You came to this world
Our Heavenly King
Who took human form
And carried our sin
With love so amazing, You lifted the chains from the lost
Your blood for our shame, You surrendered Your life on the cross
Denied and betrayed, beaten and mocked
Tortured and crucified, forsaken by God
With love so amazing, You lifted the chains from the lost
Your blood for our shame, You surrendered Your life on the cross
This is Love
This is Love
You rose from the grave, Victorious King
Your beautiful sacrifice has conquered our sin
With love so amazing, You lifted the chains from the lost
Your blood for our shame, You surrendered Your life on the cross
Jesus Christ, You gave Your life for us,
For us, This is love
Jesus Christ, You gave Your life for us,
For us, This is love
Amanda Wolfram is an incredibly gifted worship leader at Kerith Community Church. Last Friday she took a team of musicians to lead worship at Yeldall Manor. For more information about Yeldall Manor, click here. Here’s what she thought:
I’m a bit of a restless soul by nature and can’t get to sleep at night because I’m too busy counting lost sheep! (Boom boom!) But in all honesty, many of us feel the tug at the heart strings to get the gospel of hope ‘out there’ by whatever means, to broken and hurting people. And for this reason I leapt at the chance to take a few members of my band to Yeldall Manor last Friday. (For those who don’t know much about it, Yeldall Manor is a rather special place, hidden in the middle of nowhere, offering residential rehabilitation for men with drug and alcohol addictions.)
As we pulled up, a crisp, crescent-shaped moon covered by wispy, watery clouds just gave enough light to see a slightly imposing but beautiful country estate; it felt as though we had arrived at a Harry Potter film set!
Andy Partington, who heads up the work there, warmly greeted us and made us feel both welcome and at ease and as people started to arrive in their droves, you could feel a buzz of expectation growing in the room. The purpose of the evening was to celebrate the graduation of two heroes – Gary and Taff – who had successfully completed the Yeldall Course and had personally overcome huge battles for freedom in their own lives. From the moment we struck up the first chord, the place took off and we all felt that we were joining in with a party that had been initiated in heaven well before we had arrived.
It was one of those special times that you can hardly put into words but God was there powerfully and Andy did such a brilliant job of getting the balance between the wonder of the transforming work of Jesus in people’s lives alongside the tremendous effort it takes on a daily basis to overcome different temptations that each of us face.
I loved the rawness of the occasion, the brutal honesty, the sense of God’s smile and favour and the passionate revelling we all enjoyed at the wonderful message of hope. I once remember John Wimber sharing that as a young Christian he regularly used to ask his pastor, ‘So when do we get to do the stuff?’ Last Friday, we did the stuff and it felt really, really good.
As promised, below is a photo diary of last week’s visit to Kerith Melle. Apologies for the less-than-comprehensive photos…we were busy meeting at many of the core moments! Hopefully you will find this insightful…
Leaving the Kerith Centre for the airport…
Liam isn’t the best packer. Too many toiletries!
This is where Howard & Elizabeth and George & Charley live – this is also where Kerith Melle meet.
Evenings spent listening to wisdom from Ben and debating everything under the sun…
…in front of this incredible fire.
Ben talking with Marc, a small group and worship leader.
Dave and Liam before the meeting
Dave leading worship with Marc and his son, Jian (no idea how to spell his name!)
The youth and children then head upstairs to their own meetings
Liam leading the youth work while Ben preaches downstairs…
Jam session after lunch with some of the youth
Liam made two new friends…
The next day, Dave was ill…
…while Ben and Liam met with church leaders…and Liam, being a Youth Pastor after all, took this…
One of the things we occasionally do as a team is lead worship at our church plant in Melle, France. Led by Howard and Elizabeth Reece-Smith, one of the most inspirational couples I have ever met, the church meets once a month (in English), often with a speaker and worship leader from Bracknell. You can find out more about the church plant here.
On Saturday, Liam Parker and I will accompany Ben Davies to Melle for Sunday’s meeting. While we’re there, I’ll have the privilege of leading worship and Liam, our Youth Pastor, will meet with various people to talk about youth work in the area. Ben, of course, will be preaching and sharing his considerable experience in church leadership – having led Kerith Community Church for 43 years before handing its leadership over to Simon, he’s got plenty to talk about! I’m excited about the foundations that are being built in Melle and as always, look forward to seeing what God will do there. Next week, I’ll post some pictures so you can see what is happening there for yourself!
In our last post, ‘Why we do what we do’, Helen gave a fantastic insight into the motives behind what we do on a Sunday. Today, I wanted to share a little about the some of the things we’ve been experimenting with in order to create a setting where people feel free to meet with God in a powerful way.
If you were at church a few weeks ago, you would have heard the worship team play a song called ‘Hallelujah’ from the latest Kerith Worship CD, ‘This Is Love’. What you may or may not have noticed was the heavy use of orchestral instruments within the live version of the song…but with a real lack of orchestral instruments on the stage. What’s going on?!
We knew from the first time Matt played the song to us that it had to be stylistically different to anything else we’d done before. We consciously made the choice to push the boundaries of what we were capable of with this song to create a feel that actually reflects the word ‘Hallelujah’; joyful, thanksgiving, celebratory. Our song arrangements are often very guitar driven, which suits the faster styled songs but is not always quite as well suited to songs with a slower tempo. Whilst a standard ‘rock band’ set up suits us for the majority of what we do (at the moment), we knew that we had to tweak things a little in order to do the song justice.
On the track (Click to Download), you can hear that we used only one very sparse guitar part. Guitars are fantastic instruments to create a sense of ‘bigness’ in a song; as is the typical drum groove you’d hear in most rock music. Having removed both, our challenge was to create an ‘epic’ feel to accompany our proclamations of ‘hallelujah’ in a way that’s even close to fitting of our God. Since March 2011, we’ve been working on ways to translate those orchestral sounds to the stage.
This has prompted hours upon hours of research and conversations – and we’ve learnt a huge amount along the way. One of our tests was at LIFE, our youth event. We experimented with what we dubbed ‘Electro Worship’…attempting Hillsong United’s ‘With Everything’ (our version was heavily influenced by Elevation Worship). This was the result:
Essentially, the solution we arrived at was the use of backing tracks and ‘loops’. Now, I know what some of you are thinking (I’ve heard this a number of times): “but that’s not live music!! Heretic!” To that I’d simply say that it should be irrelevant whether the band is live or pre-recorded; it should actually be irrelevant whether there is any music whatsoever when we come to worship God. Our focus as a worship team is help our congregation connect with God and we’ll do whatever it takes to get there. Having said that, we are very much using the technology at our disposal to supplement what we do on the platform; visually, you won’t notice any difference!
These are exciting times as we look to find new ways to worship our Lord in spirit and in truth. There was a day when the organ was a modern tool for worship; one day we will move on from the use of electric guitars and even from the use of laptops. One thing is certain though – our purpose for worship will never change, for our God will never change.
