Worship music for Sunday Dec. 23rd

Our usual lineup of songs is of course prempted by music of the Season. I do NOT mind music of the Season. Additionally, I do not mind musical challenges ( Children of Eden at Central High School is all the proof I need ), but this year's holiday selections from Praise Carols is enough to cause several members of our worship team to comment as to the sanity of these arrangements. Evidently, a Mr. Dan Galbrath is trying to flex his musical muscles, and cram everything he learned in his music education into some of these tunes, which is probably a master's degree at the minimum. The chords are odd and complicated enough that the congregation will not be able to follow the normal flow of the song, and I expect participation to be at a minimum.

The purpose of our worship band is to be invisible , right? We are there as a conveyor, to point the people to our loving God with music and praise, and try to not get in the way. People will be climbing over the clutter this Sunday morning, trying to find the three-chord version of Silent Night they've sung for their entire lifetime.

BTW, these contemporary arrangements are so 'white-bread-and-mayo', I'm embarassed to play them. Surely there's a choir somewhere that could use the donation of my interactive CD.

While I'm at it, I'd like to thank Hendersongs for putting a repeat on pages One and Two of 'Joy to the World'. Evidently, Mr. Henderson can play guitar with one hand, and doesn't mind turning the pages back and forth for each repeat, and we only had to play it four times. FYI, there was blank space on the third page. They could have easily pushed it down a single staff and all would have been fine.

When you have a killer band, just because they can play such arrangements doesn't mean they should. Regardless, I'm going to go in on Sunday and play it exactly as our Music Leader would have us do it, after all; He's the one actually called by God to lead us. Meanwhile, let's all pray that our congregation can ignore the arrangements and think about the baby that came to die for each of us. I'll shut up now.

Jimbo
Dec . 22nd, 2007