Setlist 5-7-2017

This week was the fourth Sunday of Easter, and our songs were gathered around the theme of....Easter.  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:

Chariot by Page France

Pulse by Jameson McGregor

How Great Thou Art

Pain 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. 

Chariot: The chorus of this song captures a central theme of the Easter season: we will become a happy ending.  In this simple phrase, we find the core implication of the Resurrection.  The Love of God is unhindered on a fundamental level, even by death.  God's Yes overwhelms any No that might come before it.  

Pulse: This song speaks to the effect of the Resurrection on life in the world.  The Resurrection is driven by the transformative power that spreads through the entire cosmos, the Spirit of God.  And this same transformative power is working to raise what is dead in us.  

How Great Thou Art: We sang this song to look over our shoulder at last week's songs.  This is what we said about How Great Thou Art then: This song gives us language to situate the death and resurrection of Jesus within a broader observation of God's grandeur.  The song begins with an observation of the wonders God has made throughout the cosmos, and goes on to observe the trajectory of God's making all things new.  In the chorus, it offers us a chance to practice channeling this wonder into praise of God.

Pain: In the death and Resurrection of Jesus, we find that God is able to bear the weight of our suffering and somehow paint life on the other side. This Event offers us a picture of what God can make of our own pain, and it stands as an image of Hope.  The chorus of this song,

but the God of the Lighter Load
can take the weight of the pain we hold
until the sting becomes about much more than the pain
it's the place
that we dwell in a  Living Hope
the architecture of the ones who know
that, in the end, healing comes like the day:
from the night

is not suggesting that God takes our pain away, but instead enters into our pain and is carrying out the work of transformational healing.  This Hope hinges on the image of the Resurrection, on the fact that Jesus's suffering was not miraculously alleviated or cut short, but rather was the first part of a broader story that transcended the suffering itself.  

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 5-29-2016

This was the second Sunday after Pentecost, and our songs were once again gathered with the Holy Spirit 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 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 atjamie@ubcwaco.org.

Songs:

Just A Closer Walk With Thee

Your Love Is Strong by Jon Foreman

Be Thou My Vision

Pain by Jameson McGregor

Holy, Holy, Holy

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. 

Just A Closer Walk With Thee: In the wake of Pentecost, we have entered into ordinary time, though the Holy Spirit is still very much on our minds.  Just A Closer Walk With Thee is in many ways a song we might think of as being directed toward Jesus, but the Spirit is our connection to the Person of Jesus.  Furthermore, the presence of the Spirit among us is central to our following Jesus, as Jesus lived by the Spirit.  With this in mind, the core petition of this song is addressed to Jesus, but seeks the guidance of the Spirit.

Your Love Is Strong: This song is essentially a meditation on the Lord's Prayer, with an emphasis on being transformed into Kingdom people.  When we think of transformation, we think of the Spirit--the Spirit is the One who does the weaving of our stories, who dwells in our interconnectivity and helps to shape us.  We sang this song to ask the Spirit to continue this work.

Be Thou My Vision:  As with the previous two songs, we sang this song as a petition to the Spirit to shape us into people whose vision, wisdom, security, and hope, are all oriented toward the love of God.  

Pain: I had the opportunity to share this song a couple of months ago at a service at Baylor that was a Space for Lament for people affected by sexual violence.  This song is ultimately about how damaging pain of all kinds can be when buried inside of us, and how God is able and willing to take the weight of our pain.  By that, I don't mean take it away, though I believe in time God moves us forward on a journey of healing (however that might look), but instead I mean that God takes the weight upon Godself--that we don't carry it alone.  The second verse of the song has a more particular kind of pain in view: that of keeping secrets, of sweeping our own evils under the rug and carrying around the guilt.  God carries this pain with us as well, and enacts healing for these situations.  Last week, the institution of Baylor began the process of reckoning with its own evils.  And this reckoning has the potential to be painful in many different ways.  But God is in the midst of this kind of pain too.  I recently put out a video of this song, which you can watch here:

Holy, Holy, Holy: We sang this song to look over our shoulder at our songs from two weeks ago (I was out of town last week).  This is what we said about Holy, Holy, Holy then: We sang this song to begin our time together singing about the particularity of God, as we acknowledge the Spirit as part of the Trinity for the first time in the Christian calendar this year.

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 1-31-2016

This week, our songs were gathered around the theme of prayer.  Below, you’ll find the list of the songs and artists. Clicking the song titles will take you to the lyrics. Below the songs, 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 by David Crowder* Band

Your Love Is Strong by Jon Foreman

Fall Afresh by Jeremy Riddle

Pain by Jameson McGregor

SMS (Shine) by David Crowder* Band

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 conceiving of all of creation praising the Creator.  Interestingly, this song spends a great deal of time regarding the movements of planetary bodies as praise.  We may consider prayer broadly as a form of address to God, so, naturally, praise would fit the bill for some form of prayer.  Thinking this way, we might consider prayer the natural state of the cosmos--a fundamental part of what it is to be.

Your Love Is Strong: This song has Jesus' model prayer (the Lord's Prayer) embedded into its DNA, both broadly in the verses and explicitly in the bridge.  In using this prayer to frame the repeated "Your love is strong," we proclaim to both God and ourselves the driving assurance behind the Lord's Prayer.

Fall Afresh: This song is itself a prayer to the Holy Spirit asking for revitalization.  We sang it, in part, to practice addressing the Spirit in prayer together, and also specifically to practice voicing the desire for the Spirit's presence among us.

Pain: This song is about the fact that God can handle brutal honesty about our pain in prayer.  There is a strong (that almost feels like an understatement) tradition in Scripture of the people of God voicing their pain to God--both in crying out for help and in raising a charge against God--and God never seems to smite people for their honesty.  God can take it.  God can take it because, through Jesus, God understands our pain.  And more than just being willing to listen to us voice our pain, God is faithful in working to weave our most tragic stories into a story that is decidedly untragic.

SMS (Shine): We sang this song to look over our shoulder at last week's songs.  This is what we said about SMS (Shine) then: We sang this song to give voice to the longing that we all share at one time or another to be lifted out of dark places, or at the very least to be given some kind of glimpse of God when we feel abandoned.  We voice this longing confidently, knowing that God hears us when we call and does not cast us aside.  

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 9-13-2015

This week, our songs were gathered around the theme of transformation.  Below, you’ll find the list of the songs and artists. Clicking the song titles will take you to the lyrics. Below the songs, 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

Amazing Grace by Citizens & Saints

How Great Thou Art

Be Thou My Vision

Pain by Jameson McGregor

Fall Afresh by Jeremy Riddle

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. 

Amazing Grace: Perhaps the most surface-level take away from this song is that the Grace of God has saved us, and I think that is legitimate, but we sang Amazing Grace this week to think about the fact that this gift of Grace does not merely change our status of salvation, but knocks around in our lives and transforms us into people who are more like Jesus.  

How Great Thou Art: We sang this song to practice recognizing the works of God in history, and responding with praise.  This response is something we partner with the Holy Spirit to cultivate within ourselves--a transformation that we would do well to leave ourselves open to.  We can easily get to a place where we accept the wonders of God as simply the way things are, but this song calls us to maintain a sense of awe--to allow ourselves to be transformed into a people who carry a sensitivity to such wonders.  This might look like being the kind of people who are excited--and driven to worship--when the scientific community discovers another layer of complexity in the cosmos, knowing that science more often than not opens up doors to seeing just how much we don't know about the way things work.  It might also look like being the kind of people who, upon seeing someone do something we would consider awful, turn our minds to the dark places in ourselves and think about what God has done for us, and how much more God can do within us.  

Be Thou My Vision: We sang this song as a communal prayer that God would transform the way we see the world, and the way we live in it.  [I changed a line of this song over the summer--if you missed the explanation for that change, you can check out the setlist from that week here.]

Pain: This song is about the danger of keeping our pain locked up in ourselves.  I have two broad categories of pain in mind here.  On the one hand, this pain might be considered externally caused--the emotional effects of something that has happened.  On the other hand, the pain I'm talking about is self-inflicted--it's the guilt, the fear of being found out, that accompanies our own downfalls.  I can't speak for you, but I know that my tendency is to try and ignore things that hurt me (in an emotional sense), regardless of how serious they are, thinking I can move on unscathed this way.  The problem is, I've found that pain has a way of poisoning me to a certain extent--be it through leaving me with a dull anger that affects my general mood, or through sizzling like white noise, clouding my thoughts and social interactions.  My inclination is to carry my own weight, so to speak, but I'm ill-equipped for such a task.  Jesus talks about setting aside our heavy "yokes" and taking up His easy "yoke."  I'm pretty sure he's talking about setting aside a meticulous code of religious laws, and taking up the law of love, but I don't think it is inappropriate to apply the same image to our own anxieties and sources of pain.  I've been thinking about anxiety and emotional suffering a lot lately, and I've been asking a lot of questions.  One of these is why the pain of [insert source of emotional suffering] fades over time.  Why do things that wreck us emotionally have the potential to get better over time?  One answer might be this: the context changes: the world didn't end, life moved on, or something good came out of a bad situation.  I think this sort of change of context is what we are offered by God.  While God doesn't necessarily take our pain away, the Gospel extends to us the hope of a context-change that just might take some of the weight away in the present.  In God, we find the potential for the way we think about pain to be transformed.  This is a new one, so be sure to check out the lyrics and email me with any questions.

Fall Afresh: We sang this song to look over our shoulder at last week's songs.  Here's what we said about Fall Afresh then: We sang this song to voice our dependence on the Spirit for living life to the fullest and for taking our journey of faith seriously.  

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

-JM