Check out this youtube link of Brian performing the song live with just his guitar.  Or if you want to hear the album version of the song; you can listen to this video.  It’s such a great song, but not many people know about it.  Spread the word: this song is an anointed worship song!

Here’s what we did on Sunday:

• Your Grace is Enough (Chris Tomlin – Great opening song!)
• Unchanging (Chris Tomlin – Good followup song; they have the same first lines!)
• Holy God (Brian Doerksen – Man… I can’t say enough about this song!)
• Holy, Holy, Holy (Hymn – we came right out of the new song into this hymn; awesome!)
• Welcome / Greeting
• Mission Focus: Testimony from short-term team to Australia
• Presentation of Sunday School award
• Commission new Sunday School leaders
• Prayer for offering
• Sweetly Broken (Jeremy Riddle – We did this as a special song; great text!)
• Message: “It’s Who You Know” – Daniel 3
• Closing Song: Holy God Reprise

To check out what other worship leaders are doing, please visit Fred McKinnon’s blog

The conference that Kevin went to was the Deeper Conference.

Also, if you’d like to check out Paul Baloche’s website, you can do so by clicking here.

If you’re a faithful listening to the worship ministry catalyst podcast, we would love to hear from you and we’d also love it if you’d take the time to share us with your friends and other worship leaders you know.

Whether you’re new or have been listening for quite some time, we would love to hear form you, as well as we would really appreciate some good feedback on iTunes, if you don’t mind taking a minute to do so that would be awesome!

If you have some insight to offer on this topic, we’d love to hear from you. One of the ways you can do that is to join our growing network of Worship Leaders at http://worshipministrycatalyst.ning.com.

You can join in the conversation by joining our network, filling out the contact form, or sending an email to david@worshipministrycatalyst.com or kevin@worshipministrycatalyst.com

Don’t forget you can subscribe to our podcast through iTunes as well.

Here was our set:

• Come, Now is the time to Worship
• Welcome
• Worker Appreciation
• God of Wonders
• Better is One Day
• We Fall Down
• Message
• Surrender

This was the first time I’ve worked with the youth for a youth weekend at our church (even though I’ve been here for almost two years now) and it was great. One thing that was nice was that they listened to every thing I said and all the recommendations I made to them. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t always happen with the adults that I work with. And to think that teens get a bad rap for not listening, I think they did a great job.

For more weekend reviews, check out Sunday Setlists over at Fred’s.

This past Sunday was communion; and we had a guest speaker; and I introduced a new congregational song… it was a busy morning!  Our practice ran late; partly because we weren’t able to practice on Thursday.  Only one person was able to make it Thursday, so we tried to meet really early on Sunday… and we still ran late.  But I think the extra practice paid off because we nailed the new Paul Baloche tune.

This is a song that I learned at the worship conference I went to a few weeks ago.  The song hasn’t even been recorded yet, but the song impacted me so much at the conference that I just had to bring it to my church.  So I taught it to my team and we taught it to the church.  I think it’s going to take a few weeks for them to get comfortable with it, but I know this song has big potential.  Be watching for it early next year; I really think when it hits the radio that it’s going to be the next “Open the Eyes of my Heart” song.  Yeah… it’s that good!

Here’s what our Sunday looked like:

• Sing Your Praise (original song written by me)
• All Hail the Power (cool arrangement of the hymn I came up with)
• Lord Most High (older Vineyard song; I’m not sure who wrote it)
• Communion (with songs between the elements)
• Mystery (just the chorus of this wonderfully simple Charlie Hall tune.  We did it on Easter and it’s stuck with our people for some reason)
• Glorious(this is that new Paul Baloche tune I was mentioning.  Man I love this song!  Once it comes out, you’ll understand what I’m talking about )
• I’ll Fly Away (Jars of Clay arrangement; but a little faster)
• Sunday School launch
• Body Life / Prayer for offering
• Video Slideshow- I put together some scenery and nature pictures of my recent vacation to Hawaii and while the slideshow was going I played “This is My Father’s World”… it was cool!
• Message: “The Pursuit of Happiness” – Ecclesiastes 1 & 2 (Steve Tompert)
• Closing prayer and challenge

To see what other Worship Leaders did during the week, head over to Fred McKinnon’s blog and join in on the conversation.  Have a great week!

I don’t want to give away the whole episode, so check it out below!

If you have some insight to offer on this topic, we’d love to hear from you. One of the ways you can do that is to join our growing network of Worship Leaders at http://worshipministrycatalyst.ning.com.

You can join in the conversation by joining our network, filling out the contact form, or sending an email to david@worshipministrycatalyst.com or kevin@worshipministrycatalyst.com

Don’t forget you can subscribe to our podcast through iTunes as well.

This Sunday I had an older gentleman in our church lead worship.  I’ve been working on training a lot of younger worship leaders, but this guy actually used to be a worship leader about 20 years ago.  It was kind of fun seeing him in action and seeing his style; which is much different from mine!  But that’s a good thing: anytime we can bring variety and keep things different in our worship service, it gives our people something to look forward to and be excited about.

So Warren led worship by incorporating numerous songs and scriptures into the theme of “greatness”.  Basically, he started by asking the question: “What is so great about God?”  And then took various elements of God such as Him being our “great King”, or His “great Name”, or the “great power” of God, etc.  It was different, but kind of cool.

Warren ended up combining 13 songs and 15 different scripture passages throughout his worship set, so it’s a little hard to put down every song he did, but the service kind of looked like this:

• Welcome / Introduce Warren
• Worship Set on “Great” (included songs like “How Great is our God”, “Great is Thy Faithfulness”, “Immortal Invisible”, “There’s Just Something About That Name”, and many others!)
• Sunday School Implementation
• Mission Focus: The Haven’s (Missionaries to Reed College)
• Body Life / Offering
• Special Music: Sweet Hour of Prayer
• Message, “Enjoying Marital Intimacy”
• Closing Song: How Great Thou Art

It was nice to see a different style of worship leadership; and many of our older people appreciated the variance in music.  Not everyone is going to like the music 100% of the time, but I think we should always strive to make 100% of our people like the music at least some of the time.  That’s what ministering to the body of Christ is all about.

To check out other setlists throughout the country, hop on over to Fred McKinnon’s worship blog and see what other people are playing at their churches.

It was fantastic. We had a great time leading and the congregation really seemed to enjoy participating. This gave me the opportunity to do some of the songs we don’t normally get to do and it gave the congregation the opportunity to enjoy a simpler worship time before their personal schedules got really crazy. It was really cool.

Here was our Set:

• Rest In Your Peace (mine)
• Welcome
• Come Thou Fount
• Great & Marvelous (Love this tommy walker song)
• Speak to Me (Also, another great Tommy Walker song)
• Draw Me Nearer (Diane Sheets Arr.)
• Sermon
• All of my Days

Our vocalist really knocked great and marvelous out of the park this weekend. It was just a great time to simplify things and really get to enjoy the time of worship!

For more weekend Reviews, check out Sunday Setlists at Fred’s Place.

I don’t want to give away the whole episode, so check it out below!

If you have some insight to offer on this topic, we’d love to hear from you. One of the ways you can do that is to join our growing network of Worship Leaders at http://worshipministrycatalyst.ning.com.

You can join in the conversation by joining our network, filling out the contact form, or sending an email to david@worshipministrycatalyst.com or kevin@worshipministrycatalyst.com

Don’t forget you can subscribe to our podcast through iTunes as well.

This weekend was my first weekend back after vacation, it was kind of like going back to school. I wasn’t gone for long, but it was still a little weird coming back. Maybe you’ve experienced that same feeling?

This was a great weekend. Our focus was on communion and enjoying our salvation. So, we did a short sermon and spent a little more time on communion as well as split the service up in a different way. The service was quite a bit shorter than normal, which might be considered a summer treat!

We also got to play one of my new songs at the end of the service as a special. It’s a song called “Rivers of Love.” I’ll put a recording up on our social network (worshipministrycatalyst.ning.com) soon.

Here was our service:

• Welcome
• Because of Your Love
• Alive Forever, Amen!
• Happy Day
• Sermonette
• Love Like Rain
• Jesus Paid It All
• Communion
• Rivers of Love

On Saturday night, we had a little problem with Jesus Paid It All, I started it a little too fast, which threw her off throughout the song. We fixed that for Sunday morning, so that was much better. We didn’t quite get enough work on Rivers of Love to be able to play it like I wanted it, but considering we only rehearsed for a short time before the service on Saturday, it worked out pretty well.

How did your services go? To hear from other worship leaders, check out Sunday Setlists at Fred’s Place.

So on Sunday, I did that: I opened up the service by simply sharing all the things that inspired and convicted me.  One of the biggest things was the idea of our church being a community and a family.  So, we spent nearly 20 minutes having “Family time”.  I’ve never tried anything like it before, but it went over surprisingly well!  I litterally had people get to know the person next to them and then I took the microphone around the church and had people share what God was doing in their lives.  It was great to see the response!

It was certainly a little risky, and I was a little nervous; but most of the feedback I got was positive so I think we’ll try it again sometime.  Here’s what our whole service looked like:

• “Family Time”
• Come, Now is the Time to Worship(Brian Doerkson)
• Here I Am To Worship (Tim Hughes)
• We Fall Down (Chris Tomlin)
• Testimonies from the Clark County Fair
• Glorious(this is a new song that Paul Baloche taught us at the conference.  It hasn’t been recorded yet so you can’t find it anywhere… but I really think this song has the potential to be the next “Open the Eyes of my Heart”!  After hearing it several times at the conference, I was able to pick up enough of it to bring back to church on Sunday… talk about cutting edge!)
• Message: “Loving a Fool” Part Two (Jim Draper)
• Closing video: “Cats in the Cradle” (this was in connection with Jim’s message on parenting)

There you have it!  For more weekend reviews, check out Fred McKinnon’s blog.  Have a great week!

But I got everything scheduled and now I can focus on what I really love: worship music!  This Sunday was incredible.  I really felt like God was using me and speaking through me.  The last several weeks I’ve tried to not let my emotions control how I perceive worship, and this week I really sensed that God was working.   At the end, we all kind of broke into this spontaneous chorus of “How Great Thou Art”; it was really neat!

Of course, the practice wasn’t that great.  We went super late and I was getting pretty stressed out.  I like to be done by 8:30 and we went all the way up until 9:00; any later and we wouldn’t have time for prayer.  I made a commitment long ago that I wouldn’t sacrifice prayer time for practice time.  I know some people disagree with that philosophy; but my take is that at a certain point you just need to give it to God.  So we did and I think God really moved this Sunday.

So, here was our service:

• Meet With Me(Ten Shekel Shirt)
• Thy Mercy (Caedmon’s Call)
• Mission Focus: Supported Missionaries in Italy
• Special Prayer Focus: Outreach at Clark County Fair
• Jesus Paid it All (arr. of hymn off the Passion album, “Everything Glorious”)
• Draw Me Close (Kelly Carpenter)
• Blessed Be Your Name (Matt Redman)
• Shout to the Lord (Darlene Zschech… classic!)
• How Great Thou Art (this was a spontaneous song and our whole church rose up as we lifted our voices… it was a sweet moment)
• Message: Loving a Fool; a message on parenting (Jim Draper)
• Draw Me Close Reprise

To check out what other people are doing, go over to Fred McKinnon’s blog.  God bless!

Wow, it’s been quite a while since I’ve done a review. Sorry about that. Life has been a little crazy and quite honestly I’m a little burned out right now, so those would be the two major culprits for why.

This weekend, we didn’t have a drummer. Every week seems to be a struggle to find a drummer, and I probably could have found one for this week, but as I started thinking about it, I realized I might be shooting myself in the foot by always finding someone. If there happens to be a drummer in our church who just hasn’t stepped forward, and they always see that there’s a drummer playing, they may think that they’re not needed. So, going a week or two here and there without a drummer might actually prove to be a more effective recruiting tool. Who knows, I guess I’ll find out.

I also decided to try something different this week. Instead of just doing a couple of songs, giving announcements and doing a couple more songs, I decided to start off with the welcome, and then just plow right through 6 songs. We never do six songs, I’m pretty sure the most we’ve ever done since I’ve been here is 5, so this was a first for us. But, I’ve been thinking and evaluating our worship services over the past few weeks, and one of the things I think I’ve figured out is that one of the reasons people don’t enter in to worship is because we’re not giving them the opportunity. We’re starting & stopping and we never give them enough time to put the week behind them and get into worship. So, that’s what we did and It worked quite well.

Here was our set:

• The Heart of Worship
• Here I Am To Worship
• A Greater Song
• How Can I Keep From Singing
• Hosanna
• All The Earth Will Sing Your Praises
• Message
• Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus

For more Weekend Reviews, check out Sunday Setlists at Fred’s Place.

It’s a tricky topic, one that I’m sure you have dealt with a lot in your experience with being involved in a worship ministry.

If you have some insight to offer on this topic, we’d love to hear from you. One of the ways you can do that is to join our growing network of Worship Leaders at http://worshipministrycatalyst.ning.com.

You can join in the conversation by joining our network, filling out the contact form, or sending an email to david@worshipministrycatalyst.com or kevin@worshipministrycatalyst.com

Don’t forget you can subscribe to our podcast through iTunes as well.

We also talk about the huge loss in the music industry, MJ & all the things we have because of the King of Pop.

If you have some insight to offer on this topic, we’d love to hear from you. One of the ways you can do that is to join our growing network of Worship Leaders at http://worshipministrycatalyst.ning.com.

You can join in the conversation by joining our network, filling out the contact form, or sending an email to david@worshipministrycatalyst.com or kevin@worshipministrycatalyst.com

Don’t forget you can subscribe to our podcast through iTunes as well.

Here is what Dan did on Sunday:

• Lord Reign in Me
• Take My Heart (Holiness) (Scott Underwood)
• Baptisms
• Forever (Chris Tomlin)
• You Are My All in All(Classic Dennis Jernigan)
• There is None Like You
• Mission Focus: Commission Michelle for Australia
• Body Life
• Special Song: Oh Lord, You’re Beautiful (Keith Green)
• Message: Forgiveness is a Choice
• Forever (Nails in Your Hands)

We did a beautiful acoustic version of Forever (Nails in Your Hands) at the end as we had a responsive time of forgiveness and looking at the cross.  It was pretty powerful and I was happy with how it all went down.  Check out what other Worship Leaders are doing over at Fred McKinnon’s place.  Have a great week!

That didn’t stop us from having some great music.  It actually was one of the better sets we’ve done (musically).  Practice went okay; I was a little nervous about some of the transitions and hits/stops we were doing.  The first two songs went pretty smooth, but then around the fourth song things really started grooving.  We were in the pocket and it felt great.

I’m still struggling with that concept of not letting my emotions be an indicator of how good or bad the service was.  David and I even recorded a podcast episode about that.  It’s hard when you “feel” like things were flat… or when you “feel” like things rocked.  There certainly needs to be emotion–after all: what we do is a very emotional thing.  So, I’m still wrestling through how to be a good Worship Leader that has passion and emotion but isn’t dictated by it.  It’s a struggle worth fighting for!

Here’s what we did on Sunday:

• Your Grace is Enough (Tomlin)
• My Redeemer Lives (Reuben Morgan: Hillsong)
• Open the Eyes of my Heart(Paul Baloche)
• Forever (A song a friend of mine wrote: John Ross)
• Mighty to Save(Another Hillsong: Reuben Morgan and Ben Fielding I think)
• The Stand (United: Joel Houston or Marty Sampson… one of those guys)
• Mission Focus: Commission Dwight Johnson for long-term ministry in Taiwan
• Body Life / Prayer for Offering
• VBS Presentation
• Message: “Facing Our Problems Together” (Book of Philemon)
• The Stand (this was a responsive song I played by myself while people came forward to the alter for prayer; it was great!)

To check out what other Worship Leaders are doing, go to Fred McKinnen’s website.  God bless!

It’s kind of cool having a smaller band because everyone gets a little more exposure and the sound is a lot tighter.  Of course, you also have the potential to highlight any mistakes you make; but I’m proud of my crew on Sunday.  I think we did well!  Here’s what our service looked like:

• Patriotic Medley (This was a smattering of songs like “God Bless America”, “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, etc.  Our church has a lot of veterans and many people who “bleed red, white, and blue”, so these kinds of patriotic things are always very special for our church).
• Your Love Oh Lord (Third Day)
• Come Thou Fount (Standard hymn arrangement; with a few modified chords)
• You are my King (Amazing Love) (Billy Foote)
• Sanctuary/I Exalt Thee Medley (Classic songs; can’t remember who wrote them)
• There is Power in the Blood (We did a bluegrass/southern gospel version of this song; it was fun!)
• Mission Focus: Testimony from the Czech Republic
• Prayer for Offering
• Message: “How to Have a Good Fight”
• Sanctuary Reprise

We did a lot of “older songs” on Sunday… but you know what: it was awesome!  I think a lot of times I shy away from doing songs that were written 10+ years ago.  And while a lot of songs have a “shelf life” and you need to just let some of them die at pasture, there are other songs that have a lot of meaning despite their age.  I’m trying to do better about not looking at the year the song was written, but looking at the message in the song.

Well… that’s it for me! Check out what other people are doing over at Fred McKinnon’s site.  God bless!

We do some talking about some ways to stay sharp as a piano player and some of the philosphy we use when we play, then we start with some of the basics.

If you have some insight to offer on this topic, we’d love to hear from you. One of the ways you can do that is to join our growing network of Worship Leaders at http://worshipministrycatalyst.ning.com.

You can join in the conversation by joining our network, filling out the contact form, or sending an email to david@worshipministrycatalyst.com or kevin@worshipministrycatalyst.com

Don’t forget you can subscribe to our podcast through iTunes as well.

Having to have rehearsal on Sunday morning was a little challenging for some of our members. Granted, that’s what most of you do, but our people aren’t used to that. At my last church we met at 7:15 every Sunday morning, here we never meet that early.

So, considering we only had Sunday morning rehearsal and one service, it all went pretty well. We weren’t perfect and I made plenty of mistakes, but the sum of the whole was pretty good.

Here was our Set:

• Beautiful One
• I am Free
• Welcome
• Amazing Grace (My Chains)
• Pardoning Blood (A new song I wrote)
• Sermon
• You are my King

I’ll get a recording of the song I wrote up on our player for you to listen to, you should go check out some of the other songs that are on there. (At the writing of this post, it’s just to the right —> )

For more weekend Reviews Check out Sunday Setlists over at Fred’s Place. You can also check out Kevin’s post.

I have to remind myself that our worship of Jesus is not contingent on feelings, but it’s hard when you’re not getting that “feeling”.  Do you know what I mean?  Don’t get me wrong: the service was good and people were connecting with God… it just didn’t feel as “powerful” as it did during practice.  I know that probably sounds terribly unspiritual; but that’s how I felt about it.

So here’s what we did:

• Your Grace is Enough(Matt Maher; Chris Tomlin cover)
• Testimony from Junior High Camp
• Missionaries in town (David and Catherin Love)
• Be Thou My Vision (my arr.)
• All Creatures of our God and King (David Crowder arr.)
• Holy is the Lord (Chris Tomlin)
• Holy is the Lord(Vineyard; Jeff Searles I think)
• Message: “Dealing with Anger” (Guest speaker: Jim Draper)
• Closing: Holy is the Lord Reprise

We had a layperson in our church give the message on Sunday; he’s spoken a couple times and also teaches a Sunday School class.  He does a great job and is a great teacher… I always like it when Jim shares from God’s word.  To find out what others are doing on Sunday mornings, check out Fred McKinnon’s blog.  God bless!

We had two different drummers, one for Saturday evening and one for Sunday morning. They both did great, especially considering the extremely little time they had to rehearse.

We had a full band this week, we had two acoustics. I’ll be splitting these guys up though. I had paired a new guy with one of our more seasoned-chord-fiends for a while to get his feet wet, but this weekend he reached the place where he was comptent on his own and the challenge of working a band with two acoustics outweighed the risks of putting him on his own. So, next time around, he’ll be on his own.

I have to confess, I haven’t been preparing as much for worship as I should have been. This week I did though, and it did pay off. Especially for my vocals. I still had my share of pitchy parts, but the whole was better than previous weeks. I just realized this week why my voice is so much weaker now than it was. Aside from all the sinus & Allergy problems I’ve been having, I’m not singing nearly as much. I used to have both choir and worship band rehearsal once a week, now I’m just down to worship rehearsal, so I’m not working my voice as much as I should. So, this week, I’ve been singing with a lot of Steven Curtis Chapman & doing vocal workouts as well, they’re both really paying off.

Here was our Set:

• Today is the Day
• All We Need
• Missions Prayer
• All who are thirsty
• Rescue
• Sermon
• Breathe.

The sermon is part of our series on the Lord’s prayer. This week was about God providing our daily bread, being our source of life. We really focused on the “You are my Daily Bread.” portion of breathe and it really seemed to connect with people. Great weekend.

For more weekend reviews, check out Sunday Setlists at Fred’s Place.

We do some talking about some ways to stay sharp as a piano player and some of the philosphy we use when we play, then we start with some of the basics.

If you have some insight to offer on this topic, we’d love to hear from you. One of the ways you can do that is to join our growing network of Worship Leaders at http://worshipministrycatalyst.ning.com.

You can join in the conversation by joining our network, filling out the contact form, or sending an email to david@worshipministrycatalyst.com or kevin@worshipministrycatalyst.com

Don’t forget you can subscribe to our podcast through iTunes as well.

On the positive, we ended right on time and everything flowed very smoothly.  But in a way, I kind of feel like I cheated.  I don’t know how to explain it.  Maybe part of it is because we did less songs, so I don’t really feel like I had to put as much into the service.  Maybe another part of it is because I had one of the gals on the worship team leading 3 of the 5 songs.  I’m not sure what it is… but I just don’t feel like I had as much invested this Sunday.  Anyone else ever feel that way?

But like I said, we ended on time which was a huge plus.  Here’s what our service looked like:

• Days of Elijah (Robin Mark)
• Welcome
• Mission Focus: Summer Workers for VBS
• Prayer for Offering
• Beautiful One (Tim Hughes)
• Forever (Nails in Your Hands) (Richard Cimino I think… it’s an old Calvary Chapel tune I used to sing in Junior High )
• Before the Throne of God Above (Great modern day hymn; not sure off the top of my head who wrote it.  It’s very similar to “In Christ Alone”)
• Majesty (Delirious… one of my favorite worship songs.  Our church loves this tune, and we really rocked it out on Sunday!)
• Testimony on Communication
• Message on Communication: Proverbs 18:19-22
• Father’s Day Presentation

Considering that there was a lot of things going on (Testimony, Father’s Day presentation), I was very happy to end on time… now I just have to balance how to feel invested in all aspects of the worship service.  For more weekend reviews, check out Fred McKinnen’s Blog.

So, it was Father’s day, and we didn’t really do anything special for it. We showed a video and handed out a book to dads, but other than that, we didn’t really pay much attention to it.

Here was our set:

• Never Gonna Stop
• Video
• Father’s Day Prayer
• A Mighty Fortress (My Arr.)
• Your Grace is Enough
• Surrender
• Sermon
• The Stand

We finally did the stand this weekend. I know a ton of you out there have done it a lot, but it was new for us, and it seems like people like it.

We had some tempo problems this week, lots of rushing. We also had some tuning problems, both with the instruments and vocals, it probably wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t perfect (not that it will ever be). I just hate it when we have good musicians in the congregation and the music isn’t as good as it could be. I know we’re not doing the music for them, but…..

We were trying to do a transition between “Your Grace is Enough” and “surrender” with just a one beat head nod from me, and it just wasn’t working. I was trying to depict the tempo with the head nod (much like I do when I’m conducting, only that’s with my hands), and it just wasn’t happening. I think we might be able to get better at it, but not this week.

That’s what we did, for more check out Sunday Set lists over at Fred’s Place.

I echo David’s comments that it’s totally worth it to move in that direction.  It certainly takes a lot more work, but I’m excited to see people in our church really taking ownership of the worship ministry and getting excited about songs and creating themes, etc.

So here is what we did on Sunday:

• Your Grace is Enough (Chris Tomlin)
• You’re Worthy of My Praise (David Ruis; classic song!)
• Welcome / Greeting
• Mission Focus: Graduating Students
• Body Life / Prayer for Offering
• I Need Thee Every Hour (Hymn with very cool mellow guitar finger-picking)
• You Alone (the song that made David Crowder famous!)
• You Are My All in All (Another classic that our people love)
• Agnus Dei (powerful chorus; very majestic)
• Message: “How Come We Can’t Get Along?” – Genesis 3
• There is a Redeemer (Keith Green; just guitar… very cool)

We had a lot of slower, older songs that really featured the guitar and our vocalist.  It worked out really good because as Dan was leading he had some power vocals supporting him.  I got a lot of great feedback; especially from some older people who really appreciated the guitar.  I’ve been trying to do less piano… maybe I won’t even play next week

To check out what other Worship Leaders are doing on Sunday, go on over to Fred McKinnon’s blog.  Have a great week!

It’s such a blessing to be able to have a solid team to step up on the stage and give me a weekend to experience worship from a different perspective. It’s also great to know that there’s a solid person there if I have to be gone for whatever reason.

Here was our (their) set:

• Because of Your Love
• Youth Presentation
• Famous One
• You Never Let Go
• Enough
• Sermon
• All of my days

It was a great weekend, it gave me a chance to see some of the things that are going on in the sanctuary, and to know some of the issues that we need to conquer. I’d really recommend this if you haven’t done it, even if you don’t have the resources to do it right now, start working towards it, it will pay off.

For more weekend review, check out Sunday Setlists at Fred’s Place.

Do you know what I’m talking about? You know….(long awkward pause)…. quiet song …… (long awkward pause with weird, random instrument noises) …. Loud song (scared to death from the shock of the loud sound, heart rate jumps through the roof). …..   beuler….beuler….  Etc.

Picking up from last week’s episode we’re talking once again about creativity, and specifically about how to create good flow when we’re incorporating some of these creative elements. We don’t want the people whom we are trying to lead in worship to be victims of a worship tsunami, we want them to enjoy worship flow.

If you have some insight to offer on this topic, we’d love to hear from you. One of the ways you can do that is to join our growing network of Worship Leaders at http://worshipministrycatalyst.ning.com.

You can join in the conversation by joining our network, filling out the contact form, or sending an email to david@worshipministrycatalyst.com or kevin@worshipministrycatalyst.com

Don’t forget you can subscribe to our podcast through iTunes as well.

34:48

I take a lot of the blame because I think I was being somewhat naive about how much stuff I could pack into 75 minutes.  We did some scripture readings, a special song, communion, Summer Ministry highlight, a new song… and Pastor Mike began his new sermon series and was giving an overview of the entire series.

So, the whole service ended up being almost an hour and 45 minutes… that’s right: we went almost 30 minutes late.  That’s the kind of stuff that drives me crazy!  Melanie (my wife) had to remind me like 20 times to stop looking at my watch, but it was hard not to!  I was stressed and frustrated about the whole thing.

But on the positive side; it was actually a really great service!  And we’re lucky that we only have the one service so it didn’t interfere with other start times or anything.  People actually stayed engaged the whole time and most people I talked with didn’t even notice we were so late.  So, I feel okay about it, but I still am a little frustrated and want to make sure this week that I don’t plan too much!

• Opening Scripture: Romans 5:15-17
• Your Grace is Enough (Matt Maher, covered by Chris Tomlin… this was a new one for us but a lot of people knew it already)
• Enough (Chris Tomlin)
• Draw Me Close (Kelly Carpenter)
• Communion (with songs in-between elements)
• Jesus Messiah (Chris Tomlin)
• Scripture: Romans 5:7-11
• Mystery (Charlie Hall)
• Your Grace is Enough (we did the whole song again because it was new and also appropriate at the end of communion)
• Caring Board Update
• Summer Ministry Focus
• Offering
• There is a Fountain (very cool arrangement of hymn)
• Message: “You Were Created for Relationship” – Genesis 1 & 2

So, as you can see it was a lot to try and fit in 75 minutes.  There were some things I could have cut, but like I said: it was good service that flowed well.  In fact, one of the gals on my worship team told me this might have been her favorite service to date from start to finish.  So I have really mixed emotions about the whole thing.  I want to stay on time and on track, but I want to be open and allow for God to do big things.  What do you do?

To check out what other people are doing, go on over to Fred’s blog and join in on the conversation.  Have a great week!

When we first started, I simply publicized the possibility to our congregation and we had three or four photographers express interest.

That’s one of the big benefits of this team, there are already people in all of our churches that have an interest in photography. Of course there will be varying skill levels, but there are photographers in all of our churches. Parents who love taking good pictures of their kids, teens who are taking photography classes in high school, art majors in college even professionals who have a lot to offer.

So, why a photography team? Don’t we have enough to manage in other areas of the Worship Ministry?

• Event Photography. One of the easiest and most obvious ways to put a photography team to use is to offer their skills to yours an other ministries in the church to photograph events around the church. It gets your ministry great exposure and it documents the event for the other ministry. We have a form that people can fill out on our website, asking for a photographer for the event and then we schedule the photographer.
• Photograph worship backgrounds. This is one of the great aspects of this team, creative and specialized backgrounds for worship songs. Of course a lot of churches are using video backgrounds, but with most presentation software, we are now able to use different backgrounds for different parts of the songs that keep the background from feeling static. One of the things I have done is assign a worship song to a photographer and ask them to take pictures for different key words of phrases throughout the song. When people see images on the screen that they might recognize as local, it gives a certain sense of ownership to the worship song and worship service. Suddenly people go from looking at a generic, stock image or photograph to looking at something they recognize and their mind connects the thing they know in the image with the words or song that they’re singing. Then when they see that image, either in a photograph or in real life they have a chance of remembering that connection which helps take worship out of our weekend service and into the week.
• Photograph pictures for sermon series
• Build a community of artists. Give people a place to connect with people who think similar to them.
• Seasonal and thematic photographic artwork for decorations around the church
• Increase the skill levels of the photographers and get a win – win. They win because they increase their skill level, you win because you get better pictures. (Set up a flickr group, this will give you one place with which you can collect all the pictures – instead of getting a bunch of different discs – and you can give constructive criticism and encouragement.

At my last church we had started to build a photography team, it was headed up by a professional photographer. He was always taking pictures around the church of various events. However, there were many events that he couldn’t attend because of his schedule, so we started talking about building a team of photographers who would be availble to take pictures of events around the church.

So, here are some things that you’ll want to do.

1. Find your subject. Start with the people you know who take pictures. You’ve seen them around with their cameras, taking pictures every chance they can get. They always have new pictures to show you. They have new profile pictures on their facebook accounts. Compile a list and contact information. Start to Eavesdrop on conversations in the foyer of your church. Listen for people talking about pictures, about getting pictures taken and any other photographic oriented discussion going on.
2. Compose the image. Once you do that, you’ll want to make an email list (if you use Planning Center online, then you should use that) and start to contact people, get some buzz going about your group. Let the buzz grow for a while before you schedule your first meeting.
3. Build the frame. You’ll want to have the framework of the team set up before you have your first meeting. What do you want the group to accomplish? Do you want to simply have photographers who can take pictures of events, or do you want to build artistic community among the group? How will you accept request for photographers from other ministries in the church? How are you going to build community? For our events, we have a form on our web site that ministry leaders can go and fill out, which sends me and email, then I use Planning Center to schedule a photographer.
4. Crop the image. Now that you’ve the basic framework in place, you’re ready to get the group together. There will be a natural cropping (thinning) process that will happen as people figure out that they aren’t as serious as they thought they were, so you can expect your group to shrink a little bit. However, you’ll be left with the best and most committed photographers which will be a good thing.
5. Send the pictures for processing. We use a flickr group as the hub for photographers to use to upload pictures to and to give feedback to other photographers and support one another. This is also a good way to build community & it’s free. It’s also cool to be able to use this for assignments. You’ll want to email the assignment out so everyone gets it right away, but then you can create a thread in your flickr group for people to use to upload their pictures to and keep them organized. You could also set up a blog, and give log in information to the members of the group so they could log in and upload their images.
6. Display the image. Now that you’ve gotten the group together, and it’s functioning, you’ll want to make sure to display the images in some form or fashion. This of course will be determined by what the purpose of your particular group is, but here are some examples: Hang large prints in your foyer and throughout the building as decor, use the images as background images for a song, (more than just one please) create a photo directory for your church or for a specific ministry, etc.

That’s what I know, but these few things will help you get on your way to starting a fairly well functioning photography team. For the rest of the stuff that’s not in here, be creative!

So, this weekend we had all of our 1st stringers on the docket and it makes all the difference in the world. I could trust the drummer and rest in his groove, I could work around the electric guitarist, figure out my stuff and know that it wouldn’t change in the middle of the worship service. Our Acoustic player was rock solid, holding the rhythm extremely well, and doing some other really nice and tasteful stuff, and our bass player was solid, picking up the groove with the drummer really well. We had to vocalists who led, so I could just focus on keys. It was great.

We had a few glitches at the Saturday evening service, but we got them all ironed out before our Sunday morning service. For instance, the opening prayer happened before the first song instead of after it, which made the start of the song that was supposed to be after a prayer, but was after a song pretty rough. That kind of threw the band for a loop.

Here was our set:

• Salvation is here
• Opening Prayer
• Let God Arise
• Endlessly
• Communion
• Nothing but the blood
• Sermon
• How can I keep from singing?

I may throw some recordings up here for you to listen to. It may not be as good as your group, but we felt pretty successful this weekend. I have to confess, I stacked the deck this weekend. I did everything I could to make sure that we had all of our A players playing together this weekend. I had several motivations, but it really paid off. I think it was good for our musicians (on stand and off) to hear a really good sound coming from a group of people we all know, not a group that we bring in from the outside. If you’ve never stacked the deck on a weekend, I’d highly recommend it. It pays off immediately and long-term.

For more weekend reviews, check out “Sunday Set Lists” over at Fred’s Place.

In this edition of the Worship Ministry Catalyst Podcast, David & Kevin talk about breaking out of that box and trying to do something different. I don’t want to spill the beans, so you should just listen to it!

If you have some insight to offer on this topic, we’d love to hear from you. One of the ways you can do that is to join our growing network of Worship Leaders at http://worshipministrycatalyst.ning.com.

You can join in the conversation by joining our network, filling out the contact form, or sending an email to david@worshipministrycatalyst.com or kevin@worshipministrycatalyst.com

Don’t forget you can subscribe to our podcast through iTunes as well.

So, Dan said yes and it was just him and me on Sunday… and it was AWESOME!  I probably had more positive feedback this Sunday then I have in a long time.  People really enjoyed the laid back, coffeehouse vibe.  Dan led most of the songs and I sang tenor and played some backup piano.  Dan did a really great job and I think he realized some of his potential for future worship leadership.

Here’s what we did on Sunday:

• Sing Your Praise (original song I wrote)
• Welcome / Sunday School update
• Commission Lisa for ministry in the Czech Republic
• Body Life / Offering Prayer
• Here I Am To Worship (Tim Hughes)
• Better is One Day (Matt Redman)
• God of Wonders (City on a Hill)
• Knowing You (Billy Foote I think??)
• How Great is Our God (Chris Tomlin)

In all, it was very nice and easy Sunday.  And it was great for me because it didn’t require much prep time for me.  Dan didn’t need any charts and we didn’t need any special practices.  It was great coming off vacation and being able to trust in my leaders to take care of business.  Check out more of these reviews at Fred’s blog.

However, everything ended up being pretty good. Practice yesterday was pretty rough, but last night went pretty well, and this morning’s service went even better.

On a sad note, we said good-bye to one of our pastors today. Since our finances have been a little smaller than normal, we had to let go of one of our pastors and today was his last day. That kind of put a certain hamper on things, but I think we recovered fairly well.

Here was our set:

• Awesome is the Lord Most High
• Pastor Send-off
• Indescribable
• God of Wonders (The forgivenmuch arr. we used at Easter)
• Be Thou My Vision (My Arr. with a Bridge I wrote for it)
• Sermon
• I’ll Go Where You Want Me To Go (My Arr. of the old hymn with a few word changes)

This was also the end of our “So You’re Dead Now What?” Series. So, we’re done with trying to find songs about Heaven. I actually ran out of songs that we knew that had a heaven theme, so I went a little different direction.

For more weekend reviews check out Sunday Setlists at Fred’s Place.

We also celebrate a few milestones in this episode, both personally and “organizationally.”

If you have some insight to offer on this topic, we’d love to hear from you. One of the ways you can do that is to join our growing network of Worship Leaders at http://worshipministrycatalyst.ning.com.

You can join in the conversation by joining our network, filling out the contact form, or sending an email to david@worshipministrycatalyst.com or kevin@worshipministrycatalyst.com

Don’t forget you can subscribe to our podcast through iTunes as well.

That’s what this weekend was for me. We had a pretty solid group of musicians, who were able to hold their now, yet we were having other issues – like timing and rushing, etc. All in all, it was (…insert long writing pause for memorial day festivities…) still good, just frustrating to have issues like timing.

Here was our set:

• Alive Forever, Amen
• Read Isa 6:1-4
• Holy, Holy, Holy
• Prayer of focus
• How Great is our God
• Glory in the highest
• Fellowship
• Sermon (On Heaven)
• I Can Only Imagine
• Revelation Song

As far as the music connecting with people, that seemed to be really great. We’ve never done I can only imagine at our church, but people knew it pretty well. And ending on Revelation song after our Pastor shared a lot from the book of Revelation was also great.

One more week focusing on heaven and the after-life, then we’re back to normal. There aren’t all that many songs about heaven that we currently sing. Makes it a challenge.

For more weekend reviews, check out Sunday Setlists at Fred’s Place.

As I mentioned in my blog last week, I’ve been doing a lot of work to raise up other Worship Leaders in our church.� This Sunday, I had a guy on our team do a “Phase-3″ worship service (where he plans, prepares, and executes the entire service).� It was really cool!

One of the benefits of having others lead worship is that it keeps things fresh and exciting. Ryan has a different musical taste and style then me, so the songs he selected are not ones I would normally do on a Sunday… but they totally worked! That’s the beauty of worshipping in community together and having others who can compliment you. So even though I wouldn’t do these songs normally, when Ryan led them he did it with conviction and passion and it really worked out well.

Here’s what the morning looked like:

• Forever With You (Decyfer Down… cool Christian alt-rock band that sounds a lot like the early days of Creed.� We did this song as a Prelude with full band and vocals… it was a great way to set the tone of the morning.� Check out this song by clicking the link)
• Welcome / Memorial Day Prayer
• Mission Focus: Commission Colin Fenn (young high schooler who is going to Africa during the summer)
• Body Life / Offering Prayer
• You Never Let Go(David Crowder; we played images of flags and Arlington Cemetery during the song… VERY powerful!)
• Offering(Paul Baloche)
• Message: “How to Let God Know You’re Grateful” – Hebrews 13
• Rest (Skillet)
• Show Me Your Glory (Third Day)
• Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone) (Chris Tomlin)
• Offering (Reprise with full band this time)

You can see we did a lot of “commercial” type songs; but it was really cool. And people responded surprisingly well. I had my reserves about the music, but I was super excited how it all went down. You can check out what other people did on Sunday by going to Fred McKinnon’sblog. Btw, Fred was recently featured on the CCLI video section.� Good job Fred!

I don’t have any evidence to back this up, but I have a theory. A Senior Pastor once told me that people cling to the music of their youth. In other words, if someone has an emotional connection to a song when they’re young, they’ll likely become attached to that song and to other songs that are in that style and even the style itself. This is one possible answer to why some of the older people you know might cling so tightly to hymns and Gaither choruses.

That’s my theory for what happened this season on American Idol. I’m not convinced that America loved Adam Lambert as much as the judges did. Granted, he is a performer and was able to use the stage, etc., however, the judges pushed him hard all season long. There were very few times that something negative came out of the judges mouths, no matter how ridiculous his rendition of a song was.

Because his voice sounded so much like what all of judges cut their teeth on as performers and producers, they had a stronger emotional connection to Adam than the other contestants and in the process convinced a lot of the impressionable minds in America that he already was the American Idol. As objective as they claim to be, or at least they’re supposed to be, I don’t think that they were able to separate their emotions from their logic (if they even have any). However, if the top 40 is any indication of what America likes to listen to, it’s not KISS or whatever other 80’s rock group Adam could be the lead singer of. (Yes I know a lot of that music is making a comeback, but it’s still no where near the rest of the music in the top 40).

You see, I think America puts up with certain genres of music during American Idol because it’s American Idol. However, once the shows over, I think we all go back to our preferences, which for me would explain why some of the idols have been extremely successful and others have tanked.

It’s something we need to think about. Do we do the same thing? Do we choose music based on what we connect with emotionally or do we pick music based on what we think will connect with our congregations. Sometimes they’re the same, sometimes they’re not. For me, there have been a lot songs that I haven’t connected with that many people in our congregation have, so we do those songs.

So, as you field conspiracy theories about why Adam Lambert didn’t win American Idol, may it be a constant reminder to you to be thinking about the music you’re selecting for your congregation, are you picking it for you, or are you picking it for them.

This is the first time we actually talk about the idea of a worship leadership team, a team that gets together to discuss what’s going on in the Worship Arts Ministry and to talk about direction and vision.

If you have some insight to offer on this topic, we’d love to hear from you. One of the ways you can do that is to join our growing network of Worship Leaders at http://worshipministrycatalyst.ning.com.

You can join in the conversation by joining our network, filling out the contact form, or sending an email to david@worshipministrycatalyst.com or kevin@worshipministrycatalyst.com

Don’t forget you can subscribe to our podcast through iTunes as well.

So, on Sunday I had a young gal who helps out in youth group leading in a “Phase 2″ setting.  I have three phases of worship leadership that I empower people with.  The first is where I pick the songs and just have the other person leading on the chorus of a couple songs.  The second phase is where I pick the songs, but I have the other person leading almost all the songs; including any “wrap-arounds” (welcome, call, challenge, etc.).  The final phase is where I have the other person pick out the music and lead the whole thing from start to finish.  Next Sunday I’m having one of my leaders to a “Phase 3″ worship service… I’ll let you know how it goes!

In the meantime, here is what we did on Sunday:

• Meet With Me(Ten Shekel Shirt… anyone remember them?)
• Your Love is Amazing (Hallelujah)(I think Brian Doerkson or Scott Underwood; it was originally recorded on the sequel to the Vineyard “Hungry” album titled, “Surrender”)
• Open the Eyes of My Heart(Classic Paul Baloche)
• Jesus, Name Above All Names(old Maranatha tune with a new chorus that my friend, Brian Cheney wrote)
• It is You (Newsboys)
• Mission Focus: Brian and Melanie Stark in Australlia
• Body Life / Offering
• Special: Turn Your Eyes (we did this as a special song because I borrowed a very cool arrangement that isn’t “normal”… from my good friend, Scott Olsen http://www.myspace.com/scottolsenband)
• Message: “Who is This King of Glory” – Hebrews 12
• Who is This King of Glory (Third Day)

You can check out more Sunday setlists at Fred’s blog.  See you next week!

That brings up a question: How do you get new talent into you church? If you’re hurting for Electric guitarists, for instance, how do you get new electric players to come to your church, or to join you? I know it’s an age-old question, one that many of us and many of our predecessors have been asking. If you have any advice for me, I’d love to hear it.

I had a set chosen that was going to require some electric guitar, and wouldn’t really be possible without it, so I had to change a couple of songs that we were going to do and replace them with a song or two that I could carry on the piano.

Here was the set we ended up doing:

• Happy Day (Fee)
• Welcome
• Today is the Day (Brewster)
• Beautiful the Blood
• Amazing Love (That rescued Me) (Mike Honholtz)
• Message
• The Love of God (MercyMe Arr.)

For the most part, we pulled the songs off quite well without an electric, there were times when we despereately need the electric or something to add some of the power that the song was lacking. We didn’t have that much to build to on some of the more powerful parts of songs like Beautiful the Blood and Today is the Day.

For more weekend reviews, check out Sunday Setlists at Fred’s Place.

Our service on Sunday had a “Mother’s Day” focus.  We’ve been going through the book of Hebrews, and this week we were in chapter 11 (The Hall of Faith).  Pastor Mike made some great connections about faith and Sarah bearing Isaac.  So, our worship set had a lot songs about faith and walking a life of worship in faith.

There were a few glitches along the way… the biggest thing is that two of our stage lights burned out during the service (what are the chances of two going out!)  The whole stage right was so dark; it was annoying.  Then there was some mix-up with the Mother’s Day presents we were giving to all the ladies.  Things kind of fell apart at the end; which was kind of frustrating because we planned so much for this morning.  But I’ve learned those things happen and sometimes you just shake it off and start over again on Monday.

Here’s how our Sunday looked:

• Awesome is the Lord (Chris Tomlin)
• Famous One (Tomlin)
• My Faith Has Found a Resting Place (Great old hymn)
• Come Ye Sinners(another hymn with great text; we did it like the Robbie Seay Band cover)
• Enough (Tomlin again?!)
• Mission Focus: Gideon’s International
• Baby Dedication (on Mother’s Day… it rocked!)
• Hebrews 11 Montage (this was awesome; I spent a lot of work on this putting together different pictures that represent the various people in Hebrews 11; we then had some voice overs reading through the scripture… it was super cool!)
• Message: Living the Adventure of a Lifetime (Hebrews 11:7-40)
• Mother’s Day Presentation and presents

The music was good and went smoothly, it was more of just the technical stuff throughout the service and some details that fell apart.  In all, I think the Mothers appreciated the service and God was glorified.  To see what other worship leaders did on Mother’s Day, go on over to Fred McKinnon’s blog.

The rest of the weekend wasn’t about Mothers, we’re starting a new series this weekend on the After life. We’re using the series graphics that Lifechurch.tv put out for a series they did called “So you’re dead, now what?” They’re a great, high quality graphic and it makes your job a lot easier if you have anything to do with the series or series graphics, I’d strongly recommend you check them out.

This weekend had its bumps. Our drummer didn’t show, and we were doing some new songs, well not really new, but they were new to our group. It’s hard to find very many songs about heaven and the afterlife that are contemporary, so if you know any, please let me know!

Here was our set:

• All The Earth Will Sing Your Praises
• Great in all the Earth (Mike Honholtz)
• “Why She Deserves a Day” video (View it below.)
• Prayer for mothers
• Did you feel the Mountains Tremble?
• We Will Dance
• Sermon
• Take my life (Hymn – Tomlin Arr. – didn’t work cut it for Sunday)
• Here am I (Mike Honholtz)

Again, if you have any songs that are great contemporary songs about Heaven or the afterlife, I’d appreciate your help. (Stryper’s “To Hell With the Devil” doesn’t count.)

For more Reviews check out Sunday setlists at Fred’s Place.

Meanwhile, back at Laurelwood things went smoothly and without any glitches.  I have spent over a year now intentionally training and raising up other worship leaders within our church body.  There are now 5 people on my worship team who have led a service and 3 of those 5 could do an entire service without me there.  It is so exciting to see people stepping up and to empower them and free them into ministry.  It takes a lot more work to raise up other people (simply because I’m a control freak and it’s “easier for me to do it myself”)… but the rewards are so awesome and we’re starting to see the fruits of it at Laurelwood.

So, Angie Parr planned the service, led and executed the whole thing; and everyone I talked to said she did an awesome job!  Also, we had a lay leader in our church preach because Pastor Mike was at the Men’s Retreat too.  And we had another lay person lead communion… how cool to see the Body of Christ stepping up and working together.  It’s so awesome to see that Sunday church can happen when the Church gets involved.  Praise God!

Here’s what Angie did on Sunday:

• Call to Worship
• Beautiful One (Tim Hughes)
• Indescribable (Laura Story, but done like the Tomlin cover)
• Communion (with songs sung while the servers pass out the elements)
• Once Again (Matt Redman)
• The Wonderful Cross (Tomlin arr. of hymn)
• Bless That Wonderful Name (Old Gospel Spiritual I used to sing growing up in a Foursquare Church… I have no idea who wrote it; I can’t even find it on CCLI)
• Mission Focus: Testimony of “Serve Day”
• Body Life / Prayer for Offering
• Always (United; great song that not enough people know about.  We started doing this song at Youth Group and it has really crossed over well for our people on Sunday.  Click the link to hear it on youtube)
• Message: “Peace in the Valley” – Psalm 23 (Steve Tompert)
• Always (ended with the whole song; kind of a reprise)

For more Weekend Reviews, you can check out Fred McKinnon’s blog

If you don’t have this book, I’d really recommend picking it up. It’s a great starting point. It’s a great foundational tool, a great place to start with someone you’re mentoring or a group of people you want to teach leadership too.

For me, it seems that if I can master the few simple little things in this book, I’ll be much better off. I don’t know about you, but I know for me, the more I read about leadership, the more inept I feel as a leader. Of course I still read leadership books, and learn a lot from them, but this book gives me the hope that I can actually master a few aspects of leadership.

Back to the closing chapter. The thing about leaving a legacy is it’s a contrast between the now and not yet. If we want to leave a legacy, we can’t wait until then to do it. We can’t wait until the future and then just expect a legacy will appear. Legacy will be left by what we do today. Today, the choices we make and the actions we take will either enhance or degrade the legacy we hope to leave. Today is the day to be a leader, we can’t wait until tomorrow.

John Shares a couple of thoughts:

• Lead with a Long View – We have to lead today with tomorrow as well as today in mind.
• Create a Leadership Culture – We have to make developing leaders a part of our culture.
• Pay the price today to assure success tomorrow – There is no success without sacrifice.
• Value Team leadership above individual leadership

He concludes with a thought that many of us have heard and espouse, it’s the idea that we have to pass it on. Andy Stanley and the guys from North Point call it “Replacing Yourself.” We aren’t going to be around forever. If we want to have an impact that lasts beyond us, we have to pass the leadership on to those we are leading. We have to have a vision of the future, train people to lead for it, and let them do it.

If we all did this “little” thing from this “little” book our organizations will be in substantially different places in the future than if we just let things happen. I’d encourage you to go pick this book up if you don’t already have it and give it a read, then read it again. Then lead for a while, and come back and read it again. It’s a great book to use to gauge where you are in your leadership journey.

It’s a big topic (Just like the acoustic guitar) and there’s no way we can cover all of the essentials in these two episodes, but we talk about some really important stuff and John offers some really valuable insight from his experience using it at “The Pearl.”

If you have some insight to offer on this topic, we’d love to hear from you. One of the ways you can do that is to join our growing network of Worship Leaders at http://worshipministrycatalyst.ning.com.

ohn is an Associate pastor at Pearl Church, in the Pearl District in Downtown Portland, OR.

John’s original background is as a church musician – he’s led worship for a number of churches and currently works for Pearl Church in downtown Portland. Along the way, he’s played at coffee shops, pubs, churches, and amphitheaters; making music and practicing production. John spent 3 years running a recording studio on the side, producing and mixing records for clients.

You can join in the conversation by joining our network, filling out the contact form, or sending an email to david@worshipministrycatalyst.com or kevin@worshipministrycatalyst.com

Don’t forget you can subscribe to our podcast through iTunes as well.

Other Links:

• www.pearlchurch.com
• www.johnrossmusic.com

Here was our set:

• Rest In Your Peace (An original of mine)
• Center (Charlie Hall)
• Prayer
• Hungry
• Communion
• Jesus Paid it All
• Sermon
• Breathe

Rest in your peace (since I wrote it) is naturally a piano drive song, on Center I started with synth, the acoustic came in and carries the verses, then I really drove the chorus, play 5ths in an eighth note pattern. Hungry is also another naturally piano driven song, and the hook on Jesus Paid it all is a really easy hook to pull off on Piano.

I think it’s actually a really good style to work harder on for this group. I also think it’s good to set a style that you want the band to fit into. I can’t imagine that all the people in our congregation like the same style of music, and that they want to listen to it all the time, so why should we try to have the same style every weekend?

For more weekend Reviews, check out Sunday Setlists at Fred’s Place.

Have you ever had that happen?  Where you are frantically trying to get caught up, but in the process other things fall behind?  I hate that.  I hate not being organized and in control; it drives me crazy!  So last week was a great reminder that I’m not always going to be in control AND IT’S OKAY!

I can barely remember what I did two Sundays ago; it was a miracle that I made it through the morning.  Luckily, I had one of my guitarists do most of the leading and singing.  It was her first time stepping up like this and she did great.  And next week I’ll be gone at a Men’s Retreat and am having my number two do the whole service.  Her and I have been planning this service for a while now and I’m excited to hear how it goes.

In the meantime, here’s what we did on Sunday:

• He is Exalted (classic Twila Paris)
• You’re Worthy of My Praise (David Ruis)
• Lord Most High (Can’t remember who wrote it; it’s an older Vineyard tune in 6/8; our people LOVE this song!)
• God of Wonders (another classic)
• Majesty (Done just like the Passion cover off the CD, “How Great is Our God”)
• Mission Focus: Bob DeViney testimony (a guy from our church has been serving in Baja Mexico for 3 months!)
• Pastoral Prayer / Offering
• Instrumental w/Scripture (Mark 11:22-26)
• Message: “Ya Gotta Have Faith” (Hebrews 11:1-6)
• I Exalt Thee(oldie goldie)

We did a lot of classic songs this week; some of them were older… some of them were REALLY older!  In all, it was a great week and I sure felt a whole lot better health wise then the week before.  If you want to see what other worship leaders are doing with music, go over to Fred McKinnon’s blog and check out more Sunday Setlists.  God bless!

Kevin

It’s a big topic (Just like the acoustic guitar) and there’s no way we can cover all of the essentials in these two episodes, but we talk about some really important stuff and John offers some really valuable insight from his experience using it at “The Pearl.”

If you have some insight to offer on this topic, we’d love to hear from you. One of the ways you can do that is to join our growing network of Worship Leaders at http://worshipministrycatalyst.ning.com.

ohn is an Associate pastor at Pearl Church, in the Pearl District in Downtown Portland, OR.

John’s original background is as a church musician – he’s led worship for a number of churches and currently works for Pearl Church in downtown Portland. Along the way, he’s played at coffee shops, pubs, churches, and amphitheaters; making music and practicing production. John spent 3 years running a recording studio on the side, producing and mixing records for clients.

You can join in the conversation by joining our network, filling out the contact form, or sending an email to david@worshipministrycatalyst.com or kevin@worshipministrycatalyst.com

Don’t forget you can subscribe to our podcast through iTunes as well.

Other Links:

• www.pearlchurch.com
• www.johnrossmusic.com

It was a hard weekend for that reason as well as simply trying to get the band together. Luckily, our Senior Pastor hasn’t been preaching these last couple of weeks because we’re doing the “Life, Money, Hope.” series from Lifechurch.tv and Dave Ramsey. (By the way, if you haven’t heard about it, or checked it out, you should definitely check it out – go to www.lifechurch.tv and search for Life, Money, Hope.)

I was also able to get an Electric guitarist from Kevin’s Church, which was also great. Our drummer was sick as well, so it could have been a really rough weekend, but it turned out pretty good. In light of my vocal problems and the other possibilities for disaster, it could have been a nightmare, but it went quite well.

Here was our Set:

• I Will Boast
• Welcome
• Jesus Lead On
• All We Need (Charlie Hall)
• Give it all Away
• Message
• Amazing Grace (My Chains are Gone)

The closing song fit perfectly. In the Message Dave talks about the bondage of Debt and actually uses chains as an illustration, so to close with “My chains are gone, I’ve been set Free.” was perfect.

All things considered, it was a pretty good weekend. I hope to not have a weekend like this again, but even if we do, I know we can get through it.

For more weekend Reviews, check out Sunday Setlists at Fred’s Place.

Well anyway, it wasn’t as bad as I thought, I’m sure, it just makes me wish that every weekend could be as well thought out, planned out, prepared for and rehearsed as Easter weekend. Maybe it can.

We’re really hurting for electric guitarists right now, so I tried someone on electric this week who has never played electric and he didn’t do too bad. He’s got one of the best set of ears of all the musicians I work with, so he can hear all the little intricacies of the electric part, so I think he’s really going to be great. For his first time, he did pretty well.

Here was our set:

• Let God Arise
• O Praise Him
• Welcome & Announcements
• A Greater Song
• Holy, Holy, Holy (SCC Arr.)
• Message set up
• Life, Money, Hope. Video
• I will offer up My Life.

For more weekend reviews, check out Sunday Setlists at Fred’s Place.

We dig a little deeper this week as we talk about the “dynamics” of playing with a band. John gives us some very practical and extremely helpful advice for what acoustic guitarists can do when they’re playing with a band, and also gives worship leaders some tips on how to ask your guitarists to do certain things.

We still might not know what we’re talking about, but we’re learning!!!

John is an Associate pastor at Pearl Church, in the Pearl District in Downtown Portland, OR.

John’s original background is as a church musician – he’s led worship for a number of churches and currently works for Pearl Church in downtown Portland. Along the way, he’s played at coffee shops, pubs, churches, and amphitheaters; making music and practicing production. John spent 3 years running a recording studio on the side, producing and mixing records for clients.

You can join in the conversation by joining our network, filling out the contact form, or sending an email to david@worshipministrycatalyst.com or kevin@worshipministrycatalyst.com

Don’t forget you can subscribe to our podcast through iTunes as well.

Other Links:

• www.pearlchurch.com
• www.johnrossmusic.com

I’ve been at Laurelwood for about three years now, and I honestly feel like this was the best service we’ve ever had.  In addition to having a TON of people on Sunday (we had 450; whereas we usually average 325), the music was amazing.  I had so many people comment on the music; even older people who normally don’t like louder contemporary stuff were saying how much they enjoyed the service.  That made me feel great!

Now my only problem is I’m exhausted!!  I feel like I need to have an amazing service next Sunday, but I don’t know how to pull that off!  It got me thinking about all the time and work that goes into putting together an Easter or Christmas program.  What if we put that kind of work into making every service amazing and excellent?  Then I realized that I probably would never see my family and be exhausted all the time; so I quickly dismissed that notion

Okay, here’s what we did with our Easter service:

• All Because of Jesus (Steve Fee: straight off the his CD “We Shine”)
• My Redeemer Lives (love the classic Hillsong!)
• Christ The Lord is Risen (great Easter hymn)
• Christ Arose (another great Easter hymn with a cool arrangement I worked out)
• In Christ Alone (Getty/Townsend; we had a great sax solo during the turns; beautiful!)
• Body Life / Prayer for offering
• Still Amazed (special song during offering that a friend of mine wrote)
• Easter Message: “God’s Promises for You” – Hebrews 10
• I Will Rise (Beautiful new Chris Tomlin tune off of “Hello Love”; did it just like the recording complete with violin… except I had an alto sing it since it’s so high!)
• Mystery (Cool Charlie Hall tune we did last week; very cool build on the bridge)
• Mighty to Save (I think every church in the world did this song on Easter!)
• Shout Unto God (we did this as a “new ending” for Mighty to Save.  It’s done by Hillsong United and it’s really powerful.  I don’t know if people were expecting an ending like that, but I think it worked)

In addition to doing some great new music that really rocked, we had a lot of instrumentation.  Normally we do a pretty basic band with piano, bass, drums, and either electric or acoustic guitar.  But on Sunday we had all that plus auxilary percusion, violin, saxaphone, trumpet, and some great singers on alto and tenor.  It sounded REALLY good.  I was very happy with how it all turned out

I hope your Easter was equally wonderful.  To check out what other churches did with their Easter service, go on over to Fred McKinnon’s blog.  Have a great “week after Easter”!

We had it all going this weekend, and we got er done. Full worship band, choir, videos, lights, continuity from beginning to end, it was great. It’s got me thinking about things we can do year round that will help us come closer to achieving this caliber of service more often.

Here was what we did:

• “Worthy to be Praised” – soulful choir number by Bryon J. Smith
• Mighty to Save
• Alive, Forever. Amen!”
• “Our Hope” video from worshiphousemedia.com
• Bob’s story of hope (Our Senior pastor’s testimony)
• God of Wonders
• Welcome
• Town Hall for Hope (Promo video we used to promo the “Life, Money, Hope.” Series we’re starting next week.)
• Dismiss kids & Fellowship
• Sermon Part 2
• Video on Sin (About a Police officer in our church)
• Resuce
• All Because of Jesus
• Sermon Part Three
• Video about the same police officer and his wife adopting their son.
• Sermon part four
• Prayer
• Video about woman in our church who discovered our church was a safe place to ask questions
• “Starting Over” Robbie Seay Band.

If I had it to do over, I’d probably cut “Mighty to save” and find another upbeat, resurrection song to put in its place. “Alive Forever Amen” worked great, but “Mighty to save” seemed like kind of a downer after our opener. We did a good transition though, on the final beat of “Mighty to Save” we started the guitar intro of “Alive Forever Amen” and it worked really well.

We also did pretty much the same kind of a transition between “Rescue” and “All Because of Jesus.” I ended the song on keys and started “All Because Of Jesus” with a “loopy” patch on the Motif XS8. So, I faded out of the synth patch from “Rescue” after I started “All Because of Jesus.”

We did a cool Arr. of “God of Wonders” that the band Kevin was in – forgivenmuch – did. It’s a pretty cool, and yet simple arr. of the song, I’ll check into putting it up on here.

“Starting Over” went really well too, but doing it at the end of the service was a challenge because our vocalists voice had gotten cold, and the song requires a fair amount of vocal stamina.

For more reviews, check out Sunday Setlists at Fred’s Place.

In this first part of a two part series, John covers some of the basics of the Acoustic guitar. It’s not only insightful for those of you who are aspiring to be guitarists, but it is insightful for worship leaders who are wanting to know how to talk guitar.

John’s original background is as a church musician – he’s led worship for a number of churches and currently works for Pearl Church in downtown Portland. Along the way, he’s played at coffee shops, pubs, churches, and amphitheaters; making music and practicing production. John spent 3 years running a recording studio on the side, producing and mixing records for clients.

You can join in the conversation by joining our network, filling out the contact form, or sending an email to david@worshipministrycatalyst.com or kevin@worshipministrycatalyst.com

Don’t forget you can subscribe to our podcast through iTunes as well.

Other Links:

• www.pearlchurch.com
• www.johnrossmusic.com

Truthfully, a lot of it may have had to do with the weather.  It’s been rainy and cloudy for many weeks and this Sunday was absolutely beautiful!  There’s something about the sun that makes everyone a little happier than normal.  But whatever the case, our Sunday service was just great.  We did some excellent songs and really focused on the idea of “Jesus coming to town”.  The best part of all is that we took communion this Sunday with the idea that “the story doesn’t end here”.  That’s when everyone started getting excited about Easter.

So, here’s what our morning looked like.  All our music centered around Christ being our King and Hosanna; the one who saves.  It really worked well and people responded very positively:

• Prelude / Scripture Reading: Mark 11 (Triumphal Entry)
• Here is Our King(David Crowder)
• Hosanna(Paul Baloche)
• Mighty to Save (Hillsong)
• Communion (with songs in-between the bread and juice)
• Jesus Messiah (Chris Tomlin)
• Grace Greater Than Our Sins (Hymn)
• Mission Report from Youth (our Youth Group went to New Orleans during Spring Break to help with continued recovery from Hurricane Katrina)
• Body Life / Prayer for Offering
• Mystery (Very cool, new Charlie Hall song that we are doing for Easter.  If you haven’t heard it, check it out on iTunes or somewhere)
• Message: “Christ’s Immanent Return”: John 12 & Matthew 24
• Mystery (Reprise)

To check out what songs other Worship Leaders are doing on Sundays, you can visit Fred McKinnon’s blog.  Hope everyone has a great Easter week.  He is Risen!

1.) It gave me a chance to work side by side with one of our sound techs on getting the sound that I’m looking for, so he got to experience first-hand and side by side what I’m looking for.

2.) It gave me a chance to go around and listen to and look at all the gear in use to make sure it’s working correctly. (Which I found out that our fill speakers don’t seem to be working quite right – something I wouldn’t have known if I didn’t have the chance to listen.)

3.) We got to expose the congregation to really good worship. Since they’re a band that does a lot of gigs, they have a few worship songs that they do and do them really well. They all know what their role is in the band and they stick to it and do it really well.

4.) We got to expose our musicians to a really good group that they can gain inspiration from. It’s important to give our musicians tangible inspiration that will drive them to work harder at perfecting their craft.

5.) It gave me a chance to learn a few things from their worship leader as well as to see what does and doesn’t work with our congregation. As I would expect, their vocal leader in the group has a very vibrant stage personality. I got to see how our congregation responded to his leading.

6.) It gave me the time I would have been preparing for this weekend to put into preparing for Easter.

Here was their Set:

• A Place to Start (Band Original)
• Your Grace is Enough
• Everlasting God
• Your Love Oh Lord
• Wash over Me (Band Original)
• Sermon
• Song of Hope (Robbie Seay Band)

They used a lot of loops in their music, and I got to talk to the guy who does them a lot about the process he goes through in creating the loops. It has been great to get to know a little more about the process, as it is something I’ve been interested in doing for a while.

For more weekend reviews check out Sunday Setlists on Fred’s Site.

Between the two mission trips, 40 of our church members were gone on the mission field and most of my worship team was part of that crew.  So, I decided to just do a “Piano only” service.  It turned out to be pretty cool… and it’s actually a lot less stressful for me because I just have to worry about me   But it was really nice to just have a very simple, mellow service.  We did a number of hymns and I know a lot of the older people liked it.

• Be Thou My Vision (Standard hymn)
• Come Thou Fount (Standard hymn)
• From the Inside Out(United/Hillsong; great song that is getting pretty popular)
• Forever (this is a song that a friend of mine wrote; great tune)
• Shout to the Lord (done as a medley with Forever)
• Mission Focus / Prayer for Offering
• Scripture Reading: Hebrews 9:11-15 (with piano underscore: “Nothing But the Blood”)
• Message: “God’s Stimulus Package for You”: Hebrews 7&8
• Come Thou Fount (responsive song where people could come up to the alter and/or pray with an Elder / Pastor)

Even though the service was kind of mellow, it turned out really cool and it was very appropriate.  People responded to the responsive time at the end and I think God was doing His thing; people were taking care of business in their hearts and God gets all the glory!

For other Sunday Setlists, check out Fred McKinnon’s blog

This weekend was my “keys” band weekend. I had another guy play the piano (he’s 15 and has perfect pitch – a great asset!) while I played keys. It actually kind of worked. We might have sounded a little 80’sish, but I think it was okay. We did Steve Fee’s “All Because of Jesus” and Ryan Egan’s “I am Free” with synth patch that sounded kind of like a loop (we didn’t have an electric to do the U2 delay kind of stuff that both of those songs have, so I did it on the keyboard.)

So, I’m trying to develop different bands. I was working towards developing a bunch of bands that basically all played the same style. I was continually frustrated because I didn’t have all the people we needed for every position of each band. But now, instead of trying to come up with 4 lead electric players, I only need 1 or two, and we’ll do lead piano or lead synth the other weeks, and who knows what other styles I might try. Suggestions anyone?

Here was our Set:

• All Because of Jesus (Fee – kind of)
• I am Free (Desperation band arr. – kind of)
• Welcome
• ‘Tis so Sweet to trust in Jesus (My Arr.)
• John 3:16
• “Sick” video (From Worship House Media)
• 1 John 4:9
• I’ll go where you want me to Go (Hymn – My Arr.)
• Rescue
• Sermon
• Amazing Love (I’ll never be the same) Mike Honholtz.

I was going to change the closing song, but talked with a couple of people who said I shouldn’t. Our former worship pastor used to play keys with Mike Honholtz, and I get the impression that a lot of Mike’s songs have been beaten into the ground here. It’s a great song, though, you should check it out.

For more weekend Reviews, check out Sunday Setlists at Fred McKinnon.com.

In this week’s episode, David and Kevin talk about “Being too hard on ourselves.” As musicians and artists, we have a tendency to only be pleased with how we perform when the performance is perfect, at least to us. It might not actually be perfect, but it’s perfect to us, we don’t notice any flaws. When that happens, we’re happy. When that doesn’t happen, we beat ourselves up thinking of all the things we could have done differently (not matter how small) to make it better.

You can join in the conversation by joining our network, filling out the contact form, or sending an email to david@worshipministrycatalyst.com or kevin@worshipministrycatalyst.com

Don’t forget you can subscribe to our podcast through iTunes as well.

Other Links:

Click here to Go to Multnomah University’s website to download “Nothing is Impossible” for free.

Our service on Sunday was a blast!  We had Doug Valenzuala, a missionary from Italy, preach on Sunday (our church has been supporting him since 1977!) and the guy is hilarious!  If you’re interested, you can listen to his message online at our church’s website.

So, having Doug was a lot of fun and the music just augmented to the service.  People were singing and there was a lot of joy in the air… it was really fun and refreshing.  And it was actually kind of nice to be leading as the last two Sundays I’ve had co-leaders doing all the music and leading.  Here’s what we did:

• Call to Worship / Prayer
• Hosanna(Paul Baloche; great song for Easter Season)
• Unchanging (Chris Tomlin)
• I Will Worship You (This is a song one of my co-leaders wrote… good Easter message)
• Mighty to Save (Hillsong; another Easter themed idea)
• The Stand (United/Hillsong… our church LOVES this song!)
• Welcome New Members (had our annual Business Meeting last week)
• Body Life / Prayer for Offering
• Great is The Lord sung as a special during Offering (on Saturday, we had a memorial service for a guy in our church who passed away; this was one of his favorite songs so it was very meaningful)
• Message: Doug Valenzuala on Acts 20:20-24
• Closing Prayer

For more Sunday Setlists, you can check out Fred McKinnon’s blogroll.

Here was our set:

• Happy Day
• I Will Boast
• Easter Presentation
• Acts 4:1-22 reading
• God of Wonders
• Acts 4:23-31 Reading
• The Love of God (Mercy Me”ish” arr.)
• Sermon
• I’m forever grateful.

Personally, this has been a very hard weekend. My wife & I found out on Friday that we lost our baby. My wife was 14 weeks along. My wife has been having to go through things to help “deliver” the baby, so this weekend has been incredibly difficult.

For more weekend Reviews go check out Sunday Setlists at Fred’s Place.

John Maxwell is famous for saying, “We cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are.”

Of course it makes sense. It makes perfect sense. If we do the same things, stay in the same patterns, go through the same motions, maintain the same routines, we will never change anything, we will never go about getting better, we will never create new things, we will never move on.

Of course I know that. I don’t live up to that, but I know it. How do I fix it? The only answer I can come up with is to change something.

It looks like it would be a really cool resource that you could pass on to your worship team, I’m going to pass it on to mine.

God reveals-takes initiative reveals presence (smoke filled Temple)

• scripture reading on the presence of God
• lone soloist on stage sings
• video focusing on “God in His Temple”
• etc.

we, as created ones, adore (angels Holy Holy Holy)

• corporate worship adoration
• poetry of adoration
• beauty scripture reading
• dance or other adorational art form etc.

For the rest of this framework, go check it out on worship trench.

Os Guinness said in his book Prophetic Untimeliness, “After two hundred years of earnest dedication to reinventing the faith and the church and to being more relevant in the world, we are confronted with an embarrassing fact: Never have Christians pursued relevance more strenuously; never have Christians been more irrelevant.”

In this week’s episode, David and Kevin breach the topic of “Technological Recontextualizaion” that was brought up at the Recent CB Northwest Conference by Senior Pastor Scott Reavely of New Life Church (formerly known as West Linn First Baptist)

We don’t get very far down this road, but it’s definitely a road worth traveling down. I’m sure this is a topic that will come up again and again as we continue to think about how we do Worship Ministry in the Local Church.

You can join in the conversation by joining our network, filling out the contact form, or sending an email to david@worshipministrycatalyst.com or kevin@worshipministrycatalyst.com

Don’t forget you can subscribe to our podcast through iTunes as well.

Here are a few links you should check out:

Geeks & God Podcast (Pretty deep podcast about all things tech, especially drupal and other web 2.0 technologies.)

Church Leader Insights podcast about your home page.

FYI: David and I recorded a whole Podcast episode awhile back on church choirs.  Check it out and jump in on the conversation! http://www.worshipministrycatalyst.com/?p=224

Our Sunday Service was again led this week by one of our co-leaders: Rachel.  I tasked her with finding some creative ways of doing the service, and she stepped up to the challenge!  I have been encouraged by the response and feedback I’m getting from the congregation: people seem to enjoy seeing others lead even if it means the music is different or not as polished.  This has been a great strategic decision to help with our mission statement of empowering other leaders in our church.

So, here’s what the service looked like:

• Welcome / Call to Worship (Rachel)
• Promises (a great Jared Anderson song that not enough people know)
• Veggie Tale Video Clip (from the story of Abraham and Sara dealing with God’s promise)
• Above All(classic Lenny LaBlanc)
• Rescue (another Jared Anderson song; this one is more familiar as it was covered and made famous by New Song)
• I Surrender All (hymn with a cool guitar groove that Rachel worked out)
• Testimony time (One of our youth went to India for a month)
• Offering song: Amazing Grace (This was cool: Rachel sang with her sister, her mom, and her grandmother: 3 generations were on stage doing this quartet arrangement of Amazing Grace… it was powerful!)
• Message on God’s Promises: Hebrews 6
• Closing / Transition into Annual Business Meeting

Check out more Sunday Setlists at Fred McKinnon’s site

We had some technical issues, we couldn’t get the choir up loud enough as they were right in front of the drum cage. Even though the drums are fully enclosed, we finally got them up in this mix during our service this morning by adding another mic.

It was probably a frustrating week for the band, as they were primarily a “pit band” who accompanied the choir, but they did a great job and hope they enjoyed their time.

I love choir! Choir is still pretty new to us. I guess they used to have one here way back in the day, but they haven’t had one at all for the last 7 or 8 years except for the occasional song for Easter or Christmas. I’m really excited about the possibilities that having a choir will bring us.

Here was our set:

• All The Earth Will Sing Your Praises
• Your Grace is Enough
• Welcome
• Choir Promo Video
• Easter Choir Announcement
• Majestic (Brewster)
• How Can I keep from Singing
• Sermon
• Be the Centre

For more weekend review, checkout Sunday Setlists at Fred’s Place.

Aside from all that, it’s a fantastic movie. And it’s not just because it’s heart warming, or because it has a happy ending, or because it’s based on a true story. Yes, those are all true, but there’s another reason or two that it’s great.

The first is the obvious one, the moral of the story. The obvious moral of the story is a great one, and overcoming segregation was a tremendous feat and worthy of being noted (obivously what the movie was about). However, I think the moral of the story goes beyond this to the idea of overcoming adversity.

The second reason it’s great is because of the Leadership lessons that can be learned. It obviously took great leadership to lead a team through such a trying situation into a victorious season. There are examples of great leadership throughout the movie, but there are a couple the really stand out to me.

Lesson 1

“You may not like each other, but you will respect each other…maybe someday we’ll learn to play this game like men.”

How many times have you wished the people you are working with would “learn to play this game like men”? I certainly know I have had that thought. If we could just get beyond some of the childish, all about me ways of thinking, we’d get so much further down the road. If it wasn’t always about “ME,” “WE” could go so much further.

Lesson 2

“Attitude Reflects Leadership – Captain”

Do you remember the Scene? Julius and Gary are having a confrontation about playing as a team and Julius calls Gary out. He calls him out about not getting on his white buddies to block for Rev. Then he says that Line, “Attitude Reflects Leadership – captain.”

Have you come across this in your ministry? You start noticing a certain attidue, whatever that might be among the people in your ministry, when you suddenly realize that it’s because it’s an attitude you have been exemplifying to your people.

Lesson 3

“You call this game fair, or I’ll go to the papers, I don’t care if I go down with you…Dig your own grave”

There will be times in our leadership careers when we will have to make decisions, the right decision, that many or even most others disagree with. It might be huge, it might be small, but for some reason people have chosen sides and you have to make a stand for what’s right. You may be taking yourself down, you might be diggin your own grave, but you know it’s right. The result might be positive, you might go down, but it’s still the right decision and you needed to take a stand.

Whatever your position, there’s a wealth of leadership knowledge that can be gained from watching “Remember the Titans.” If you haven’t seen it, it’s been a while, or even if it was last week, go rent it and watch it. I’m positive you’ll find something in there to encourage you as well.

In this week’s episode, David & Kevin talk about Time management and particularly how it relates to being prepared for rehearsals and other events. We talk about some of the struggles in getting prepared and some of the things we can do to be more prepared.

This is a very important issue, one that can really add to or take away from our volunteers experience. If we’re prepared, we really set the stage for them to feel like they are succeeding and we also set them up for success. If we aren’t prepared, we’re communicating that it’s not all that important to come to rehearsal prepared, and we’re requiring more of them for all of us to be able to succeed. This is a topic we’ll definitely becoming back to in the future, we’ve only scratched the surface in this episode.

You can join in the conversation by joining our network, filling out the contact form, or sending an email to david@worshipministrycatalyst.com or kevin@worshipministrycatalyst.com

Don’t forget you can subscribe to our podcast through iTunes as well.

Speaking of awesome, our service on Sunday was pretty awesome.  I had one of my co-leaders (Ryan) do the entire service from start to finish.  He picked the music, arranged the service order and actually led/executed.  It went really well; Ryan even introduced a song that he wrote, which was very meaningful for our church.  Here’s what it looked like:

• Instrumental Prelude: There is No One Like You (David Crowder)
• Welcome / Body Life
• Mission Update / Prayer for offering
• Psalm 25 (read during the offering with keyboard in the background)
• Message on Hebrews 5
• I Will Worship You (New song that Ryan wrote)
• Kindness (classic Chris Tomlin song)
• Take my Life (aka “Holiness”, written by Scott Underwood; made famous off the SonicFlood album)
• Unchanging (another Chris Tomlin song… GREAT song!)
• Let my Words be Few (Matt Redman song… another GREAT tune that our church loves!)

Next week I’m having another co-leader do the entire service from start to finish (including picking the music, etc.)  It’s been fun having other people use their creative talents in the service and I think we’re starting to see some of this idea of communal worship.

For other Sunday Setlists, check out Fred McKinnon’s blog

However, once we got into the service, things seems to run pretty smooth. Not perfect, better than I had anticipated with as unpolished as we seemed to have left things in rehearsal.

We had our midweek rehearsal with almost all of the band there, we were just missing one acoustic player. We were only able to work up a few of the songs, and I was hoping that would be enough to give us a good jumpstart for the weekend.

We also had a worship concert on Friday night, which the stage was completely struck for, so there were a bunch of little things that hadn’t been put back correctly that had to be dealt with right before rehearsal.

All that so say, we weren’t feeling at our best in the service last night, in spite of that it all seemed to work pretty well. For the most part the band was able to get through the music without any major hiccups and nothing that was majorly distracting (except for when I started “I’d rather have Jesus” in 4/4 instead of 6/8.)

Here was our set:

• Hosanna (Baloche)
• Call to Worship Prayer
• All We Need (Hall)
• All Who Are Thirsty (Brown – Kutless Arr.)
• Sermon
• Sweetly Broken
• Communion
• I’d Rather Have Jesus.

Here was the band:

• Acoustic 1 – Steve
• Acoustic 2 – Tim
• Drums – Casey
• Bass – Alan
• Electric 1 – Phil
• Electric 2 – Steve
• Piano – Me
• Soprano – Lisa
• Alto – Tracie
• Lyric Presentation – Nathan
• Lyric Presentation Shadow – Jeff
• Sound – Todd
• Sound Shadow – Phil

For more weekend Reviews Go Check out Sunday Setlists at Fred’s Place.

We use Adobe’s InDesign to do our bulletin in, and my Mac is the only computer with the software on it. Therefore, our office manager logs on to my computer via logmein.com when she needs to work on and print the bulletin.

Well, I’ve been trying to create her a fully functining account that she can log into without having to use my account at all. At first, I couldn’t get her access to the folder that was in my account, (even though I had shared it) so I had to move all the files. Then I couldn’t get log me in to work logging into her account and not mine.

Now I have two new problems that I don’t know how to solve. For some reason, when you install a font on a Mac, it only installs it on the account you are working with, not on the entire machine. So, if I’m working with a graphic that is using a unique font on my account, I have to install the font on her account as well if she’s going to be able to work with it.

Secondly, when I open up InDesign, it will only open for about one minute, then a box pops up saying something about a licensing error (Yes, it’s a completely legit copy, I have the boxes and serial numbers in my office) and the program shuts down.

I’ve never had either of those problems on my PC. I also don’t understand the “Paying more for Quality” argument. There are plenty of PC computers that rival the quality of a mac, some that surpass it in my opinion, and they’re all cheaper.

Anyway, even though the world seems to think Mac is winning the PC vs. Mac battle, with me PC is winning.

“Developing Excellent Communication skills is absolutely essential to effective leadership. The Leader must be able to share knowledge and ideas to transmit a sense of urgency and enthusiasm to others. If a leader can’t get a message across clearly and motivate others to act on it, then having a message doesn’t even matter.” – Gilbert Amelio

“Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.” - John C. Maxwell

“A Leader must get things done through others, therefore the leader must have the ability to inspire and motivate, guide and direct, and listen. It’s only through communication that the leader is able to cause others to internalize his or her vision and implement it.” – Danto Manquez Jr.

I don’t know about you, but I really connect with these quotes. Maybe you’re a great communicator by nature, and you don’t have to worry too much about how you communicate, but for me, these quotes really help me think about how I can be more intentional about my communication and what the end goal/result of my communication should be: “Simply inspiring people to internalize and implement the vision.”

In this week’s episode of the Worship Ministry Catalyst Podcast, David & Kevin talk about the art of communication (or the lack thereof). It’s a delicate thing, how much should we communicate, and in how much detail, how often, what should we say, etc.

We share some of our personal successes and failures in communicating and talk about some of the goals we have to improve our communication. We hope this episode will really help you in getting thinking about how and what you communicate.

You can join in the conversation by joining our network, filling out the contact form, or sending an email to david@worshipministrycatalyst.com or kevin@worshipministrycatalyst.com

Don’t forget you can subscribe to our podcast through iTunes as well.

The verse is a call to worship (who God is).  The pre-chorus is our approach (why we’re here).  And the chorus is our response (what we do).  It’s real simple and straight forward… and our church really seems to worship and connect with this song.

As with the other song, this recording is taken straight from our Sunday worship service (i.e. it’s just a board feed!)  I’m on piano and lead vocals; there is also bass, electric, and acoustic guitar and some alto vocals.  And even though you can’t here it, there are drums

Sing Your Praise (song)

Sing Your Praise (chart)

Out of that idea I started pulling images, ideas, and verses from the book of Hebrews to create a song that I felt embodied our response to who God is and how His Word impacts us. His redemption, His grace, His sovereignty, boldly approaching Him, looking up, knowing the God who knows us;these are all ideas from the book of Hebrews… and our response is to worship the King!

This recording is taken straight from our Sunday worship service (i.e. it’s just a board feed!) I’m on piano and lead vocals; there is also bass, electric, and acoustic guitar and some alto vocals. And even though you can’t here it, there are drums

Your Word is Alive (song)

Your Word is Alive (chart

Either way, it was a good service with some new music that I wrote. If you want to listen to one of the new songs, click on the link listed below (keep in mind these are just board feeds that don’t sound that great… you can’t even hear the drums! And what’s worship without drums?! The congregation seemed to really responded well to the new one I wrote.

Here’s what we did:

• Opening testimony and video (a family in our church has a 7-year old son with cancer; we’ve been praying for them and I thought it would be cool to start the service with an update and video on his progress)
• Great is the Lord (old Steve McEwan song)
• Jesus Messiah (new Chris Tomlin song)
• Communion (between songs)
• You are my King (Amazing Love)
• Grace Flows Down (off the Passion “One Day Live” album)
• Sing Your Praise (song I wrote several months ago that we’ve been singing)
• Mission Focus / Offering
• Your Word is Alive (new song I wrote)
• Message on Hebrews 4:12-16

For more Sunday Setlists, you can visit Fred McKinnon’s site

This weekend has been a great weekend. Aside from not having our drummer at rehearsal on Wed. we were really well prepared for the weekend. We had our band practice on Wed. evening for all the band (minus the drummer), we had a vocals rehearsal on Saturday at 3:00 and full rehearsal at 4:00 (pm not am). There were still some skiffs along the way, but all in all, I feel like we were far better prepared to lead this weekends than I feel we are on most.

We did Lincoln’s new song “Today is the Day” which fit really well with our sermon last weekend. I planned on doing it last weekend, but when we didn’t have electric and I wasn’t sure about drums I cut it and opted for songs we already knew. However doing the song this week gave me an interesting tie back to last week. I was able to tell people to think back to last week as what pastor Bob talked about in terms of Sloth and diligence.

Here was our set:

• Today is the Day (Lincoln Brewster)
• Because of your Love (Paul Baloche)
• No Greater Love (Tommy Walker)
• Prayer to be diligent in our worship
• Beautiful the Blood (Fee)
• Your Name (Paul Baloche)
• Sermon
• Surrender (James Marc – Lincoln Brewster Arr.)

I’m really diggin’ Tommy Walker right now. It’s got a fresh feel for us, gives us a style that’s a lot different from most contemporary, our people seem to be liking it too.

For more weekend Reviews, go check out Sunday Setlists at Fred’s Place.

We truly hope that you’ll find this episode of the WMC podcast encouraging and insightful in your pursuit to continually improve the worship ministry at your local church.

You can join in the conversation by joining our network, filling out the contact form, or sending an email to david@worshipministrycatalyst.com or kevin@worshipministrycatalyst.com

Don’t forget you can subscribe to our podcast through iTunes as well.

The service went well… a few little snags on starting the songs.  One of the problems with someone else leading (and one of the things I’m working on!) is that I’m not in control… but that’s a good thing.  I’m learning that I don’t always have to lead everything and be in control all the time and that even if things don’t go perfect, it’s so much more meaningful to have others leading and engaging in ministry.

So… here is what our Sunday looked like:

• Awesome is The Lord (Chris Tomlin)
• Greeting / Transition
• Mission Focus: Ehtiopia (we had a gentleman from Ehtiopia share about a Missionary College he is starting… it was so cool!)
• Body Life / Prayer for Offering
• Show Me Your Glory (Third Day)
• Message: The Believer’s Rest (Hebrews 4)
• Rest (by Skillet… this song rocked!)
• All Who Are Thirsty (straight off the Kutless worship album)
• Still (Hillsong; written by Reuben Morgan… great tune that not a lot of people know about)
• Knowing You (Graham Kendrick)

It was cool doing some of these new songs that rocked a little… and having a chunk of music at the end was a great way to respond to Pastor Mike’s message on rest.  I think it worked!

For more weekend reviews, check out Fred’s Place.  Have a great week!

We had a drummer who didn’t show up, so I had to ask someone to come who only got to sit through about 40 minutes of rehearsal. He did a tremendous job, but we ended up wasting quite a bit of time waiting for the other drummer, we tried to rehearse without him, but having a lot of new musicians on the team this weekend made that a challenge.

We’re doing a series right now called Elevate – it’s on the 7 deadly sins. This week was on sloth. We’ve built a staircase to use as a prop, and each week we’re adding a step with what the counterpart is to the sin. The opposite for sloth that our Senior pastor landed on was Diligence. My lack of diligence forgot to print the sign up for the step until right before the service, and instead of using diligence as the opposite, I used next week’s opposite – love. I fixed it for this morning.

Here was our set:

• Every Day (Brewster arr.)
• Never Gonna Stop (Walker)
• Welcome
• Praise Adonai (Paul Baloche)
• Here Am I (Mike Honholtz)
• Sermon
• Grace Greater than our Sin (Hymn)

We didn’t do the closing song on Saturday night due to a family emergency. We would appreciate your prayers. My wife is pregnant with our third child, and we had to rush her to the emergency room in the middle of the service last night because of some complications with the pregnancy. I don’t want to get into the details here, but my wife is fine and the baby was moving in the ultrasound, so everything seemed to be okay. We’re just praying that is stays that way. Thanks for your prayers!

For more weekend Reviews, go check out Fred’s Sunday Setlists.

We talk about some of our thoughts from the interview, as well as give you some of the details for the Reviews we’re doing with our own worship ministries.

If you’re doing a Year End Review, we’d love to hear from you and how the process is going for you.

You can join in the conversation by joining our network, filling out the contact form, or sending an email to david@worshipministrycatalyst.com or kevin@worshipministrycatalyst.com

Don’t forget you can subscribe to our podcast through iTunes as well.

Almost 7 years ago, my wife & I had our first date. It was at a little place called Jazz de Opus and the performer that night (and the reason we went there) was Dan Balmer. So, on Monday night, after not having been back in quite a while we went to see Dan Balmer at Jimmy Maks (Jazz de Opus has closed and last I heard was a Gay mens club.) Not only was this a Romantic experience for my wife & I, it was an inspiring night for me as a musician.

The Dan Balmer Trio consists of Dan Balmer who plays Electric, George Mitchell who plays keys & bass, and a drummer (the drummer changes from time to time, though he recorded an album with Matt Wilson). Dan also has another group, Go By Train which plays more of a fusion-esque Jazz as opposed to the the Dan Balmer Trio.

My friend Mike introduced me to Dan Balmer a while ago, and Dan has since become my favorite musical group. My favorite playlist in my iTunes is “Dan Balmer.”

Why such an affinity? (As I’m writing this, I’m hoping you’re not thinking I’m some kind of weirdo.) It’s because of the music. The songs he writes and plays are the whole package. They speak volumes without saying a word. Dan’s extraordinary skills make the music. I’ve heard many great musicians, many who have a great technical skill, others who have a great feel. Dan is at the top of both scales.

Every time I listen to his music, I’m drawn in. He’s not just technically amazing, but he’s musically astounding. All of this taken into account, you might imagine he’d have an ego as large as his skill, however, the opposite is true. He’s humble. Of all the musicians I’ve seen and heard, if any have a right to brag, it’s him and he doesn’t.

Every time I see him live, I leave inspired to improve the skills I’ve been given by our creator in a way that no other music I listen to can do. That’s one of the things that amazes me, he’s a guitarist and I’m a pianist and still I find him inspiring. I do have to say that I find George Mitchell quite inspiring as well, but that’s a differnet post.

All that aside, I have to ask you: where do you go for inspiration? Do you have an artist you can go to that can take your dreams of your music to places no other music can do? Is there an artist in your life that not only inspires you in terms of ability and writing, but in their attitude? If not, borrow mine for a while and give Dan a try. You can buy his albums on iTunes or through his website. I don’t think you’ll be dissapointed.

I was a little nervous going into this Sunday because I knew it would look, feel, and sound different than most other Sundays… but it went really well!  I was super impressed with the message and also with the way Rachel led the practice and the songs.  I’ve been trying to be more intentional about having others lead.  It’s one of those deals where I don’t want to be a control freak; it’s so much more meaningful when others have buy-in and actually are leading.  That’s one of my big goals for 2009: to do less and have others do more!

So, here’s what we did on Sunday:  Steve was preaching on 1 Corinthians 15, which is all about heaven, and the rapture… so we set the stage right at the beginning of the service explaining how all the songs have to do with heaven and the scripture passage; making the whole service very thematic.

• I’ll Fly Away (old hymn with a cool “Jars of Clay” arrangement)
• Soon and Very Soon (old Andre’ Crouch song… similar arrangement as “I’ll Fly Away”)
• Marvelous Light (Charlie Hall)
• I Can Only Imagine (Mercy Me/Bart Millard)
• Forever (Calvary Chapel tune… “The nails in Your hands / The nail in Your feet…”)
• Better is One Day (Matt Redman; arrangement straight off the “One Day Live” album)
• Commissioned Mission Teams
• Special Song: “I Surrender All” (sung in Spanish like on the new Michael W. Smith album)
• Message on 1 Corinthians 15:50-58
• Amazing Grace (just piano and vocals)

It was a good service; and it was really good having other people take such an active role in the music and the message.  For more weekend reviews, check out Fred McKinnon’s  website

Knowing it would be difficult, I had our secretary start calling two weeks ago to try to find out who would be available. The only problem is that we did hear from some of them until a few days before the weekend, which didn’t leave any time to find replacements on a weekend like this one.

That said, I decided to back the band all the way down to just piano and two vocals. So instead of looking like we weren’t able to get the band together for this weekend, it would look like we had intentionally decided to go with just a piano and two vocals for the weekend.

The amazing thing is that it worked. When we were talking about it last night after the service, one of our pastors said that he had thought it was on purpose. Until he talked to another pastor who knew that it wasn’t, he thought we had planned it that way.

Going with just the piano, allowed us to go a little old school, which we don’t get to do very often, but really worked well thematically with the sermon.

Here was our set:

• Amazing Love (Mike Honholtz)
• Scripture: Romans 12:9-16
• Good To Me (Craig Musseau)
• Welcome
• Bible Sharing
• You are so Good to Me (Third Day”ish”)
• Scripture: 1 Thes. 5:16-18
• Wherever He Leads (Hymn I wrote new music too.)
• You are my King (moved this here for Sunday morning)
• Sermon
• I’m Forever Grateful. (Mark Altrogge)

Our senior pastor joined us on acoustic for Sunday morning, all we needed was an upright bass and fiddle and we could have had a pretty cool folk group up there. Maybe next time!

Check out more Reviews and set lists over at Fred’s Place.

Here’s why I use an ipod (or any mp3 player) instead of CD’s.

First, it’s easier to go through a lot of songs. What I used to do was buy a bunch of CD’s, rip them to mp3’s and then load them on my computer. Lately I’ve been buying albums on iTunes. I don’t have to keep a whole stack of CD’s in my car. I don’t have to keep messing with swapping the CD’s and keep them all in their correct cases.

Second, it’s easier to cut out the songs that I don’t think are going to work. Once I’ve listened to all the songs and I’ve started to eliminate some of the songs that aren’t going to work, all I have to do is remove them from the playlist. I don’t have to keep skipping past the songs that we aren’t going to use, I can focus completely on the songs we might use.

Thirdly, once I have the gotten the songs down to the list that I’m actually going to use, I have a playlist that I can use to learn the songs, use in rehearsals, etc.

For me, and iPod really simplifies the whole process of choosing new worship songs for our church, if you haven’t used yours in this way, I’d really encourage you to think about starting.

Jordan not only shares with us some very helpful insight in how to do a Year End Review, but many other little helpful bits of information along the way.

If you’re doing a year end review and have some thoughts you’d like to share about your process we’d love to hear them.

You can join in the conversation by joining our network, filling out the contact form, or sending an email to david@worshipministrycatalyst.com or kevin@worshipministrycatalyst.com

Don’t forget you can subscribe to our podcast through iTunes as well.

Pastor Mike has been going through the book of Hebrews on the sermon series: “Knowing the God Who Knows You”.  Last Sunday was all about Christ’s humility leading to His exalation (Hebrews 2:5-18).  So I really wanted to do some songs that would focus on that beautiful idea of Christ humbling Himself; an image of humility and grace leading to a place of praise.  As such, we started things off pretty mellow, but then worked our way to a place of total praise!

• Scripture reading from the Worship Team Vocalists (Philippians 2:5-11)
• Here I Am To Worship
• Here is Our King (this is where things started picking up!)
• Forever (Tomlin)
• Jesus Messiah (also Tomlin)
• Holy is the Lord (another Tomlin?!?)
• King of Kings (a Clay Heacock song I learned at a Calvary Chapel conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida)
• Offering
• Mission Focus
• Message
• I Dare You to Move (Switchfoot… and it rocked!)

I kind of took a gamble on that closing Switchfoot song, but Pastor Mike really wanted it and it tied in perfectly with Mike’s closing challenge, so we did it and rocked it pretty good (especially for not having an electric guitar this week!)

For more Weekend Review’s, check out Fred’s Place. Thanks for listening!

First, let’s start by defining what a Creative Team is (and isn’t). I’ve been doing a lot of research on other creative teams out there, and what I’ve found is that there are two types of creative teams – at least the term gets used in these two ways quite regularly. In the first it is used to describe a team of people who do the creative stuff. They’re the dancers, singers, actors, etc. This is NOT the type of creative team I will be discussing. The type of creative team I will be talking about is the group of people who meet to brainstorm creative ideas about a sermon or sermon series and creative worship elements that will enhance the point of the sermon or sermon series.

With that out of the way, I want to talk about one of the biggest hindrances to the success of a creative team – Patience. I haven’t talked with a ton of people who have been doing this, but one of the common threads in these discussions seems to be that the ideas just don’t seem to come. It seems, in our culture, we can’t be satisified unless we get the resolution we’re looking for immediately. It’s this desire that forces us to settle for the lesser creative ideas and not plow through to find the absolute best ones.

It’s like that at times – plowing. The old school kind, you know using horses or mules, etc. Coming to the best idea can be a lot of hard work and take a lot of time.

So, in your meetings, do everything you can to excercise patience. Wait. Don’t get in a hurry (if you can help it).

Also, don’t be afraid of the silence. People need time to think. You need time to think. Most people (men and women) can’t think their best if someone is always talking. Stop talking. Encourage the silence. This is the hard part, ask others to be silent. If you have someone on your team who jeopardizes the conversation, talk the him/her in private and ask them to try to allow more time for others to talk.

Along with patience and silence you need time. It’s different than patience. You need to have enough notice on what the sermon or sermon series is going to be that you don’t have to be rushed to come up with something. You’ll never get the good stuff that way. This will be something that you’ll have to work with your Senior Pastor on. It might be a hard conversation, but it’s absolutely necessary. If you’re not far enough out in advance, you’ll always be behind the eight ball, only able to do what you can accomplish at the last minute. You’ll also be frustrated. You’ll come up with really good ideas, where if you had just a couple more weeks you could pull off the really good idea, but because the weekend is only days away you’re forced to do what you can not what you could.

One last though is that your patience and time may need to span multiple meetings. (If you’re planning far enough out) you don’t need to feel like you have to come up with the final idea at this week’s meeting. One of the best creative ideas a team I was working with came as the result of four weeks worth of meetings. It won’t always take a long time, but it might. You need to give yourself the time for it to take time. You need to give yourself permission to not make a decision right away. Let it simmer in your brains for a week or two. Then after the whole team has had time to process the idea, make a decision as a team on what the best idea is.

That’s it for the first round. There’s plenty more to come, stay tuned!

In the past I’ve been too afraid of compromising our sound to have new people up there without having worked with them a lot beforehand (which we still do) because I was afraid that it would really jeopardize people’s worship experience. I was wrong. People seem to really enjoy it.

Here was our set:

• Let God Arise (Tomlin)
• Everlasting God (Brown)
• Welcome
• Communion
• Sermon
• How Great is our God w/ the Chorus of How Great Thou Art (Tomlin & Hine)
• Hosanna

Our pastor finished his sermon talking about worship so we did a little bit longer of a set at the end of the service this week. It seemed to work well. We were running late, so I was worried that people would be feeling like they wanted to get out of there, but that didn’t seem to be the case for the majority anyway.

That’s what we did, check out what some others did over at Fred’s Place.

Here’s the link: http://www.chrisfromcanada.com/?p=1033

Here are some of the highlights from the article:

• 12:37 Chris - 5 Elements of a Great Song – #1 Define Your Purpose
• 12:38 Chris - ‘Songs that have universal appeal fall in to that trap. They have no specific purpose and no specific meaning.’
• 12:40 Chris - Lots of worship songs are filled with phrases that have worked really well in other worship songs.
• 12:40 Chris - ‘What is my purpose here? Is this how I would talk with someone I love? It this really how I talk or am I treating people like cattle?’
• 12:43 Chris - Example of specific songs with specific purpose – Heart of Worship by Matt Redman, God of Justice by Tim Hughes.
• 12:44 Chris - 5 Elements of a Great Song – #2 Eight Seconds
• 12:44 Chris - ‘Whether it’s A&R or a congregation, you don’t have more than about eight seconds to get them engaged.’
• 12:47 Chris - ‘Don’t bore us, get to the chorus.’
• 12:49 Chris - 5 Elements of a Great Song – #3 Show and Tell
• 12:49 Chris - ‘Communicate the image by telling them what it is.. but you also have to provide them with a picture, something they can see, something that they can put in context.’
• 12:50 Chris - Don’t go overboard on the pictures – make sure part of the song also TELLS the meaning of the song.
• 12:51 Chris - Examples of songs that show and tell – East to West by Casting Crowns, One by U2.
• 12:53 Chris - 5 Elements of a Great Song – #4 Strong Lyric and Melodic Hook
• 12:53 Chris - ‘If it’s not entertaining or captivating or interesting you’ve missed your point.’
• 12:54 Chris - ‘We’re all free – create whatever you have to create. But if we want to be better communicators with our music we have to do things that are captivating and interesting.’
• 12:55 Chris - ‘Lyrically, people just get lazy. Melodically, you’re just not daring enough.’
• 12:58 Chris - Sound of Your Name by Above the Golden State, Crazy Beautiful by Chasen.
• 13:00 Chris - Weave hooks through different sections of the songs.
• 13:01 Chris - 5 Elements of a Great Song – #5 Critique and Re-Write
• 13:01 Chris - ‘When you co-write, critiquing happens in real-time.’
• 13:02 Chris - ‘I think it’s important that you let the song happen. Give the song an opportunity to be birthed.’
• 13:04 Chris - ‘Don’t do critique and re-writing right away. It’s a creative thing and you need to give it time before you can come back to it with a little more objectivity.’
• 13:04 Chris - Listening to the first two versions and then the final take of Great Things by Matt Maher.
• 13:07 Chris - ‘A melody is good if you can remember it after going for a drive and spending the day at work.’

Here’s a pic from the blog “Chris from CA” who also got listed. You can see we’re about 6th from the top.

Some of my other Blog friends are listed there as well:

• Fred McKinnon
• Worship Trench
• Chris From Canada
• Rich Kirkpatrick

If I can find a link to the article I’ll post it on the site, but I think it’s a subscription based service to be able to access that article. Thanks for listing us Leadership Journal.

In this week’s episode David & Kevin talk about using Non-Christian Musicians in the Worship Band. For too many of us, we just answer “no” without ever thinking about it. But could it be possible that we’re missing out on an opportunity by not keeping an open mind? Listen in to find out.

You can also join in the conversation by joining our network, filling out the contact form, or sending an email to david@worshipministrycatalyst.com or kevin@worshipministrycatalyst.com

I’ve started asking people the questions. I Started with my Worship Leadership Team. Since I have never done this before, (not at this church and not in this way) I wanted to give it a little test run to hear people’s responses to the idea of a Year End Review. I’m getting ready to do the review with everyone, at our “quarterly” fellowship.

What I have learned already is amazing. I’ve gotten some really great and genuine responses to the questions. One thing that I wasn’t expecting to see was the amount of ownership that a lot of people are taking in the Worship Arts Ministry. I didn’t think I would get any responses that would indicate this, but I certainly have.

One of the things I’m really excited about is the fact that a lot of the dreams that some of the people have expressed for the Worship Arts Minsitry at our church are a lot of the same ideas that I’ve had.

I sincerly hope you’ll consider doing a year end review. (No, I’m not making any money for pushing this.) You have to be willing to take a little heat. But, as you’ve heard me say before, that’s the only way any of us are going to grow. As Pastor Troy Grambling of Flamingo Road Church says, “it’s only a mistake if you don’t learn from it.” We have to be willing to see the areas we need to improve in and the areas we’ve made mistakes in over the past year, learn from them and fix them so we don’t repeat them in the future.

So, I thought I’d share with you some of the new songs that people are really liking at our church. They might not always be brand new, but they’re new to us.

• Revelation Song – Jennie Riddle. This is definitely at the top of our favorite new songs list. We did this song just this past weekend and it seems to have connect with people in a very powerful way. It has a lot of open space in the song, between and in the middle of phrases which some might like and some might not like, so far, I haven’t heard anyone who doesn’t like the song.
• Beautiful the Blood – Steve Fee. This too is a great song. The phraseology of the title line is very creative in and of itself. It has a great, driving prechorus (channel to some of you) that builds you up quite a bit and then you find all the relief you need in the chorus. It also has a very strong ending.
• Speak to Me – Tommy Walker. If you’re looking for a good song to help prepare people’s hearts right before the sermon, or if your doing a scripture reading, or talking about listening to the voice of God, etc. this is a great song for that. It’s got that great Tommy Walker feel to it, it’s especially great for piano driven worship, or churches looking for songs that are contemporary, but not too contemporary.

One question I’d like to pose to you is, How often to you introduce new worship songs? How often do you think is acceptable to introduce a new worship song?

I hope this helps you in your search for the worship songs that will help you and your congregation worship at the feet of our Savior!

I don’t know about you, but for me, it seems like I feel quite regularly (as a worship leader) there is always more I could have done to help us get ready. And it usually shows in some way on the weekend. You know…could have gotten the band the charts earlier, could have worked more on one part during rehearsal, could have communicated better, etc. It wasn’t a perfect week, there were a couple of loose ends that had to be tied up on the weekend….our bass player couldn’t make to the midweek rehearsal, we didn’t have childcare for our Sat. rehearsal, I could have reminded the band what they needed to work on between our rehearsal and the service. But those things aside, we were really prepared for our role to lead worship this weekend. And it showed.

We got a lot of compliments like “Great worship” “There were times that it was hard to sing (in a good way)” & even one who said “That was the best worship we’ve ever had.”

In spite of all we did, the best thing that we did and the best thing that happened was that all of us on the team were being submissive and allowing God is speak to us and through us. In the end that’s what made it so great – our willingness to be led by the Spirit and lead the congregation that way.

Here was our set:

• All the Earth will Sing your Praises (Baloche – Travis Cotrell arr.)
• Lord I lift your name on High (Lincoln Brewster Arr.)
• Welcome & prayer
• Great & Marvelous (Tommy Walker)
• Scripture Reading (Rev. 4)
• Revelation Song (Jennie Lee Riddle)
• Sermon
• I surrender all (on Sat.) Grace Greater than our Sin (on Sun.)

Great and Marvelous.

This was a new song for us. It was challenging to our band (and me), and it was stylistically quite different from what we normally do here on the weekend – which is exactly why I chose it.

Revelation Song.

If this song isn’t in your rotation it needs to be. It’s one of the best, power-worship songs to come out in a long time (in my opinion).

Lessons Learned this week: When I do my part to prepare it frees the worship leaders up to be able to lead and be led in worship.

For more weekend Reviews go check some out at Fred’s Place.

That’s what David & Kevin talk about in this episode of the Worship Ministry Catalyst Podcast. What do you do when things Crash & burn?

We would love to hear from you about this topic. Maybe you found yourself in the same situation this last Christmas. If you did, we’d love to hear your story too.

You can also join in the conversation by joining our network, filling out the contact form, or sending an email to david@worshipministrycatalyst.com or kevin@worshipministrycatalyst.com

“Great leaders, like great companies and countries, create meaning not just money. The values and interests of freedom, self-actualization, learning, community, excellence, uniqueness, service, and social responsibility truly attract people to a common cause.”

Isn’t that great! It’s a great reminder to me that what I’m doing isn’t about trying to drive people towards success for the mere purposes of money. In fact that’s not the desire of most. Most desire to live lives that mean something.

That’s why we’re here.

This weekend we had one of our volunteer worship leaders lead and she did a great job. I’m happy to have her leading and starting to do it more often. I’m really looking forward to the way she will develop in the future. She has a ton of potential.

Here was our set:

• Mighty to Save
• Unchanging
• Prayer for Missions
• Beautiful the Blood (Fee)
• Enough
• Message
• Rescue

I’m really digging Beautiful the blood. I really like a lot of the stuff that Steve has on that Album and plan on implementing a lot of it over the next couple of months.

I was off keys and on Acoustic this weekend, we had Ian on keys, James on Electric, Nik on Bass & Russ on Drums. Erin was the lead vocal & Jeanette sang alto. With me on acoustic, and a couple of other really new people on the team this weekend there was quite a bit of potential for things to go badly, but they actually went really well. We struggled with tempo on the Pre of “Beautiful the Blood” and the outro where we were all really hitting every beat and driving it really hard.

I’m not sure yet if I like playing acoustic, to be honest. It’s fun, however I don’t feel like I’m adding anything. And I don’t mean this in a poor me kind of a way. What I mean is that as the worship leader or band leader, I feel like I need to be strong on the instrument I’m using to lead and not be a hindrance. I’m also a “maximize your strengths, minimize your weaknesses” kind of a guy, so I’d rather keep working at becoming a really good piano guy than work really hard to become a decent acoustic guy. It also kind of feels like peer pressure from the contemporary Christian music world. Everyone else is doing it, ergo so should I.

Anyway, enough about me (I’m out of coffee anyway). Go checkout what some other worship leaders did this weekend.

And we’re back! After a little Break around the busy time of Christmas and then vacation, we’re finally back with an all new episode of the Worship Ministry Catalyst podcast.

In this week’s episode David and Kevin start talking about doing a year end review. We started this conversation before Christmas, and it sparked both a good discussion and some follow up that is going to bring about another episode or more about doing a year end review.

We hope you’ll dive right in and listen to this podcast and in turn be willing to consider doing some form of a year end review.

In this podcast we also talked about the Worship ministry catalyst network. We were talking specifically about the ability to upload your original worship songs that you’re willing to share with the Worship Ministry Catalyst Network. We hope you’ll start to take advantage of this network and share some of the gift that God has given to you with a group of worship leaders from around the world!

You can also join in the conversation by joining our network, filling out the contact form, or sending an email to david@worshipministrycatalyst.com or kevin@worshipministrycatalyst.com

Links for this Episode:

• Worship ministry catalyst network.
• Worship Trench