rich Mullins
Our congregation is loving “Everlasting God” right now – they sing it loud, they really get in to the lyrics and the words seem to really express a place that our congregation is at right now. It’s also a song where our band can crank it up a little bit so they enjoy that. I had our piano player do more of the lead on the verses and pre-chorus and I just filled in little rhythmic things on my guitar – made for a nice arrangement and a good contrast for when we went full out on the chorus.
“Because Of Your Love” is a song that we’ve been doing for a while here and for the first time we dropped the key from G to F. I’ve been finding that the chorus (which hangs on a high D in the melody line) has been a bit high and I was wondering if it was holding the congregation back. So we dropped down a key to stay in that golden “C to shining C” range for our people and it really seemed to help.
I’m excited about the rest of this series and digging in to the life of David some more. One of the things we’ll be doing with the worship side of our services is pulling from the Psalms which parallel different parts of the David story. Right now I’m working on a song taken from Psalm 51 that we’ll be using in a couple weeks and we’ve got a few other ideas we’re throwing around.
Well, what is your church’s target market? If this visitor is from a small church where they sing “Up From The Grave He Arose,” then I wouldn’t think too much of it. If it is someone in your target market, however, then you should maybe look into finding out what aspects of the performance seemed “concert-like.”
I know already that we get complaints from several people that our services are too much like a concert. However, generally these comments come from people who are church people, who usually don’t fit our target demographic. And this is before we have installed our new lighting system and future fog machines!
Hope that helps.
Pat
Hey Chris, thanks for the link love. That sounds like an awesome set. You really seem to do a good job of going between the two “styles” of worship, the traditional and the modern.
I was just reading that comment just above mine from Pat and I feel you on getting the complaints. I lead at a 75 year old church and there are alot of old people who feel the same way. I think you get it everywhere. Anyway, Pat is right on the whole target demographic thing. But at the same time you don’t want to exclude those other people. It’s a tough place to be in and honestly I’m still trying to figure it out. I think what it comes down to is just showing them the value of what you’re doing and getting them to buy into that vision. That’s what we have been trying to do at our church. Until they realize the vision the complaints will keep on coming. Thats just they way it is. Sucks!
hey!
Well, I think my reply would be:
“is this a concert or a church service … I’d say that all depends on whether or not YOU WATCH OR YOU ENGAGE. :-)
Just my $.02
Fred McKinnon, Worship Leader.Blogger.Pianist.Producer
http://www.fredmckinnon.com
TheWorshipCommunity.Com – Discuss Everything Worship
o wow yup we get those comments every once in a while – it can be a little disheartening, but if you are doing what God has called you to and what your church’s vision is – you have to nut up and move forward…
Fantastic set! welcome to the wonderful world of textfessionals. Ive got to get a video camera myself. lol