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so I made a strange decision last week, after years of pushing for more music up front at our services, always lobbying to maintain our typical 4-song set whenever possible… I decided that I’m going to try something over the next month or so. 3 songs. 3 songs in the 20 minutes or so that I’m allotted in each service. why? well, lately I’ve felt… I don’t know… trapped. constricted. have I really been allowing the Spirit to move in our sets? we’ve become much more polished in the last several years—especially after moving into our first facility. sure, I’ve been accused thousands of times of rambling during worship… but it never fails. those are the days when someone comes up to me and thanks me—not for the great music, great words, great band, but for my heart. something that I said, read, suggested, questioned even.

anyway, this past weekend was the first of those 3 song sets, and I did my share of rambling again… spoke a bit about the Trinity. I have a brand new song called ‘Holy Lord’ (that I’m so amped for all of you to hear, by the way) that focuses on the entities of the Trinity for a verse each. the bridge is one of those one-line repeating worship bridges and the chorus just shouts of the holiness of God. my hope is that I allowed—both musically and with what I said—a moment to happen. a moment where the music would culminate in a change—even ever so slight—in someone’s heart, mind, soul…

anyway, I’d love to hear about how you all intentionally leave space for the movement of the Spirit… how many songs up front, etc. songset follows:

Beautiful One - (Tim Hughes)

Indescribable - (Laura Story)

Holy Lord - (M. Roach)

feature tune - Better Is One Day (Matt Redman)

we ended the service (and our entire series on ‘Inheritance’ actually) by singing ‘Better Is One Day’ together… I broke out the ol’ bible on the platform and just read portions of Psalms 84 and 27, just two of the passages represented in the lyric. we used a loop that I created in the vain of the original Passion version’s loop, so that was fun… and we triggered it with Ableton Live and were able to loop the fallout section as our Pastor came up to do the blessing and return to the full loop seemlessly into the end. I love using technology in that transparent sort of way, although we fell just short of mastering it this weekend. it worked out, though.

until next week…

 

 

 

this post is also a part of sunday setlists