01.28.07 eXchange evaluation

What’s an eXchange evaluation? Click here to find out.

While, overall, I think the set went well, I believe we hit some opposition, which is to be expected. I’ll explain more as we proceed here.

We opened with Crowder’s There Is No One Like You, a fun diddy to get the gathering started. For some reason, I yelled “Here we go!” at the break, and I still can’t tell you why I did. Otherwise, the song went well, and did a good job of setting the tone for the evening (QAFE; Quiet, Action, Famous, Empty, being the key teaching points. Ultimately, we need to shout like those that marched around Jericho did, then see God act, not the other way around… sometimes).

Turns out, Dan, our electric guitarist extraordinaire for the evening, had no monitor during the first song. During the teaching time the sound crew got that fixed, but that wasn’t the last problem we’d have that evening.

The song set after the teaching went like this:

• Came To My Rescue
• Wonderful Maker
• Lord You Have My Heart
• Hungry (I’m falling)
• Once Again
• Did you feel the Mountains Tremble
• Make a Joyful Noise/I Will Not Be Silent

Scot‘s teaching ran a bit long (but the teaching was good, so it was worth it) which pinched us a bit for time (we ran over 10 minutes or so) but after the next to the last song, we were about three minutes over time. The room was too electric to stop, so we did our last song anyway. I think it was the right decision.

Came To My Rescue was the only new song for the evening. It’s from Hillsong United’s United We Stand album, and it’s one of my new favs. It really only builds at the end of the song, but keeps a locomotive-style tempo to it. You know something big’s coming, and it’s up to the band to capitalize, which I think we did. I’ll definitely be doing this one again in the future.

Somewhere midway in that set, Larry’s B3 organ just stopped. Granted, he had two other keyboards, but he was scrambling to find an organ sound on one of them to keep consistency. There was a noticeable dip in the “fullness” of the band, but it was temporary, and Larry worked his magic to get right back in there and keep plugging along.

Then, near the end of Once Again (we did a faster, more rock version of the song) Jack Fox, the associate pastor of eXchange, came on stage, stopped worship to announce that we had a bit of an emergency back in the kid’s area. He walked off stage, and we were left standing there in the uncomfortable silence. So we just fired up the next song and kept moving.

I made a mistake yesterday in not eating anything after about 11:45 (a quick lunch of leftover Chinese food) and I could tell during worship. To my own ears, my voice sounded shaky and not confident, and I immediately knew it was a lack of energy. Lesson learned (my wife’s actually going to start up a food ministry in getting some stuff prepped for the eXchange team in the evenings, so if you’d like to be a part of that, give her a ring at the MCC offices and let her know).

I missed some notes throughout the evening (weakness related I believe) but I could hear the crowd during Did you feel the Mountains Tremble and it was energizing! To hear them plow through the room like they did was unparalleled. Sure, we had run into some opposition earlier in the night (I’m not quick to say, “oh a couple things failed? IT’S SATAN!” but I’m not going to just count it out either) but the set still finished strong. After the closing prayer, we went back into a slower version of I Will Not Be Silent, very reverent and fun.

All in all, it was a good night, and while we’ll never have a “perfect” night, we did well enough with everything that happened. It’s funny that sometimes, nights like last night work out better, with the organic and real rising to the top for everyone to see. We’re all just a bunch of screw-ups anyway, so why not screw up big and loud? That’s what my band director in high school taught me. “If you’re going to mess up, mess up big, and mess up loud.”

[tags]came to my rescue, hillsong united, jericho, sunday school, exchangemcc, worshipplus[/tags]