It’s been a quiet week here as on Tuesday we mourned the passing of Christine’s grandmother. Layla’s been sick most of the week and last night was admitted to the hospital with RSV and will be there until tomorrow. Our family would appreciate your prayers.
How can we pray for you?
When it comes to good graphic design most of us don’t immediately think about churches leading the pack. Most of us especially don’t think about small churches producing high-quality graphic design for their ministries. However, I recently came across one church in a small 800-citizen town in Minnesota that is changing that perception. Along with showing you some of what they’re doing I also wanted to share a few ways that even small churches can get away from the typical clip art that we often see churches using.
Spiderman's my favorite! No, Scorpion's my favorite!
I was recently taken aback by a post on Twitter that I happen to glance at and wanted to get some discussion going. The tweet basically went like this (I’m paraphrasing from what I remember):
I can’t wait until [so-and-so]’s worship set. Then I’ll really be energized!
Now, don’t get me wrong, I understand that God has consistently used personalities to do His work (Moses and Aaron, Joshua, Sampson, the prophets, Peter, Paul, etc.), but I wonder if there’s a danger in the above statement. Do we, as Christians declare that without a certain “persona” we:
Did God use some personalities doing some crazy things to get His people’s attention? Yes (Specifically thinking of Ezekiel laying on his side and other prophets doing odd things). But the danger remains in the fact that if we don’t get the worship leader or pastor that “we want” we might tune out, assume that we can’t learn, and potentially harden our hearts to the working of the Holy Spirit.
I have my own “favorite” teachers, pastors, and worship leaders, but I try to be as open as I can to letting God work through anyone (as long as they’re proclaiming Biblical truth of course).
So what do you think? Is it dangerous to have a favorite teacher, pastor or worship leader? Is it bad that certain “personalities” can stir us up more easily than others?
Worship leader, teacher, and blogger Bob Kauflin and the folks at Sovereign Grace Music consistently produce and record high-quality, Biblical music for the church. They are continually offering a sacrifice of praise through the work of good lyrics, good production, and fresh music that is grounded in truth. I love that they sacrifice hours and hours of time they could be doing something else to spend time writing, arranging, producing and recording in the studio. Take a look at this video overview of their newest album, Risen, just in time for Resurrection Sunday.
In working with every element of the worship service, it’s important to remember that everything we do should serve the congregation and help them be able to worship without distraction. One of our toughest areas to minimize distraction has been on the video team. One of several issues we’re attempting to tackle in that area is to display the song slides in a much more helpful way.
One key to displaying slides for your songs on your screen(s) during corporate worship is to make sure that the phrases are displayed musically. Every song is a piece of poetry, really, so understanding the meter of the lines of the song helps to know how to break up each line visually. By breaking up each line visually the congregation will naturally know where to pause, keep going, and feel much more comfortable singing the song.
Let’s take a look at two examples. The first example shows a poorly created song slide that doesn’t help the congregation understand how the lines of the songs are broken up:
This next image of the same song shows the song in a much more processable format:
Ryan is a follower of Christ, husband, father of three, and Director of Worship & Creative Arts at Living Word Free Lutheran Church in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
