ICOC Worship – thoughts on strengths and opportunities

I’m grateful to be a part of a family of churches known as the ICOC (International Churches of Christ) with hundreds of churches around the world.  I just returned from being at ICMC this past weekend, our conference for campus students in our churches, with about 2200 students in attendance.  It was awesome to get to be led in worship by a phenomenal group of worship leaders, under the leadership of Marc Persing and Julia Dunn.  I was so proud of the whole team.  Here are some things I appreciated:

– worshipful presence of the whole team – clearly about God not them
– excellence in execution and ability
– continually pulling in the church – lots of voices only points to hear their voices
– nice flow of things, prayers interwoven, etc
– good mix of classics and new songs
– new songs that were introduced were accessible, not too hard to sing
– diverse representation on stage, great worshipful leaders that were super giving
– whenever possible trying to put songs in blocks together instead of spaced out between talking things
– it really worked to pull the students up and in the aisles for the worship night
– Loved the new songs by disciples from our family of churches! Whenever possible I’m all for playing favorites with songs by those in our fellowship –something special about that

I have been humbled to get to have some of my songs sung in several of these congregations and to have been involved in worship ministry for a long time, so people sometimes ask my thoughts about worship ministry in our churches, and I had lots of great conversations at the conference.  I recap a few of my thoughts in this video.

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