Category Archives: Worship
Album Review: My Savior Lives. New Life Worship
(Recently purchased this album from iTunes and thought I’d give my thoughts about. ) This is a great live worship album from the get-go. If you’re looking for a great experience that has been captured on CD, this is the one you want. New Life Worship team is great at capturing the presence at an event and recording it to CD. Here are the tracks:
1. My Savior Lives – Great upbeat, guitar driven song. When I close my eyes, I seen people jumping up and down with fists in the air.
2. Everyone (Praises) – another great guitar driven song. This song has been around for a while, and if you haven’t heard it, you’re really missing out. It’s an anthem of Praise to God. A great congregational song to get everyone involved.
3. King of All Glory – The drum intro part is sweet. It kind of has a tribal type feel, maybe a chant type song at first. Things pick up in the middle/end of the song and it becomes an all out worship jam with violins, and all that cool stuff. All great songs have a violin in them, right?
4. Endlessly – I first heard this song on ORU’s live CD a few years back. We picked it up and started singing it at our church. It has great lyrics and a great rhythm. The words can be a little trick if you’re leading it, though.
5. – In Your Presence – Ever have one of those soft, quiet worship songs that hits home with ya? This is one of those. It’s mysterious, melodic, and lyrically great. It really picks up with a guitar solo in the middle of it, then it brings down the house at the end with almost a capella vocals after the hard-hitting guitar solo.
6 – In Your Presence (Reprise) – A continuation of song #5. The track begins with the audience singing out the song…purely awesome. The worship team comes back in with a driving drum beat and guitar. This is/was a great time of spontaneous type worship.
7 – Hiding Place – Another great song…it has a violin. The vocals on this song are the purest of pure. The leader has a great solo male voice. The song is well written and easy on the ears. Classical guitars, violins, strings, etc. Ahh….
8 – Everlasting Go – builds off of track #7. This one reminds me of a Brooke Fraiser song. She’s the girl from Hillsong who wrote/sings Desert Song. Listen for the cool drum loop in this track!
9 – Your Name – One of my favorite worship songs by Paul Baloche and Glenn Packiam. This song was previously released by Paul, but New Life Worship did a great live version of it on this CD. There are a few variations in this version to Paul’s, particularly the shouting of “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus”, but it’s done pretty tastefully.
10 – We Will Sing – brings the tempo back up from track #9 with a solid guitar/Hillsong type intro which quickly dies out when the vocalists begin singing. A great song of praise that heats up from the 2nd verse on.
11 – Promises – YEAH! This is what Praise is all about. I love this song, starting from the drummer count off. The overdriven guitar keeps you wanting more. “‘ I couldn’t walk away if I tried ’cause your love is better than life.” best line of the song.
12 – Glorious God – breaks it down with some vinyl scratching in the beginning. Needs.More.Vinyl.Scratching. This song turns out to be an acoustic guitar/electric guitar song proclaiming that “You are Glorious God”.
13 – Live to Worship – What it’s all about. We live to Worship, what else is there?
14 – This is Our God – previously recorded by Hillsong on the “This is Our God” album and the same ORU album I mentioned before. A great song that talks about the goodness fo God. It’s like we’re showing off our God before the world. “Tell the whole world, everyone sing, This is our God, this is our King.”
Where have I been???
Busy. That’s right, busy. That’s where I’ve been…at the intersection of Busy and Excited. God continues to impress us and give us our heart’s desire. It has been a great journey so far!
We’ve been enjoying God’s presence in Bentonville for a little over a month now, and man has it been great! God is really doing a new, fresh thing in Bentonville! What anointing! What talent! What great attitudes! What great worshippers! I thank God for showing up and healing hearts and lives in the services. It’s not ever about us, but it’s always about him.
I hope that you can come experience God in Bentonville with us . If you’re not able to come to Bentonville, check out this excerpt from our Sunday Evening Worship Service on 8-2-09. I’ve been listening to it while typing this post, and the tears began to fall…I feel that God’s anointing was so fresh and soaked on this service and I know that it will continue to flow and minister to you as you listen.
(Setlist: Awesome is the Lord Most High by Chris Tomlin, Jesse Reeves, Cary Pierce, Jon Abel. Forever by Chris Tomlin. You are Good by Kari Jobe. How Great is our God by Chris Tomlin, Jesse Reeves, Ed Cash.)
Keep us in your prayers as we seek God’s face and will for our lives. God is THE Orchestrator and continues to put things together that no one else can. Thank you Lord for what you’ve done for us this far, but we thank you already for what you’re going to do in the future!
10,000 songs and still strong
10,000 songs. Ten thousand. Diez Mil. dix-millièmes. diecimila. 一萬 That’s alot. That’s how many songs Amy and I have sang in the last 7 years.
Here’s the breakdown:
Time at Victory: 7 years
Approximate number of times to lead worship: 1,000
Avg. Songs per Worship Service: 8
Avg. Songs per Altar call: 2
Avg. # of songs in the key of E: 15
Avg. # of songs in the key of G: 25
Avg. # of songs in a flatted/ key: 0
That means that we probably sang songs like ‘Open the Eyes’ and ‘I Could Sing of Your Love Forever’ about 400-500 times apiece..Yowza!
So hat’s off to the last 10,000 songs that we sang, and here’s to the next 1,000,000. May God continue to grow and bless us 10 times over on the next 10,000. We pray God’s blessings on you all…thanks for letting us worship with you. If you haven’t worshipped with us yet, what are you waiting on?
Memo To Worship Bands
I recently went to a great Christian concert (which was awesome!) and came out of the arena with my ears ringing. Now before you get mad at me and say that I’m griping at music volumes, let me justify myself. I enjoyed the concert. Notice I said “concert” and not “Church Service”. Concerts are supposed to be loud, church services, well, usually not. If you come away from worship service with yours ears ringing, then there’s probably a problem. Nothing should distract us from worship.
While researching sound levels online, I found a great article that the church congregation and worship team will benefit greatly from. The article, entitled Memo to Worship Bands is on Christianity Today’s Website. John G Stackhouse Jr. gives five reasons why the volume should be turned down in church services. I have added some of my comments below each number.
1. Cranking up the volume is just a cheap trick to add energy to a room.
- This is not always true. I believe that there are times in a service when the volume should be turned up (during the ‘praise’ part of worship service, offertory songs, when the congregation is rejoicing, when the team is teaching a new song, etc.), and then down (during the worship time, altar call, prayer time, when Pastor is speaking, etc.).
2. When your intonation is not very good, turning it up only makes it hurt worse.
- Amen!
3. The speakers in most church PA systems cannot take that much energy.
- We have experienced this first hand. Speakers will catch on fire, won’t they?
4. Consider that you might be marginalizing older people.
- As a worship leader, this is one of the hardest areas to discipline yourself. Bringing pre-teens and seniors together during worship can be a hard thing to do. It’s only by God and lots of sacrifice that this can be done without hurt feelings, unless the church has a designated ‘Traditional service’ or ‘Contemporary Service’.
5. Musicians—every one of them, including the singers—are accompanists to the congregation’s praise.
- This is one point that I try to stress to our Worship team. We are not here for a show or performance. We are here to serve the song. We are servants. It’s not about seeing how many guitar licks, drum fills, piano slides, or vocal runs you can manage to throw in ‘Trading My Sorrows’, it’s about opening the congregation to the presence of God.
So the next time you enter into worship, begin to focus on God and we’ll do our best to have the volume at the right level.
You and I were made to worship
You and I are called to love
You and I are forgiven and free
When you and I embrace surrender
When you and I choose to believe
Then you and I will see who we were meant to be
–Chris Tomlin, Made to Worship
1/25/09 Sunday AM Setlist
For all of you at Victory, here’s the setlist for the morning worship service. Pray about and come prepared to worship and find God. I may try and start posting the lists a few days ahead of time, so that you can look forward to what’s happenin’ at the next service….I said “try”.
Check it out below:
Free Music Goodness
For all you Worship Leaders out there looking for new music to throw in your Ipod, I’ve found some. It’s a “blend of Austrailian and American talent.” Kinda like Steve Irwin meets Jack Hanna. The music is from Christian City Church. You can get all caught up with them on their website.
From their website:
True Christians, with true music. Not about the royalty checks, or the hype. Here it is. Have our music and be blessed. Their heart speaks to me. I’ve been spinning the CD tracks from “It all comes back to You”, which is a step up from worship as usual. Distorted guitar, and vibrant vocals on every track. Be sure and give “Here and Now” a listen from the same album. A worshipper’s cry to authentic and real worship.
Enjoy.
Writing Songs
As many of you may or may not know, God has given Amy and I the gift to write our own songs. To date, Amy and I have have written somewhere around the neighborhood of twenty songs. The songs range from songs of praise to songs of lament. We both know that one day our songs will be used around the World. But for now, we have had the push to start a CD fund for our first official CD. Many contributors have already given (monetarily or prayerfully).
I said all that to show you this. Bob Kauflin’s blog: www.worshipmatters.com. The most recent post of Bob’s is one entitled “Top Ten ways to Write Bad Worship Songs“. If you are in the process of writing, or have written songs to be used for worship, you may want to take a looksie at his list. After reading his list, may I suggest the book “God Songs“, by Paul Baloche and Jimmy & Carol Owens. This book will help get your thoughts and processes started when you are aiming to write music for God.
Now get out your paper and start penning the words that God gives.
National Music Department New Forums!
The Assemblies of God National Music Department have recently launched brand new forums! (Added to my BlogRoll to the right also!) I applaud the NMD for all of the upgrades to their website recently. They have newly re-vamped the entire music department online. I Love it! Cruise on over to the forums and join in on the discussion!
Get hip. Get Visual Worshiper.
I was rolling through a Worship Forum that l frequent, trying to keep up with all of the current worship scenes today, and I stumbled upon a really neat site. The site is www.visualworship.com. The site is a presentation of the services that this company offers. Think plain old LCD projection is cool? Try this. Architectural Projection. That’s right, architectural. I admit, even I didn’t know what this was until I read on the site…I didn’t even know it existed.
Basically Architectural Projection turns your whole room into a canvas on which images are projected. However, as you can see on the website, there is still some use for a screen. (Still projecting the words onto it.) The atmosphere that this technique creates is really quite phenomenal. Taken from the website: “When imagery, motion, colors, stylized fonts, texture, and light are used together in a creative and relevant way, they create a focused and unique atmosphere for your corporate worship”. True dat, brotha, true dat. Cruise on over to www.visualworshiper.com to see what they can do for your worship facility.
:
Why… Hello, Love.
The wait is finally over. As I type out this post, I’m listening to it. My #2 Worship person has just released another album today. The album is called Hello Love. Don’t know who I’m talking about? His name is Chris. Chris Tomlin.
Many people have said that Chris Tomlin is the icon of worship today. The poster boy of Worship. Just look at his name, Chris Tomlin. Now run the letters together: christomlin. See anything? Try again: christomlin. Yes mice and men, even his name has ‘Christ’ in it. Awesome possum. Chris Tomlin and Paul Baloche both have extraordinarily amazing gifts. They both hold the gift of being able to write congregational songs that are both easy to sing and to play while being scriptural at the same time. Chris’ new album proves no different. Many great songs on it! Read on for a track by track break down.
1. Sing, Sing, Sing – If you’re not already singing this in your conregation, shame on you. It was first released a few times back on a Passion CD.
2. Jesus Messiah – it’s been on the radio for awhile. You’ve heard it, and probably already love it.
3. You lifted me Out – Hard core distortions on this song. Chris’ tenor voice soars as usual.
4. God of this City – Another song released by Passion and also Bluetree. Very powerful song written for the country of city of Pattaya, Thailand. Listen to it and be drawn to tears.
5. I will Rise – Slower song. Still very moving. Piano intro and piano driven. I love Tomlin’s piano songs. Lyrics are a proclamation of truth and rising up.
6. Love – features the Watoto Children’s Choir. I like the song but it kinda reminds me of that Michael Jackson song with the African Choir. What was that song from? Free Willy or something.
7. Praise the Father – To me this song sounds like a hymn in the beginning. Very christian-ese type lyrics. Good song to sing for worship though.
8. God Almighty – the intro alone is outstanding. Chronicles of Narnia soundtrack eat your pants. Hold on to your hats during the saweeeet intro.
9. My Deliverer – A classic Tomlin song. Guitar driven with distortion and delay. Lyrics are simple yet effective. Don’t listen to this one if you don’t like songs that repeat and repeat…….and repeat.
10. With Me – Another classic Tomlin intro’d song. Pretty hard core distortions again. Feel the drive in the bass line and the entire song. Use of lots of delays again.
11. Exalted (YAHWEH) – Reminded me of ‘Amazing Grace My Chains are Gone’. Simple guitar and piano until the outro.
12. All the Way My Savior Leads Me – Another slow one from Tomlin and the gang. I like this song but wish the would’ve ended the CD on a fast note. Great song, nonetheless.
If you like Chris Tomlin and band, you need this CD. Go buy it. Don’t steal it. Don’t pirate it. Buy it. Support the artist!
Worship is Life 
