Real Worship

This week was our 3rd in the new venue (& we were down another band member). Our regular drummer was on a weekend away with his wife, so I played drums. This was also my week for choosing the set list & having overall charge of the worship.

Choosing the songs for this week wasn’t a problem and because I knew I would be playing drums, I had deliberately delegated leadership of all but one song to Ali. This weeks set list looked like this:

• You Light My Way (Ali Loaker) Ali
• Coming To Praise You (Loaker/Ellis) Mike
• “R-Kidz” Theme Song (Loaker/Ellis) Ali
• More Than Life (Hillsong United) Ali
• Amazing Grace (Ali Loaker) Ali
• Everlasting One (Ali Loaker) Ali
• Thousand Miles (Ali Loaker) Ali

The first two songs are both in the key of E and have quite a “rock” feel and so work well together; though leading the second song from behind a drum kit had its challenges.

Firstly, I’m not getting any younger & my fitness level isn’t yet what it should be – and so there was a degree more perspiration and puffing & panting by the end of the song than there should have been (incidentally, I only dropped the drumsticks twice this week!). Secondly, though our congregation are used to me leading from behind the kit on occasion, I’m beginning to wonder (especially for the visitors we have) whether not having the worship leader visible at the front of the band adds an element of insecurity to the congregation – or maybe just intrigue (If you have a view on this, perhaps from experience, then I’d be interested to read your comments).

We’ve re-branded our children’s church (R-Kidz) and were announcing the launch next week of their own full-service meeting to run concurrently with ours (to-date, they’ve stayed in with us until just before the last song on the set list – when they leave for their own ministry). As part of that announcement, we had the whole of the R-Kidz team and the children up to sing their theme song live with the band (complete with actions). This too has a rock feel and was really well received.

Having had 3 consecutive up-beat, rock feel songs, you may think that people would be ready to “worship” some… oh no – not our lot! So, here we go again, veering off the “planned” set list. Instead of “More Than Life”, Ali launched into a semi-improvised up-beat song in the key of A. I say semi-improvised because the “chorus” to the song was based around what he spontaneously sang last week, “Joy, Joy, Joy in the presence of God”. The verses, however, were completely improvised on-the-spot. The whole thing flew! The congregation were really entering in (& I was in need of a rest!).

Rest came when we picked up where we left off with Hillsong United’s “More Than Life”; though we only got through the set as far as “Everlasting One” (because of the earlier improvisation). One piece of good news (for me at least) was that there are no drums in “Everlasting One”. I had set up my acoustic ready for this song & so just dropped onto that – playing second guitar. It’s a beautifully intimate song that’s played stripped down with lots of “space”.

One thing that became clear today is that having delegated leadership of practically all the songs to Ali whilst I stayed playing drums made it very difficult to remain in “overall leadership” of the service. In future, if I am needed to cover on the drums, then Ali will be at the helm for that day.