LifeWay Worship Project.blog

Unfortunately, we won't be able to help you celebrate the U2Charist.

On Monday (Tuesday after a holiday weekend) mornings, we'll post set lists from the prior Sunday. Just post them online and then shoot them to the email address linked on the right column.

This week... only one:

• SunRidge Church

Terry Delaney at saidatsouthern.com reviews James Bartley's book Worship that Pleases God.

Has anyone been to Israel and New Breed's Worship Conference? The conference was just announced.

Mark Hare, senior editor at the Democrat and Chronicle newspaper of Rochester, NY talks at length about the megachurches in his area.

If you've ever been to a LifeWay Worship Leadership Conference at Ridgecrest or Glorieta, you know that we try to cover all the bases: choir, praise team, worship, children, students, tech, and more. One of the responses that we hear from time to time is "this was great, but I want to go more in-depth."

Our friends at Yamaha, who have been long time supporters of "music week," have connected with Shure and Martin Professsional to create a new conference called the Worship Arts Technology Summit or "WATS" for short. This national event is the "next level" of training for two groups of leaders in your church. As you would expect, there are going to be in-depth sessions for technical people: sound, light and media. However, they're also offering something you might not expect: the same kind of things for guitarists, vocalists, and even musicians who'd like to arrange for praise band.

When I sat down with Mike Overlin, Yamaha's worship resources manager, he shared with me his heart about this conference. Even though they'll be using Shure, Yamaha and Martin products at the conference, this isn't a hard sell event. You're not going to feel like you're at a timeshare presentation. Even if you use products from other manufacturers at your church, you're going to learn a lot. What this conference is focused on is training and equipping the worship community. To me, that's one of the things that LifeWay is called to do to, and we don't have our own tech conference, so that's why I wanted to make our blog readers aware of the it.

The event is being held at the Maranatha Conference Center in Muskegon, Michigan, September 14-18... not a bad place to go in the middle of the summer, and will be at two more locations in 2009. More details at worshipartstechnologysummit.com.