We've had a fabulous weekend at Greenbelt.  It is great to see such a diversity of worship, theology and creative expression. 

Our Saturday morning worship session was such fun, with and amazing band, fab visuals and brilliant interaction from the crowd.  If you were there and wanted to get some of the resources, or weren't there but are interested, here is the outline:
1) We started with Richard Lyall's 'Unforced Rhythms of Grace' flash animation, available on his blog.
2) The music continued into singing the chorus of Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah', interspersed with a piece of spoken word piece 'What is your Hallelujah' which we've posted up for you.
3) Sara led us in some liturgy, 'In the beginning'.  This flowed into singing 'Immortal Invisible' with drum'n'bass-inspired music (the chords were Bb /// Bb/C /// F/A /// Dm/// x3, Gm /// Am /// Bb/C ///) and using the Jubilate words.
4) That went into 'Jesus Lead us to the Father' (free music and tracks on RESOUNDworship.org), but using AdAM Parkes backing track from this remix.
5) Next we focused on the humanity and divinity of Christ, using a kind trip-hop version of 'Meekness and Majesty' inspired by a Cinematic Orchestra track called 'As The Stars Fall'.
6) 'He's My Saviour' (free on RESOUNDworship.org) proved itself once again as a fantastic way of getting people involved as they shouted out their own ideas for verses.
7) That led into Stuart Townend's 'The Lord's My Shepherd', using a great version he recorded on a CD called Monument to Mercy.
8) From there we turned outward to our broken world, singing 'When our songs' (free on RESOUNDworship.org).  A number of people asked
9) We performed a version of Psalm 88 by Sunil Chandy and invited people to write prayers for people or situations they knew of, inspired by the honesty of the Psalm.
10) The session closed on a high, celebrating God's justice and faithfulness with Geraldine Latty's Shout it.

Our afternoon workshop on Interactive/Unfinished Worship followed the same lines as our articles on this site and Worship Leader.  We demonstrated the clay modelling and Psalms Praise ideas, and sang He's my Saviour.  Richard Lyall demonstrated his use of fractals in worship (see how-to article here) - he promised we'd post the images that were created, so here they are.  Thanks to all the people who came along and contributed! 

Other stuff - engageworship.org contributor Andy Stinson was involved in a really creative Beat Eucharist, we're looking forward to see what happens with that material.  We bought Jonny Baker's new book on Curating Worship which looks great.  Lou Rhodes was absolutley the musical highlight.  And we, err, drank lots of coffee and hung out with a lot of lovely people!

One of the fractals Rich created in the workshop.  Zip of the whole set here.

Sam says something in the seminar.

The clay worship idea.  Pics by @SonicSteveUK

Our activities will be limited in the autum due to Sam starting at LST (see here for full story), but we are going to be involved in a couple of awesome weekend conferences, and would desperately like to be involved in a third!

Greenbelt (27-30th August, Cheltenham Racecourse) is an exciting, well established Christian arts festival.  We'll be leading some innovative, creative worship at 9.30am on the Saturday morning in the Underground venue (we have had so much fun rehearsing an amazing band for this!), and then are running a workshop on Interactive/Unfinished worship at 1pm in the creatively-titled Workshops 2 venue.

Journey ( 7-10 September, Pioneer Centre, Kidderminster), is Tearfund's Student Justice conference, which we loved being involved with last year and are GUTTED to miss this year!  Filled with worship, teaching, ministry, stories, seminars, discussions, time for chilling out and meeting new people… and all of it with the aim of catching more of God’s heart for justice, allowing him to inspire and equip us to make a real difference in this world.  With guests including Andy Flannagan, 24-7’s Andy Freeman and more… we’re set for the ride of our lives, so don’t miss out!

Youthwork the Conference (19-21 November, Eastbourne) is a mega shindig which we are once again providing visuals and creative worship for.  Vicky Beeching is leading the music and there are loads of other big name speakers.  You'd be nuts to miss it!

STOP PRESS - Worship Leader mag just posted a slightly rejigged article on Interactive/Unfinished worship from this site - check out their version, or see the original to comment or leave your own ideas!

Lots to tell you...  Sam has just been appointed part time lecturer on London School of Theology's Theology and Music degree course.  This will start in September, and involve him teaching modules like Multimedia and Communication, Youth and Worship and Songwriting for the new stream of the course.  It is so exciting to be joining the faculty at this key stage in its development, and to explore the potential of helping the students grow in innovative, creative worship.

He will overlap this with his job at St James' until Christmas, but sadly we feel that in the long term we need to move closer to the college, and have more time to develop engageworship.org and its itinerant ministry.  So we will be looking to move early in 2011, and we're talking to friends in towns closer to LST.  This means there is a job vacancy for a Worship Minister at a beautiful, outward-looking and supportive parish church if you know someone who is looking for a job - the spec is on St James' website.

We are being careful about the itinerant events we take on in the Autumn term, but the website will continue to be updated and in the long term we will have more time (and weekends) to further engageworship.org's ministry.  Please pray for us at this exciting and slightly scary stage of our lives and ministry!

We've converted all our free videos, so you can now download them as .mpg format, which will easily slot into PowerPoint presentations and lyric software like EasyWorship on PCs.  There is still the option to choose .mov format which plays easily on Macs, and on PCs if you install Quicktime.  We hope this will make all of our videos more easily usable in your services.  Search under Media Types/Video for all our stuff, including 9 looping backgrounds.

It is great having Andy Stinson here on a two week placement with us.  He has given us a reflective mp3 and a great PowerPoint taking you through the ACTS pneumonic.  He's also helping us at an Ely Diocese LLM creative worship training day on Saturday, and he and Sara are helping lead the Year 8 eucharist next Tuesday at St Bede's school in Cambridge.

We're really excited that our old college, London School of Theology, is announcing two new 'Pathways' to the Theology and Music course.  In addition to the existing course for music 'readers', they are now offering a second stream for 'non-reading', contemporary-style musicians, and a third for people who don't do music at all!  This really appeals to us as we're passionate about seeing a far wider variety of artists and creatives trained and released as worship leaders.  If you're wondering what to do from September why not check out the new courses on their website. 

We recently taught the first and second years on the existing course in Youth and Worship - it was a great fun morning with interesting discussions and a relaxed, encouraging atmosphere.  Given that LST have just begun to run their Centre for Missional Leadership in Watford, it is encouraging to see the college flourishing.

Other news - our genius actor/writer friend Abby Guinness has just released her book 'The Word of the Wives; monologues from the unheard women of the Bible’ published by Authentic.  She's given us a freebie script which we've posted here, and you can see more info at www.livingandactive.co.uk and buy the whole thing at your Christian bookshop or in the usual online shops.

Also, Abby and Spring Harvest are running a Creative Retreat you might be interested in - click here for details.

Back from week 2 of Spring Harvest Skegness - Sam was leading the Culture Zone, doing the Student Central stream in the afternoons, and helping the Bless Network with their evening GODSpace celebrations.  Had loads of people at our Creative Worship seminars, and it was great to meet and chat to people.

We've put up the In the silence video/poem that we used night 2.  Download it for free!

We've also posted the We are chosen liturgy which closed night 1, the If we remain silent response from night 3, and you can also download the Praise Shout from Psalm 66 which we used on night 4 of week 1. 

These are some of the pictures our week 1 artist Cas did for the Big Top.  You can check out her website at www.artymiss.org.uk.

The Worship Beyond conference was fab - we were especially excited by the concert with the local school in the evening.  It was great to feel we'd blessed the local community and walked out some of the things we'd been talking about.  Geraldine Latty was an absolute star leading most of the sung worship, and encouraging the school's choirs, and it was fab to see some DJ worship at the event by Steve Leach.  If you came, do feedback your thoughts, and anything you've been able to put into practice.

Loads of Spring Harvest prep at the moment - putting together motion graphics, liturgical bits, seminars, creative worship workshops...  We're doing two weeks at Skegness so might see you there!  Have also just been asked to lead some worship at Greenbelt Festival, so that should be fun.

Teaching at the S. Peter's school as part of Worship Beyond

How would Jesus lead worship was recently reviewed as part of a really helpful article on books about 'worship beyond music'.  Clem Jackson writes that this is a "book which all church leaders should have on their bookshelf and share with those in their church who lead (musical) worship."  Read his other comments and the rest of the article here.

Our book can now be purchased from this website!  We've also posted a free, eight session, interactive group study guide.  This downloadable, 18 page pdf will help you, your worship team, your church leadership and/or your home group to engage with the issues thrown up by viewing 21st century worship through the life and work of Jesus.  How does he enable and inspire us to give authentic, passionate and whole-life praise today? 

We've also posted an article which is generating discussion on blogs like musicademy about whether our worship should be Inward looking or Inside-out?  It explores some of the themes we'll be tackling at the Worship Beyond Conference - book yourself in to guarantee great input for you and your team in 2010!

We had a great time on 31st Jan at the Engage/Cambridge YFC youth worship training day.  If you're in the Cambridge area do check out our six week evening course for young worship leaders - it would be great to see you!

Sam and Sara

Our book How Would Jesus Lead Worship is now available to be purchased from this website!  We've also posted a free, eight session, interactive study guide for our book.  This downloadable, 18 page pdf will help you, your worship team, your church leadership and/or your home group to engage with the issues thrown up by view 21st century worship through the life and work of Jesus.  How does he enable and inspire us to give authentic, passionate and whole-life praise today?  What does Christ-like worship leading look like?  How can we hold the tensions of being Humble Servants, Leaders with Authority, Creative Communicators and Reliant on the Spirit?

We've also posted an article which is generating discussion on blogs like musicademy about whether our worship should be Inward looking or Inside-out?  It explores some of the themes we'll be tackling at the Worship Beyond Conference - book yourself in to guarantee great input for you and your team in 2010!

Sam and Sara

We had a great time at Youthwork the Conference! We've posted some of the creative resources and visuals we used on the main stage, including the Luke 4 motion graphics Bible reading.

We also did a devotional time at a UK Songwriters Consultation, which included a lot of liturgy on PowerPoint, so we've been able to post three of those - a great gathering liturgy, a confession focused around worship and justice, and a closing act of dedication.

There are tons of ideas for Advent now posted - check out these new ones by Kieran and Chloe. 

Its not too early to be booking your conferences for next year - young people in Cambrige need to be at the Engage day on 30th Jan, and everyone in the UK should make Worship Beyond on 13th March a top priority!

In what was supposed to be a 'quiet' term we seem very busy; had a great Saturday with the Chinese Church in London, songwriting training days in Manchester and Ispwich, loads of prep for Youthwork the Conference (not too late to book in!) and a visuals-in-worship night this friday at C3 church Cambridge.  Phew!

Don't forget to search 'Advent' or 'Christmas' for creative seasonal resources, and email us if you've developed any great ideas to use this year which we could share with others.

Worship Beyond will be the cutting edge worship conference of 2010 - wrestling with the integration of worship, mission, evangelism, intercession... This will be the fourth MWF Prism of Praise national conference, as hundreds of people meet in the Midlands to go deeper with God.  We are thrilled to be playing a part in this amazing day which also includes folks like national worship leader Geraldine Latty, dance music pioneer Steve Leach, justice-and-worship enthusiast Eileen Shipton and many more speakers from different spheres of influence.  Visit the website and book online today!

Worship Beyond will be the cutting edge worship conference of 2010 - wrestling with the integration of worship, mission, evangelism, intercession... This will be the fourth MWF Prism of Praise national conference, as hundreds of people meet in the Midlands to go deeper with God.  We are thrilled to be playing a part in this amazing day which also includes folks like national worship leader Geraldine Latty, dance music pioneer Steve Leach, justice-and-worship enthusiast Eileen Shipton and many more speakers from different spheres of influence.  Visit the website and book online today!

We had a great time last week leading creative worship at the Tearfund Journey conference - we've posted the prayer stations and video we used on our ideas pages.  Over the three days we also made use of the Blessed be your name intro idea, Psalms Praise and one of Richard Lyall's video loops.  We were particularly challenged by the talk Mark Powelly gave - he leads a community called Breathe exploring Christian Simplicity - "less stuff, more life".  Check out their 'Promise of Life' and other resources on their website.  It was great to chat to people (including the lovely Steve Stockman and his interns from Belfast) about the connections between justice and worship.  Well done Tearfund Youth team and well done God!

We're back from holidays, conferences and the like and have found some space between the piles of washing, emails and overgrown garden to put up some of the resources we used and a report on how the festivals went.  So do have a look around and see the new content.

This summer is going to be a time for making new resources, so please pray for our creativity.  We've also picked up a couple of new contributors, so be on the lookout for new resources by some new faces.

A few other things we are really happy to recommend - our friends at BIG Ministries have recently published a book of excellent all age Bible readings - check it out here.

We've been put in touch with an excellent artist/photographer called Ben Hodson - check out his website.

Finally, if you are anything to do with youth ministry, book in to Youthwork the Conference which this year features Jim Wallis, Pete Greig and also us doing bits of creative/visuals stuff.

And enjoy your summer!

The WorshipConnect conference at London School of Theology is coming up soon, and we wanted you to know there are now Day and Evening tickets available. 

For instance, why not join us for Tuesday 21st July: a Multigenerational Worship lab with Big Ministries, seminars including the engageworship.org stream on 21st Century Worship, and an evening of new songs with RESOUNDworship.org?

Or Wednesday 22nd: a worship lab on Lament, seminars including the engageworship.org stream on Indigenous Worship and Worship the Connects with Real life, and an evening on Celtic worship?

Or Thursday 23rd: our Emerging Worship lab, seminars including Worship with the Unchurched and Technology in Worship, and Ian Collinge on Multiculural Worship in the evening.

Check out day ticket prices here and all the other details on their website.

We were recently interviewed for the latest edition of Christianity magazine, for a piece called 'Worship Idol' (read the opening paragraphs here).  We've also written an article for August's copy of Youthwork magazine on our dream for the future of youth and worship over the next 20 years - so check out both of these quality magazines at a Christian bookshop near you!

Tour news
We had a great time in York for the penultimate Tour date - a real 'singing' crowd, positive feedback, and a really productive training morning at St Michael le Belfrey on Saturday.  Friday night is your final opportunity to catch the How Would Jesus Worship Tour at Riverside Church, Birmingham - come and bring your friends!

Adoration
We'll be at the Adoration music festival on 3rd & 4th July in Stoke-on-Trent. NXT Ministries have given us a stand in the Marketplace, and our friend and web genius Kieran Metcalfe will be on-hand throughout the event to chat about engageworship.org, or even just to say 'Hi'. He'll also be playing on the two fringe stages on the Saturday afternoon, both of which are free of charge to the public.  Also on the bill for Adoration are some great names like: Matt Redman, London Community Gospel Choir, Hillsong London, YFriday, Andy Hunter, The Steels, Lifecolour, ...and more!

NXT are working with Stoke City Council, taking over the town Centre of Burslem, and bringing great music to the local community as well as the usual festival crowd.  There will be 3 stages in the town centre (2 of which will provide quality Christian music free to the public, alongside a ticketed Concert Stage which will showcase artists on the evenings of both days of the event) and Cross Rhythms Radio station will be broadcasting from a venue in the middle of the event.  We're really pleased to be able to be there, and would love to see you there.

 Hi All

If you want to keep up with what we're doing, to support, pray or just be nosey, sign up at www.twitter.com/engageworship.

We are also pretty excited about a new partnership with Wendy Beech Ward at Spring Harvest - we're working together to produce some motion graphics video stuff for worship.  Sam's first stab at this can now be downloaded - its a reading for your Pentecost services.  Take a look, let us know what you think, and if you're doing similar stuff we want to know about it!.

Grace and peace,

Sam and Sara

We've had a great time at Spring Harvest Skegness, leading creative worship at iScape and the Big Top.  It has been a great privilege to work with such creative and inspiring teams.  Over the next few days we are going to be putting up a bunch of the PowerPoint and liturgy resources we've been using, so do check those out.  We also led workshops on developing creativity in the local church, and it was really exciting to hear lots of ideas and enthusiasm coming from the groups.

A couple of resources which we've picked up and can recommend - our friend Steve Leach has produced and album for Spring Harvest of his amazing remixes of sermon soundbites (from folks including Pete Greig, Matt Redman and Steve Chalke) put to bang-up-to-date dance music - 'Right here in this room' is really worth checking out at the Spring Harvest website.  You can also pick up the new songbook, which has the usual selection of new and old songs, plus some particularly excellent liturgy resources this year by people like Gerard Kelly, Martin Leckebush, John Leach and our very own Sam Hargreaves...  Some of those liturgies are about to go up on this site with accompanying PowerPoints.

At the event Sam got to oversee visual artists Hideyuki Sobue and Josh Butler.  Below are some pics of their work - the central panel changed each night, whilst an aspect of that panel was picked up in the surrounding panels.  In the second pic you can see the removed central panels.  Check out Yuki's beautiful website.

Finally, Spring Harvest and Faithworks have produced a guide to putting on a community art project, with examples from existing projects, background theology and practical application.  You can download the two pdfs here.

The completed work at the end of day 5.

The central panels which were removed after each night.

Load of people stopped to take photos.

The new piece done on morning 6,

We're really excited to announce the engageworship.org track at the London School of Theology Summer School - Worship Connect.  This is the first of its kind - four days at this residential conference to explore worship which engages with a new generation.  The blurb says - "Ideal for anyone wanting to break the mould, lead worship in new ways and connect with contemporary culture, the historical church and our timeless God. We want you to bring your ideas, creativity, questions and perspectives, to share your successes and frustrations, to pool our experiences and begin to carve out some new space for engagement with God." 

This will be a complementary track alongside what is already a great line up of speakers and leaders, covering topics like multi-generational worship, lament, sing and play gospel... and loads more!  Each day will also feature 'worship labs' - an opportunity to experience a number of diverse worship styles and then spend time reflecting on them.  This will be one of those life changing weeks where you get to really grapple with the big questions - not to be missed!

Interested?  Know someone who might be?  Check out www.worshipconnect.org for loads more info, or email us if you have more questions.

We had a great time on our first tour date in Keynsham, Somerset. This pic shows how sunny it was!  The band were amazing (thanks guys!) and we had a really mixed crowd from lots of different churches in the area.  Thanks to everyone who came and supported it.  A few comments from the response cards -

"Lively, heart-felt and interactive led by friendly, passionate people."
"Inspirational worship, Christ exalting, helpful, spiritual, opportunity for creative prayer, well presented information, great music, visual illustrations."
"[I liked] the enthusiasm! The variations leading between prayer and worship. The band!"
"Authentic, powerful, inspiring. Wonderfully relevant for today’s church."

Do come and see us on one of the other dates, and let your friends know about them.  We've also added a comment feature to the book page, so when you've had a read do let us know what you think.

We're really pleased to have a stand at the ECG Conference, 14th-19th April in the Llandudno Conference Centre, Wales, UK. It mixes teaching, worship and the opportunity to get involved with local mission projects. Do check out their website at www.ecgevent.org.uk.

The How Would Jesus Worship Tour kicks off this month, beginning at Keynsham near Bristol, and then going to Kent and Cambridge in March.  We are excited to announce the band will include Sunil Chandy on bass, Richard Morgan on drums and Helen Barnes on violin.  The evening will be a creative celebration of Jesus - how he has made the way for us to worship the Father, by the Spirit, and how he inspires us to worship today - featuring music, multimedia and a few thoughts from our book...  

How would Jesus lead worship? is published by BRF on 20th Feb - preorder your copy direct from their website, other online bookstores, or better still go and ask your local Christian bookstore to stock a bunch of them!

Other news - we had a great time with BIG ministries at the Childrens' Ministry conference - and Sam even got to dance with Duggy Dug Dug (err, sorry about that).  We're also going to be blogging regularly on the Musicademy site, so check that out as they have loads of other great stuff there.

Please do all you can to promote the tour in your area, and come along yourself!

Welcome to engageworship.org v2.0 - the new site for usable, downloadable worship ideas and thought-provoking articles on fresh approaches to worship.  We pray you had a blessed Christmas, and are really looking forward to all 2009 has in store!  Thanks for all the people who have fed back on the site - here is one satisfied visitor:

"A gorgeous, user-friendly site that does what it ambitiously claims on its virtual tin."  Martin Saunders, Editor, Youthwork Magazine.

A few things to highlight:

Getting Engaged - Its great to see new people sign up over the Christmas break - if you haven't done this yet why not do it now?  You get to download stuff, comment on the message boards and can receive a monthly news email.

BIG at Children's Ministry - On the 24th Jan Sam and Sara will be playing in the band with Jo and Steve Squires and the BIG Ministry team at the Eastbourne conference, as they model innovative, creative worship for children.  Check out their website.

Tour - Check out the How Would Jesus Worship Tour to see when it swings by a venue near you.  If you can promote this locally please email us for some posters and flyers.

And please do let other people know about this site via email, facebook or other ways of badgering them.  Nicely. 

Sam and Sara

Welcome to our all new, all singing all dancing version 2.0 of engageworship.org!  We are really excited about the possibilities of this website.  We will be able to share usable creative worship ideas from grassroots church contexts in the UK, feature articles by a wide variety of worship thinkers and practitioners, keep you up to date with our movements and more besides!  Do sign up to be able to download content, comment on our message boards and recieve monthly email updates.  And please do feedback your thoughts, ideas and other stuff so we can get the whole thing ship-shape for a more formal launch in January.  Your prayers are really valued as we seek to serve the church with this resource.  

If you are wondering what we've been up to, the Autumn term has seen us be involved with the LST Deep Calls to Deep conference, run a training day in Melton Mobray Baptist, lead worship and a seminar at the LST Alumni Day, and Sam has done two weekends as Creative Director at Youthwork the Conference.  So quite busy!  But we are moving into even more activity in the new year (see the Events page) and would really value your prayers as this ministry begins to enter its second year.  Thanks for stopping by - see you again soon!