I’ve been so blessed the past 6 weeks or so with our new instrumental/puritan prayer reading openings to service. I’ve been blessed on multiple levels. First, I’ve loved see more people involved in Sunday service. We’ve opened this prayer reading up to the body and man we’ve had some incredible readings. Secondly, the content is just crushing. We’ve been reading through “The Valley of Vision – A collection of Puritan prayers & devotions” and the prayers are a brutal combination of truth, wisdom, passion, pain, joy…I mean they are just incredible!

Third, the tone we’ve been able to set from the get go with the music in support of the reading has been really beyond my expectations and become something I look forward to the entire week. Every week we work on a new original instrumental arrangement and I’ve been blown away by what we’ve come up with and I can’t wait to turn these core riffs into full songs. Creatively I feel like we’ve hit a real groove and it feels amazing to be part of. If you’ve played in many bands you’ll know that it’s really special when you find that creative groove that seems to come easy, that’s rare.

Here are the songs that made up our set…

1. Opening Prayer – “The All Good“
2. You Love Me Forever – Merchant Band
3. We Will Run – Gungor
4. Nothing But the Blood – Robert Lowry (Page CXVI arrangement linked)
5. How Deep the Father’s Love For Us – Stuart Townend (Chad Gardner arrangement linked)
6. None But Jesus – Hillsong
7. How Great Is Our God – Chris Tomlin (After Sermon)

In Part 1 I discussed how dangerous it is for our worship to be uninspired and in Part 2 I talked about how often our worship music can be cheap and its impact on the gospel. In Part 3 I discussed the prevalence of the fear of man in our often safe worship music. For part 4 I’m going to discuss another aspect of worship that can turn it into bad hotel art — unoriginality.

4. Unoriginality

This is a delicate topic because in some ways our worship is intentionally unoriginal. We are singing the praises of an unchanging, everlasting God, who gave us the greatest revelation man will ever know 2000 years ago in the cross and chose to make his word known through scripture that should never be added to or subtracted from. So at some level we certainly shouldn’t be looking for anything new there, that content remains the same. But the methods of delivery continue to change and that must be purposefully and missionally original.

Let me define the phrase “purposefully and missionally original” as it relates to worship.

Someone who’s inspired and informed by the gospel through the Holy Spirit to reach a specific people with the message of Jesus in an effective way through music and the arts.

The art in my hotel room was copied all over the country or all over the world, no thought was given to the different contexts it might be displayed in and if there might be a more effective art piece in different areas. The thought being if it worked in Beverly Hills it must work in Omaha, or Denver, or Miami, or Puerto Rico. Seems silly right? The culture, the idols worshipped, language used in those areas is so different.

But how silly are we in the church when we say the same thing? If it works in Australia at Hillsong, it must work in Phoenix, or in Santa Barbara. We attempt to carbon copy the missional expression without doing any of the evaluation or prayer to see if that expression would be effective in our mission field.

Being purposefully and missionally original requires worship leaders to find how best to use music and the arts for the people in their mission field through prayer, study and practice, for the glory of Jesus Christ. All being attractionally unoriginal requires is a CCLI license and a few hours of band practice to cover the latest CCM hit.

I’m not saying that Hillsong or Tomlin won’t work in multiple churches, locations and cultures, I’m just saying don’t blindly assume they will. And then perhaps you can find an arrangement that better suits your church rather than just ripping the cd.

Let’s be purposefully and missionally original.

This song has been on the back burner for a long time for me. I never really dug any of the arrangements I heard, but I knew the song had some good remix potential. I finally got around to putting one together for this tune. I’ve always loved the words to this song and thought it was really a powerful song. The dominant portions of the loop I composed for it are this sort of rhythmic electronic sequence. They are layered throughout so that it hopefully doesn’t get over bearing. I leave room in the verses and pre-chorus, and even the early chorus is pretty open and simple in the loop.

Towards the end though each component comes together in the final chorus. I’m pleased with how it ended up coming together. When we play it live it’s heavy on electric guitar so the guitars add the rock bite to it that you might not pickup just listening to the loop.

You can stream the loop below but you are not able to download the loop. In order to download the loop files you need to send payment through PayPal. The price for this loop is $2.99. Once payment is received I’ll contact you and give you download instructions. The following is what’s delivered upon receipt of payment:

• Loop (high quality stereo mp3 and aif)
• Vocal Cue track (aif)
• Master Reason 4 file (rns)
• Arrangement Details (rtf, shows exactly what parts come in at what time)

As always though please comment and rate the loop to let me know what you think. I had a lot of fun making this loop and I’m pleased that the original customer is very happy with it.

Song: God of This City by Bluetree, Album “God of This City” (made famous by Chris Tomlin)
Key: C
Bpm: 154

Note: the free podcast file is lower quality mp3 (128kbps)

 

 God of This City (Loop) [6:13m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Last Sunday I was feeling the onset of a cold. As the week progressed my voice deteriorated, my throat was a mess and I was hoping that it would be better by this Sunday but it wasn’t to be. I asked my bass player, Josh, to step in and lead whatever songs he was comfortable singing and he stepped up and knocked it out of the park. Comforting to have someone with that talent level on the team. We weren’t without some surprises though, Josh snapped a bass string during the morning practice and had no strings with him, so had to find another bass quickly. But other than that, smooth sailing. It was Josh’s first time singing with a click an loops so he was nervous but I don’t think anyone could tell, pulled it off without a hitch.

1. Everlasting God – Chris Tomlin
   
2. Coming Back – Desperation Band
3. Ready Now – Desperation Band (listen/download loop)
4. Gloria – Taylor Sorensen, using Tim Smith Arrangement (listen/download to loop)
5. How He Loves - John Mark McMillan

This post is part of Fred McKinnon’s Set List Sundays.

I didn’t feel great about the set going into Sunday, kept making changes, it just didn’t feel connected. For all the spiritual people out there when I say it didn’t feel connected I mean, I didn’t have peace about it. Musically the set went over fine, there seemed to be a general laziness and depression in the church. Maybe it’s everyone’s finances, I don’t know, but we have to focus on this during our prayer before service. I also was nervous about a tough meeting I had after service, so that was weighing on me as well.

Anyhow this was the debut for John Mark’s new song Dress Us Up. It went over like a new song typically goes over, so we’ll give it a couple more weeks and see how people pick it up.

1. We Cry Out – Brian and Jenn Johnson, Kim Walker arrangement (loop not yet posted)
2. Dress Us Up – John Mark McMillan
3. How Great Is Our God – Chris Tomlin
4. Ready Now – Desperation Band (listen/download loop)
5. Prepare the Way – Charlie Hall

This post is part of Fred McKinnon’s Set List Sundays.

I have for quite some time been hoping for a Abelton Live/Reason/synth/jack of all trades musician to come to our church. I love working with it in the studio but I’ve always wanted to get it integrated into our live worship sets. Sadly that person has not walked through the door yet so I got myself  a midi controller(M-Audio Oxygen 8), installed Reason and started hacking away.

I was very impressed with how easy Reason 4 was to work with. I was able to make some real progress really quick, the transport features are similar to standard recording software (Logic/ProTools), the mixer and components are all easy to work with. The patches it comes with are plentiful and give you plenty of avenues of creativity. So I was off and running there. I started looking at Abelton but it felt very Windowsy to me. Being a completely saved man (mac man) I can’t be havin that.  So it’s just Reason for now.

This Easter we tried out our first go at playing with a Reason track. We did a stripped down acoustic version of Mighty Is the Power of the Cross by Chris Tomlin and integrated a reason track I recorded. I think we’ve been reasonably well paced in the progression of musical style in our church and I hope we haven’t left many behind. This was another leap forward and I must admit, my first try at it so it wasn’t all that great but it was a start. For the first time in a long time I was nervous. I was panicking that my computer would shut down or the track would pause or something funky. Thank God it went smoothly, giving me a bit more confidence using this live going forward.

So here’s a 2 minute cut from what we used on the outro. This of course had live vocals as well as an acoustic guitar.

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