In light of comments regarding Bono on the last post, I thought it’d be fitting to share an article a friend sent me about Biblical references in U2 songs. Quite interesting.
I recently commented on one of Kent Sander’s posts. He hit a subject that I’ve wrestled with for a while. I decided to share that comment, and I found the video that I references (unfortunately it’s a lot shorter than the one I watched):
I can relate and agree with your post. This is something I’ve really been struggling with for a couple months now. Not only in that”contemporary praise & worship” music is limited in what they say, but most churches/Christians aren’t being 100% honest in the worship [hear me out first].
There is a large pallet of emotions that humans experience… and our worship music often only expresses the “happy” emotion, and it pretends like everything is right with the world. Where are our songs that say, “God, this world is messed up, we need your help to go through it, and we need to see you come back soon… we need you to pour out your judgment and wrath.”?
I remember seeing an interview with Bono (from U2) and he said that he feels like he can’t worship in the churches because they’re not honest. He feels like he can relate to the blues more as worship music than what is being played in the churches. He says he likes the Psalms a lot, and the Psalms seems to be more like the Blues rather than “worship music.”
Although I don’t usually make it a point to look at Bono for theological insight… I think he hit it right on the nose.
One last note. A few weeks ago my pastor was talking about problems and why they happen. We closed the service with a song that’s called, “How Long.” The song is a desperate cry saying, “How long till there’s judgment on the earth? How long till we hear the victory roar? How long till we can gaze upon your face? Yes I know that You’ve already won, but come Lord Jesus!” This is a desperate cry, and our church as a whole took it to heart (some were even in tears). When our worship is honest–it is powerful–truth brings out our emotions. I strongly believe that when we’re honest, God blesses us.
My previous post mentioned that I had my worship team watch these videos. They’re a good resource for trying to get your team to listen to each other and not "over play."
Worship Band Workshop by Paul Baloche
Worship Band Workshop Part 2 by Paul Baloche
With my first post I must begin by recommending the most useful tool I have found for planning services–Planning Center Online. This tool powerful and easy to use. I lead worship at two churches (one on Sunday mornings and our church plant on Saturday nights). This involves, two different teams, two different services, and two different pastors. This is has changed my 12-16 hour planning process for services to 6-8 hours (and sometimes as little as 4 hours).
What can it do? Allow me to list a few features:
1. It creates pdfs for your cord charts. It also can be configured to generate the same chord chart in any desired key.
2. You can create a schedule for your worship team (i.e. who’s planing and what they are playing/singing). It then sends each person an e-mail with an "Accept" or "Decline." When they click accept/decline an e-mail is sent to you telling you that the person has confirmed or declined the request for the week.
3. It allows for uploads and link attachments. For example: I wanted my team to watch Paul Baloche’s "Worship Band Workshop" both "part 1" and "part 2." I found it on YouTube, and then attached a link. I sent an e-mail to my team and asked them to watch it. All they had to do is click the link and it’ll take them to the video.
4. Planning Center allows the leader to attach mp3s to the plans. This is useful when introducing a new song so that everyone on your team has listened to the song before coming to practice. There is an option in Planning Center to allow for downloads of the mp3 or just to allow the users to listen. For example: I wrote a song that our team was going to do on in a Sunday service. I did a recording of just me and my guitar and put it up on Planning Center. I set the permissions to download (because I owned the song) so that my team could put it on a CD, computer, or whatever in order to learn the song well.
These are just a few things that Planning Center allows you to do. You can check it out with a free subscription… but the free subscription doesn’t allow the users to do much. In order to get a deeper idea of how powerful this tool is, I’d recommend watching the tutorials. Planning Center Online