An Interview with Shane & Shane’s Shane Barnard

What’s your current situation with regards to working with your local church community?
We’re plugged in as worship leaders at a church called Watermark in Dallas. We lead worship every Tuesday night at a Bible study called The Porch for young professionals in their 20s and 30s. We are also part of the worship team on a few Sundays every month.

Can you break down the title track on Bring Your Nothing? What does that mean and how is it emblematic for the whole CD?
Bring Your Nothing is another way to say “grace.” What do we bring that makes us worthy to come to God. Namely, nothing. The title was taken from the first paragraph of Isaiah 55.The key Scripture there talks about coming to buy wine and milk without any money. The concept is that we bring nothing—that’s the requirement—and He gives us everything. The rest of the album, along with every other album to come, is an attempt to unpack this great gospel of grace.

Your new CD was put together in a unique way, could you describe it?
We brought in the band for a week and really just took each song individually with a clean slate and pushed record, and whatever came out, came out. We didn’t really have an agenda—we weren’t looking to make any kind of record, we were just looking to serve each song the best we could.

These songs were inspired by your weekly songwriting classes, how do you encourage a new songwriter to begin the creative process?
I would just say for every hour you spend on your instrument, spend two hours in the Word in the presence of the Lord. And let the Scriptures do what they do and the God of creativity do what He does, and it’s a win. It becomes less about trying to write a hit song and more about loving the Lord at that point.

What are some practical ways a songwriter can pull from their life’s experiences to write a song that works in a congregational setting?
I think the key is not separating the Word of God from your life experience … letting your life experience lead you to the pages of the Bible. For example, we’ve recently walked through some pretty deep valleys, which led us to Scriptures like the one in Job that says “though you slay me, yet I will praise you,” that we use congregationally because everyone goes through fires. Though it’s not about our life experience necessarily but about Him at the end of the day. And He can be glorified even in our darkest hour.

How do you continue to find renewal of passion and energy for the ministry you have been a part of for quite some time now?
The Bible and being in community. Singing doesn’t fuel me. Leading worship doesn’t necessarily fuel me. What inspires me is seeing Jesus lifted up. And that passion is fueled by continuing to stay in His word in the midst of community.

What’s the most important leadership lesson/insight every worship leader should understand?
Consider your calling. I think every worship leader should look at what he does through the lens of Scripture and not through the lens of culture. Because if we do that, then our job becomes about something so much bigger than songs and motivating people to stand or sit or raise their hands or give you a response that you’re wanting. If we go on a quest to truly consider our calling, then it’s so much better than those things and so much more important than those things.

For more on Shane & Shane, visit shaneandshane.com.

By Chris Paavola

Choosing songs can become a paralyzing and polarizing task for any church because people have a hundred excitable reasons why they like a song: The life-long member loves the hymn from 1904, the pastor loves the anthem from 1994 and the band loves the new song with the 5/4  groove.  Each week, the person in charge of choosing music tries to balance these opinions as they sift through a song catalog spanning centuries.

At my congregation, anytime we tried to develop rules about song choices we found ourselves either making constant exceptions or arguing over nuances like musical legalists.  But once we ran a report and discovered we had sung over 100 unique songs in a year, we knew we needed to find a system for choosing songs. If for no other reason than we were inadvertently reminding people new to the church they were still outsiders because they didn’t recognize a song everyone else seemed to know.

Then we stumbled across a story about Disc Jockeys in the 1970′s.

Disc Jockeys
There once was a time when radio stations didn’t have computers tracking song downloads and people could actually call in song requests. During this magical era, some radio stations started putting three bins and a trash can next to the DJ: The “New” bin held new records, the “Regular” bin held regular records, the “Classic” bin held those beloved oldies, and the trash bin was self-explanatory.

Programmers then told DJs they could choose any song as long as their playlist went: New, Regular, Classic. Repeat. New, Regular, Classic. Repeat.  Programmers loved the system because they could control song usage to better sell air time.  DJs loved the system because they had the freedom to choose the eclectic music they enjoyed. 

But the genius of the system was, any time a new song was introduced, a record from the New Bin would either go in the trash bin or in the Regular Bin. Which meant one of the records in the Regular Bin was moved to the Classic Bin.

This sparked an idea for us as a Worship Team to come up with a “Bin System” to maintain a fresh and flexible inventory of songs for our worship sets.  The Bin System systematized what we tried to do intuitively, but defining and following a system liberated us to work faster and with less frustration.  Feel free to customize the Bin System for your setting, but I’m confident it will help you as well. 

The Bins
Instead of a physical bin, we label our songs using Custom Properties in Planning Center Online.  A simple spreadsheet would be just as fine, however. In each bin songs are broken down into fast, medium or slow tempos.  The size of your bins depends on the number of songs you sing in a service.  In our setting, we sing about 3 or 4 songs per service.

New Bin: 9 songs
In our New Bin we have 3 fast, 3 medium and 3 slow songs.  When we introduce a song to the New Bin, it bumps the oldest song in that tempo out of the New Bin and into either the Trash Bin or Regular Bin.

Regular Bin: 36 songs
In our Regular Bin we have 12 fast, 12 medium and 12 slow songs. When we introduce a song to the Regular Bin, it bumps the oldest song in that tempo out of the Regular Bin and into the Classic Bin.

Classic Bin: Unlimited Songs
Finally, our Classic Bin holds an endless supply of songs.  We decided hymns, regardless of new arrangements, would fall into this category by virtue of their age.  Songs in the Classic Bin have no set shelf life, but may retire to the Trash Bin at any time.

The Bin Rules
At first glance, the number of songs in the Song Bins may seem small, but it’s surprising how difficult it is to overplay these songs once we came up with three simple Bin Rules to plan our services:

Rule 1 – No more than one new song in a service.
Rule 2 – No more than one classic song in a service.
Rule 3 – Christmas doesn’t count.

Benefits of the Bin System
Immediately, the Bin System speeds up the process of choosing songs. For instance, if we’re looking for a slow song for a service and we’ve already got 1 new song and 1 classic song chosen, we look at the 12 slow songs in the Regular Bin instead of an endless alphabetical list of songs. 

Somewhat surprisingly, the Bin System also minimizes arguments about song selection because it considers everyone involved in the worship service regardless of their tenure in the faith.  If a pastor, team member or volunteer objects to a chosen song, the discussion is channeled from a confrontation of opinion into a discussion of the Bin System.  “Sorry, we’ve already done a Classic Song” is easier to say and hear than, “I don’t like the song you like.”

If you’re still hesitant to try the Song Bin system, consider this- when you make a worship set, you use a system.  It may not be defined, but if the process is cumbersome and quarrelsome, you need a better process.  Efficiency in planning isn’t just a good system, it’s good stewardship.

Chris Paavola is the Director of Worship Production at St. John church (www.stjstl.net) near St. Louis, MO.  You can follow him on Twitter at @chris_paavola.

By Kristian Ponsford

How one worship leader broke the pattern of monotony that may have been causing his congregation to “tune out.” 

A few years ago I moved to a new house situated along the flight path into Manchester airport, one of the busiest airports in Northern England. The first few weeks consisted mainly of broken sleep and sudden shock as yet another noisy plane would cut through the air above our little house. However, in a surprisingly short amount of time I adjusted to the familiar sound of the aircrafts and soon I didn’t even hear them.

Our next house was in a town centre adjacent to a shopping centre and a multi story car park which was also the evening residence for a tribe of noisy seagulls. At 6am every morning the metal shutters of the centre were pulled open, the alarms reset and the seagulls would launch into full chorus. Again, within a few months this noise was simply filtered out.

Scientists explain this process of filtering as Habituation. They refer to a specific structure in the brain stem called the pons, which as well as our hearing deals with our sleep, respiration, swallowing, bladder control, equilibrium, taste, eye movement, facial expressions, facial sensation, and posture. This process of habituation is even the main form of treatment for hearing issues such as Tinnitus.

Habituation is defined as the brains ability to filter or ignore familiar, repetitive or even boring noises.

Ignored Much?
Now as a worship leader I find this all a bit scary.

I wonder how long it takes the average brain to filter out our repetitive and familiar sounds. How many songs does it take before my acoustic guitar is no longer heard, or the same familiar song rock arrangement is simply ignored. Maybe the excitement expressed when a new song, sound, band or genre comes along is not just due to its creativity but because it is fresh or more accurately refreshing.

Like many people I love music and the way it can move people. I love the way music is constructed and layered. I love musical creativity and expression. And I’m often frustrated that my passions outstrip my abilities. All of these thoughts instigated a change in the way I lead worship and started me on a journey of experimentation.

In short I wanted to freshen up the way we did musical worship, the instrumentation, the sounds, the textures.

One Solution
It was amidst all of this that I discovered loops. Loops are basically tracks designed to compliment your band but provide the sounds and textures usually reserved for the studio or huge productions.

Go and listen to some music that really moves you but this time really listen. The dark room, eyes closed, music loud, kind of listen. Study your favourite band’s album and you begin to notice the little textures that are so easily missed. In my music collection I started to notice the little electronic beeps, the multi layers of pads, the lush string parts, solo cellos, multiple pianos, the synth bass parts below the normal bass, the electric drum sounds mixed with the acoustic kit and so on. These are the textures and sounds missing from most worship bands and these are the parts that loops can provide. This is where technology and worship can collide beautifully. 

I believe technology can be to our era what the Cathedrals were to previous worshipers.

Soundscapes
Walk into a Cathedral and the sheer size and grandeur of the place screams of the glory and majesty of God. Now an aspect of that is missing in most modern worship settings. Maybe the use of technology, media and well-crafted sounds can draw our worshippers to a higher place to a sense of the majestic and to a place of wonder in worship.

This is why I love using loops and technology in our worship times.

Loops are more common than you might think too, in fact it’s harder to find chart topping bands that don’t use loops when playing live. The worship scene is readily accepting and recognising the advantage of loops and there is a vast online community offering support and guidance.

The application of running loops varies from simple iPod setups to laptops and midi controllers. Personally I use a brilliant piece of software called Ableton Live to trigger my loops. Ableton is amazing and is one of the most versatile programs ever.

Ableton can be found in many DJ setups or is usually being run on the macbook you often notice sat next to the drummer.

Probably the biggest reason I chose Ableton was the fact that I am still in total control of the loop. I am not playing to a backing track. Ableton allows me to move around the song with ease and with the press of foot pedal I can trigger off the verse or repeat the chorus or bridge. I can play with loop and not to loops. 

In fact, I’m now a self-confessed Ableton geek and in our church Ableton feeds multiple sends to our desk for strings, beats, guitar parts, keys & pads. It also feeds clicks and band director cues into ears so we are all super tight. Ableton controls our projection software and triggers off lyric video in time with our loops. It turns the pages on our iPads and pdf chord sheets and Ableton can even control our lightning rig! 

Since the introduction of loops into our worship set up our band is tighter, our musicians are more expressive and our church is more engaged. What more could I ask for?

Technology is my pile of bricks and I aim to creatively pair it the with the cement of servant hearted musicians to build something that is bigger than all of us. To build an environment that allows people to engage with God and lives to be changed.

Kristian is a Worship Leader, Songwriter and Ableton trainer with a passion for seeing the church engage in new, fresh and relevant ways. This is coupled with his love of using technology, loops, samples and DJ equipment in his worship leading. Highlights of his year includes leading at large UK festivals such as New Wine & Spring Harvest. Visit, iam-kp.com.

By John D. Witvliet 

This article was first published in Reformed Worship magazine, June 2013. Visit their site: reformedworship.org.

The function of hymnals in the life of the church has changed dramatically over the past thirty years. Many congregations rarely use them. Thousands of Christians seldom, if ever, open one. When people hear of the publication of Lift Up Your Hearts (LUYH), it’s natural for some of them to ask, “Why would you ever want to publish another hymnal?”

The most basic response to this is that many congregations do use hymnals every week, in both public worship and in church education and pastoral care. Still others are rediscovering the value of hymnals, reintroducing their selective use alongside other ways of presenting songs. Indeed, the hymnal supplement Sing! A New Creation surpassed its original projected sales ten times over. Psalms for All Seasons did the same in less than one year. Hymnals from a variety of other publishers continue to sell well, too. 

Hymnals make several valuable contributions to Christian life today, in dynamic interaction with all the other ways we access and project music and information. Further, a hymnal is a valuable resource for all kinds of Christians, as well as congregational leaders, whether or not their congregation uses a hymnal in worship.

Here are 10 reasons why:

1. Hymnals are especially well suited to good group singing of many kinds of songs (though not all).
Cyclical songs of exuberant praise are well served by projecting texts. People’s hands are free for clapping, and the text can easily be cycled through a set of slides. Singing from a hymnal can inhibit participation in songs like these.

But the reverse is true for other kinds of songs.

Hymnals are well suited to singing contemplative songs, where it is helpful to sing with bowed head, while seated or kneeling.

Hymnals are especially useful for singing in harmony, unless that harmony can be projected (which you can do, incidentally, by using the electronic version of Lift Up Your Hearts).

Hymnals are ideal for texts that are more linear—texts that unfold an argument or tell a story in several stanzas. When we sing those kinds of texts from a screen, we can’t see the whole thing at once, and it’s very easy to lose track of where the song is going. (The same can be said for reading the Bible while seeing only one verse at time.)

Congregations do not have to settle for only one way of presenting songs, whether in print or via projection.

2. Hymnals are portable.
Hymnals can travel easily into Sunday school rooms, summer camps, hospital rooms, family rooms, and more. Many congregations that no longer use hymnals or songbooks for worship are realizing that they—without intending to—no longer sing together in places that lack projection equipment. Or, they end up singing only a very narrow range of songs that the congregation may know from memory. This means that they sing less (or not at all) in Bible study groups, in council or staff meetings, or at other gatherings.

I am so pleased to know that some churches that do not use hymnals in worship nevertheless have a library cart with thirty hymnals on it that travels throughout their church so any group can use hymnals at any time.

3. Hymnals are splendid for home piano or keyboard devotional playing.
For thousands of believers over the past century or more, including my own grandfather, some of the sweetest hours of prayer have happened at the family piano or keyboard. A devotional tour of the hymnal might begin with a favorite song, but then veer off into uncharted territory—rather like a spiritual off-road vehicle. 

True enough, a few people can do this by ear, without a book. True enough, you can print some songs off the Internet, though it costs much more to print 900 songs at home than to buy a hymnal with the same number of selections.

Indeed, one of the best ways to use the Internet for music is to purchase a tablet-formatted hymnal. (By the way, it is possible to purchase the electronic pdf of Lift Up Your Hearts from Faith Alive and save it to your tablet. It’s not as glitzy as an app, but it does let you page through the hymnal and play from it.)

4. Hymnals are an efficient one-stop worship planning resource.
With a hymnal, a pastor or worship planner can swiftly thumb through a varied but well edited cluster of at least ten songs for Easter, or morning prayer, or lament, for example. You could find the same ten songs on the Internet, but that would take twenty clicks or more—after you wade through a dizzying variety of other options with no guarantee of their musical or theological integrity. While a hymnal need not be the only worship planning resource, it is one indispensable resource.

5. Hymnals make it relatively easy to stumble on and fall in love with good music you never thought you would like.
One stunning result of the 1987 Psalter Hymnal was the number of Anglo congregations that fell in love with the black gospel hymn “Lead Me, Guide Me,” and the number of history-resisting congregations that found “If You But Trust in God to Guide You” to be a source of blessing in times of tragedy. Now, it is very possible to experience crossover songs on the internet, or through other sources. But, in general, the internet tends to feed us more of what we like. It pulls toward homogenization. Today’s hymnals, with their musical diversity, are designed to help us meet, discover, and come to love a wide variety of music.

6. Well-designed hymnals offer a vision of a balanced thematic diet.
Any hymnal worth its salt needs songs for both praise and lament, for both Christmas and Jesus’ baptism, for both Thanksgiving Day and New Year’s Day, for both morning and evening prayer, and texts for probably a hundred other key themes. One of the main goals for any hymnal is to give people access to a balanced musical diet, full of all the right kinds of proteins and carbohydrates to sustain the life of faith.

As several leading advocates of contemporary music have recently pointed out, the contemporary worship industry is not well organized to promote this balanced worship diet. The top two hundred songs in the CCLI list are simply the two hundred most-sung songs. There is no mechanism built into such a list to ensure thematic balance (though we need not blame the CCLI list for not doing what it can’t possibly do!)

Every congregation, whether it uses hymnals or not, needs a tool for imagining a balanced diet. The best hymnals turn out to be very useful resources. For this reason, I am grateful for a number of contemporary songwriters I know who regularly look at hymnals to remind them of the kinds of songs that they need to be writing to fill in the gaps of the church’s repertoire—songs that may never become greatest hits, but that may be used, like powerful yeast, to transform the imagination of large segments of the church.

I realize that congregations who use hymnals may not themselves have a balanced diet. They may choose only a narrow range of what appears in the book. But just as a good reference book in nearly any field (medicine, for example) opens up our eyes to full range of learning, so too a hymnal offers a vision of the breadth of the church’s song. 

7. Hymnals help connect songs with elements of worship.
Like many recent hymnals, Lift Up Your Hearts includes several selections that integrate music with a variety of prayers, liturgies, and other acts of worship. Indeed, some of the best music in worship doesn’t stand on its own; it helps a congregation sing its way through the telling of a biblical story or pray through the prayers of the people. In contrast, the CCLI list and the larger worship industry are best at delivering ready-packaged songs that stand on their own. They are not well equipped (at least for now) to generate ways to integrate music and congregational prayer, or music and Lord’s Supper liturgies.

8. Hymnals give people access to a “cultural memory bank” that many desperately want.
I have been struck of late by the number of emerging churches that want to meet in old cathedrals (“Give me a building with a memory,” one pastor said). While some are fleeing from oppressive histories, many spiritual nomads are longing for a sense of history. It’s hard to think of a more poignant and accessible way of engaging history than by singing the songs used by Christians across the centuries. Using a hymnal we can sing the grand Trinitarian words of Ambrose, the memorable hymns of Watts and Wesley, Orthodox prayer refrains, and passionate revival hymns from Asia and Africa.

9. Hymnals can be appealing to seekers.
To be sure, for some seekers, a hymnal could well be a barrier to the faith—too foreign and incomprehensible on first reading. To other seekers, a hymnal could be appealing as a proof that the community takes its faith seriously, invests in enduring art forms, and is willing to encounter difficult texts and themes. (“I knew I could take these people seriously because of the way their songbook specifically mentioned ‘suicide,’ ‘war,’ and ‘grief,’” said one seeker). Hymnal lovers need to honestly realize how hymnals can be a barrier for some people, and hymnal detractors need to realize that they can be gift and attraction for others. 

10. A hymnal can be a surprisingly effective catechism for both brand-new and lifelong Christians.
Hymnals offer pithy, memorable, poetic answers to a host of questions that people have about the Christian faith. They summarize vast, sweeping biblical themes in the space of a single page, often with remarkable nuance. Even if a congregation doesn’t sing “In Christ Alone,” that text is a fine way to introduce people to the significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Further, a good hymnal will contain curricula for Christianity 101, 201, and 301 side by side. It is a powerful tool for learning about the faith for people at every stage of their faith journey.

In summary, hymnals are a good resource, not the only good resource. And they may not be even the best single resource for every one of these functions. But for overall value, it’s pretty hard to beat a single book that does so many things at once: 

• provides a comprehensive reference resource for finding songs and one technological mode of presenting songs;
• functions as a musical collection and a worship book, with prayers and liturgies for congregational use;
• presents a single-volume snap-shot of the diversity of the church throughout time and space, a kind of working experiment in the “catholicity” or “universality” of the church; and
• acts as a single source for strengthening devotional, pastoral care, educational, and liturgical ministries, making it possible to integrate these dimensions of the Christian life. 

And hymnals like Lift Up Your Hearts do all this while providing almost one thousand songs for around twenty dollars, or a mere two cents per song.

John D. Witvliet is director of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship and professor of worship, theology, & congregational and ministry studies at Calvin College and Calvin Theological Seminary.