The Sunday Musician

I’m on vacation this week in the Seattle area, visiting my daughters. This post is part of Fred McKinnon’s Sunday Set Lists feature.

(Don't miss last week's 'My Big Fat Training School' and 'Ten Years In Search of Amazing Grace'. And this Tuesday I'll attempt to answer the question, "Will There Be Franklin Planners in Hell?')

Several weeks ago I did a short series of posts entitled ‘Finding Moments’ (part 1, part 2, part 3) , and I have to tell you—I got about month’s worth of moments last night. New Song is a fairly young (in church years—10 or so) congregation meeting in a gorgeous old church building in downtown Tacoma, WA. 

Young also in average age—my estimate is 25—they were wildly energetic. Decent, orderly, but wow—enough enthusiasm to light up a city.

And that’s exactly what they’re hoping to do—light up Tacoma. Their efforts are definitely outward, and largely youth-focused. They had their beginnings in 1997 as a college youth ministry, and have obviously retained that energy and culture. Lots of talk last night about reaching out to high schools, middle schools, college campuses, etc.

I had hoped to meet their worship director, Aaron Barker, had emailed and set it up, but was told he was home sick. I had also hoped to sit in on their rehearsal Thursday night, but it didn’t work out—wow, are they busy.

Worship last night was led by Sean Hughes, and he did an outright masterful job, in my opinion. The entire service—an hour and forty-five minutes—was devoted to worship and pastor-led prayer, the band never leaving the stage. Rehearsed material interwove with long, improvised sections, which the audience readily, eagerly followed.

We walked in to the old disco hit, ‘Good Times’ (click here if you don’t remember it), and while it played, Sean asked everyone to be patient—the computer had crashed, and they’d lost all the song lyrics. While the slides were re-written, the audience talked, moved to the music, etc. When it became apparent there would be a wait, the band started playing along with the recording, the guitar soloed a little, and Sean rapped a few made-up lines about church, worship, etc. Eventually they pulled the track out, and the improvised on the song until the slides were ready.

For the next thirty minutes or so we sang familiar songs, but much of it was improvised. If you read my Finding Moments posts, you know one of my requirements for creating these moments is permission—permission for the band to take the risks, permission for the audience to just flow along. This they did in spades. In fact, the audience was obviously expecting it. Over and over the band pushed louder, pulled back, and followed verbal, visual and musical cues to repeat sections. We’d repeat phrases, move on to a new song, go back and quote the song we just did, etc. The band had obviously done this many, many times, and they pulled it off seamlessly. In fact, we went a full half hour before the band ever stopped.

The pastor invited a guy onstage to ‘sing over us’, and with a huge, operatic voice he improvised on a theme for probably seven or eight minutes. Later on young woman did the same. At one point Molly turned to me and said, “All they’re doing is creating moments!” The band kept a sharp eye on the leader, the leader deferred to the pastor, who walked up over and over to interject, and the result was a seamless 105 minutes. There were points also where one or another band member had a say in the direction; for instance the drummer several times started a long, building set of sixteenths on the snare, which the leader picked up on.

This might now be everyone’s cup of tea, and I certainly found myself out of energy the last half hour, but it was a sterling example of leading an audience into an experience.

'My Big Fat Training School'

'Ten Years In Search of Amazing Grace'