Category

Worship Confessionals

05.27.08

Worship Confessional: May 23, 2008 Music, Worship, Worship Confessionals | (5)
Typical low attendance for a Memorial Day weekend, but not as low as I expected. I saw a phenomenon I've never seen before. One of our folks sat down during everysong she didn't like, and stood back up for the ones she did (hymns). I'm really not sure what to make of that. Oh well, I shouldn't dwell on the negatives. Service flow went well, especially considering we had no rehearsal. I really don't have a whole lot to say about the day. Here's the list: Leaning on the Everlasting Arms // Elisha Hoffman and Anthony Showalter Made to Worship // Chris Tomlin Joyful, Joyful, ...
05.19.08

Worship Confessional: May 18, 2008 Music, Musings, Worship, Worship Confessionals | (1)
Yesterday was our last day in our iLife series on the spiritual disciplines. As the discipline highlighted was "celebration," we spent the entire corporate gathering time in celebration of the blessings of God, and the milestones He's helped us achieve. We recognized and celebrated graduates from high school and college, we celebrated our volunteers from the previous year, and we celebrated the faithfulness of God and His people by burning the note of debt on our auditorium. All in all, a really good day. I decided to stick with familiar tunes for the day, to generate more participation. Say what you ...
05.12.08

Worship Confessional: May 11, 2008 Music, Worship, Worship Confessionals | (0)
This week's iLife discipline focus was worship. I love that we took an entire day to focus on what is the theme of my blog ;) . I think we had a great time. I did something I would not usually do, and that is cancel rehearsal for the week. Why? Two reasons. First, Sunday was a choir focused day, so no praise team singers, so no need for vocal rehearsal. Second, the music was either all extremely familiar or extrememly easy or both, so again no need for band rehearsal. We met at our usual sound check time and things ...
05.07.08

Worship Leader Wednesday #12, part 2 Music, Worship, Worship Confessionals, Worship Theology | (0)
Welcome to part 2 of Jamey Ketchum's interview at Consuming Worship Jamey Ketchum What’s the greatest “worship risk” you’ve ever taken? I don’t think I’ve done that yet. I’ve never really had to play the keyboard during worship before, but my next step will be just that—lead from the keyboard. I say that because, when I sit at the keyboard and other people are watching I get very nervous for some strange reason. So the risk will be getting “out of that box”! Any risks you wish you had taken but did not? No, because I believe that there’s always going to be times ...
05.05.08

Worship Confessional: May 4, 2008 Music, Worship, Worship Confessionals | (1)
I'm so thankful for such a smooth week after an action-packed schedule the week before. I took some much needed time away from certain things (as stated in a previous post), and the relative simplicity of the weekend was glorious. We're on the final leg of our iLife series on the spiritual discipline. Yesterday we covered Confession, which as a corporate discipline is somewhat outside most folk's experience. Musically, planning for such a theme was pretty easy, even regarding the fact that we had a return of the "regular" Sunday PM service. Here's the set list's for both gathering times: 11 AM Psalm 139:23-24 ...
04.28.08

Worship Confessional: April 27, 2008 Authenticity, Music, Worship, Worship Confessionals, Worship Theology | (0)
This will be a strange confessional, in that I don't have a lot of details for you. This was an extrememly busy week between organizing and hosting a worship retreat and organizing a ministry fair. Rehearsal and sound check both went very well. We worked on some further refinement of our overall sound, and were pleased with the clarity we were able to bring to the mix. I think we really took great strides towards a more "up front" presence without a louder volume. As far as the service time itself goes, something pretty strange happened, but it was a wondrous thing. ...
04.21.08

Worship Confessional: April 20, 2008 Music, Worship, Worship Confessionals | (3)
Wow, I was feeling pretty bad yesterday. I was on day four or five of a pretty bad head cold, one that had successfully moved down into my chest over the weekend. All in all, I thought things went pretty well, but as always there were a few unexplained hiccups along the way. Our lead guitar was out of town this week, so we missed his usual brilliance. He'll be back this week, and I'm looking forward to what he always brings. Rehearsals went well this last week. Our choir takes the spring/summer off after Easter, but in an effort to ...
04.14.08

Worship Confessional: April 13, 2008 Authenticity, Music, Musings, Worship, Worship Confessionals | (2)
Such an interesting day yesterday. As a staff, the planning for the day was easy, but wrestling with the idea of whether or not we should do what we wanted to do was harder to deal with. In the end, things went off pretty much like we had planned, but you never know how trying something outside of people's comfort zone is going to go off. (This is referring to the foot washing referenced in my previous post.) As far as the morning goes, it was a pretty typical service. Musically, our rehearsal on Thursday was a little rough, and the ...
04.07.08

Worship Confessional: April 6, 2008 Music, Worship, Worship Confessionals | (3)
Yesterday was "minor technical glitch day." Nothing major was a distraction or anything, and very few people probably noticed. Thankfully, none of this stuff seemed to phase any of us on stage. Our flow was good, and all the pieces really fit together much better than even planned. I so love it when God takes what we've planned and makes it into something way better than we could have EVER done on our own. We were studying the spiritual discipline of solitude—which I'll blog about tomorrow—so all of our music today had something to do with solitude, stillness, quietness, listening, etc. ...
03.31.08

Worship Confessional: March 30, 2008 Authenticity, Music, Worship, Worship Confessionals | (9)
Well, after last week's near-death feeling while conducting the choir, I felt bright and springy yesterday. Attendance was a little low, but we had many of our visitors from Easter and the previous weeks return for another look. It looks like there's another influx as usually happens in the Spring. Some of the visitors I saw were definitely unashamed worshipers, and that made me put all that much more heart into the leading. We're firing our iLife series back up after Holy Week, and we studied the spiritual discipline of Simplicity, and so I put a little different spin ...