Sunday Retrospective - November 9, 2008
(This post is part of the Sunday Setlists blog carnival. Check out what other worship leaders are doing around the world…)
Hey worship leaders - ever have one of those Sundays where you spend most of the day going back over it and wishing you had done this or that different? Yesterday was one of those.
We knew our pastor was going to focus on the International Day Of Prayer For The Persecuted Church. In addition, he also had to make a presentation about our 2009 budget. And we had communion. So we had discussed in advance that we would reduce the number of songs to allow for the extra parts.
Our setlist (links to iTunes):
How Great Thou Art (Paul Baloche arrangement) - Great setting for the classic hymn. Gives it a lot of energy.
You Are (Mark Roach) - and this fantastic song worked VERY well coming out of “How Great”.
Then we broke for 10 minutes or so for the budget talk…then back into these songs to set up the IDOP prayer time…
Through It All (Reuben Morgan) - Old one from Hillsongs, very beautiful musically.
Be Unto Your Name (Lynn DeShazo / Gary Sadler) - Also old (I guess 10 years would be considered old given how fast new worship music is coming out) but very strong lyrically.
This second set is where things started going a little squirrely. By the time I was ready to start “Through It All” we were already about 5 minutes behind. I thought about cutting it and going right into “Be Unto Your Name”, but Anna gave me a thumbs up when I asked her if we were okay on time. So I did both of them as rehearsed.
Going into the prayer time, we had three other people helping the pastor pray for various countries. We asked them to keep it to 3 or 4 minutes. They actually prayed anywhere from 8 to 12 minutes. So by the time communion came around, it was a few minutes before noon. We didn’t get out until around 10 after (we were going to do “Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone)” after communion, but we DID axe that one because of time). We usually end the service between 11:45 and 11:50. That was a good bit too long.
So then Anna and I spent a lot of time evaluating. Should we have never planned those last two songs? Should I have redone the arrangements on the fly and leave out some repeats? Was it a mistake to ask other people to pray without really locking them in on a time frame? That sort of thing drives me crazy. It’s hard to let go of a service that I know we could have done better.
I feel a little bit better about it today, but it’s still bugging me.
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My brother in law still talks about what happened in one of his old congregations where he had a “sharing time” about a third of the way through the service. After what amounted to a couple of short testimonies, a woman got up and began to “share from her heart” about what she felt was everything wrong with the church, and a large amount of this was directed towards him personally. His ministry there was never the same afterward, and he was there for several more years. This is in the UMC where pastoral moves are (sort of) governed from a higher, diocesian authority, and his bishop encouraged him to stay there, which he did. But, like I say, it just wasn’t the same.
When I was chairing our worship committee I would try to get our WMD (Worship & Music Director, that is…some folks try to tag the “other” title sometimes
)to tailor the music if there was going to be: a “missions moment,” or communion, or anything resembling a “sharing time.” Sometimes he would, sometimes not. It’s a hard call. If you’re in a PCA congregation where most people are used to a running time of 1:10 +/-, that can be a stretch.
I think a common mistake made with a lot of blended services is the “Equal Time Paradigm,” where the WMD programs x number of hymns and x number of CCM tunes, trying to achieve some sort of time-based parity. A lot of times it doesn’t work, and just makes the service interminably long. Some people don’t mind it (I’m thinking of those that come from more free-form traditions, like the charismatic/pentecostal)…some do (those more used to a liturgical context). This is where the Church Calendar (woefully under-used by most PCA congregations) comes in handy…you can tailor the general flavor of your musical palette according to the season. Some church musicians do this already, almost instinctively.