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The songs we never stop singing.
Started by Nils on 28 October 2008 - 10:00am
| 28 October 2008 - 10:00am | |
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Hi, everybody. I'm quite new here at Worship Central but I've heard a lot of good about it, so now I'm ready to try it out. Been thinking about what songs to use while leading worship. Sometimes i feel that I always play the same "old" songs that I always play. Luckily there is always new songs coming to our attention. Still we have to keep some of the known songs on the list so that the group of people we're leading is not just standing there trying to follow on the new tunes. How can we bring freshness into our setlist without making it all about new songs? One thing I belive we can do is try to bring back some old songs which we sang a lot before and put them back on the list. Perhaps we can make a new arrangement to them which also can make them fresh and new. While eating lunch today I started thinking about this and suddenly and great "old" song popped into my head. "Shout to the Lord" is a great song which we sang alot years ago. Maybe it's time to try it out again. I'll definetly put it on my "song-to-play list" So what other "old" but still powerful songs are there to play? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Nils |
I'd agree Nils, it's easy to lose a congregation by having too many new or unfamiliar songs in a service. It's not easy to give examples of older songs to bring back in, as every church will discover songs at different times - for example I played Brenton Brown's "Holy, holy, God Almighty" on Sunday - which is several years old, but we've never sung it at my home church before.
I think your initial idea is a good one - delve back in your church song catalogue/archive for songs with good lyrics that reflect where you want to focus in a service. If you can change the arrangement to freshen it up, so much the better, but don't be afraid to play it as it was originally done - if it's not been used for a while, the congregation will go with it.
I lead a conference in the summer where we went spontaneously from "God in my living" to "Shine, Jesus, Shine" - the roof nearly came off (in a good way!)
I'd also encourage anyone to go back and use hymns - such great truth in them lyrically, which it's hard to replace in more modern songs - I've been using "All people that on earth do dwell" recently, same tune, just speeded up the arrangement -it rocks!
You are beautiful beyond description
Awesome!
hey guys
I think there's power in some of these old songs that we often dont realize is there because we just discard them as 'past it'! i think its a shame to not play old songs just because they're old.
I find in my church some oldies go down great because the congregation love stuff that they are familiar with. For example, at times we'll play;
Oh Lord my God (then sings my soul)
Be thou my vision
I will worship
My Jesus my savior
and so on....
the thing with these old songs (I find) is that doing them after months or even years of not being played gives them a new lease of life.
One of my favorites is to do the chorus of 'Oh come let us adore him' (the christmas carol!), as it really takes people by surprise, and in a wierd way such a spirit led way of playing such a traditional song encourages people to worship harder. Sounds wierd but it does!
God bless all you guys
Josh