Worship Team Workshop - Sharing Break Forth

As you may remember, this past January, Gerald and I flew to Edmonton to attend the awesome Break Forth conference (You can see photos of our experience here.)

Our church generously provided some financial assistance for the trip, so as a thanksgiving, we organized a Worship Team workshop today to share some of the things we learned at the conference.

We started by sharing the basics of Break Forth - the enormous crowds of worshipers, the amazing speakers, and the freakishly cold weather. We gave the highlights of each class we took, and shared a few nuggets of information that we felt would be interesting or useful to our team.

Then, Gerald and I took turns teaching on one specific topic. I loved what Paul Baloche taught about our role to "minister to the Lord" and the practice of personal worship. I played a clip from one of his training DVDs that addresses this exact topic, and shared my notes and thoughts from the workshop.

Then, we broke the crowd into small discussion groups of 3 or 4 people. Each group was asked to the following 2 questions:

1. What is one thing you do Monday through Saturday (ie: not going to church) that you consider an act of worship?
2. Thinking outside the box, what is one new thing you could try that could weave more worship into your everyday life?

After 15 minutes, we regrouped, and each group shared one or two ideas that they found particularly interesting or inspiring. The discussions were spirited, and it was awesome to hear some of the new ideas.

After a short break to refresh the coffee and grab more snacks (it's a church event - of course we ate!), we gathered for Gerald's talk on songwriting. We don't have a lot of active songwriters in our group right now, but we have a lot of people who are interested in songwriting, so we're excited about nurturing and developing this in the team. Gerald based part of his discussion on Brian Doerkson's class "The Agony and the Ecstasy." He talked about the writing process, the challenge of writing songs that actually minister to people, and the power of a great idea. There were a lot of questions and some great discussion. Gerald shared our dream of starting a Christian songwriting group, where we could meet together to share songs, learn new skills, and encourage each other to write great songs for worship.

All in all, it was a great experience, and the feedback was very positive. I'm hoping to get some photos soon, so I'll let you know when they're up.