Creative Worship

A Few Thoughts For The Worship Leader

*God is not looking for a certain "kind" of worship. He is looking for a certain "kind" of worshipper. God is looking for worshippers who worship Him in Spirit (connecting to Him relationally) and in Truth (grounded in Scripture). See John 4. Your primary focus should be to keep your heart aligned with God relationally and your life grounded in the truth of His revelation through His Word. Focus first on becoming the right "kind" of worshipper and worry about the "kind" of worship you will lead secondary.

*Anchor your life in His Word. Okay- so I am repeating myself here. The Word is where it is at!! You will not be the worship leader God has created you to be without anchoring your life in His Word. You might be a talented artist who can lead a crowd to sing, but you will not be a worship leader.

*Focus your worship on the work of the cross and the power of Christ's resurrection.

*Worship should fuel the rescue mission. When you lead worship, lead people to take that worship outside the walls of the church! Lead them to live a lifestyle of worship that sends a clarion call to the world the hope found in Christ.

*The measure of successful worship is not just involvement in a service (hands raised, voices singing). The measure of successful worship is life change. The measure of successful worship is what happens after the band stops playing and you stop singing.

*You can't lead worship without a stunned heart. When was the last time you stood in awe of your Creator? Yes, you write about Him and sing about Him, but when was the last time you allowed Him to stun your heart with His glory?

I thank God for the gift worship leaders are to the Church. To the team at FC: I love you guys and thank you for keeping your hearts in tune with our Saviour. You are doing an amazing job!!

Turkey Update

Well I saw a lot of birds, but I couldn't get a gobbler to strut my way.

I went with my brother-in-law to a cabin he and his friend have been going to since he was 12. They have some land in the foothills of WV. We hiked in and set up around 5:15 am. There is absolutely nothing like sitting on the side of a hill listening to God's creation wake up and praying that a gobbler would be stupid enough to strut by. Talk about relaxing! We started hearing the birds around 5:50 am. A crow set them off. About 6 gobblers started doing their thing about 50 yards in front of me. They were roosting in a group of pines right on top of me. I watched them fly down from their roost around 6am, just out of reach. They disappeared into the thick pines and headed on down through the valley. I had two huge hens "shake their tail feathers" about 20 yards in front of me by the decoy. What a rush!

The view was incredible. The experience even better. I think I just became a full-on turkey hunter.

Here are a few shots of my view from where I was set up.

Creative Production Part 1

This past Christmas we opened the service off with a production-heavy eye-catching event. We performed a melody rendition adopted from the Trans-Siberian Orchestra mixed with “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” We synced-up everything from the additional band tracks, to the video screens, to the versatube-driven lighting. The sync was all time-code driven from an HDCAM deck. It started with a mood-setting drone that burst with energy over and over again all the way to the climax at the ending. Below is a clip from the service clean-cut.

Post Production Process:

One of the main energy-driving elements was the video created as the song’s foundation. The design was inspired by the much seen Mary J. Blige iPod spot from Apple. For those involved in video and post production, this post will be enjoyed!

The project started with shooting HD green screen elements on a Sony F-900 of just two actors. The actors played all of the different instruments to our edit and click of the track. Once on tape, we laid out the edit in the timeline and segmented 33 or so scenes to be composited. During the edit stage we determined how many layers of our characters were going to be present in each scene. This simplified the compositing process by presenting a rough-visual picture along with a text animatic track with animation notes.

The fun begins! With the help of Video Copilot, our motion graphics team put together many matte (white on black ) elements from scratch using Adobe Illustrator and After Effects. We have an in-house library of many pre-made mattes, textures and animations that helped speed up the process. We are always adding to our library to assist us with projects each week. In After Effects the animations were parented with the waveform of the music track to be emphasized through the musical beats.

Using the new release of Autodesk Smoke 2009, the compositing began. Smoke 2009 offers a batch schematic workflow that significantly sped up the process. We used the particle system of Autodesk Flame to work in a true 3d environment. The characters were then keyed, color-corrected, duplicated and placed in 3d space.

Each scene was created to increase in complexity as the song climaxed. By the end, the camera moves are drastic, the elements are numerous and the characters appear like a large symphony.

Some ‘gap effects’ and 'axis'-transitions in the Smoke timeline provided the flashing and blurring that created additional harmony between the video elements and music.

This project was one of our team’s favorites. Surprisingly, we were able to complete it in about 4 days time...Wow. Thank the Lord for the ability to lean on Him to provide creativity and productivity in such a tight time-span.

Update: You can view the Element by itself here.

Heading Out...

I am heading out to go turkey hunting. Pictures to come- I hope.

Also I am working on pulling the video content for our Christmas opener this past year. I will post that tomorrow afternoon. We did a Trans-Siberian piece that was killer.

Gobble, Gobble!

The "Altar-ed" Life

I am studying Old Testament worship this morning and I had a thought.  Have we eliminated the idea of the altar and sacrifice in the Church?  Within the context of the old covenant the very thought of worshiping God involved sacrifice.  Worship was costly.  Worship required sacrifice to stay in relationship with a Holy God and although we now have a more superior way of worship in the new covenant, I sometimes wonder if we have missed it. 

Every step of the way to relationship with God in the Old Testament required thought of sacrifice.  Even if it were a small sacrifice, one had to bring it to God.  You walked with your sacrifice.  You would smell and hear sacrifice.  The entire worship experience involved sacrifice.  It involved the altar.  Without the altar there was no place for the blood to be shed.  The altar was the place where the divine transaction took place.  It's where man's sins where covered temporarily by the innocent blood of the sacrifice and on that altar relationship with God was "altar-ed."

Today we have a totally different mindset as we go to worship God.  Instead of walking into the Church with sacrifice on our minds, we walk into Church thinking about ourselves.  We come into a worship experience with a consumerist mindset.  We rate our experience with God based on whether or not we liked the music or the message.  And the ironic thing about all of this is that the worship experience shouldn't be about us.  Ours worship is for God's consumption, not ours.  He is the consumer, not us.  And as for rating the service-  if anybody should be doing the rating it's Him. 

Now I realize that because of Christ's work on the cross one sacrifice has been made for all and that the sacrifice of blood is no longer required.  Christ blood doesn't cover our sin, it washes our sins away.  Praise God!  But let's not miss it here.  Our worship should still be costly.  Romans 12 tells us that our very lives are to be presented to God as "living sacrifices." 

When we remove the cost of worship we remove the altar in worship.  When we remove the altar in worship we remove the ability to be "altar-ed." 

So what does the altar look like in a New Testament Church service?

Family, Fish, and Turkeys

What a crazy day! I just landed in Pittsburgh, PA with my family of five. Let me just say that kids are not designed for long airplane trips and I am definitely not designed for long airplane trips with three kids. THANK YOU JESUS FOR MY WIFE! Anyway, I am homeless and sort of out-of-pocket for the next couple of weeks. We are staying at my in-laws house until our house is ready.

I plan to rest while I am here. We have been on a long run since Fall of '07. I need this break some kind of bad. I look forward to getting refreshed. While I am here I am going fishing for walleye and smallmouth bass and hunting for turkey with my brother-in-law. I hope to post pictures soon.

I also plan on wrapping up a 4 week study on worship I am writing with our Worship Leaders. In May we will be taking our entire Worship/Media team through this study. I have wanted for some time now to have a curriculum of sorts to have all our volunteers, band members, choir members, and worship team members to go through so we can all have the same vision. I can't wait for what this is going to do for our team!

But before all of that I am just going to hang with the family, the fish, and the turkeys.
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Next Generation...

Last summer I had the opportunity to spend some time in Australia at Hillsong Church.  At a distance Hillsong is most known for it's worship, but after seeing this incredible church up close, I will forever think about it in a new light.  While there I spent some time with several staff members including Pastors Brian and Bobbie Houston.  Brian Houston has got to be one of the top 3 leaders that I have had the priveledge to meet.  He is an phenomenal leader.  He is leader with a capital "L."

What marked me most about Hillsong is their love and commitment to build into and release the next generation into this world equipped to do life and build the Church.  They don't just talk about next generation ministry like a lot of churches, they do next generation ministry.  They are next generation ministry.  Doing next generation ministry takes confidence in a leader.  Confidence to give ministry away without being afraid that ministry will pass you by. 

I praise God that my Pastor has given ministry to our team so freely, so boldly.  As a result we serve this House with a passion for God and a heart not to fail in the mantel of ministry our Pastor has given us.  As a leader I am charged to do the same.  I am charged to lead in a way that reaches back and pulls up the next generation. I am charge to give ministry away.  We do that in big ways here.  Most of  our Worship Department is under the age of 30 and half of them under the age of 25.  But we also do it in small ways and it's the small ways that I love watching. 

Today I took this picture of next generation ministry taking place.  This is one of our Worship Team players, a student intern, and our Media Pastor.  Every weekend here at FC we have students that have a heart to be the future Worship Leaders at FC work as interns- free interns.  We build into them, abuse them a little (in fun), and slowly give ministry away.  I love that!  I love to see our team give ministry away to the next generation!

Creative Team

What makes up a good Creative Team? Well, I don't necessarily think there is an exact formula to building your Creative Team, but here are 5 quick things that help us as we work in our Creative Team for Worship/Media at Fellowship Church. In this post I will be talking about our Worship Brainstorm.

1. Diversity Is Key: One of the strengths of our Creative Team is the diversity in the room. We have men and women from all walks of life. For example: We have a former Miss Texas, a guy from Englewood, California, and a country girl from Nashville, just to name a few. As far as race, we're very diverse. Musically, we are all over the map--none of us likes the same genre of music.

2. Trust Is A Must: We have some incredible fights in our brainstorms! I mean some great throwdowns. Do you know why? We all love what we do and as a result what we do has our hearts. In our meetings we put our hearts out there and without trust, our fights would be team-ending. I love that the men and women I work with are so passionate about what they do that they are willing to fight to express their perspectives. The amazing thing is that by the end of the meeting we are all on the same page and with a single mind and single heart we move forward. I guess you might say we fight until we are in one accord.

3. Someone Has To Land The Plane: I don't know about you, but I have been a part of some marathon meetings where we just didn't land the plane. Nothing is more frustrating! In your creative sessions, you have to have someone who is directing the meeting and landing the plane.

4. PINGERS: What is a "pinger?" It's the name I have given to people who have the ability to allow ideas to flow freely through their minds. These people don't get bogged down in the details, they are first dreamers. The mind is amazing! It is constantly in search for solutions. "Pingers" have the ability to delay the mind in finding a solution in a brainstorm setting until the best idea presents itself. (I will post more about how the mind works later. I am bit of a nerd when it comes to this stuff.)

5. Pre-Meeting Work: We spend one hour alone on campus individually praying for God's direction in our brainstorm before we meet. Armed with direction from our Pastor we spend time coming up with preliminary ideas so that we all have something to present to the team when we gather.

I will be shooting a short video of one of our meetings in about two weeks as well as writing a few more thoughts so be sure and check it out. Send me your thoughts on what makes a good Creative Team.

Crazy Times...

This is going to be a super quick post because my life right now is CRAZY!! I am in the process of packing as we have to be out of our house on Monday. I am also in the throes of buying a new house and trying to figure out where we are going to live until the house is ready. Throw in the mix of that- I am getting ready for our Weekend Services, preparing a 4 week study on worship (more about that to come), putting together some things to prepare us to put out an all original worship album, outlining a book, brainstorming for the summer and coming fall, yada, yada, yada, and it's CRAZY TIMES! But I love this stuff. It's all about building the House and I am sold out to doing that full on!!

On a positive note I did take the chance to spend some much needed time fishing yesterday with some friends. We went to some property with some incredible spring fed lakes! I can't tell you how many fish we caught. Of course we released them all. It's all about catch and release. My thumb is raw from lipping the fish. One of the things I love about fishing is that it's one of the few things that I can shut everything else off in my mind. Amazingly enough some of my most creative thoughts come when I am fishing- and that's all about the theta waves. No creative thoughts this time though. I was able to spend some time praying when my trolling motor died and I was walking the banks and wading. I have found that it is critical to take the time to do things that allow my mind to focus on something else. That thing for me happens to be fishing and I don't wait for time to go fishing, I take the time to go fishing. It's the only way I can stay healthy with the break-neck pace of ministry. What do you do to stay healthy? What do you do during CRAZY TIMES?

Empty.?.?.

Sorry I haven't posted all week. I am empty on so many levels: physically, emotionally, and mentally. Jesus has been my supply spiritually, but as for everything else, I have nothing. Well almost nothing. I have the love of my life, my wife standing with me. I have an amazing Pastor who is leading us through an incredibly tough time. I have a united church that is showing the world what the church is all about.

At a second glance I have more than I thought, but man I am whipped. I plan on posting some this weekend. Please continue to pray for our church family. Talk to you on Saturday.