Now that I just finished my last day of work, all that’s left before the end of summer break is packing to move back. This seems to me like a good time to wrap a post-mortem of sorts for my summer.
Summer started with a pleasant twist for me. Another guitarist from Crusade was invited to play at Elevation Church in Charlotte, NC with Chris Brown. Now, in order to fully understand this, you must know that Chris has been my hero for some time. It wouldn’t be too far of a stretch to say he is the reason why I want to lead worship today. But anyway, I invited myself to tag along and visit Elevation. This trip largely set the tone for the rest of my summer. I was awesome to see how a church that has an attendance of ~4000 operates, and to see how a band comes together when the first time they play together is two hours before the service.
So, coming back from that trip and heading into the summer, I wanted to learn all I could about worship and what it’s really all about. I was also knew 100% that that’s what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. So I began reading all I could and studying worship from a biblical standpoint( I still have quite a stack of books I’m trying to read through). I also began requesting information from seminaries, trying to start figuring out where I might like to go.
Now, during this early summer period there began a rumor that there were several people in my church interested in starting a contemporary service. This is something my church has lacked for many years, and when there was a contemporary service, it was kind of tossed to the side. It would be pushed to the gym, or it would be a very early service, basically not something designed to bring people in. So when I heard of this movement in the church, I was quick to contact those leading it to help out with the planning, and they were quick to hand over the entire music portion of the service to me. Going into it, we knew we had several major goals and obstacles ahead of us. First, we wanted it to be in the sanctuary at a time of day that would be convenient for the largest number of people. This became slightly easier because our church just installed a new multimedia system in the sanctuary, and a lot of people were interested in experimenting with that while we experimented with the service itself. Second, we realized that we didn’t have the resources to pull this off as a weekly service, and so we had to be sure to treat this as a compliment to the Sunday worship services and not a replacement. Third, we realized that we would need to build up resources in the Church fairly quickly(particularly musicians) if this service were to last past 6 months, and especially if we ever wanted to make it a weekly service. There was a lot of other stuff going on too, but these were the primary logistical obstacles in our path.
To be continued…
