Category: Uncategorized

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to speak to a gathering of (mostly) Anglican worship leaders, many of whom did not grow up in a liturgical church. I was asked to share on the rhythm and progression of the church year and suggest different songs that work well during different seasons.

I thought it might be helpful to share my notes here.

Guiding principle:
If the point of the church year is to point people to Jesus, then the point of the songs we sing during these seasons is to point people to Jesus.

How observing the church year in the songs you sing can be helpful
It helps you get out of ruts. If all 52 Sundays out of the year are just regular Sundays, you’re bound to get bored and so is your congregation. Observing the church year, telling the story of Jesus, can help you get in different gears and experience different kinds of services.

Advent
Songs that await Jesus’ coming again/heaven.
Songs that focus on his first coming.
Not Christmas songs yet!

1. Lo He Comes with Clouds Descending
2. O Come O Come Emmanuel
3. There is a Higher Throne (Getty)
4. Lord, We Wait (Townend/Getty)
5. How Long? (Townend)
6. How Long? (Andrew Peterson)
7. From the Squalor of a Borrowed Stable (Townend)
8. Soon (Hillsong / Brooke Ligertwood)
9. All to Us (Passion, on my church’s CD)
10. Creation Sings (Townend/Getty)
11. Glorious and Mighty (Sovereign Grace)
12. There is a Redeemer (Keith Green)
13. Come Thou Long Expected Jesus
14. Jesus Shall Reign
15. Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing (vs 4 especially, on my church’s CD)

Lessons and Carols
See this post from two years ago.

Christmas
Avoid sentimentality at all costs
People want to sing carols on Christmas
But people have been hearing them in Target and on car commercials
Look at older wording of hymns. Usually stronger theology.
Wait until Christmas Eve to sing Christmas songs. It’s supposed to make people want it!

Epiphany
Not a season most churches emphasize that much
Songs that focus on the Kingship of Jesus
Cardiphonia.org has tons of great suggestions

Lent
Too many people view Lent as a season to refrain from chocolate in order to suffer a little bit and prove to God they really love him, but they feel guilty when they eat chocolate and wonder if God now doubts how much they love him, so they just give up and feel weak and gain weight and feel even more guilty and like God is disappointed.

This is not the point of Lent. If Lent points to Jesus, then the songs should point to Jesus.

A time to paint a huge picture of God’s holiness, our sinfulness, and Jesus’ saving grace.

No alleluias in most liturgical churches during Lent.

Here’s a list of songs that follow an Isaiah 6 trajectory — seeing God’s holiness, our sinfulness, our need for atonement, and God’s gracious extension of mercy and pardon through Jesus.

1. Holy, Holy, Holy
2. Holy (What Heart Can Hold) (Redman)
3. How Great is Our God
4. Holy is the Lord (Tomlin)
5. We Fall Down
6. Immortal, Invisible
7. I Come By the Blood (Sovereign Grace)
8. Jesus, Thank You (Sovereign Grace)
9. How Deep the Father’s Love (Townend)
10. Jesus Paid it All
11. You Alone Can Rescue
12. Here is Love (Grace Takes My Sin) (on my church’s CD)
13. Now Why This Fear (on my church’s CD)
14. When I Survey
15. Come You Sinners (Jamie Brown)
16. Jesus, Son of God (Passion)
17. The Power of the Cross
18. And Can it Be
19. Rock of Ages Cleft for Me

Palm Sunday
Give people the experience, in one service, of using the same lips to praise Jesus and to call for the death of Jesus.

Explain what “Hosanna” means

1. All Glory, Laud, and Honor
2. Hosanna (Praise is Rising)
3. Shout to the Lord
4. Majesty
5. Here for You (Passion)
6. Jesus Messiah (Chris Tomlin)
7. The Power of the Cross
8. To See the King of Heaven Fall (Gethsemane) (Townend/Getty)
9. Glory Be to Jesus (old hymn. Do it slowly)
10. My Song is Love Unknown

Hillsong’s “Hosanna” is popular but not very clear…

Easter
Don’t waste this opportunity to present the gospel in song
1. Jesus Christ is Risen Today
2. Crown Him with Many Crowns
3. In Christ Alone
4. See What a Morning (Townend/Getty)
5. Christ is Risen (Matt Maher)
6. Mighty to Save
7. Jesus Son of God (Passion)
8. Behold Our God (Sovereign Grace / on the TFCA CD)
9. Hail the Day (on Sovereign Grace’s CD “Risen”)
10. Alleluia, Alleluia, Give Thanks…
11. Before the Throne of God Above
12. You Alone Can Rescue (Matt Redman)

Pentecost
1. All My Fountains (on my church’s CD)
2. Holy Spirit, Living Breath of God (Getty/Townend)
3. O Great God (Sovereign Grace)
4. O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing
5. Consuming Fire (There Must be More) (Tim Hughes)
6. Pour Over Me (Stuart Townend)
7. Holy Spirit (Wendell Kimbrough)

And while we’re on the subject of liturgy, here’s the seminar I taught at the 2011 Sovereign Grace Ministries WorshipGod conference on “Thinking Surgically While Leading Liturgically”.

If you’re anything like me, you might find yourself frustrated to hear a really great worship song that you’d love to incorporate into your church’s repertoire, only to find that its range makes it unsingable for most people.

By the way, my spell-check tells me that “unsingable” isn’t a word, but I’m going with it anyway.

Certain songs start out really low. Almost a growl. Then the chorus picks up a little bit and gets more singable. And then all of a sudden, by the second chorus or bridge, everything is way up in the stratosphere and your congregation is passing out.

What do you do? Most of time time you don’t sing the song. It’s nice to listen to but just too hard for people to grab onto.

But sometimes you can bring the song down majorly. Like four whole steps down. This way, instead of growling the first verse and chorus, you’re singing it in a normal range. And then later, instead of jumping an octave, you can sing it down an octave, but because you’ve moved the key around, you’re not all singing bass.

Here’s an example.

On the latest Passion CD, “White Flag”, there is a great song by Chris Tomlin, Matt Maher, and Jason Ingram called “Jesus Son of God”. The verses talk about the sacrifice of Jesus in our place. The chorus helps us exalt Jesus “on the altar of our praise”. The bridge continues to magnify Jesus and the finished work of the cross: “the cross was enough! The cross was enough!”

The problem with the song is that in its recorded key, B major, much of the song, especially the bridge, is (here’s that word again) unsingable unless you’re in the Georgia Dome with 30,000 students all belting it out. When the song really gets going, you’re hanging out on almost constant Ebs, Es, and many F#s.

If you want to know what will happen in your congregation if you try to get them to sing F#s, read this post.

Usually I would have just given up and not tried to incorporate this song. But I liked it too much.

So I took it down from B major to F major. Three whole steps.

This ends up switching around the order of when you’re singing high and when you’re singing low (i.e. the verse is in a higher range than the chorus, which is usually a no-no). But it makes the whole song comfortably singable. And that’s the goal.

Here’s what the original version sounds like:

And here’s a rough demo I recorded for my team (in my basement, so I wouldn’t wake up my sleeping daughters) of it down four whole steps. It’s not a terribly pretty demo but you’ll get the idea.

So, when you hear songs like this one that have massive octave jumps and huge ranges, instead of (a) doing it the way it’s recorded and making your congregation give up, or (b) not doing the song at all, maybe you can do some minor surgery on it and make it singable. Now that’s a word. And a good word too.

At long last, the live CD my church recorded in March, has been released and is available to order/download at www.tfcamusic.org.

I couldn’t be more thrilled with this recording!

Here’s what we say about the heart behind it in the first page of the booklet:

How can a congregation lose nearly everything – its buildings, its property, and most of its money – but worship God with more unity and joy than ever before?

When that congregation knows that it has everything it could ever need in the precious cornerstone and sure foundation of Jesus Christ.

These songs are a taste of the vibrant, Christ-centered, Spirit-filled worship that has become a hallmark of The Falls Church Anglican. They were recorded in the Main Sanctuary over two evenings in early March, just two months before we vacated our property. This was the end of over 275 years on that campus but not the end of our church.

So, at the close of this sweet chapter in our church’s life, we went out lifting high the name of Jesus and thanking God for his faithfulness.

This recording captures the cry of a congregation that has learned and clung to the reality that Jesus is worthy of costly worship. And if that means we lose everything to gain Christ, then we say a resounding “amen”. So be it, Lord. We believe you’re all to us.

The CD features 14 congregational worship songs, a mixture of existing songs, original songs, and hymns. The songs are:

1. Behold Our God
2. Praise My Soul the King of Heaven
3. Praise the Lord
4. God of All Power and Grace
5. Here is Love (Grace Takes My Sin)
6. Now Why This Fear
7. More Than Conquerors
8. Come You Sinners
9. The Lord’s Prayer
10. All My Fountains
11. Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing
12. All to Us
13. To Him Who is Able
14. A Thousand Amens

It was a joy to work with the amazing musicians on this CD. We used musicians from our own church (Jairo Viquez on electric guitar, Matt Brown on percussion, and Simon Dixon on the pipe organ). We used musicians from our sister churches (Jordan Ware singing and Chris Rothgeb on bass). And we used musicians from Nashville and L.A. (Carl Albrecht on drums, Luke Moesley on piano, and Russell Crain on electric guitar). Our own staff and volunteers engineered, recorded, and tracked the project (Jon Crocker, Andrew Schooley, Nathan Mitchell, Daniel Harlan and Tim Larson). And we got the project mixed by Paul Salveson and mastered by Jim DeMain in Nashville.

Here are just a few of the things I love about this CD:

It was recorded in our former Main Sanctuary. This was a beautiful space and I really miss it. You feel like you’re standing in that room with the bricks under your feet when you listen to it.

You can hear the congregation loud and strong. I told the congregation when we recorded this CD that we wanted this CD to sound like you’re standing in the midst of the congregation. I think we achieved that. The congregation sounds great.

All of the songs were recorded in congregational keys. We covered several songs that had been originally recorded in virtually un-singable keys but were still great songs. We brought them down to be more singable and accessible.

The songs reflect variety. We cover some Sovereign Grace songs, Passion songs, and a few songs from other sources as well. We have some fresh new arrangements of old hymns. And we have some original songs of mine (“God of All Power and Grace”, “More Than Conquerors”, and “Come You Sinners”) and Simon Dixon’s (“The Lord’s Prayer”).

The songs on the album are in the order we recorded them. We tried to make sure the songs flow into each other well and make sense not only musically, but thematically.

The packaging looks great. I know it’s much easier to download a CD on iTunes or Amazon or somewhere else, but if you can bear the wait (and pay a bit more) and order from www.tfcamusic.org, I think you’ll love to hold the actual copy in your hand, and see the pictures of our church and of the recording.

This CD has been a labor of love, and I just hope and pray that it blesses and refreshes and encourages everyone who hears it.

Order it through the link above, and in the meantime here’s a video with some pictures from the recording set to the last song on the album.

A Thousand Amens Promo Final-Vimeo Upload 720p from Daniel Harlan on Vimeo.