This morning at Bethel was a unique morning, with a special presentation of our Spring Musical, “Until the Whole World Hears”! This post is part of the Sunday Setlist blog carnival at The Worship Community, where you can read stories of what took place in churches around the country this weekend.
Instead of having our regular four services, we had two special presentations of “Until the Whole World Hears”, which is actually just a collection of all the songs on the latest release by Casting Crowns, arranged for choir by Travis Cottrell. We added our own narration between the songs, and rearranged the order of songs for flow, and put it all together in a musical format.
We had close to 50 people in the choir, 5 in the praise team, several soloists, plus a narrator. There were several familiar songs where we included the congregation. It was a great morning of worship! We only do this once a year, so people look forward to it, and it has been a great way to get more people involved with the worship ministry. We’ve been working on this since February, one rehearsal a week.
You can watch the video of our performance, and also see the Planning Center details.
Songs
“Joyful, Joyful” (Beethoven/Hall)
– The old familiar hymn redone Casting Crowns style!
“Holy One” (Bronleewe/Garrard/Hall/Ingram)
– A nice, energetic song of praise – with choir and praise team
“Shadow of Your Wings” (Mark Hall)
– One of my favorites – love the moving parts and high energy!
“Always Enough” (Armstrong/Cash/Hall)
– A solid ballad about God’s faithfulness.
“Blessed Redeemer” (Avis B. Christeanse/Hall/Herms)
– This was actually an old hymn repackaged in contemporary style. Very nice! I wasn’t familiar with the original hymn, so I wouldn’t have known that unless I knew the background.
“Jesus, Hold Me Now” (Hall/Herms)
– Very nice solo with choir and piano
“Mercy” (Hall/de Jong/Levine/Tofa)
– This was another great solo with choir song. But, our soloist for this one called me the night before and said she had no voice! Unfortunately, we ended up skipping this song in our musical – too bad!
“At Your Feet” (Hall/Ingram)
– Another nice one for solo and choir!
“If We’ve Ever Needed You” (Hall/Herms)
– This is one where we added the congregation since it was so familiar.
“To Know You” (Hall/Herms/Ingram)
– This was one of the choir’s favorites, as heard by the explosion of sound each time we got the chorus – they sang it out!
“Until the Whole World Hears” (Glidewell/Hall/Herms/McArthur)
– This title song of the musical was another one where we added the congregation and praise team. Powerful song challenging us to take his message out into the world.
“Glorious Day (Living He Loved Me)” (Chapman/Bleecker/Hall)
– This song also comes from and old hymn called “One Day”, redone by Mark Hall. Our church has been singing it since before Easter, so it was nice to end with this one that everyone knew so well and could sing it out strong!
Our tech crew did a great job keeping everything running smoothly, and I was so happy with the choir and all the other singers! The recording quality on the video link here really does not do the choir and singers justice. You don’t get the same effect watching it back as it was hearing in person and the room sound/mix. But, it will still give you an idea of what the event was like.
Putting one of these things together is a lot of work, but the reward is so great, and so much fun! I love directing the choir, and this type of event draws people in that aren’t normally involved with the ongoing worship ministry. This group feeds people into our monthly Worship Choir, and that feeds people into our worship teams, so this is a very important part of our worship ministry here.
Our church was full yesterday, too, probably a result of combing 4 services into 2, but also because we encouraged the choir members and others to invite friends, family, co-workers and we had many guests there!
Thanks to Travis Cottrell for doing such a great job of arranging these powerful songs for choir, and to Mark Hall and crew at Casting Crowns!
Barry Westman 