Free Worship (The First Attempt)
A few weeks ago we took our first crack at free worship at a church. What is free worship? I’m calling it this but I heard it called ad lib, Hillsong titles them Selah on their CD’s. Whatever you want to call it, I love it. Basically what it is, is a instrumental section where the congregation (and worship team) sings, prays, shouts unplanned words. The idea here is that the congregation express their hearts to God. The songs that we are singing on any given sunday may not be what is in someone’s heart. We might be singing the chorus to Trading My Sorrows (Yes Lord, yes Lord, yes, yes Lord) but someone may not be there. Their heart may be screaming NO! God may be sifting them (pruning, a popular term at FCOV) they may need to cry out to God that they don’t like what he is doing and it may be through that expression that God show them His will and comfort them.
I want to give our congregation the opportunity to express their heart to God. Not just Matt Redman’s, Tim Hughes, Chris Tomlin’s, or Darlene Zschech’s heart.
Now that I’ve explained what we are trying to do this is how it went.
We chose to play the instrumental after Hosanna on Hillsong United’s All of the Above CD. I chose to sing the part Brooke Fraser sings because I am not too comfortable lead this kind of thing yet. I ask our sound man to pump a lot of the congregation into my monitor so I could hear how they were responding. During Hosanna they were singing strong but (expectedly) it kind of petered out when we got into the instrumental but I did hear a few singing I heard someone praying out loud. It definitely felt a little awkward but whenever you try something and you’re trying to figure it out there is bound to be an awkward stage. I think this is important enough of a thing to do that we will continue, even if a little awkward right now.