The following is part of Fred McKinnon’s Sunday Setlists. Check out what other worship leaders around the country were doing this Sunday!

I am absolutely buzzing in my spirit this afternoon, after an unbelievable weekend at Grace. We had a huge emergency on Saturday night, as the sermon failed to record, leaving us with nothing to show in our simultaneous traditional service in the commons on Sunday morning. A.J. Mcglynn, our Director of Production, did an amazing job of solving the problem. He came back on Saturday night and figured out how to run a live feed to our traditional service on the fly, and we used planning center as our coordination machine.

Coincidentally, we were also trying to use click tracks for all of our music this morning, so it was easy to tell how long each song was going to be for coordination between services. We got both services to their offering times within 60 seconds of each other, and then went live feed with a video testimony into our camera crew with the sermon feed. It was practically flawless in execution, and no one even noticed that something was wrong.

I can’t say enough about our tech teams at Grace. A.J. does an amazing job training and leading them, and they don’t get thanked enough. I was blown away at their willingness to step up to solve what could have been a catastrophe. Thanks guys.

I have to say–trying to coordinate a traditional service with hymns and a contemporary service with more lengthy modern songs is a challenge that I’m not sure I could do every week yet. Getting two service to run within 60 seconds of each other, let alone 15 seconds requires a level of staff coordination that is unreal. I can see us pushing for this in the future, but we’re not there yet. But it’s nice to know that we can do it.

I ran all the clicks and loops out of Ableton, and used my Pod XT Live as a foot midi controller. It worked really well, but it’s another thing to compartmentalize in the task of leading worship: pedal board/loops & click/midi controller/chords/words/pitches/holy spirit (hopefully not in that order!) Leading worship can get pretty complicated.

Here’s the rundown of the songs and my thoughts on the morning’s worship:

Worship Confessional: Help and Hope When God Seems Distant from Brian Lusky on Vimeo.

Songs:

Hosanna (Brooke Frasier)

Here’s the loop we used. It’s not mine, I found it as I was searching for a loop of the L. Brewster vesion of Everlasting God. I loaded the mp3 into Ableton and then sliced it up into it’s major parts. It worked really well.

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Everlasting God (L. Brewster version)

Who Can Stand (original song written by me)

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You Found Me–we did this as a special to go before the testimony, because our sermon topic was “When God Seems Distant”. It really worked.

Trading My Sorrows–not a song I would normally pick, but just like last week, our pastor asked for it, so we pulled out an older tune and switched from contemplative reflection to outright celebration.

Band:

Drums–Greg

Bass–Josh

Acoustic/Electric–me

Electric–Mike M.

Keys–Angie

Vocals–Rachel, Christie, me.

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Filed under: Services, Sunday Setlists, Worship Confessional