LCCWorship

Yesterday was our official Launch! Now we are having weekly services! That being the case, these should become weekly posts by me.  Here’s a rundown of what happened yesterday and the setlist.

We debuted our new service format yesterday so there were some things that happened that need to be worked on a bit.  Mainly some transition things between the first part of the message, life groups, and the second part of the message.

The music went pretty well.  The band did an excellent job, as always. I’m so proud of our band members and all of the work they’ve put in. Overall though, the worship seemed a little flat for some reason.  I don’t know if it was the volume to new visitors (which are sometimes shy about singing), the increased distance between the stage and the chairs, or what it was.  Pretty good overall though, I had a good time worshiping at least!

We had a total of about 30 people in the worship service including five prospect families.  All five prospect families turned in fully completed connection cards and several said they would be back and invite friends. There were also several great comments about the inclusion of Life Groups in the middle of the service.

Here is our setlist…

Set I

• King of Majesty (Marty Sampson)
• Everlasting God (Brenton Brown & Ken Riley)
• Madly (Steve Fee)
• We Fall Down (Chris Tomlin)

Set II

• Mighty to Save (Ben Fielding & Reuben Morgan)
• One Way (Joel Houston & Jonathon Douglass)

We had to cut two of our songs from Set II due to running out of time, which is ok.  We were doing great staying on time the whole service right up to the very end of the second part of the message, which went a little long.

We also had some huge EasyWorship issues.  It kept on freezing up everytime a video clip was played.  A couple of times it was pretty catastrophic and the computer had to be rebooted to fix the lockup. This is not good and we are looking into the issue.

This is part of the Sunday Setlist Blog Carnival at fredmckinnon.com.

In sticking with what seems to have become my tradition, here is my wrap-up from yesterday…

As is normal, we got to the school at 8:00AM and began the setup. This was the first time that we had to completely setup before the service (last month we were able to leave our equipment setup overnight at the school after practicing setup). Not only was this our first time to do a complete setup before the service, but we had more stuff to setup than ever before as we keep adding stuff to our setup (only few items left to add though). Anyway, it took us about 1 hour and 10 minutes to setup. Although this is the fastest we’ve ever done it (1.5 hours was our previous mark), we still are not quite to where we need to be at 45 minutes.

With setup taking a bit longer than expected, we ran late the rest of the morning. Band rehearsal ran about 35 minutes so by the time we actually finished rehearsing it would have already been time for us to start playing for the service, so things were pushed a bit more. Other than being about 10 - 15 minutes behind schedule, the service went pretty smoothly.

The most exciting part for all of us was that we had three new families visit yesterday!

Here’s the setlist…

• Love the Lord (Lincoln Brewster)
• Hosanna (Paul Baloche & Brenton Brown)
• One Way (Joel Houston & Jonathon Douglass)
• Everlasting God (Brenton Brown & Ken Riley)
• Fire Fall Down (Matt Crocker)
• Nothing But The Blood (Robert Lowry)
• Holy is the Lord (Chris Tomlin & Louie Giglio)

So I will probably make this a habit of doing my Sunday wrap-up on Monday sometime…

Yesterday was a great ending to a busy weekend. After spending all day Saturday setting up and getting used to our new equipment all we had to do is show up at the school and do our service.

The band started about 10 minutes before the service was supposed to start (as is normal) playing ‘prelude’ music. At 10:00 AM, the scheduled start time, there was still no one in the sanctuary, even though I had seen some people walk in the front door several minutes prior. So, we extended the the prelude by jumping around our last song a bit repeating the bridge and chorus a couple of times. By the time we actually finished (about 3 or 4 minutes after we were supposed to) we had 22 people in the sanctuary! Praise God!

Everything just went so smoothly the rest of the service and we even finished on time (this was the first time this happened)! God was there in with us allowing us to worship him and speaking to us the words we needed to hear.

Here is the setlist for yesterday…

Prelude:

• Hallelujah (Your Love is Amazing)
• One Way (Joel Houston, Jonathon Douglass)

1st Worship Set:

• Awesome is the Lord (Chris Tomlin, Jesse Reeves, Cary Pierce, Jon Abel)
• Unchanging (Chris Tomlin)
• In the Secret (Andy Park)

2nd Worship Set:

• Everything (Tim Hughes)
• Mighty to Save (Reuben Morgan, Ben Fielding)
• One Way (Joel Houston, Jonathon Douglass) - repeat from prelude

Postlude:

• Hosanna (Paul Baloche, Brenton Brown)

God has truly blessed us with great people, great equipment, and a great love and I feel honored to be able to serve him as the Lead Worshiper at LCC.

Today the LCC Worship Band (which I think we might start calling Charge or Amp or something) led at Brookwood Baptist, where we were once all members. Brookwood is our ‘Parent’ church if you will. They are supporting us in many ways and we are truly thankful to God for them. We felt it might be nice to show them some of the stuff that we had been up to and so when their Worship Arts Pastor asked if we would come lead one Sunday we said yes!

For those of you that missed it, you missed quite a Sunday! It was awesome! God was truly there and moving amongst the band and congregation. God Rocks!

Here’s the setlist from this morning….

• Awesome is the Lord
• Blessed Be Your Name
• All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name
• God of Wonders
• Mighty to Save
• How Can I Keep From Singing (Special Music)
• Draw Me Close
• Hallelujah (Your Love is Amazing)

Brookwood has two services and we played at both in order to give everyone an opportunity to see what God has been doing in LCC. The early service is typically more traditional (more hymns fewer ‘choruses’ as many people call them) and the second service is more contemporary (more ‘choruses’ and fewer hymns). Well, today, they were both the same. There were a few hiccups here and there (especially in the early service), but that’s to be expected.

Well, our first preview service has come and gone. We were at the school for a total of about four hours that seemed to be over in a flash.

We arrived at 8:00AM to begin setting up. Our setup was a mix and match sort of thing using borrowed equipment from several different sources. Once we have our own equipment it will be much better. It took us about 1 hour to get completely setup and then we had some bugs to workout.  Here’s what the timeline looked like.

• 8:00AM - Arrive and begin setup
• 8:50AM - Begin sound check
• 9:15AM - Band rehearsal
• 9:30AM - Break
• 9:40AM - Prayer
• 9:50AM - Band starts playing
• 10:20AM - Keith begins sermon
• 10:57AM - Invitation
• 11:02AM - Offering
• 11:07AM - Dismissed

So we didn’t quick stick to our original time schedule. I took a little longer at the beginning and got us 3-4 minutes behind, then Keith preached for 7-10minutes longer getting us further behind. I ended up cutting out 2 songs at the end to make up some time.

It was a great service though and went pretty smooth for being our first one! God is doing great things at LCC!

Here’s our setlist from yesterday:

• Everlasting God
• Awesome is the Lord
• Famous One
• Kindness
• Give Us Clean Hands
• Be the Centre (Invitation)
• Awesome is the Lord (Offering and Dismissal)

Next week we have a BBQ!

Here it is, the set list for rehearsal tonight…

• Great Redeemer (Paul Baloche) - We looked at this last week as well, but it definately needs some more work (especially on timing)
• How Can I Keep From Singing (Chris Tomlin, Ed Cash, Matt Redman) - This will be the first time we have looked at this song
• Offering (Paul Baloche) - We also looked at this last week, but it also needs some more work.  There is one section in particular that the chords were giving several people issues last week.
• One Way (Joel Houston, Jonathon Douglass) - This will be the first time we look at this song
• Everything (Tim Hughes) - Also a new song

Again, I know this is a lot of new material but with these ‘free’ rehearsals (see my last post) I want to get through a lot of the new music that will be a standard part of our repertoire.

I’m really excited for band rehearsal tonight! It’s our first actual playing rehearsal and I think all of the preparations have been completed.

Here’s what we are going to look at…

• How Great is Our God (Chris Tomlin, Ed Cash, Jesse Reeves) - warm-up, sound check, group worship time
• Awesome is the Lord (Chris Tomlin, Jesse Reeves, Cary Pierce, Jon Abel) - new song for us
• Blessed Be Your Name (Beth Redman, Matt Redman)
• Offering (Paul Baloche) - new song for us
• Great Redeemer (Paul Baloche) - new song for us

I know this is a lot of new songs for one rehearsal, which I typically wouldn’t do, but what do you expect when we are a new band? Pretty much everything will be new.

I’ll post how it went tomorrow.