Today was the first and only day that we will sing Christmas songs here at Glenville.  With our special “Connections” Sunday last week, this was the first week that we could sing Christmas stuff.  Next week, we have our concert, and I guess we will sing a couple things during the Choir concert, but it will be with track, and not live band.  I have not heard any numbers, but I think we were down just a bit today.  Not much, but enough to make a visible difference.

We started both services with:

Joy To The World (Casting Crowns) – Handel/Watts/Motts
Angels From The Realms of Glory (Steven Curtis Chapman) – Montgomery/Smart/Chapman/Schopmeyer

Both of these were a lot of fun to do, and the sound is fresh and energetic.  I love doing Christmas songs, but after a while, they get a little old.  These new arrangements really help.

Our Pastor then welcomed everyone, and introduced the choir.  Our choir is prepping for our concert next week, so we did another one of the songs that we will do next week.  I like having the opportunity to sing some of our concert music before our concert because it lets us preview the music for the church and hopefully get them excited about what we are doing.  That should translate into our people inviting more people.  We will see!  Our choir sang “Everything Glorious” from the music collection of the same title.

Our next set of music included:

O Come All Ye Faithful (Third Day) – Avery/Carr/Powell/Lee Anderson/Shipps/Galbraith (first service music ended there)
Enough – Tomlin/Giglio
How Great Is Our God – Tomlin/Reeves/Cash
Here I Am To Worship – Hughes

Our Pastor then spoke on “The Other Miraculous Birth,” which was based on the conception and birth of John the Baptist.  He talked about the joy that surrounded John’s birth as the forerunner of Christ.  People responded very well during the response time.

We faced the dreaded “gremlins” in the sound system today.  Already have our audio company coming out tomorrow to get it checked out and fixed so we are not having to face the issue again during the concert next week.  It was really strange… the system would just stop sending the sound out intermittently.  All the channels on the board were still lighting up and looked like they were working, but all was silent.  It would last anywhere from 2-10 seconds.  It made it a little bit difficult today.  Even with those problems though, there was still a great spirit and great energy today.

This post is also part of Sunday Setlists at Fred McKinnon [dot] com.