I started doing some “worship metrics” I suppose you’d call it, on our set lists. I pulled out some interesting stats on the songs we use. One metric I wish we had was “anointing level.” Some kind of sliding scale that shows which songs God is using and the congregation is responding to(only partially joking). I suppose the play count is a reflection of that. So here are the worship song stats for my band at Life Connection Church.

Top 5 worship songs in the last year…

1. Hosanna - Hillsong United, We Cry Out - Kim Walker (tie)
2. How I Live - Kyle Campos (me)
3. I Am A Temple - John Mark McMillan
4. (4 way tie)
   1. Salvation Is Here - Hillsong United
   2. Ready Now - Desperation Band
   3. Rescue - Desperation Band
   4. Sweetly Broken - Jeremy Riddle
5. (4 way tie)
   1. What the World Will Never Take - Hillsong United
   2. Everlasting God - New Life
   3. Rain Down - Delirious
   4. Solid Rock - Delirious

Biggest Rotation Increase from 2 years ago…

1. Hosanna - Hillsong United (played 11 more times this past year)
2. We Cry Out - Kim Walker (11 more times)
3. How I Live - Kyle Campos (10 more times)
4. I Am A Temple - John Mark McMillan (9 more times)
5. Rain Down - Delirious (7 more times)
6. Solid Rock - Delirious (7 more times)
7. How He Loves - John Mark McMillan (6 more times)

All of the above songs were introduced this past year.

Biggest Rotation Drop off from 2 years ago..

1. Let Everything that Has Breath - Matt Redman (played 6 less times in the past year)
2. From the Inside Out - Hillsong United (5 less times)
3. Friend of God - Israel Houghton (4 less times)
4. Shout Unto God - Hillsong United (4 less times)
5. *Holy Spirit Come - Rita Springer (4 less times)
6. *Meet With Me - Michael Gungor (4 less times)

* Haven’t played at all in the last year, out of rotation

Would love to hear from some other worship leaders on what songs are topping their rotation currently.

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Lacrae and his group did a concert at Mars Hill Church but also joined Red Letter on stage during worship to lead a song this past Sunday evening. Amazing worship song. So cool that MHC has the courage to do things like this. I love seeing people with a conviction and identity and just going after it.

‘Send Me’ - Live at MHC | Ballard from Mars Hill Church on Vimeo.

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There has been a lot of mention in various blogs about the recent survey report from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. It was incredibly revealing, maybe not shocking though as many have seen the clear trends nationally and globally. But never the less, it was painful to be confronted with some of the facts. Here’s a few that caught my eye:

• 66% of Protestants believe there are other ways to heaven than through Christ
• 11% of Protestants who claim the existence of God is an absolute certainty, say it isn’t very important to their lives
• 27% of Protestants do not believe in hell

The survey results should be sobering for church leadership and certainly is for me. A professor from Rice University summed up the report in an article well by saying,

“The survey shows America is, indeed, 3,000 miles wide and only 3 inches deep.”

That is just a beautiful way of describing a horrific reality. It makes me examine what I’m doing as a worship leader to either contribute or combat this. Am I leading hundreds of people every week in singing a wide variety of songs that only go 3 inches deep? Do we sing songs that confront the notion that there is no hell, that there is a way to heaven besides Christ, or that Christ life, death and resurrection shouldn’t be that important to our lives? I sure hope so.

I think the important thing as a worship leader is to get prayerful and purposeful not just in our sets but in our leadership of our teams and songwriting. We focus a lot on unity, singability, melody which are all important, but what good is unity without truth? More specifically, essential truth. What the findings in this report tell me is not just that 66% believe in other ways to Christ, but that 66% feel comfortable showing up to church with that lie and aren’t confronted by truth.

I have no desire to lead such weak and sanitized worship that the flesh and lies of the enemy aren’t offended. In the coming weeks I’m going to start a series of posts on how our phrasing and word choices in worship lyrics can contribute to essential biblical truth. No ambiguous language, no vague interpretation, no confusing imagery.

If you have any examples of worship songs you feel do this I’d love to hear them in the comments.

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At Life Connection Church we very much value songs written specifically for the local congregation. That doesn’t mean that they won’t have any relevance outside of our church, but just that it was written with our body prayerfully in mind. I believe that’s not only how the best songs are written musically, but spiritually I think that’s where the greatest gift is to the kingdom, in building of the local church.

Recently I’ve been examining ways to get my church body even more involved in our songwriting process. As a worship leader and elder I’m aware of the larger spiritual issues impacting the body, and as my role as discipleship leader I’m privy to more personal issues on a smaller scale as well. But in order to bring in everyone something else had to be done.

The idea is this. We will write a song around a theme and ask everyone in the body to submit a 1 sentence response to a question around that theme. The song’s lyrics will predominantly be made up of these responses. First up we will tackle grace. The question to the body is this…

How has God’s grace changed your life specifically?

Huge question I know, so many aspects to grace so I expect a wonderful wide spectrum of answers. The goal is to answer personally(can be anonymously) and not generally. An example of a general response would be, “He took this sinner and made me clean“, a personal response would be, “He took my life of drugs and death, and gave me a life of purity and hope.”

I’ll then take these answers and shape them poetically to fit musically, rhyme etc… I’ll probably write a chorus that captures the entirety of the submissions, but if someone submits something that God puts heavy on our hearts then we may very well use it for the chorus as well. I don’t really know what to expect out of this exercise, this is new ground for me.

By God’s grace at the end we’ll have a skillfully crafted song of worship that glorifies God by demonstrating the life saving, transforming, empowering impact of God’s grace in our church body, by our church body. I’m incredibly excited to get started on this. I’ll keep everyone up to date on how well or poorly this experiment goes, should be fun.

Let me know what you guys think, am I nuts?