Sunday, March 13, 2011

St. John's York Mills - Part 1

This morning, Gerald and I led the praise team at St. John's. This was also the morning we welcomed our new interim music director, Eric Osborne. (Eric will lead the choir and play the organ while we're looking for a new full-time music director.)

It also marked the first Sunday of Lent, so with all these things coming together, Gerald and I decided to try a few new things today:

Traditionally, the organist has only played for the choir, but today, we invited Eric to leave the organ bench and play piano with us for "My Heart is Filled With Thankfulness."

For the first Communion song, we played Gerald's original song, "All The Things I've Broken," as a song of reflection. The praise team never gets to play a song that's not congregational, so it was nice to be able to offer this message in this way.

Our final Communion song was the beautiful "King of Love." The band played the first two verses, and when we got to the third verse, Eric joined us on organ! Yes, organ and praise band! It was majestic and awesome!

For so long (and like so many churches!), we've had two distinct music 'camps' in our church - traditional and contemporary. But today, we broke the seal. We're far from being one cohesive music team, but I truly feel that today was the first step towards a music team united by a love of great music and powerful worship.

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