Each year I talk with worship leader friends around the country and find out what they are jamming to this time of year as they prepare to lead worship in December. Of course, Chris Tomlin’s album “Glory in the Highest” is great. At my church last year we did some songs from that as well as some Christmas originals from North Point.
This year there’s new Christmas music from David Crowder Band and Matthew West, but what I stumbled across through an app on my iPad called Discovr Music is Jadon Lavik’s new Christmas album. I love it and I think you will to. This is my recommendation for you to consider checking out this holiday season. Let this album and his arrangements inspire you to take your December worship in a fresh, new direction. Happy holidays!
I’ve known Pastor Steven Furtick since he was in high school in South Carolina. He was a passionate leader in a local youth group when I was in college at Charleston Southern University. His church that he planted a few years ago has exploded to over 8000 people in worship.
Their band and worship music is amazing. Here’s a taste of how they opened their services this past weekend. Worship leaders: This is the kind of creativity and innovation I’m looking for. This is what I mean by breathing new life into an old hymn. Watch and enjoy! HERE is the link in case you having trouble viewing on my blog.
It happens every Sunday in churches around North America. It’s something I look for every time I visit, consult with or secret shop a church – it’s the keeper of the vibe and how he uses that position of influence. I’m talking about the FOH audio engineer and his use of pre and post-service music.
As both a worship pastor and a tech pastor, I used to intentionally and strategically (plus creatively) put together a pre-service and a post-service mix. I thought through what we wanted people to feel when they walked in the room and what we wanted them to feel upon exiting.
I dare say the most crucial part of execution on a given Sunday is the sound engineer hitting play as soon as the service ends (cued by the pastor saying, “See you next week.” or something like that). I know that sensitivity is key and knowing the vibe, feel and spirit of the service is crucial.
Maybe it’s not appropriate to rock their faces off. Maybe it’s Good Friday and you want people to leave in silence or you just finished taking communion and you want to tone it down and go with something more chill. I used to have a chill version of well-known worship songs that we used at Bent Tree a lot.
But 9 times out of 10, you want your sound engineer to hit play on something upbeat and positive as people file out. Have a great song cued and ready to go as most people will only hear that first song you play. Choose it well.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, people sit through several songs before the service begins. Choose them well. I’ve seen churches use chill versions of songs like we did at Bent Tree, well known songs from the radio, instrumental versions of songs by Coldplay and U2 (like my friends at Lake Pointe in Rockwell, TX) and anything from Owl City to DJ Andy Hunter. Something like Postal Service or the Sunsets and Sushi album from David Crowder Band can be great, too. What are your practices at your church?
Do you use the same old CD every week? Do you use the same playlist on iTunes? Do you put together a special weekly playlist? Do you incorporate songs that people will hear in the upcoming service? Do you (at the end of the service) play a reprise and bring back a key song from the set that day?
The key is to not take these special and influential moments lightly. Choose your songs wisely and creatively. Be intentional and strategic. You, my friend, are the keeper of the vibe!
Please share what songs and genre of music you use in the comment section. How loud do you play the music when people are walking in? One thing I love about visiting NewSpring in Anderson, SC is that they rock your face off during the prelude time. They honestly, have the loudest walk-in music of any church I’ve been to. They also have a female voice-over that shares a few announcements with the music still playing underneath at about a minute or two before the service begins. So… What’s the vibe like at your church?
The following is a guest post from Don Chapman of HymnCharts.com. Check out his Easter resources HERE. Here’s what Don had to say about using hymns in a contemporary praise set:
For churches with a steady diet of contemporary worship there are two times a year when we’re almost expected to do hymns – Christmas and Easter.
A pastor I know in a very contemporary church dreads the Christmas season for that very reason – his distorted electric guitar driven praise band pulls their hair out during the month of December. Hymns and carols aren’t very guitar friendly.
Because I like to arrange music I’ve solved this problem for myself by contemporizing hymns and making them a little easier for a praise band to play, and my website HymnCharts.com grew out of this.
Try it yourself – take a hymn and see if by making a few simple tweaks you can make it fit better in your praise set. Here are my five tips for making a hymn more contemporary:
1. Change the key. Many hymns are in awkward, flat, anti-guitar keys like F, Eb and Bb. Sure, a capo is handy in these situations, but hymns are usually too high for modern congregations anyway. Just transpose it down a half step.
2. Smooth out the chord structure. Classically based hymns can change chords on almost every beat. If possible, in my hymn arrangements I try to have no more than 2 chords per measure – and 1 per measure is best.
3. Substitute minor chords when possible. Play around with the song – the right minor chord substituted for a major chord can give the hymn a contemporary twist.
4. Avoid the 5th. Western harmony is built on the V to I cadence but pop songs often go from IV to I. It doesn’t work all the time with hymns, but see if you can substitute a IV chord for a V chord here and there. (If you’re in the key of D, the IV is a G chord and the V is an A chord.)
5. Add a drum loop. A quick, easy way to add a contemporary sound to a hymn is to play with subtle drum loop. I use Spectrasonic’s Stylus to quickly create my loops in Sonar audio software (or any recording software that will play VST instruments) render it as a WAV and play along with it as you would any stereo track or click track. Other websites offer premade downloadable drum loops in various tempos (Google drum loops.)
Visit the front page of HymnCharts.com and you’ll find an MP3 player in the middle of the page. Listen to “Are You Washed In the Blood,” “Christ Arose” and “Jesus Paid It All” for examples of how it’s possible to turn a song older than your grandma into something totally usable in a modern praise set.
If you read my blog via email or RSS, you may not have noticed several things – such as the new blog design and some of the new sponsors recently added to my blog homepage. Sponsors such as HymnCharts and their Easter resources and my newest sponsor: Interactive Worship Live.
I’ve known Phillip Edwards for several years and remember when he called me and several Church leaders together in Dallas to show us his new resource and give us all an up-close-and-personal demo.
At my current home church in Georgia (where I play keys with the praise band when I’m in town), we use IWL each week and love it. I asked our worship pastor, Michael Wells, to share his thoughts on this resource for our church. Here are Michael’s thoughts:
I have been an Interactive Worship Live user for some time and would highly recommend it. There are three areas that IWL has made us more effective in.
First, because you can isolate studio quality musicians, our musicians can clearly hear things like strumming patterns or vocal inflections which has improved their skill level and learning speed.
Second, you don’t have to worry when a musician has to cancel last minute. If our bass player calls in late Saturday night sick I can unmute the bass player channel and sleep well.
Last, IWL fills out the sound by adding instruments not on our team. I may have an electric guitar but I do not have five and many artist tracks today will have multiple layers of instruments.
All three of these areas have made use a more skillful team.
*** I agree with Michael and have personally witnessed this great worship resource in action. We’ve had weeks where the drummer was out and we just plugged in the drummer track on IWL. We had a week when the bass player was out and we did the same thing. I also resonate with the third point Michael made of filling out our sound. We have a basic band, but love having the added percussion sounds added in and it’s always good to add a couple more electric guitars to fill out our sound.
Have you heard of IWL? Why don’t you check them out HERE at their website? If you use IWL at your church, please comment and share with us why you like it/use it and if it’s ever saved the day.
I shared this on Facebook a couple of weeks ago, but I realized that many of you may have missed it or may not follow me on Facebook. Let’s fix that right now. If you’re not following me on Twitter, you can HERE. If you’re not friends with me on Facebook, find me HERE. Check out the creativity and innovation in this video from North Point Church!
Here’s something that I thought was cool. Squeeze, made an appearance on Jimmy Fallon’s show the other night to play the classic “Pulling Mussels (From The Shell),” and the keyboardist was playing both the electronic ivories and an iPad. He even drops a nice solo in right around 2:32. YouTube commenter MooCowMusic says it’s his app, Pianist.
I’ve commented before that I look for laptops on the stage when I visit a church. If I came to your church, would I see someone playing an iPad? What do you think?
The following is a guest blog from my friend, Brian Davis – Media Resources Manager at Highland Park United Methodist Church.
For months I have heard Paul Rasmussen (Pastor of our modern worship service) say, Don’t let resources dictate vision”. As a resources manager, I live in a very concrete world of what we have and what we don’t have – what’s real and what’s imaginary. I know what gear we have available, and what money we have in our budget. So I have to live with the tension of what we have and what everyone would like to do. Recently in a staff meeting, Paul fleshed out what he means, and I think it’s worth a few bullet points here.
* Resources is not the same thing as money. Resources include money, but also include you (what you personally bring to the table in terms of influence, skill and other traits), systems, and human resources (volunteers).
* Most people are pretty good with the You. A talented video producer might tend to simply take all the assigned videos and crank them out by himself. That mat be because he’s a perfectionist or control freak. But it may also be that the systems aren’t in place to accommodate volunteer editors. Or maybe there isn’t a system in place to allow the video producer enough time to develop people in that role.
* Many people who may be in good shape with the You or the money, but meet with opposition when trying to expand or change systems. In church work we often tend to operate without much personal margin, so when we are met with the slightest opposition, we retreat back to what we know. It takes continual pushing against the status quo to affect change.
Andy Stanley has said “Your people are exactly where they have been led to be”. And I’ve heard it another way – “Your systems are perfectly designed to give you the results you’re getting”. Historically, our church has not had a really strong emphasis on volunteering. In some areas, yes, but certainly not in the areas of music and worship service production. We are committed to changing that. At the very least, it will require two things. First, our people have to be led to a different place. Led by our pastor, led by me, led by our tech staff. Secondly, it will require a culture change on our part. We have to change the way we think about our work – who owns it, who we’re doing it for. We’ll have to be prepared to volunteers be better at our jobs than we are (that can be intimidating). Paul told us “The reason for increasing our volunteer force is not to get free labor, but to increase buy-in of our mission”. So lastly, we’ll have to change our definition of success. Success will have to mean much more than successful operation of equipment, and “professional” performance. We’re not giving up on that, but success has to be expanded to how well we engage the body and allow our people to increasingly take leadership in our services.
I’m convinced that doing this will help our people grow. And it will help us grow, too.
I promise (I think) this is the last one. I do have a blog prepared on a totally different subject tomorrow (leadership). The last 2 posts (Lifehouse and this one) have come from your comments. I thought your suggestions were too good to go unnoticed.
In today’s video/song, one of my favorite bands, Death Cab for Cutie, ends their live concert with Transatlanticism. Thanks to Michael for reminding me of this piece of musical genius. Notice that the electric guitar plays his first soft strum at 1:50 in. The drummer sits with his arms in his lap for the first 3 minutes! At 3 and 1/2 minutes in he starts to lighting play his cymbal and kick.
At about 4 and 1/2 minutes in, the lead singer (Benjamin Gibbard) switches from keys to guitar. At about 5 minutes in you get to experience a band truly letting a song breathe – it’s wonderful. If you’ll notice: from about 4 minutes to 6 minutes there are no vocals – just instruments building (this is what I was referring to in my post about Owl City and the future of worship music – Selah moments).
At about 7 minutes in the drummer builds to where he’s beating the fool out of the drums and then right at 7:36 he drops out – again reinforcing what I said here about players knowing when to drop out. Watch and enjoy!
My hope is that worship leaders will drink this (and the last 4 posts) in. Wrap your brain and heart around the philosophy of letting music build, breathe and taking dynamics seriously. Send my blog links to your band members. Ask them to watch the videos, take notes and use it for a launching pad of discussion that you can have at your next rehearsal.
If you’re a band member in a local church band, show this to your worship leader and other band members. If you’re a pastor or church leader, pass this on to your worship pastor. Let’s raise the bar in our worship leadership and strive for a creativity and beauty that is worthy of our Creator.
Today’s example of great musicianship is brought in part because of one of the comments made by Trae earlier in the week. I absolutely love this song and love using it in worship, but it had slipped my mind. Trae brought it back to my attention.
This will close this week out. This is Lifehouse singing/playing “Everything” live in Amsterdam. Please notice how long the song takes to build. The band doesn’t come in strong until 4 minutes in!
As Trae said, one of my friends and favorite worship leaders, Michael Bleecker of the The Village Church (where Matt Chandler is Lead Pastor) does this song the best of anyone I’ve heard lead it. I used to play this song with a band I was in every Tuesday night that led worship for 20 somethings/singles and college age. I would often request that we play this or just start playing the intro and let the band jump in with me. Enjoy!
Not sure how this translates to worship? Watch this video of a drama performed to Lifehouse’s “Everything”. I’ve blogged about this before. I can not watch this without crying every time – it’s amazing.
The following is a guest blog from my friend, 
