As always, this post is part of Fred McKinnon's Sunday Set List Carnival. You can click here to read more sets from this past Sunday.
Centerpoint Church 12/21/08
Pre-Service
-God With Us (MercyMe)
Opening Set
-O Come, All Ye Faithful
-Your Grace Is Enough (Matt Maher, Chris Tomlin)
-The First Noel
-Away In A Manger
Closing Song
-What Child Is This
We hit the Christmas music full force this week. As I mentioned in my previous post, I actually really like Christmas music, but haven't done much of it yet this year for a variety of reasons. This week, we decided it was time. We opened with MercyMe's "God With Us", which is explicitly a "Christmas" song, but nailed our series theme head on. We played a pretty straightforward version of "O Come, All Ye Faithful" and repeated "Your Grace Is Enough" from last week. Then things got fun... I worked up a new arrangement this week of "The First Noel" which included the tune of "Away In A Manger" and then flowed into that song (with a key change, of course :-P ) We had a little trouble getting it started (had to switch out a mic), but once we got it going, the band nailed it and it sounded great. Hopefully we've worked out all of these technical things (as one guy told me after church - "seems like you should be good for a while with equipment problems after these last few weeks") We closed with a very upbeat version of "What Child Is This".
This was the third week in our "Searching For More Than Santa" series (which ends Wednesday evening at our Christmas Eve service) and we used another of our Jesus vs. Santa (think Mac vs. PC) "ads" - our congregation has really responded well to these clips, and they've done a great job of setting the scene for our pastor's messages.
We're switching gears a little bit and going with a very intimate, scaled back approach, which should sit in a nice contrast to yesterday's service (at least that's what I'm hoping)... challenging though, since every song we're doing that night required a new arrangement from me! But more on that later this week...
