Worship Recap – May 17th, 2009

So sorry for the delay. This week I’m taking EFCA Church Planters Boot Camp in Deerfield, IL. It counts as my final 3 credits for my Masters, which is very exciting. I hit the road right after our service and didn’t have time to write a recap until now, so here goes:

Two words were our musical theme this week and those words are “familiar” and “easy”. The band usually rehearses on Wednesday nights but this week we were hosting a local High School’s choir concert so rehearsal was canceled. In light of this I looked at the band line-up for the week and intentionally chose songs that this specific group could produce without a proper rehearsal.

Reign in Us (A) > This song was one we introduced two weeks ago. I realized that the line-up for this week was almost identical to the line-up from then, so this was an easy choice. In order to save a few precious minutes at the top of service we did a 3 minute arrangement that eliminated both bridges and several choruses. We needed to save some time this week because we were wrapping our “Bible for Life” series and the pastor needed some additional time for the message. It’s much better to anticipate this need rather than to try to make a cut on the fly.

Mighty to Save (A) > Another “safe” song. We’ve done this one a lot as a church but haven’t brought it back in a while. It was a lot of fun to sing it again. Sometimes so many repetitions make you forget why you started singing the song in the first place. It really is an incredible tune.

Overcome (A) > The perfect closer to our “Bible for Life” series. What better way to wrap the story of the entire bible than with a song where the chorus is drawn from Revelation. I’m going to make a bold statement and say that this is one of the best worship songs ever written. When we’ve played it 100 times and I’m sick of it please remind me that I said that once upon a time.

That’s it for this week. Only 3 songs (really 2.5 after cutting Reign in Me down to size) in the worship order in order to make time for an extended message as well as some new members that joined. Final service time was 59 minutes. Win!

Oh, and those new members I mentioned. One of them was none other than our very own, amazingly talented, world class percussionist, Bryce Schill. Congratulations Bryce

What is “Sunday Set Lists“?

For those of you that wonder why I put this at the end of every post, Fred McKinnon is a worship leader and blogger who hosts a “blog carnival” week after week. Basically that means there are about 70 or so worship leaders from around the country that write blogs about our weekly services and each week Fred hosts a giant board of links to all those posts. So if you are interested in this sort of thing, definitely check out this week’s post.