Yo!

I hope you all had a great weekend and Easter.

Per my blog post last week, I wanted to go ahead and post this weeks worship set.  Again, these are the songs we are doing this coming Sunday, April 11th, at The Gateway Church.

How Great Is Our God – Chris Tomlin
Beautiful Jesus – Kristian Stanfill
Cannons – Phil Wickham
Here Is Our King – David Crowder

I encourage you to listen to them (here, if you’d like), worship with them, read the lyrics with and without the music, and possibly even buy an album or two to support the artists.

Can’t wait to worship with you this Sunday!

~chris

There was a time that on Mondays or Tuesdays I would post the set list and a review of the Sunday before.  I would talk about the songs, what they mean, and how things went.

Lately I have been feeling that this is kinda one-sided and mostly beneficial for me and other worship leader-types.  (Then this idea was confirmed and became something new through a conversation I had with Jeremy.  He’s rad and way smarter than me.)

I am gonna pull a Missy Elliot and “flip it and reverse it.”  But in a way less raunchy way.

At the beginning of each week, I am going to post the upcoming weeks set list, and link to where you can listen to the songs, and talk a little bit about why those songs were picked and other things of that nature.

My big hope is that the people of The Gateway Church will start to use this as a tool and resource for their personal worship during the week.  Worship doesn’t begin and end on a Sunday morning at church.  We are called to worship all week long through our actions and conversations, through our thoughts and prayers, and yes…also through song.

I absolutely believe that if you and I spend the next 6 days thinking about the words to these songs, singing them (in the car, office, or wherever), and meditating on them in our hearts, that we can have the most sincere, authentic, and passionate worship experience on Sunday mornings.

A few weeks ago Dashboard Confessional was in town.  My wife is a huge fan, so we got tickets.  Well she spent about 2 weeks before that listening to his songs; learning new ones and refreshing her mind with the old ones.  She couldn’t stop talking and thinking about it.  She wanted to make sure that when he took the stage and she was standing there with 400 other people, that she was ready.  It was almost like she was a love-struck 19 year old girl again!

Well, I want to make sure that when we come together on Sunday morning (with the desire of giving Christ center stage) that we are ready.  That we have spent time preparing our hearts, thinking about what is to come, and just plain old getting excited!

So here is my encouragement and my challenge:

If you go to The Gateway Church, listen to these songs.  You can listen to them online or buy the album for yourself.  Spend time with these songs, and let’s get excited to worship God together!

Click here to listen to this Sunday’s songs.

~chris

We showed the following video on Sunday morning at The Gateway Church.  It pretty much wrecked me when I first saw it last, and again when I heard it on Sunday morning paired with Paul’s message.

The performance was originally done live by a guy named Mike Perez, and then he recorded it and made this video.

It is a call to just worship.  Not “just” in the sense of “hey man, why don’t you just worship.”  But in the sense of our worship being just.

The entire thing is ridiculously powerful, but the lines that really broke me are these:

me way drown in justice
and may we be resuscitated with hearts transformed
with hearts that mute the musics noise
because they long for a worship that responds
to the angelic callings of the orphan and the widow
a worship that feeds
a worship that quenches thirst
a worship that isn’t irritated by visiting hours or prison doors
a worship whose sense of smell can stomach
the stench of urine and unbrushed teeth
whose sense of sight can bare an urban crown of thorns;
lice filled hair and bloody nails
whose sense of touch and embrace can loosen the grip of domestic violence
whose sense of hearing and concern can fill the void
shaped by the held-back “i love you’s” that
turned dreams into nightmares and nightmares into realities
a worship whose purpose is to shine outside the dry walls of the church
where a world waits, and a God watches
the question, the challenge; will you worship

So yeah…chew on that for a few days.

~chris

I have been pretty absent from posting here lately.  It has been a crazy few weeks of travels, events, and mucho other stuff.

I can’t take too much time here right now, but I did want to post the most epic setlist ever.

This Saturday night is capitalC, an event that I am lucky enough to be a part of.  Essentially it is a worship night.  The cool thing about it is that it involves multiple churches from all over Des Moines coming together and saying “WE are the Church.” Big “c” church.  Get it? capitalC?

Anyhoo, for more info you can check out the website.

So here is the set list. Six different worship teams with a mixture of originals and not.  But I guarantee it will be a night to remember.  We are expecting God to move in just an epic way.

So. Pumped. Right. Now.

Sing Alleluia
Agnus Dei
Worthy
I love you lord
Nothing but the Blood of Jesus
He Was There
Only You
Grace that is greater
Tell the World
Blessed be your name
From the inside out
I’m not ashamed
Beautiful one
Lead me to the cross
God of wonders
Because Of Your Love
Glory To God Forever
Beautiful The Blood
Your Love is Everything
Sweetly Broken
Awesome In This Place
Peace Like A River
Where Would I Go
Break Our Hearts
With A Loud Shout
Overflow
Enter In
Can You Hear Us
From the Rising of the Sun
Love Came Down
Beautiful Jesus
Savior King
Came to My Rescue
Carrier
We Are Hungry
Your Love Never Fails
Hosanna
Hallelujah To My King
You Are God
Closer
Come Thou Fount
All Creatures Of Our God And King
Our God Reigns
Lord, You have my heart
God of This City
How He Loves
With Everything

Will you be there?

Even if you can’t be there in person, if all goes as planned we should have a live internet feed.

Follow @capitalC10 on Twitter to keep up to date on the happenings!

~chris

This past Sunday was really fun for me.  I was able to finally do a couple songs I’d been wanting to introduce to The Gateway Church for a while, and I had an incredibly talented guitarist alongside me.

Brandon Findlay of the group Bella Soul (and a few others) came out to play with me Sunday morning.  He did a great job and it was nice to have him sit in.  We both played acoustic, but he was able to change things up from the typical.  He ended up playing slide guitar on a few of the songs and it just sounded awesome.  I’m a huge sucker for this whole alt-country thing though, so that probably helped.

The set was:

O Praise Him – David Crowder Band
Your Love Is Everything – Chris McClarney
Mighty To Save – Hillsong
Closer – Charlie Hall

Your Love is Everything just has a great feel and is a super versatile song.  It works great broken down and slower, as a medium tempo groove, or as a full sounding rock song (like the Jesus Culture version.)  The lyrics are powerful and easy to catch on, like most the Chris McClarney songs (i.e. Your Love Never Fails and others.)

I also was able to bring in Closer, which is one of my all time favorite Charlie Hall songs.  I have always been a huge fan of his stuff and I think lyrically he brings something to the table that no other well-known worship leaders do.  I am also leaning into his stuff a bit more because it seems like it really resonates well with Gateway and where we are at as a church right now.

So until next time…

~chris

It was a good Sunday for the worship team at The Gateway Church with two acoustics and a new vocalist.

I am still trying to build a bridge between the stage and the seats.  We tried setting up the chairs differently, which did help in a few ways, but it’s a work in progress.

The set was:

Hosannah (Praise Is Rising) – Paul Baloche
Your Love Never Fails – Chris McClarney
You Never Let Go – Matt Redman
Your Grace Is Enough – Matt Maher
Invitacion Fountain – Michael Pritzl

I am still using the Ellis Stompbox, and actually getting a lot more comfortable with it.  I’ve also been able to connect with a few more local musicians and hopefully the band will be expanding soon.

One thing I keep having to tell myself is that we are still three weeks in to the launch of this church, so as long as we are sowing the right seed, the harvest will come in due time.  This note is just for myself

~chris

(This post is part of Fred McKinnons Sunday Set List Festivities.)

A couple months ago I met a guy at the Apple store in the Jordan Creek Mall.  Turns out he is a Christian and a photographer.  So a few weeks ago we had Matthew Flowers come out and take pictures at our last preview service.  They turned out incredibly well and we couldn’t be happier about them!

If you are in the Des Moines area and need photos taken, I definitely suggest you get in touch with Matt!

Here is a video we made with some of the pictures…

~chris

This week at The Gateway Church there was quite a few of our core team members gone for various reasons.  A lot of the tech team, some of the worship team, and other people from different teams.  The amazing thing is that it still went extremely well and super smoothly.

The set this week was:

Salvation is Here – United
For Who You Are – Hillsong
Mighty to Save – Hillsong
How Great is Our God – Chris Tomlin
Hosanna (Praise Is Rising) – Paul Baloche

Instrumentation this week was pretty stripped back.  It was just myself on acoustic guitar, and a guy that I haven’t been able to play with yet, Ricky, on percussion.  It was so good to play with percussion again, and Ricky is a really talented drummer.

We had him set up with a djembe and I also had him use my Ellis stompbox for that driving bass.  I think that it sounded great, and all gelled together really well.  (I’ll probably write a blog about the stompbox another time.  It’s pretty incredible, and I have a lot of thoughts about it.)

I am still feeling out the room, and also the people that come into the room.  It’s just our second week so a lot of people are still first-timers or relatively new.  I think everyone is getting more comfortable with each other, and I am trying to keep things as simple as possible to avoid giving any reasons to not participate and get involved.

I have some other things coming down the line too, as far as deepening our worship experiences and time together.  I’ll write more about that later though.

~chris

(This post is part of Fred McKinnons Sunday Set List extravaganza.)