Every November it was always the same; take down the Christmas file and pull out the classic Christmas carols. And every year I experienced the same mixed emotions…
On one hand it was always good to be reacquainted with these songs. They’re nostalgic and so many have great theology in them. But each year I knew that in the two months that were coming, we’d lose a vital aspect of our worship.
For ten months of the year we’d sing in the first person, making our worship personal. And we’d make it vertical too, singing to the Lord rather than singing about Him. But the carols take a different route. So many of them deal in narrative, creating the scene, describing the action.
It all changed for me the moment we sang "O Holy Night". We reached a sweet moment at the end of the song, and the words ‘O night divine’ were hanging in the air while a few people held their hands up in worship. It struck me how odd it was. ‘Wait a minute,’ I thought. ‘Are we really worshipping a night? This is awkward!’
So I began working out how we could touch on classic Christmas carols and let them stir up the theology, the narrative, the nostalgia, but then come out of it in a simple response. How could we give them a vertical chorus that allows people to respond in a personal way to the Lord?
The answer was keeping the original carols and matching them up with familiar choruses. Simple.
Now, I’m not Nat King Cole, Tony Bennet or Michael Buble. I’ve got an octave range and that’s it, but even so I found myself recording an album with Integrity in 2013. We called it Christmas Worship. It got some great feedback from worship teams and individuals who said that it had helped them to keep this attitude of worship throughout the season.
With people suggesting other songs, last year I took the ones we didn’t use first time around and carried on experimenting by adding in familiar choruses.
Christmas Worship, Volume 2 has songs like Joy "To The World" blended with "Our God Saves", "O Holy Night" (with Kathryn Scott) mixed with "Love Shines Bright", and "Angels From The Realms Of Glory" blended with "Praise Is Rising". It flows so well to sing those old familiar line about ‘come and worship’ and then flow into ‘Emmanuel, you are the God who saves us, worthy of all our praises, Lord have your way among us, we welcome you here Lord Jesus.’
That’s the Christmas posture right there.