A Few of My Favorite Things (Christmas 2013)

Most of you already have your Christmas song sets and resources put together but a friend of mine recently said, “Christmas music is like wrapping paper, you buy it the year before and then look back at it the next year to see what you’ve got”. So here’s my list of favorite finds for this Christmas season and if you haven’t finalized your plans hopefully you can grab a couple of these.

Loops in Worship with iPad and BeatMaker 2

We’ve been using Ableton from a desktop for running loops and tracks in worship for a while now and I’ve been looking for an easy portable alternative. I’m a big proponent of having a backup system so when things go wrong you’re not frantically trying to pull things together or troubleshoot. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to afford a macbook yet so I turned to my handy dandy iPad to look for solutions. There are a couple options out there but I wanted something that I could use immediately without having to upload or process anything and that wasn’t dependent on an internet connection. Additionally, I wanted to be able to control things with the Keith McMillan Softstep that I already owned.

I’m excited to say that after hours of trying out apps and digging through online forums I’ve found something that works like a dream.

Help Your Team Do Their Best (Worship Rehearsal Prep) Part 2a

People really want to do their best. They want to come in prepared, play well and leave having enjoyed the night and ready for the coming Sunday. However, it’s not all in their hands to come prepared for rehearsal.

If you are going to ask your teammates to take their own personal time to prepare for rehearsal by actively listening and then learning to play or sing the music then there are some essential things that you are responsible for.

Beyond Songs and Themes: Part 1 (Responding to The Story Together Every Sunday)

I was sitting in a Thai food restaurant discussing the various things that people expect out of a worship service like songs, volume, scripture readings and other things with a friend of mine when he asked the question that brought on the last couple of years of clarifying the “why and how” of worship design.

He simply asked, “what are you trying to accomplish when you plan worship services?”

Creativity: Finding The Right Ideas (Scratching 201)

So in my post about killing bad creative team meetings one of the major parts of designing worship services is about gathering various elements that will be pieces in the puzzle called scratching. Scratching is the process of intentionally looking through any resources and compiling elements for a worship service. One of the hardest things about scratching is knowing where to start. Creativity is not about finding ideas, it’s about finding the right ones.

Killing Bad Creative Meetings (tips for Creative Teams)

Running effective and productive meetings is hard. As I’ve talked with other worship leaders and ministers I’ve found that running a creative meeting seems to be even harder. When I ask how colleagues run creative meetings, the response is usually something like “not very well”. I’ve been working on killing bad creative team meetings in the last couple of years and have identified some of the pitfalls as well as a couple of solutions. I think that a lot of the difficulty comes from our understanding of creativity. We tend to treat creativity as if it’s this magic inspiration that appears at just the right time.  That explains why sitting in a room and looking at a sermon title with a section of scripture, waiting for the good stuff to come pouring out rarely happens.