Setlist 8-4-2019

This past Sunday was the eighth Sunday after Pentecost, and our songs were gathered with this in mind.  Below, you’ll find the list of the songs and artists. Clicking the song titles will take you to the lyrics.   If you want to talk about any of these, feel free to email me at jamie@ubcwaco.org.

Songs:

Come Thou Fount

Wayward Ones by The Gladsome Light

For Those Tears I Died by Jameson McGregor (adapted from Marsha Stevens)

Be Thou My Vision

Fever by Jameson McGregor

Your Love Is Strong by Jon Foreman

Doxology

How They Fit In:

There are many ways to think about the significance of songs and the way they fit together–-this is simply one way you can look at these songs in light of this week’s theme. 

Come Thou Fount: We sang this song to set our attention on God’s activity in our lives.

Wayward Ones: This is our communion hymn, and it contemplates Christ's self-giving love that is displayed and remembered in the eucharist.

For Those Tears I Died: This song is a part of our mass shooting liturgy. It is a lament that asks how long things will be this way.

Be Thou My Vision: We sang this song to petition God to be our vision, wisdom, security, and hope, as we navigate an uncertain world.

Fever: This song is about the ways in which we try to self-regulate our lives into status quos that should be otherwise, and imagines the work of God as a pathogen that overpowers our defenses.

Your Love Is Strong: We sang this song to look over our shoulder at last week’s songs. This is what we said about Your Love is Strong then: We sang this song to linger on the spirit of the Our Father.

Doxology: We close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos.

Setlist 3-17-2019

Yesterday was the second Sunday of Lent, and our songs were gathered with this in mind.  Below, you’ll find the list of the songs and artists. Clicking the song titles will take you to the lyrics.  Below the songs, you can find a brief example of one way you might think of these songs. If you want to talk about any of these, feel free to comment at the bottom of this page or email me at jamie@ubcwaco.org.

Songs:

In the Night by Andrew Peterson

Deliver Me by David Crowder* Band

For Those Tears I Died by Jameson McGregor (adapted from Marsha Stevens)

Acetone by Jameson McGregor

Be Thou My Vision

Doxology

How They Fit In:

There are many ways to think about the significance of songs and the way they fit together–-this is simply one way you can look at these songs in light of this week’s theme. 

In the Night: This song traces the thread of God’s presence within struggle throughout the biblical narrative, and invites us to step into the lineage of hope-in-despair.

Deliver Me: This song offers us language to carry through Lent as we turn toward the Living God.

For Those Tears I Died: We sang this song to accompany a time of prayer and lament for the mosque shootings in New Zealand.

Acetone: This song is about God cutting through the decorative ways we wear our religious convictions, revealing to us the tombs we disguise.

Be Thou My Vision: This song will accompany us through Lent, reminding us to turn to God for our vision, wisdom, and security.

Setlist 2-10-2019

Yesterday was the sixth Sunday of Epiphany, and our songs were gathered with this in mind.  Below, you’ll find the list of the songs and artists. Clicking the song titles will take you to the lyrics.  Below the songs, you can find a brief example of one way you might think of these songs. If you want to talk about any of these, feel free to comment at the bottom of this page or email me at jamie@ubcwaco.org.

Songs:

Holy, Holy, Holy

Mystery by ubcmusic (adapted from Charlie Hall)

Future/Past by John Mark McMillan

For Those Tears I Died by Jameson McGregor

Rise Up by BiFrost Arts

Doxology

How They Fit In:

There are many ways to think about the significance of songs and the way they fit together–-this is simply one way you can look at these songs in light of this week’s theme. 

Holy, Holy, Holy: We sang this song to begin our time together directing our attention toward the triune God and meditating on God’s presence among us.

Mystery: This song invites us to consider the death, resurrection, and enduring presence of Jesus as being transformative to the way we navigate our ordinary lives.

Future/Past: This song offers us language for expressing our gratitude that the Eternal has not abandoned us to our own devices, but instead has come alongside us in our time and place.

For Those Tears I Died: This is a song of lament which grasps for the healing of the wounds of the world, and raises a question about how long we are supposed to wait for all of this to be set right.

Rise Up: This song is a petition for God to come to the aid and defense of people who are trampled by our systems of power.

Doxology: We close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos. 

-JM

Setlist 2-18-2018

Yesterday was the first Sunday of Lent, and the songs were gathered with that in mind.  Below, you’ll find the list of the songs and artists. Clicking the song titles will take you to the lyrics.  Below the songs, you can find a brief example of one way you might think of these songs. If you want to talk about any of these, feel free to comment at the bottom of this page or email me at jamie@ubcwaco.org.

Songs:

Rise Up by Bifrost Arts

Come Thou Fount

Wandering by Jameson McGregor

For Those Tears I Died by Jameson McGregor

In the Night by Andrew Peterson

Be Thou My Vision

How They Fit In:

There are many ways to think about the significance of songs and the way they fit together–-this is simply one way you can look at these songs in light of this week’s theme. 

Rise Up: We sang this song to petition God to rise to the defense of the vulnerable, and by extension a reminder to ourselves that to be the people of God is to take up the cause of the vulnerable.

Come Thou Fount: This song offers us language to seek sustenance in who God is and root our hope in who God has been for us.

Wandering: This song praises God’s faithfulness in the midst of our own inconsistency and selfishness.

For Those Tears I Died: This song is a cry of lament.  I’ve thought of these words as being directly related to too many tragedies to even remember—it’s just a blur of despair at this point.  And I hate that.  But these are words I return to time and again to process my rage when faced with a reminder of how very evil we humans are capable of being.

In the Night: This song carries us through Lent all the way to Easter.  It is a record of God’s showing up in the midst of despair throughout the biblical narrative.

Be Thou My Vision:  Throughout the Lenten season, we will close our liturgies with these words to reaffirm our desire to seek our vision, wisdom, and security in God alone.

-JM

Setlist 10-15-2017

This was the nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost.  Our songs were gathered with this in mind.  Below, you’ll find the list of the songs and artists. Clicking the song titles will take you to the lyrics.  Below the songs, you can find a brief example of one way you might think of these songs. If you want to talk about any of these, feel free to comment at the bottom of this page or email me at jamie@ubcwaco.org.

Songs:

House of God Forever by Jon Foreman

Crown Him With Many Crowns by Jameson McGregor

Rise Up by Bifrost Arts

For Those Tears I Died by Jameson McGregor

Mystery by Jameson McGregor (adapted from Charlie Hall)

Doxology

How They Fit In:

There are many ways to think about the significance of songs and the way they fit together–-this is simply one way you can look at these songs in light of this week’s theme. 

House of God Forever: This song is essentially Psalm 23, and offers us language to express a trust in God's comforting us in the face of uncertainty.

Crown Him With Many Crowns: We sang this song to give voice to the lordship of Christ, with language of power-in-weakness.  In doing so, we call ourselves to imagine how this self-giving savior would have us live and move in the world.

Rise Up: This song is a call for both God and our own community to rise up and defend the vulnerable.

For Those Tears I Died: This song expresses a feeling of dislocation, abandonment, and perhaps just deep pain, and puts it in conversation with Jesus' solidarity with those who suffer.

Mystery: We sang this song to look over our shoulder at last week's songs.  This is what we said about Mystery then: This song proclaims the story of the death, resurrection, and expected return of Christ, and offers this story to us as a cause for a transforming Hope in the midst of whatever affliction might befall us.

Doxology: We close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos.

-JM

Setlist 7-23-2017

This was the seventh Sunday after Pentecost.  Our songs were gathered with this in mind, and heavily influenced by the lectionary texts (particularly, the weeds & wheat passage that Josh preached from).  Below, you’ll find the list of the songs and artists. Clicking the song titles will take you to the lyrics.  Below the songs, you can find an example of one way you might think of these songs in light of this week's theme. If you want to talk about any of these, feel free to comment at the bottom of this page or email me at jamie@ubcwaco.org.

Songs:

Hope by Jameson McGregor

Lord, I Need You by Matt Maher

There by Jameson McGregor

For Those Tears I Died by Jameson McGregor

Wandering by Jameson McGregor

Doxology

How They Fit In:

There are many ways to think about the significance of songs and the way they fit together–-this is simply one way you can look at these songs in light of this week’s theme. 

Hope: This song clings to the hope that the work of redemption made visible in the Resurrection will spread to the entirety of the cosmos.  This hope is characterized as such because, at the moment, things are still not as they should be--the weeds are growing up with the wheat, so to speak.

Lord, I Need You: This song is a confession of our need for the transformation of the Spirit in our own lives to form us into people who are like Christ, and for the Spirit to hold us together as we face any number of struggles in living in a world that is still broken.

There: This song proclaims that the same God who is imminent with us in our suffering also stands over and above every kind of brokenness as an Anchor that is holding us in place in the midst of the turbulence of history.

For Those Tears I Died: This song holds in tension both the solidarity of Christ with human suffering, and the cry of "how long?" from the worn-thin world.

Wandering: We sang this song to look over our shoulder at last week's songs.  This is what we said about Wandering then: This song allows us to confess our tendency to, knowingly or not, attempt to use God for our own ends, while also praising God for being consistently faithful.

Doxology: We close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos.

-JM

Setlist 10-2-2016

This was the twentieth Sunday after Pentecost, and our songs around the theme of our need for God, and God's faithfulness to us.  Below, you’ll find the list of the songs and artists. Clicking the song titles will take you to the lyrics. Below the songs, you can find recordings from Sunday morning of a few of them, and below the recordings, there is an example of one way you might think of these songs in light of this week's theme. If you want to talk about any of these, feel free to comment at the bottom of this page or email me at jamie@ubcwaco.org.

Songs:

All Creatures of Our God and King

Lord, I Need You by Matt Maher

Up On A Mountain by The Welcome Wagon

For Those Tears I Died by Jameson McGregor

Wayward Ones by The Gladsome Light

Doxology

How They Fit In:

There are many ways to think about the significance of songs and the way they fit together–-this is simply one way you can look at these songs in light of this week’s theme. 

All Creatures of Our God and King: We sang this song to begin our time together acknowledging our interconnectedness with all of creation through our mutual praise of God.  This song was born out of the writing of Saint Francis of Assisi.  He is memorable for many things, but one overarching theme of his life was an awareness of our siblinghood with creatures that are not human.  He extended this familial relationship even to the sun and the moon.  Every created thing bears witness to the work of the Creator, and sings a song in praise of God's sustaining work.  God's sustaining work is ongoing, and we are ever-needful of it.  This song allowed us to begin our liturgy by practicing the correct orientation of our attention.

Lord, I Need You:  This song voices our need for God's help in all aspects of life, but particularly when it comes to doing the things that we should do.  Left to our own devices, we have a tendency to disappoint--or, worse, harm--ourselves and those around us.  Over time, we might find ourselves more permanently formed by the Spirit, but we never get to the point where we do not in fact need God's presence.

Up On A Mountain: This song recalls the story of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, allowing us to meditate on the inner anguish he faced as the time of his death approached.  The point of it is that, when faced with this horror, he was at no point interested in forfeiting the outcome of his death.  He knew it was a long way down.  He knew what was at stake.  And now he is our advocate, and sent the Spirit to be our Comforter.  Because of this, we are not alone, but are held in the mind of God.

For Those Tears I Died: I've played this song once before.  It's consists of equal parts confession, despair, anger, and hope.  When I wrote it, I thought I knew what tragedy it referred to, but it now points to an ever-growing list of tragedies.  I recently recorded an acoustic demo of it, which you can stream here:

this song was written in the summer of 2016 in the wake of a series of tragic events that continues to grow. it is loosely inspired by the Martha Stevens hymn by the same name and includes most of that hymn's chorus.

Wayward Ones: We sing this song every time we take communion to remind ourselves of a couple of things.  First, we are a broken people--though we are seeking to become more like Jesus, we often fail at this.  Second, Christ has given Himself for us despite our brokenness.  We take communion to remember the sacrifice of Jesus on our behalf, even though we did not, and do not, deserve it.

Doxology: We close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos.

-JM

Setlist 7-10-2016

This was the eighth Sunday after Pentecost, and our songs were gathered around the themes of lament and hope. Below, you’ll find the list of the songs and artists. Clicking the song titles will take you to the lyrics. Below the songs, you can find recordings from Sunday morning of a few of them, and below the recordings, there is an example of one way you might think of these songs in light of this week's theme. If you want to talk about any of these, feel free to comment at the bottom of this page or email me at jamie@ubcwaco.org.

Songs:

Rescue Is Coming by David Crowder* Band

Peace (Change Everything) by Jameson McGregor

Because He Lives by Bill and Gloria Gaither

For Those Tears I Died by Jameson McGregor (adapted from M. Stevens)

All Creatures of Our God and King

Doxology

Recordings:

From time to time, we'll post live recordings of the songs from Sunday morning.  These recordings aren't what you would call polished--sometimes guitars are out of tune, sometimes the vocals are off--but they are records of moments we've shared together.  Here's one from this week.

How They Fit In:

There are many ways to think about the significance of songs and the way they fit together–-this is simply one way you can look at these songs in light of this week’s theme. 

Rescue Is Coming: In the wake of a week full of pain, anger, and longing, we began our time together proclaiming that this present darkness is not the final word.  Now is a time when we need to address systemic issues of racism, police brutality (both racially motivated and not), cultural addictions to violence, and overall division, but we placed those conversation on hold as we entered worship to reorient ourselves toward our only Hope.

Peace (Change Everything):  As we have been moving through these difficult weeks, we have been singing Advent songs, because Advent is the time where we look around, see how dark the world is, and voice our longing for a Light.  We sang Change Everything again this week because it afforded us the chance to voice our longing for change, and to turn to God as the catalyst of this change.  

Because He Lives:  We sang this song with a couple of things in mind: First, the claims made in this song are true—Jesus is alive in a way that is more  than real.  And so, we as individuals can stake our hope in One who is outside of ourselves and be held there.  Second, Jesus is alive in another way in the people of Christ, those who have been and are being formed by His story and Spirit.  Because of this, the people of Christ are partnered with Jesus in actively reconciling the world to God.  But we need to know that sometimes that might mean doing things.

Furthermore,  we need to know that the true claims to hope that Because He Lives makes are quite difficult for some people to claim for themselves.  Namely, the “calm assurance” that our children can face uncertain days because He lives.  If we listen to the cries of the black community in America, there is a decided lack of this "calm assurance," because their life experience says otherwise.  And, yes, there is a way in which the "calm assurance" of Because He Lives is rooted in what Jesus' resurrection means broadly for the whole of human history, but if the church is the body of Christ, and this body is living and breathing in the present, that should bring some measure of hope to the present as well. 

So we sang this as a proclamation of something true, but also as a challenge to ourselves to take seriously the fact that being the people of Christ demands something about the way we move about in the world, and that when we see that life experience makes it difficult for someone to claim the same hope that we do, we should make it our purpose to do something about that.

For Those Tears I Died:  I came across this hymn text a couple of months ago, and started to reimagine it.  After a few weeks of this "reimagining," I had stripped the text down to about 4 lines, knowing that they contained an important truth, but not knowing how to structure the rest of the song.  In the wake of the attack on the LGBT community in Orlando, I started keeping track of things that I was praying as I expressed anger, confusion, and ultimately self-loathing for my own complicity in systems of hate by not being very vocal in combatting them.  The song continued to take shape this past week as I felt more of those same emotions.  This song isn't finished, and I don't know what it will look like when it is.  At the moment, it's part existential despair, part personal confession, and part proclamation of hope.  Probably the most personal side of it for me is the line in the second verse, "I've made an idol out of comfort, praised by keeping my mouth shut//but now it's found a thirst for blood."  I'm what you might call incredibly talented at not speaking out against something I know to be wrong when I feel I can slip by unscathed if I keep my head down.  This is fundamentally unchristian, and I am attempting to lean into repenting of it.

All Creatures of Our God and King: We sang this song to stand alongside creatures of all kinds in acknowledging God as our creator, sustainer, and the One who is  reconciling all things to Godself, knowing that the Story that God is weaving is far from over.

Doxology: We close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos.

-JM