Barry Westman

There’s been a question rumbling around in my mind the past few months, and it was brought to the front again last weekend when I attended the Pulse Arts/Worship Conference. It has to do with how many worship team vocalists to include on the team.

We typically have 3-4 worship team vocalists on stage, along with myself leading from the keyboard. We also have a couple singers, usually, in the band singing from guitars.  We also have a worship choir that sings once a month along with the band and WT singers.  The choir has between 20-30 people.

But, lately, as I’ve watched services online, and when I was at the Pulse conference, I’ve noticed that frequently there’s the worship leader plus one other female singer on harmony. That’s it.  I’m guessing this is done to give it a more contemporary sound? (And I thought what we were doing was contemporary, but I guess that was 10 years ago…) I really like the sound that’s created with the 2 singers. It does sound more like what you hear on the radio.

But, we have so many singers on our rotation, that people would not get as much opportunity to sing on the team.  Also, I’d miss the 3 pt. harmony that we’ve developed.

So, I would love to hear what you do at your churches in this area. What’s your reasoning behind it, and what do you think about the current trend to smaller teams?

Thanks!!

We had a lot going on in our services yesterday, so we didn’t have as much time for music as we normally do.  But, it was so neat to see the baby dedication and hear from one of our missionaries. 

So, for the songs, we did:

• “Rising” (Paul Baloche)
• “Majestic” (Lincoln Brewster)
• “God You Reign” (Lincoln Brewster)
• “Mighty To Save” (Ben Fielding and Reuben Morgan)

You can see the whole service order at the Planning Center 
Read other recaps at The Worship Community

This morning’s worship service felt very familiar, and I mean that in a good way! The last couple of weeks I have been introducing some new songs, and although I love to do that, I felt this week I just needed to give the congregation a chance to sing out confidently and wholeheartedly! So, except for one newer song, all the rest were ones where people could just focus on praising and worshiping our God together!!

Songs

• Our God Saves (Paul Baloche and Brenton Brown)
• We kicked things off with this great call to worship. One of my favorites!
• God Is Great (Marty Sampson)
• We did Travis Cottrell’s version from his “Alive Forever” CD.
• Your Name (Paul Baloche and Glenn Packiam)
• One of my favorites by Paul! Our sax player was with us today, and I had him take the solo in the middle, which sounded great!!
• You Alone Can Rescue (Matt Redman)
• We introduced this song last week, and we did it again today.  I love this new song by Matt Redman. I was happy to also hear a new version of it on the new Passion CD – “Awakening”.  We followed more closely to Matt’s version, but I love the Passion one as well!
• Jesus Messiah (Chris Tomlin)
• We ended our service after the message with this favorite of our congregation.  I had Zack, our high school electric guitar player, take the solo on the first verse. He did a great job!!

  Read about other setlists from this week at the Sunday Setlists blog. See the full Planning Center order for this service.

I just got back from the Pulse Arts/Worship Conference at Blackhawk Church in Madison, WI. We had a team of 6 people from our worship team attend the conference, and it really was a great event! We started Friday night with a concert by Stephanie Seefeldt and Fernando Ortega.  It was a very intimate concert, with both Stephanie and Fernando singing and playing from the piano without any other instruments. If you haven’t heard Stephanie’s music before, I would check it out! I loved hearing Fernando’s stories about his songs – especially Laguna Beach and Mildred Madeline Johnson!!

This morning started with a time of worship led by the worship team from Mt. Zion Baptist Church. They did such a great job!! They had 6-7 singers, 2 keyboards, bass, sax and drums. The drummer was 11!! Great way to kick off the morning with worship! After that, Tim Mackie, one of the pastors at Blackhawk gave a very challenging talk about how God uses tension in our lives and art to cause us to grow.

My first workshop was about video venues with Joel Hassenzahl, the Director of Worship at BlackHawk. We’re talking about all kinds of different options for Bethel, so it was good to hear their story, and how they have used video venues, first as a way to overcome a space issue, but now they intentionally use them as a way to build community and be a big church with small communities. Very interesting!!

After lunch we had a session with worship led by Stephanie Seefeldt, and then Rory Noland spoke about “How to Grow as a Private Worshipper”. Rory is the author “The Heart of the Artist”, a great book for worship teams to read about having a servant’s heart.

My second workshop was on “Conflict in Ministry”, led by Steve Musto, another one of the pastors at Blackhawk. It was a good reminder about what to avoid and lean in to when conflicts arise.

The closing session was fantastic!! The worship team from Blackhawk led us in worship, and they rocked!! Also, Curt Cloninger led us through one of his one-man monologues on the life of Christ. That led us right in to a time of communion, and then we ended with a closing time of worship.

Overall, it was a wonderful way to spend a Friday night and Saturday!  For only $30, it was a tremendous value! Great job to all the organizers of the event. Thanks so much!!

This morning we talked about the heart of Abraham vs. the heart of Lot. Interesting study from Genesis 13-14.  Here’s our setlist from this morning:

Songs

• “Awesome Is the Lord Most High” (Chris Tomlin and others)
• One of my favorite songs to use at the start of a service – high energy, gets people thinking about the greatness of God.
• “Matchless” (Aaron Shust)
• Our electric guitar player Zack  did a great job on the lead part! Way to go!
• “Give Us Clean Hands” (Charlie Hall)
• I pulled this one out of the files for this week. It’s been a few years since we’ve done it, but it’s a great song to do as a prayer of repentance, commitment to living a holy life. People really responded well to this one.
• “You Alone Can Rescue” (Matt Redman)
• Our new song for the week. I love this song – the melody is so easy to pick up, and the bridge is great! 

After the message, we also had Communion, so during Communion we did:

• “Sweetly Broken” (Jeremy Riddle)
• A great song that focuses on the cross. It was so cool to see Eric, one of our WT singers do the solo on this one today. It was his first time singing a solo on our team. He has an amazing testimony, and it’s just so cool to see changed lives!!
• “At the Cross” (Reuben Morgan and Darlene Zschech)
• Our drummer, Christina, actually had to fill in on the solo for this one. She got the call at 7:00 a.m. when another of our singers wasn’t able to make it in. Great job, Chris!

 You can check out the Planning Center info for this service, as well as see other setlists from around the country at  Sunday Setlists at TheWorshipCommunity.com.

As I’m watching the USA-Canada Gold Medal game this afternoon, I’ll take a few minutes to send in my Sunday Setlists recap for today. This morning’s service went well.

Here’s the link to the Planning Center, and here’s the link to the Sunday Setlists page.

We started the service with “You Are Good” (Israel Houghton), one of my favorites.

After the announcements, we did:

“Only a God Like You” (Tommy Walker)
“Stronger” (Ben Fielding and Reuben Morgan)
This is newer song from Hillsong that I’m really liking a lot! It has a modern-day hymn feel to it, and we’re planning to use it as we approach Easter. It’s actually in our Easter musical that we’ll be doing (“Run to the Cross” by Travis Cottrell), so I’m doing it a few times as we lead up to that.

During the offering, we used “Through Christ”, (Donna Lasit) which is a great song by Generation Unleashed.  We had one of our worship team singers sing it as a special with the band and the other singers as BGVs.  It turned out great.

We ended the service with “To the Ends of the Earth” (Joel Houston and Marty Sampson). We haven’t used this song for quite a while, but it really fit in to our service quite well, and it worked well.

There, now back to the game – at this point Canada’s up 2-0. Go USA!!

We had a great morning of worship here yesterday! I had one of the other worship leaders here at our church lead today, so I actually just played keys and sang today. He did all of the transitions, etc… We worked together on a setlist, and came up with some really neat stuff. I have had other worship leaders lead for me when I’ve been gone on vacation, etc, but I think this is the first time I’ve had them lead while I was still here. I’d be curious to talk to other Worship Pastors to see if that’s something that you do as well. I think it’s great to build up other WLs in the church. But, I did get a few questions from people in the congregation like – what was wrong, were you sick or something, did you get demoted?? So, it will take a while for them to get used to seeing someone else lead, but me here. I had a great time just playing and singing, actually, and Jeff did a great job leading!!

We started off with:

“Almighty God” (Tim Hughes) – a great song!!

“Glorious One” (Steve Fee) with “We Will Glorify” (Twila Paris)
– Might seem like an odd combination, but it actually worked really well! This was Jeff’s idea. We did Verse 1, Chorus, Verse 2, Chorus of “Glorious One” in A, then went right into “We Will Glorify” (same tempo and key) and did a few verses of that, building it up each time, then went back to the Bridge of “Glorious One” and finished out that song to end the medley.  It went very well!

“Great Is Your Glory” – (Vicky Beeching)
– Another one of her great songs!

“Revelation Song (Jennie Lee Riddle)
Our message today was from Genesis 11 on the tower of Babel, called “Lessons from the Languages”. To tie into that theme, we ended the song with what turned out to be a very powerful time of worship using the “Revelation Song”, but using three different languages.  I had seen this done in another church, and just had to use the idea this week.  We have quite a large segment of Filipinos here at our church, so we used their Tagalog language, as well as Spanish and English on certain parts. Then, on the last two choruses, we all sang together in our own language. We opened with Scripture from Revelation that speaks about all tribes and nations worshiping around the throne, and ended with a call and response prayer. It was very powerful, and by the end, when we invited them, people were ready to jump out of their chairs and worship along with us.

Here’s a link to our Planning Center page for this service.
Here’s a link to the Sunday Setlists page at The Worship Community, where you can read other recaps from around the country.

Here’s our setlist for this morning:

“You Are Holy (Prince of Peace)
– An oldie, but a good one!

“Glory to God Forever” (Steve Fee and Vicky Beeching)
 – This is one of my favorites right now!

“Glorious” (Paul Baloche)
– We had our worship choir sing with the worship team today.  Our worship choir sings once a month, and I love having the extra 30 or so singers add to our sound. It really makes a difference! We introduced this song today as a special with the choir, team and band. I’ve had so many responses from people saying that the song was so meaningful to them. They all did a great job!

Then, after the message, we ended with:

“Everyday” (Joel Houston)

Here’s our link to the Planning Center plan

Head over to The Worship Community to read more setlists..

Here’s our setlist for this morning:

“Let the Praises Ring” (Lincoln Brewster)
“Glorious One” (Steve Fee)
 – This was a new one for us here. Great song! Easy for the congregation to sing (once we transposed it down to A).

“You Never Let Go” (Matt Redman)
– One of our congregation’s favorites!!

After the message, we had communion, so to lead into that we did:
“Lead Me To the Cross” (Brooke Fraser)

Then, during Communion, we did:
“How Deep the Father’s Love For Us” (Stuart Townend)
– The lyrics to this song are so powerful!
“Remembrance (The Communion Song)” (Matt Redman and Matt Maher)
– This is a great new song for Communion.  We did the vocal harmonies on Matt Maher’s recording, and the musical arrangement of Matt Redman’s recording in the key of D.

Here’s our link to the Planning Center plan

Head over to The Worship Community to read more setlists..

Our setlist this morning:

Opening Song: “Let the Praises Ring” (Troy Kennedy): We pulled this one out after a couple of years on the back shelf.  I had the congregation read Ps. 96:1-4 just before we started. I love this one as a service opener, and it worked great this morning.

Meet & Greet/Welcome/Announcements/Prayer

Songs:
“Better Than Life” (Israel Houghton) – We had the sax with us today, and it just adds so much to the mix. It fit great on this song. I had the WT read from Ps. 63:2-4 before this one.

“From the Inside Out” (Joel Houston) – It was great to see people worshiping Him so freely on this song today!

Message from Genesis 4 – “Brother Against Brother”
After his first point, we did “The Heart of Worship”, to tie into his theme. We usually don’t sing during his message, but our pastor asked us to add that in this week. It worked great.

We had a special offering for Haiti this morning, so we started that segment of our service with a video our conference (Converge Worldwide) put together. You can find that video here

“God of Justice” (Tim Hughes) – This was a new song for us that we used during the Haiti offering. It seemed to fit so well as a call to action. Great song!

“God of this City” – We had planned to do this one during the service, but the service ran a bit long, we did it as people were leaving. I found a background showing an areal view of Haiti after the earthquake.

You can see the full Planning Center schedule here.

You can read about other services from today around the country at the Sunday Setlists page at The Worship Community here.

Thanks for checking in!. How did your service go?