Worship Confessional - July 6, 2008

I've been reading a couple of different worship blogs lately, and have seen a couple of people do this thing called a "Worship Confessional." Basically what this is is a recap of the worship Sunday, so people can see what we did and why, what worked and what didn't. I don't know if Fred McKinnon invented these, but that's where I saw it first, so that's where the credit goes.

Our opening was a little out of the ordinary. Normally, the worship team meets in a back room just before service to pray. This Sunday, I went to the stage as usual to do a quick tune on my guitars. Aquim was also up there changing the drum setup a bit, and Danny was tuning his base. We began to just jam a little, when Josh came up and said to just play something. I started playing Praise Adonai on my electric with a lot of chorus and wah, with a little Latin flavor. Soon everyone came up and we were doing a pre-opening-song song.

We were doing a new song this week, Hillsong's For Who You Are. I had watched a Paul Baloche video where he said he had introduced new songs by playing them twice at the same service, so we decided to play this song as our opening music as well as in the main set. People seemed interested in it, and the chorus is pretty easy to remember.

The main set opened with a pair from Israel and New Breed, Say So and Free for All. Say So is a particular favorite of Pastor Jim's, and Free for All generally gets things moving. (even more so after the sound booth actually unmutes my acoustic!) From there we went back into For Who You Are. It was a little familiar since we had played it earlier, and people were not struggling like they usually do with a new song. Good idea!!

The slower songs were Holy is the Lord and How Great is Our God. I had decided to play Holy with the electric and an acoustic modeller to ease the transition into the second song. In retrospect, I think it sounds better with a real acoustic. I had plenty of time to switch, it turns out, as we were just vamping for quite a while as people prayed and worshipped. Note to self: go with the gut!

At communion, Josh just sang Remember Me while I played along on the acoustic. We hadn't done that before. Nice! Since we had a guest speaker, we hadn't planned on playing for altar call, but we got called up anyway, and played Holy Fire. (Empty Me) After service, we cranked up the volume and distortion and jammed everyone out.

So there you have it. Hmm.. this might come in handy.

BTW, check out The Worship Community, a new site of resources for worship leaders.

Comments

  1. Hey!

    First, thanks so much for plugging TheWorshipCommunity.Com, we really do appreciate it.

    Second, I appreciate the link, and I'm glad to know you're reading my blog. The "Worship Confessional" actually started with Carlos over at RagamuffinSoul.Com, though! So, I'll pass the credit torch to him.

    Thanks man!
    FRED

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular Posts