Sunday Setlist for 06/14/09

This is part of Fred McKinnon’s Sunday Setlist Series.  Since this is my first blog in this series, I’ll give a little background…

I am not the worship leader at my church, but I do have a significant amount of experience leading worship and in worship ministry in general. Currently, I am one of two electric guitar players on our team, and this was actually only my second Sunday playing. Personally, I have a lot more experience (and talent) with the acoustic guitar, so this has been a really great opportunity to grow in my ability on the electric guitar, and I must say, I’m having an absolute blast!

This is a great Sunday to start blogging on this because I think we rocked the house this Sunday – no glaring mistakes, a lot of energy, and the congregation was really feeling it today. It was awesome to be in God’s house this morning!

Now for the review:

Love the Lord Your God:
This was probably my least favorite song in the set, honestly. It was difficult to figure out exactly what the electric guitar should be doing, and so it was very difficult for me, both services, to really just relax and worship while I played. However, I think we played it well, and it had a good energy to kick things off, but it was also a kind of mellow energy which allowed us to comfortably ease into the service.

Break Free – Hillsong United:
Nothing mellow about this song. It honestly amazes me that our worship team can pull this song off congregationally. I love Hillsong United, but they have a lot of songs that I feel are just unreasonable for normal congregational worship. This is one of them…or so I thought. The amazing thing is that not only do we play this song well, our congregation LOVES IT! People were dancing and shouting all over the place during this song – it’s truly an honor to be a part of a church full of worshipers who worship with abandon! I especially enjoyed the instrumental bridge.

I Am Free – Newsboys:
This is another song that our congregation just really seems to connect with. Our pastor preaches a lot on our identity and position in Christ, and I think this song speaks to that profoundly. At one point a couple of the youth started running around the sanctuary at the “I am free to run” part. It was a flashback to my Bible School days – we used to do that all the time. Even though for most churches, people running around during worship would be kind of weird, maybe even distracting, I felt that it was a beautiful expression of worship from these young people – and the energy was high enough that I don’t think it was a distraction at all.

Musically, I think we nailed this one both services. It’s pretty straightforward, but we have some dynamic changes throughout the song that just really make it work well. I don’t know where it came from, but we add a repetitious intro part to this song where we just sing “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom,” over and over. We slowly build it from just acoustic and some light cymbals to full band, full throttle, and then quickly scale it back to start the verse. Very fun!

From the Inside Out – Hillsong United:
This is absolutely one of my favorite worship songs of late, and even though I think we do this song well, I also think we could do it a lot better. The various parts of this song are not very well defined, and we all just kind of improv our way through it. We’ve got a talented team of musicians, so we pull it off, but I think we could give some more attention to the song, do some fine tuning, and really do it with excellence.

Came to My Rescue – Hillsong United:
Another favorite, and again another song I think we could/should spend some time on working the kinks out. In fact as I think about our team in general, I think we are really good at the upbeat/praise songs, and less good at the slower/worship songs. We have a tendency to pick out worship songs that have  some section of high intensity somewhere in the middle (both From the Inside Out and Came to My Rescue have full band, full throttle sections). I don’t think our team does quiet worship well…

The Enemy has been Defeated/Shout Unto God – Hillsong United:
(As you can see, we like Hillsong United). This was our song for offering. Honestly, this one felt a little awkward – I think we all felt that way on the worship team. We never really got it right in practice, and we didn’t really do it well in service. In my mind, it’s really not a stand-alone song – it needs to be tagged onto the end of another song.