man.of.depravity

Sunday was a first. For those of you who do not know, at Sunset (where I work and serve) we have two different types of services. Most of you would say that one is traditional, and one is contemporary. I think it goes a lot deeper than that, but I won’t fight you on it. Anyway, I led worship in both services today for the first time.

9am service:

• For All You’ve Done in E (Hillsong)
• My Redeemer Lives in E
• The Solid Rock in D
• Blessed Assurance in D
• Responsive Reading in Psalm 33
• How Great Thou Art in C (just a verse and chorus)
• Offertory: Because He Lives (Jill and Regina blew this one away, it was amazing)

11am service:

• Let God Arise in B (Tomlin)
• For All You’ve Done in E (Hillsong)
• Beautiful Jesus in A (Stanfill)
• The Solid Rock in D (Passion/Charlie Hall version)
• The Stand in A (United)
• Offertory: Lord of Lords in E (Fraser)

What worked:

1. Pretty light load music wise compared to the past few weeks. Most of these songs were pretty familiar to me before this weekend, so that really helped for me memorizing the music.
2. Blessed Assurance in the 9 was a bit hit I thought. They seemed to really sing out and enjoy it. It isn’t one of our consistent hymns, but I think we’ll be doing it again soon.
3. The Stand was “a moment” in the 11. Not only did I feel totally freed to worship, I sensed that the congregation did as well. I love hearing the church sing instead of me, and when I stepped back from the mic I could really hear them.
4. We started the 11 with a video (Hillsong dvd opener) and went straight into Let God Arise. I thought it was pretty killer. It had some energy to it that me welcoming everyone and having them stand doesn’t have.

What needs work:

1. My in ear monitors didn’t work for the first 2 songs in the 9. I had bumped a chord connected to it and didn’t have time to fix it until after the 2nd song. That was interesting…
2. Only doing a small part of How Great Thou Art. I hate it when you plan for something to be really great and it backfires. I could tell they wanted to sing more, but I had already planned for everything to end after one chorus, and I didn’t know the 2nd verse words by heart.
3. I hate dead space in a worship set, something I told the drummer (Rhett) this week actually. Well between Beautiful Jesus and The Solid Rock (which he starts) there was dead space. I turned around and he was in his own moment of worship. I hate dead space, but when it happens because someone is worshiping, I don’t care at all.
4. Doing the Passion version of The Solid Rock didn’t seem to work to me. I could tell some people really enjoyed it, and others were giving me the blank stare of: “what the heck is this?”. Haha, I love those!

I want to highlight someone who has only been a part of my life for the past 8 months. Her name is Janet Fraser (the picture is of Janet, Jay, and me at Willow Creek), and many of you who read this blog, know her. Many of you, however, don’t.

In many ways Janet is my boss. She has the authority to tell me what to do everyday I’m at church. In many ways she could be my mom…her oldest son is only 3 years younger than myself. But of course, she hates the thought of that, so I don’t remind her of that too often. Janet blogs, texts, Twitters, uses Facebook, and emails all the time. These are all the things she reminds me of when she wants me to know that she isn’t old.

Janet was gone this past week to be with her family as her dad passed away last Monday night. I didn’t know her dad, but I do know that Janet couldn’t be doing the job she loves if it wasn’t for her dad. I know he has been very formative in her desire to serve God through music and the arts.

So why a post for Janet?

As you know, the worship department went to Vernonia a few Saturdays ago to do some various jobs around town. On that Friday night I got an email from Janet saying that her dad was on his very last leg. He probably had 2 or 3 days left to live. I emailed her saying that she shouldn’t come to Vernonia, but that I knew she would. And with no surprise Janet went. Janet served. And her dad passed away 2 days later. She said, he would have wanted her to serve.

Thanks Janet. You have shown me what it means to work hard at doing what you love, because you do it so well.

Here is what Janet read at her dad’s memorial service. And here is her reaction when she found out her dad had passed away. Both are definitely worth a read.

(Positive Post Tuesday)

For Father’s Day this year we had a theme of “What Makes a Real Man?”

Holly, Kent, and I went out to shoot a video on the topic.

After having thick topics the last few days, I think we’re due for some fun.

Enjoy! (RSS readers-for some reason it doesn’t show up in all readers so come over to see the video)

Creative Chaos @ the Soul and Watercooler Wednesdays @ Ethos.

I haven’t done a “worship confessional” in a long, long time so I figure I’m due. This morning was great. My buddy from high school, Matt, finally came to church, my grandparents from Nebraska and my 2 youngest siblings came as well. It was weird to look out into the crowd and see people I know. The video with Arnie that I talked about last week, was great. I’ll post that later on this week. Here is what our 11am service looked like.

Main Set:

• Happy Day (C)
• Beautiful Jesus (A)
• From the Inside Out (F)
• Offertory- What If? by Nicole Nordeman (sung by Laura and Jenni)

Communion:

• Grace Flows Down (D)
• With All I Am (D)
• Walk the World (A)

I think today was a great example of some of the newer songs we’ve been doing. We finally introduced Happy Day, a song I’ve been wanting to do for a while. This was also the third time we’ve sung Beautiful Jesus and Walk the World and I think both of those are finally starting to catch on.

2 things I loved from today:

1. Seeing the band not only nail the songs, but feel the songs. We spent a lot of our practice time figuring out the ebb and flow of some of the more balladish songs. I think that showed on Sunday. I thought we played with purpose.
2. Ending with Walk the World (which by written by Charlie Hall). I don’t think you could ask for a better way to end communion or a service. That song just says anything that I could say, but much more eloquently.

What are some of the new songs your church is doing?

Last night I helped out at Sunset’s middle school program, Wildfire. They were having an Ignite night, something that happens twice a year. It was an American Idol themed night. And yes….I played Ryan Seacrest.

We did it big. We did it huge.

The judges were:

• Faith Hill- played by Julie Reid who is kind of like my boss, but in a really cool way.
• Paula Abdul- played by Holly Resnick who is a singer on the worship team.
• Simon Cowell- played by Aaron Soule, a drummer on the worship team.

The night went just about perfectly. I think we had about 40 kids audition out of the 300 that were there, and we then whittled it down to 3 and chose the winner based on crowd noise. Kurt came up with the idea and ran with it, and it was totally a hit with the kids. I took some time to film some of the stuff on our new Flip camera. That cheap little thing did alright. Check it out.

If you liked this, be sure to get my rss feed here.

Check out the best auditions. Best meaning…most funny.

Watercooler Wednesdays and Creative Chaos.