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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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?

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As many of you know John Mark McMillan performed at our church, Life Connection Church in April. He was nice enough to sit down with us for a good long conversation. This video is just part 1 of our conversation. John Mark is an amazing guy and had a lot of great insight into music and worship. You don’t want to miss any part of the interview so make sure you subscribe to the rss feed to keep up to date when we release the other portions of the interview.

Also We’ll be doing a little giveaway here. The prize is John Mark McMillan’s cd “The Songs Inside the Sounds of Breaking Down” on iTunes. So you will get the album gifted to you over iTunes. To enter into the giveaway you need to so 2 simple things:

1. Link to this post on some other site. Could be your own blog, could be a digg submission, delicious, Facebook, you get the idea. All those nifty links are at the bottom of this post.
2. Comment on this post with a link to where you mentioned this post.

That’s all you have to do. I’ll let the competition run for 2 weeks. Now onto the video…

See also Part 2.

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When playing recorded intros in Reason there’s something you don’t want to do, unless you intentionally want to screw up the song and distract the entire congregation. I of course didn’t intentionally do this yesterday, but unfortunately intentions mean jack squat in music. No there is not going to be any video going up on You Tube so you all can laugh at me. Below is a screen shot of the intro I used for Ready Now, see if you can spot the problem. Hint: this is just an “intro”.

Screen shot with the answer after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Doxologist has posted a good Q&A exchange between a band leader and deacon Joel Brown at Mars Hill and a ministry leader in Australia. In it the “brotha from down unda” asks questions relating to transitioning from a “worship team” model to “worship bands” model (which we follow at Life Connection Church).

It’s a good read and I think Joel did a good job answering the questions. It was a tough transition early for our church in just getting people’s expectations reoriented and seeing people struggle to break out of religious tradition is always a grind, but in the end good. I’d be interested to hear other worship leaders and pastors experience with their worship model and the pros and cons they’ve experienced.

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Below are a few pics from the John Mark McMillan concert, you can see the entire Flickr set here. What a night it was.

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It’s here folks! We will be selling tickets at the door if you’ve slacked and haven’t already bought your tickets. There are a few VIP tickets left, just a few. VIP Q&A session starts at 5pm, doors open at 6pm, concert starts at 7pm. Go here for full ticket information.

See you tonight!

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Life Connection Church is having our first Open Musician Call on May 10th at 1pm. We’re going to try and accomplish 3 things on this day:

1. Observe level of musicianship. Each person will have a short audition and we will encourage with some critique and present what the next level for each person is musically. It may be that lessons are needed before you are considered for band placement, or maybe you are ready for band placement talent wise but you need your own instrument.

2. Explain vision and commitment. I will explain to everyone what the vision of Life Connection worship is, how we build bands, how we train worship leaders and how that process can begin for those interested. I’ll discuss what worship is in general and what our doctrinal footing is in our practice of worship musically. In our individual interviews I’ll explain a bit more about the level of commitment and sacrifice required and see if you’re up to it.

3. Band placement. If you’ve made it through the first 2 steps then we’ll start analyzing what type of band you’d best fit into and work on band placement.

If you wish to be part of this day please send me an email and let me know you are interested so we can build a schedule of auditions. Even if you know you may not be ready for band placement I really encourage you to come and get the process started so we can encourage and direct you in training.

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It has been confirmed! April 25th at Life Connection Church in Phoenix, AZ, John Mark McMillan will perform live with special guest Life In Stereo! Tickets are available online. Concert starts at 7pm, doors open at 6pm. We have 30 (only 30!) VIP tickets available which include:

- priority, stage front seating

- exclusive access to band Q&A session prior to concert (5pm)

- John Mark McMillan cd “The Songs Inside the Sounds of Breaking Down”

- Main Squeeze smoothie at event

Childcare tickets are SOLD OUT!. If you want to bring your child into the concert then they need a General Admission ticket unless they are under 3, in which case they can enter the concert free.

Space is limited so make sure you get your tickets early.

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

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As proof of the content of this post, I must add a disclaimer to this before I even get started. This post in no way, shape or form is a testament to Our Rising Sound worship band at Life Connection Church. Our Rising Sound is an amazing group of talented musicians and wonderful servants and this post is not a testimony of experience with this band in particular but a collective observation on life experience in the church and specifically worship bands.

A worship leader always has to be aware and sensitive to the feelings of members of the worship team. There is an emotional connection to this area of service that is quite unique, and much of the time unhealthy, in the body. If you ask those who are cleaning the building to make sure and vacuum the kids room better cause the kids are really messy, I don’t think they’d get offended and leave the church over it. They’d just take the advice and go along with their service. But I’ve seen many musicians/singers leave the church when corrected musically. There is such a strong emotional bond and the road to offense seems like a short walk most of the time.

You’ll commonly hear a few things in defense or at least in explanation of this phenomena.

1. Music is emotional in itself
2. Music is very personally important to people
3. Taste in music is everyone’s own preference and when you correct they take offense because they feel you are saying your idea of music is better than theirs
4. Musical expression in worship is a right a Christian is (re)born with, who is the worship leader to comment on it or correct

I think all of those are factors but I’m beginning to see the most important cause is not amongst those. Let me respond to the above list first:

1. True
2. Some people yes, musicians and singers I would hope so
3. People often confuse music structure/theory with preference. If you play the wrong chord, have no sense of dynamics, have bad time, sing out of key, those have nothing to do with your musical style. You are playing music bad, not different, just bad and making correctable errors.
4. The root of this problem is the improper coupling of music and worship. Everyone is reborn to praise and worship God, that is something we all must do. And of course we are always worshiping, the object of our worship shifts. However, expressing worship through music corporately is not everyone’s right.

Now onto what I really see as the root of the problem. I’ve found an unhealthy relationship between serving on the worship band and creative outlet. God has created us as creative beings, we should seek to glorify God is increasingly creative ways, musical creativity included. I do believe there is a place for a lot of creativity in corporate worship music. Much more than traditionally is expressed. That being said, the worship band and corporate worship should not serve as your creative outlet.

The problem is born when you view worship as a chance to express yourself creatively while worshipping God. Instead of what should be the case, your desire is to worship God and to do that use your body, soul, spirit, mind, all of you, including creativity, in your worship. Another way and perhaps a better way of putting this, is the problem of creativity around our worship instead of fitting inside of worship. This isn’t as nuanced as it seems, it is a very important distinction and makes a huge practical difference. If Sunday is your creative outlet, then when the worship leader asks you not to play or sing on a song, then that can become very hurtful because it seems to you as if the worship leader is turning off your God given creativity and your avenue of worship. The nerve! But if instead your only desire is to worship God and creativity is only a tool in that, then not playing doesn’t matter, because it’s only a tool and not the avenue of worship.

I can’t tell how important it is to get a proper perspective of how creativity fits inside of our expression of worship and not around our worship. This is much too broad a topic for a single blog post, perhaps I’ll split it up into a few posts soon. For now, we’ll leave this as an intro.

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