WorshipRises EP – Available July 13

UPDATE: The songs are now live on iTunes (USA|Canada), Amazon.com and most other digital platforms. Worship leaders – you can get chord charts and lead sheets for the songs over at PraiseCharts.

Thanks for all of the encouragement and kind words leading up to today. Praying that these songs have great impact in the church for the glory of God.

UPDATE #2: Today has been an incredible event in the life of WorshipRises. The EP is sitting at #2 on the iTunes Canada Inspirational chart, peaked at #20 on the full iTunes Canada chart (we’ve been fighting it out with Bieber all day!) and we’ve seen some movement in the right direction on the iTunes US Christian chart. Thanks so much to everyone who blogged, tweeted and bought the EP. Your investment in the kingdom today is significant!

Over the past year and a bit I’ve been spearheading this thing called WorshipRises (facebook|twitter). I’ve mentioned it a bunch of times on the blog and you may be familiar with it. Basically we’ve been gathering Canadian worship pastors/leaders together to develop worship resources for & from the Canadian church.

It’s been amazing to see the response to this thing so far – we’ve had 3 writing days attended by a total of about 50 worship leaders from every kind of church/worship expression you could imagine. Young, old, men, women, white, black, hispanic, conservative, charismatic – it’s been incredible. At our last writing day we were very fortunate to have Paul Baloche and Jared Anderson join the 32 worship pastors/leaders who were there in attendance.

Out of our writing days, we’re releasing our first EP on Tuesday, July 13. We’ve got four songs recorded for this all co-written by the WorshipRises crew. Each of these songs are being sung in churches all over North America and we are excited about releasing them to a wider audience. We are very thankful for our friends at PraiseCharts who are helping to create some additional resources for worship leaders that will help you teach these songs to your bands and to your congregations.

So.. How can you help? Here’s a few things -

1. If you are a Canadian worship leader, I want to hear from you. Comment on this post or send me an email (chrisvacher@gmail.com) and introduce yourself. If you have a passion to see the Canadian church go deeper in her worship, WorshipRises may be something you will want to be involved in.
2. Buy the EP. It will be available on every digital platform on Tuesday, July 13 – iTunes, Amazon, etc. Four songs for under $4 – it’s hard to go wrong with that. Consider it an investment in the Canadian territory of the kingdom of God. (You can actually preview the four songs over at Amazon before they release. Here’s the link – Amazon.)
3. Head over to PraiseCharts and check out the chord charts and lead sheets they have created to help you teach the songs to your bands and churches. We really do want to be writing songs that churches will actually sing and are trying to do whatever we can to make that easier for you. If you think that one or more of these songs will be helpful for your church’s worship, I’d love to hear how it goes when you teach it to them.
4. Blog, tweet, facebook, talk about WorshipRises and spread the word. We have a facebook page, a twitter account and are having conversations with people all over Canada & the US about how they can be involved.

Let me leave you with this – a live video of my friend and WorshipRises compadre Joshua Seller leading a song that he & I co-wrote at one of our writing days called “Worship Rises”. This song has become a theme song for the collective movement and is being sung in churches all over Canada & the US already. It has been amazing to see God use this song in incredible ways. Praying for more!