WorshipConnect and New Wine Report

We had an amazing (if shattering!) two weeks first at London School of Theology’s worship summer school, and then New Wine North and East.  We met some fantastic people, saw God move and were excited to see innovative worship spreading across the country.  Here are a few highlights, and places to get your hands on the resources...

WorshipConnect
We led the opening time at LST, including the Blessed be intro liturgy which went down really well.  Our friends at BIG Ministries led a fantastic lab on ‘Multigenerational Worship’, which included the very simple but effective idea of singing
“Praise the Father (repeat), praise the Son, (rpt),
praise the Holy Spirit (rpt), God is one, three in one”,
to the tune of Frères Jacques.  Great way of getting all ages to worship the Trinity!

Other highlights for us were the opportunity to lead a lab on ‘Emerging Worship’, featuring Steve Leach DJing and Richard Lyall VJing, loads of prayer stations on the theme of the ‘word of God’, (which you can download here), and an opening liturgy by Sharon (available here.)  It was very stretching for most people, but exciting to see a very different form of worship inspire people to develop the ideas in their own context.

New Wine
We led worship at the Thirst (15-18’s) venue in Newark, easing them in with some well known songs and then pushing boundaries with other forms of worship.  We introduced Matt Osgood’s ‘When our songs’ into a time of intercession, which helped focus our worship outside our cosy festival bubble.  To get the young people involved in helping to lead and steer the worship we used the Psalms Praise idea and also the song ‘He’s my saviour’, where people suggested their own verse ideas over the radio mic.

There was some great creative worship expressed in the art tent, and the team also made use of the Cardboard Testimonies idea to help anyone who wanted to declare the things God had done in their lives.  It was thrilling to see the young people create their own worship to God, and we are really grateful to all the team from YFC who encouraged us to push the boundaries.

Musically, the band was really up for creative arrangements, and we had fun redeeming secular riffs and intros behind well known worship songs (Rage against the machine’s ‘Wake up’ for Brenton Brown’s ‘Holy Holy’, ‘Play that funky music white boy’ for ‘Jesus be the centre’, and Girls Aloud’s ‘Love machine’ for ‘I will worship’!).  These helped put different thematic emphases on the songs and kept them fresh.  We also made use of a Nigerian ‘Alleluia’, which stopped our worship being too Western-centric.

Overall, it was really exciting to see so many young people engage will different sides of worship, and we left feeling like the worship we'd been part of would continue in local churches, schools, jobs and homes.  Were you there?  We'd love you to comment below about how you found the worship - encouragement and critique both gratefully received!

 

Comments / Responses