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Yesterday was perhaps one of the sweetest days of worship that I can recall at SSCC.  I think there are lots of reasons.  We’d just had a “Night of Worship” event the Friday night before.  We had more margin (see tomorrow’s post!) in our service plan, and the teaching focused on worship.

We opened slowly, with an older classic, “Open the Eyes of My Heart”.  I find it nice to open slowly sometimes.  Paul Baloche calls this an “on-ramp”.  It gives people a transition into worship and I could see people making that transition clearly.

To open up the top of the hour, we introduced a new, upbeat song called “We Are The Free” from Matt Redman’s newest album, “10,000 Reasons”.  I’d originally decided that although I love this song, it would never find a home in our typical sunday service.  I felt it was just too edgy and youth-driven.  It didn’t seem to fit our culture.  I had so many people from the band and congregation who’d already heard the song and really encouraged me to go for it.  To my surprise, the song was really well-received.

From that song we segued directly into super-familiar “Glory to God Forever”.

After a time of announcements, we introduced the brand new worship ballad from the Passion 2011 album, “Waiting Here For You”.  Heather, one of our team members, led this and did a beautiful job.

At the conclusion of this song, I felt a strong sense that we should just wait a moment and not rush into the sermon.  We lingered there, and before I knew it, we were praying and crying out to God.  The congregation was praying, people were praying for others who needed prayer … it was a beautiful thing that I’ll describe more fully in tomorrow’s blog post.

Our Discipleship Pastor did an incredible job teaching on worship, our response to God, and living the life of worship.

We concluded with a traditional version of “The Old Rugged Cross” with nothing but vocals and piano.  IT WAS GORGEOUS.  I loved hearing the people of God sing this classic hymn.  I also sang the deep bass line, which was stylistically different for us, but added to the traditional feel.  It was a special moment.

Transitioning out of the hymn we sang “The Song of Moses”, a newer song from some guys up in Atlanta.  It was massive and I can only say that I felt that our congregation literally walked together through this journey of worship.  It was one of my favorite Sundays!

As always, I’m sharing our worship service recap as a part of the “Sunday Setlists” event, hosted weekly at TheWorshipCommunity.Com.

I announced a while back that I’d finally taken the plunge to purchase an iPad2.  I confessed that it was much more of a luxury item than a necessity.  Now that I’ve used it for a couple of months, I’ve realized just how much I’ve missed by not having it sooner.

Here are 6 ways that I’ve used the iPad2 in the context of corporate worship and my job as a worship pastor.

1.  Planning Meetings:  this is a bit of a luxury, but I no longer have to haul my big MacBook Pro up the stairs and take up a lot of table space at our weekly planning meetings.  I show up with my iPad2 in hand, with quick easy access to my tunes and PlanningCenterOnline.

2.  Digital Music Stand:  there are numerous apps out there that let you store a library of .pdf files.  I haven’t even gotten that far yet, but I export our setlist from PlanningCenter as a .pdf into my DropBox account, and then open it on the iPad for a quick, easy digital music stand.  No more stacks of paper to shuffle through.  (DropBox is FREE, and if you haven’t created a free account there, you’re missing out.  Use my affiliate link so I can get more free space, please!)

3.  Remote Control:  with the “Remote” app, I can easily control my iTunes playlist from my iPad.  This has come in extremely handy when I’m at the piano or keyboard rehearsing a tune or charting out a song.  Where before I’d have to reach way over to my desk and press play w/ the mouse, scoot back to my keyboard, scoot back to stop and rewind, etc., I can do all of this with the iPad sitting on my keyboard.  From one seat at the piano or keyboard, I can load, play, rewind, repeat, scrub – making charting arrangements and learning new songs a lot easier.

4.  Yamaha M7CL StageMix App:  with this incredible, FREE app from Yamaha, I can actually connect via WiFi to our Yahama M7CL sound board and easily adjust the sound.  Granted, we’ve got an incredible tech team on hand mixing the sound, but being able to tweak my personal in-ear monitor mix from the iPad is genius.

5.  ProRemote:  ProRemote is a high-end, paid app (it’s got a hefty price tag of $99) that is a full-featured remote mixing/editing surface for all of the popular recording and looping packages, including Logic Studio, ProTools, Ableton Live, Reason, Garageband, and more.  This app is far more powerful than a simple on/off remote.  It gives you full access to almost every feature in the software itself.   Imagine being able to leave the studio console, walk into a vocal booth, record-enable a track, hit play, punch in and out recording, scrub back and listen, set location markers, and more …. by yourself, wirelessly, without an engineer sitting at the console.  All of this is possible through ProRemote.

In our studio, I’ve toggled back and forth between the iTunes Remote and ProRemote to create loops,click tracks, and full arrangements of songs.  On stage, I used ProRemote to not only control the Start/Stop of our click tracks in Ableton Live, but I also setup loop points and markers where I could easily loop or go back to a rehearsal marker with a push of a “pad” on the screen of my iPad.

6.  My Music – everywhere:  With the landing of Spotify here in the US, I can have my music, playlists, and even the playlists and music of friends available to me on my iPad instantly.  I’m not worried about syncing libraries, managing iTunes accounts, or even better – taking up precious storage space on my device.

Free Spotify accounts are by invitation only through Klout … but I have good news.  I’ve got a special link to get you in.  (Get a Klout and Spotify Account Here!)

This is a short-list of the way I’ve benefited from using the iPad2. If you’ve considered making a purchase, I hope this can help justify it.  If you already have an iPad, how do you use it in the context of your job?

Let the fun begin!

Well, nothing is perfect.  But the way the songs and lyrics fit the 3rd week’s message in our “Uncaged” series at SSCC this week was close to it.

I’d planned our closing song in cooperation with Jon Blankenship, who would be preaching this week … but had no idea that the rest of his sermon would literally be full of the actual lyrics and expressions in all of our songs.

I love it when it when that happens!

Overall, it was a more “contemporary” Sunday than normal, with bigger, edgier, louder music.  I expected that I may get a little more pushback than I did, but only one complaint thus far, and it was from a visitor who said they don’t want anything except traditional music.

Walk In:
My Savior Lives

Opening Song:
I Am Free

Worship Set:
Your Name
You Save (original)

Closer:
Christ Is Risen

It was awesome seeing a number of people confessing Jesus as their Lord and Savior in both services!

Sharing this as part of the “Sunday Setlists” event held weekly at TheWorshipCommunity.Com.

Better late than never, right?

Here’s a recap of our Setlist from SSCC.  As always, I’m posting this as part of the “Sunday Setlists” event hosted over at TheWorshipCommunity.Com.

View our Service in PlanningCenterOnline.

This was one of those Sundays when before you ever start, you realize that you’re probably trying to cram way too much into one service.  Sometimes it just happens that way.  We want to worship through music and song.  We want to be challenged and equipped through the preaching of the Word.  We want to have community and communicate things to our congregants.  We want to celebrate missions and pray for outgoing teams.

The tension comes when all of this needs to happen on one Sunday, for whatever reason.  We are held to a fairly tight schedule due to multiple services and the logistics of clearing a building and parking lot.

This Sunday was one of those Sundays.  We had a longer-than-normal sermon (which we already knew, and was great).  We had new members to introduce, several important announcements, and a missions team to send.  Plus, we’d planned an inspiring time of ministry for response after the sermon.

Well, our service DID go a bit long – but it was worth it.  At the end of the day, I’m sure we were the ones paying attention to the clock a lot more than those who came to worship.  It’s a tension that has to be managed, and I think we did a good job with it this week.

On to the music:

Walk In:  “Everlasting God” (a last minute change because the original song we’d chosen didn’t work out)
Opening Set:
“Alive Again” (Maher, one of our favorites)
“Song of Moses” (recently recorded on new Aaron Keyes album, LOVE this song)

Ministry time at end:
“Rescue” (Jared Anderson)
“Jesus Paid it All” (Northpoint)

Without going into a lot of detail about the sermon and how it impacted people, we were overwhelmed at the conclusion of the service with people coming forward for ministry and to “put their sin” in this cage we’d built.  It was incredibly inspiring and I felt like people were really getting free.  Praise God!

And that’s a wrap for this week!

Question:  how do you manage the tension of time management in your services?

This 4th of July holiday threw my blogging schedule off a bit.  Excuses, Excuses!

So I’d hoped to do a thorough recap on my use of the iPad2 in our worship service but for today, the setlist recap will have to suffice.  The blog on the iPad is going to be a lot more involved.

You can view a production sheet for our July 3rd service via PlanningCenter.

Sunday, July 3rd - St. Simons Community Church

Russ Hutto opened us with the debut of “Here for You” off the new Passion 2011 album.  It was a great song and one I look forward to integrating into our services.

From there, we went into “All my Fountains” (also from Passion 2011) with the arrangement I use for hammer dulcimer.  It’s a favorite of ours, and I love playing it.

After announcements, I acknowledged the significance of the upcoming July 4 holiday and we sang “God Bless America” as a prayer, asking God for his blessing on our country.  That flowed seamlessly into “I Stand Amazed” (How Marvelous) hymn, followed by “Mighty To Save” that was more in the Laura Story-type arrangement than the Hillsong one.

We had an intense sermon about being “caged” — I’d been waiting literally for 2 years to find the right service to do the song “Pieces” by the band, Red.  This was the service.  I spent the week scoring out cello and violin parts, sequencing, tracking, and we did this song for a very powerful time to close the service.

Tons of great feedback about this closer.  I will be posting the sequences and loops soon.

As always, this recap is part of the “Sunday Setlists” event hosted by TheWorshipCommunity.Com each week!