Tebow Testifies, Draws 15,000 for Easter

Pro football player Tim Tebow drew a crowd of about 15,000 to an outdoor Easter church service Sunday, telling the gathering it’s important to be outspoken about faith while admonishing athletes about not being better role models.

“In Christianity, it’s the Pope and Tebow right now,” Celebration Church pastor Joe Champion said. “We didn’t have enough room to handle the Pope.”

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Why You Should Use Hymns

Last month my website HymnCharts.com was 10 years old. I started the website soon after I became a church music director for the first time. As most of you have found, mixing hymns with contemporary worship songs is quite a challenge and back then resources were non existent.

The young church where I was serving had a praise band and contemporary music, yet I was getting requests for hymns (or perhaps “demands” would be a better word – you know how it is!) I arranged “All Hail the Power” for the band one Sunday and it was a smash. A mid twenties year old guitarist in the band wondered where I found this “great new praise song” and an older lady came up to me and was thrilled to hear the old hymn.

These days many worship leaders believe they’re too hip or cool to include hymns in their cutting edge praise sets. It’s their loss – and their congregation’s.

In her epic book Worship Evangelism, Sally Morgenthaler reinforces what I’ve believed all along – the average person in your congregation, even the unchurched, are far less “hip” than the worship leader. They may love the new worship songs but they also love the old hymns (although they don’t want to hear them with pipe organs.) I quote from her book:

In a recent study, two-thirds of the unchurched said they would prefer to come back to an “informal” church experience. What exactly an “informal experience” entails was not clear. Yet 47 percent of those surveyed also indicated that they would like to sing some traditional hymns. (Note: This does not necessarily mean they want to sing them in a “traditional way.”)

Another study found that while only 21 percent of all Americans would choose churches that offer an exclusive diet of traditional hymns, 65 percent prefer churches that provide a mix of traditional and contemporary music (music that has been composed in the last ten to twenty years). Evidently the American public — including its vast unchurched sector — does not support a wholesale abandonment of religious trappings.

In A Generation of Seekers, a boomer pastor speaks of the powerful emotions that are often triggered when boomers return to church and intersect with certain traditional elements in worship:

Many of my age group talk about coming to church, and they cry through the service… [especially when they listen to] the hymns, they are just unraveled. And these are people who haven’t come to church in years… It’s empowering… a real deep sense of coming home again… of something that was missing and then reaching some real deep places that people weren’t even aware of.

So just how can you combine hymns with worship music? The problem is that hymns out of a hymnal don’t have the same “feel” as the contemporary songs.

If you only have hymnal versions of hymns, don’t mix these with your praise music. Putting a hymnal hymn in the middle of your set will disrupt the flow – the styles are too different. Instead, isolate them as a call to worship, a benediction or offertory.

To effectively blend hymns with praise songs you’ll need a contemporary hymn arrangement. My goal is for such a seamless transition from a praise song to a hymn that the congregation doesn’t even realize they’ve shifted lyrical centuries.

The best contemporary hymn arrangements:

…lower the key: SATB hymnal hymns have a wide vocal range with high sopranos and low basses. Modern music harmony is tight and mid-ranged.

…are put in guitar friendly keys like D, E and G. I’m also hearing more and more praise songs in B.

…keep the melodies intact. I cringe when arrangers jazz up a hymn melody to make it “cooler.” The whole point to a contemporary hymn arrangement is to bring the generations together. Adding syncopations to traditional melodies makes for a tongue tied congregation. Completely new melodies are great, however, as they give a breath of fresh air to ancient texts, as are traditional hymns with added choruses like Tomlin’s “The Wonderful Cross.”

Bottom Line: Mix Hillsong United with Isaac Watts and you’ll hit a home run.

Big Trouble: Church Stages Mock Kidnapping of Youth Group

A church tried to teach its youth group a lesson by staging a raid in which unsuspecting teens were ‘kidnapped’ at gunpoint, forced into a van and made to watch one of their pastors being assaulted in his house.

The ‘lesson,’ according to pastors at the Glad Tidings Assembly of God in Middletown, Pennsylvania, was meant to teach them about what Christian missionaries are subjected to in other parts of the world.

However, at least one girl, 14, was bruised and battered after the object lesson, and has now filed a complaint with the police.

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The Idol of Worship

Joe Cameneti Jr. of allaboutworship.com talks about when worship leaders start worshiping the act of leading worship:

I’m convinced that songwriters, worship leaders and even music enthusiasts can fall so in love with the act of worship that it can become just that… simply an act.

I want to be sure that you understand my heart in saying this. I love worship. I love “worship artists.” And more than anything, I love The Church. But I see a tendency in my own walk with God to lose site of what worship is all about, and I thought it
might be a good idea to think out loud amongst friends.

I’m not suggesting this is an issue for every worship leader. It’s possible that this tension most commonly exists in writers and those who enjoy to create. But it’s an undeniable reality in the circles I seem to find myself in.

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Beef Up Your Band with Digital Musicians

Matthew Starner talks about using tracks with the church praise band:

Generally speaking, I’m not in favor of replacing key instruments digitally. Our normal team consists of drums, bass, electric guitar and keyboard. Even if one of them were missing, I wouldn’t be comfortable replacing any of them with digital musicians because they’re too important. However, this does depend largely on your circumstances. If you’re just starting out and you have only a guitar player and vocalist (and they’re both you) then you’re going to have to find a way to enhance your sound. There are options for this such as Worship Backing Band.

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Should Churches Hire Family Members?

Url Scaramanga from outofur.com discusses a possible cause of the decline of the Crystal Cathedral – nepotism:

The post mortem on the Crystal Cathedral continues. The iconic southern California megachurch pastored by Robert H. Schuller once represented the innovative and market-savvy dexterity of American Christianity. Schuller started his church at a drive-in movie theater, allowing visitors to stay comfortably inside their cars. Then he utilized television with the “Hour of Power” ministry broadcast. Its success allowed him to build one of the largest churches in the country.

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Where I Go for New Worship Songs

Matthew Starner reveals how and where he finds the best worship songs for his congregation:

There’s no shortage of songs that you could play in worship. The challenge is finding good ones and that’s why it’s important to have a process by which you can objectively evaluate your potential songs. Most people already think we worship leaders just play all of our favorite songs anyway – why make that a true accusation!

So you have a process to evaluate songs, now where do you find them?

You can drive in your car or sit around listening to Christian radio all day and perhaps find some good ones (but remember that not all Christian songs are worship songs.) but that’s awfully time-consuming and not a very efficient way to operate. There must be a better way!

Oh, but there is! Granted, there are lots of different places out there to look, but these are the ones that I frequent the most to find good ones.

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What I Learned from Aristotle about Leading Congregational Worship

Bob Kauflin has a great post on leading worship, bringing up a few thoughts that have never occurred to me:

Specifically, I haven’t learned anything from Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) about leading congregational worship that I didn’t learn first in Scripture. But in his day, Aristotle sought to help speakers be more persuasive by identifying three crucial areas to keep in mind. He called them logos, ethos, and pathos.

Briefly, logos is seeking to persuade through truth. Aristotle was concerned that the speakers of his day, the sophists, focused too much on flowery language and not enough on actual content.

Ethos has to do with the character of the person speaking. Aristotle recognized that listeners tend to be influenced most by people whose character they trust.

Pathos refers to the ability to stir the emotions of your listeners. Important truths are often presented with no apparent response in the hearer. Airline attendants experience that every time they review the flight safety procedures before takeoff.

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