What a way to start my morning… thank you iGoogle for this morsel of frawesomeness… I just couldn’t stop watching!
So as I mentioned in a previous blog, this year we decided to focus on what we are great at for our Christmas production. Which would be music, art and media (and of course, bringing the word). So here’s what happened…
We opened the day off mellow with a Rock Church/Nat King Cole duet of “The Christmas Song.” Confession, we copied Buckhead church on this one (thanks guys). This project entailed me getting on Amazon, ordering a Nat King Cole DVD, ripping the footage of “The Christmas Song” off of the DVD, slicing it up a bit in iMovieHD, putting a couple transitions and titles in there and then adding a click track to keep us locked with the video. It was good.
Then, pastor Justin frolicked onto the stage as we played an upetty cinematic version of “Pour Some Sugar on Me” by Def Leppard… wait that didn’t happen at all.
Sorry got off track! Anyway, we then went into the portion of the service which served all of the parents’ and grandparents’ their hard earned gas money back to them with a nice video that Josiah orchestrated with the Kids Rock ministry department. We thought we’d kick it off by answering the question that everyone was dying to know the answer to… “What is Christmas all about?” I’m sure you can imagine the responses that we got from kids ranging anywhere from 6 – 12 years old. All in all it served its purpose and was a success.
Then the fun began! A Christmas production is not a Christmas production at Rock Church without the infamous drum line led by none other than Stuart Soliz. But this year we wanted to make it different, so I put together a track in ProTools for us to play along with. And DIFFERENT it was. During the first service we had a freak technical error (which just always tends to happen) in which the front-line monitors lost connection with the amps preventing us from being able to hear the track to stay on beat with it. It didn’t exactly produce the results I had envisioned but the show went on, as it must, and we made up for it during the second service!
We then did 3 songs off of Israel and New Breed’s Christmas CD. ”Hark,” “Least of These,” and “Silent Night” to be specific. Each laced with orchestral tracks that I made in Garageband and click tracks sent to our ears. BIG ups to the band and singers for pulling these less-than-easy songs off. They were definitely not a walk in the park and we really raised the bar musically with these tunes.
Next were a couple of songs that Josiah and I got together and arranged from this year and last year. A version of “Angels We Have Heard on High” that was a mix between John Mayer’s “Tracing” and Hillsong’s take of “Angels.” Following that was “The Christmas Song” by Dave Matthews. This really turned out to be a magical moment. As I played the verses, we showed clips from the Nativity Story and the Passion on the screens as they related to the lyrics. Does that make sense? You may have had to be there. It was good. That led into an instrumental version of “My Favorite Things” which featured Amanda Dean and a girl from her small group (forgive me) as artists. They painted what appeared to be material things on canvases located on opposite sides of the stage, which when brought together and stacked on top of one another formed a cross. Very cool moment as the audience cheered when it all came together with the crescendo of music behind it.
We brought it down a notch with an acoustic version of “What Child is This” from Kari Jobe’s Christmas CD. The soloists for this one were Amanda and my very nervous wife Tif. They both ended up doing an amazing job with the song and it truly ended up sounding better than it had during the… well… 2 rehearsals we had to prepare it with.
The culmination of the production brought everything together as we worshipped to David and Nicole Binion’s song “You Are Holy.” The entire (except for the opener) production was focussed on Jesus. And what better way to finish up with lifted hands, hearts and voices?
Dan came and brought a nicely packaged (literally) Christmas message and people’s lives were changed.
The End.
The times are-a-changing folks! One thing I never want to have come out of my mouth is “man I miss the way we use to do it.” I want my life to be a consistently open vessel to be used to reach the next generation of Christ-followers. And that means constantly evolving and changing the methods we use to spread the everlasting message of Jesus Christ and what he did for us.
That being said, we are embarking on a brand new adventure as far as worship experiences are concerned. We (the church) are worshipping God online. We’re still learning how to do it “right” and as effective as possible. But let’s be honest folks… people spend time online… a LOT of time. To deny them the opportunity to meet Jesus in a place that has this many people already wandering around would just be foolish. And Lord knows that the world-wide-web could use a little “light” in its increasingly dark landscape.
So here’s the address:
We usually have a steady flow of material playing 24/7 aside from our meeting times which are 8pm on Tuesday evenings. It’s also a place where myself and New Wine will be introducing some new material as well as a place for some our up-and-coming worship leaders to get their feet wet.
Filed under: Creativity, Kingdom Youth Church, Live Music, The Mix: ReDefine
I’ve been getting into to audio sequencing lately. I’m not even sure if that’s the correct name for what I’ve been doing. Somebody said it at a creative meeting once and it just kind of stuck. Let me explain what I mean.
Part three of our church’s “Quarterlife Crisis” series. A little twang this time around for ya!
I may or may not begin a blog series that has something to do with me playing acoustic versions of all of my released and not-so-released New Wine tunes.
If you’ve seen it, then by now I don’t have to tell you how absolutely breathtaking the opening ceremony for the 2008 summer Olympics was.
