Worship pastor at Grace Church, Erie PA.
Married to my beautiful wife, Rachel
Self-proclaimed gamer, mac geek & Liverpool Fan.
Other activities include singing, writing, playing, worshiping for Christ.
Worship Confessional: June 6th & 7th, 2009
We launched a brand new series this weekend called Captive–it’s all about sin and the gospel–how we’re captive to sin, but Jesus rescues us by his death on the cross. The metaphor we used was chains/prison/being set free. Check out the video confessional:
Worship Confessional: Freedom From Yourself from Brian Lusky on Vimeo.
Be sure also to check out some pics of our stage design for the series, complete with matching outfits.
Setlist:
First thing’s first–if you have Ableton Live, you can grap my loops and clips here.
Be Lifted or Hope Rising (David Crowder) I basically sampled this song and looped parts of it where Crowder wasn’t singing, and then the band learned the chorus and improv bits, coming in big at the first chorus. We don’t have a banjo or gospel choir, so we didn’t got into the hoedown section of this song (I’ll save that for you folks down in Waco).
We Cry Out (Brian & Jenn Johnson) Loop modified from Our Rising Sound (Kyle’s loop was close, but didn’t really account for all the ad-libbing that Kim Walker does, so I cut and pasted his Reason loop into Ableton and made myself something that we could control in real time. I set automations for it, but then took it out so that our keyboardist could control Ableton manually through a midi controller. Check out his stuff, most of his loops are top notch.)
How He Loves (John Mark MacMillan) I love this song and the story behind it, but I always think that the line “sloppy wet kiss” is a little clumsy. The song is too strong not to sing though, so we modify that lyric and roll with it. What about you? Do you change the line for your church or do you sing “sloppy wet kiss”?
Be Thou My Strength (Brian Lusky)
Come and Reside (Brian Lusky)
Video–the Cell–I’ll be honest. We popped this canned video into the service late in the game because we felt like we were missing something. It fit our theme pretty well, although it’s a little heavy handed. I was confident that Derek could transition out of it into something strong for his sermon open, and he didn’t disappoint.
Give Us Clean Hands (Charlie Hall)
Band:
Drums–Dustin
Bass–Derf
Acoustic–Me
Electric–Mike M., Me
Keys, Ableton–Chris
Vocals–Me, Amy
This post is a part of Fred McKinnon’s Sunday Setlists.
Filed under: Captive, Creatives, Services, Sunday Setlists, Video, Worship Confessional
[...] just launched our brand new series entitled Captive here at Grace. We don’t usually have the budget to go for elaborate stage [...]
Ha–we have the same hang-up with “How He Loves.” Two weeks ago, we introduced it to the congregation during communion (slightly more performative time) while keeping that lyric. Upon further reflection, we thought our youth could sing it without questioning the reverence of “sloppy wet kiss” but not the rest of us. So we changed it to “So heaven meets earth with a lasting embrace.” It’s not a perfect rhyme, but neither was ‘kiss’ and we found it kept the warm, strong, affectionate tone of ’sloppy wet kiss’.
How DID you modify that lyric, anyway?
In my opinion the descriptives sloppy and wet are the offending words. We ending up going with “in a moment of bliss”, but my friend uses “infinite kiss” when she leads it.
i think How He Loves worked much better, though i wasn’t there Saturday to witness it…
thanks for asking me to sing Sunday with you guys
love you bri!
Those are good suggestions, Bri. Yep, I suppose our issue was those same words. Based on the story of the song, and JMM’s declaration that “it’s not even a worship song” the fact that only one line needs to be modified in order for it to be a corporate song is pretty awesome.
“how he loves” is such a great song. that lyric is a trip though, but i haven’t thought of anything great enough to change it to. we did it during communion a few weeks ago and kept everything the same. regardless, it’s a powerful song.
I actually really like the line “sloppy wet kiss” in How He Loves, because I think it captures the messy, passionate, excitement of worship. Proskuneo, the Greek word for worship used many times throughout the new testament means: “to kiss, like a dog licking it’s master’s hand, to adore…”