Our band took some time out of rehearsing our usual worship numbers to play at the CCK Leader’s Party. We did a full hour set featuring some classics from MJ, Maroon 5, Stevie Wonder, Jamiroquai and more…

Was a hugely fun yet stretching experience for us. Recommend it to any band if you get the oppotunity – the discipline of learning a load of function songs beat for beat, helped us raise the game a lot. Anyways here are some videos from the rehearsals and live performance. (I got promoted/demoted to percussion)

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A series of articles on prayer written by Joel Virgo are currently being featured on The Resurgence Blog, a resource based in America and run in partnership with Mars Hill Church Seattle and the Acts 29 network.

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eMusic are offering 45 free music downloads when you sign up to their online music store.

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Today was CCK Women’s Day, 400 women across Brighton gathered for a day of worship led by Jules Burt, teaching from Wendy Virgo and Livy Gibbs (married to Stuart, planting a church in Greenwich, London) and ministry time. The day was lead by Kate Virgo and her excellent team. The talks will be online soon, so keep tuned in for those…

If you’re a bloke, we’re having a CCK Men’s Weekend soon and I’m sure we’ll post up the talks for download. Will let ya know

Managed to sneak in for the worship as my band were playing. We were the only 5 males in the room… so I didn’t hang around for long(!)

Jules’ songlist was:
Psalm 95
Sing to the Lord (Lou Fellingham) E
Famous One (Chris Tomlin) E
A Father to the Fatherless (Paul Oakley) D
Majesty (Jack Hayford) D
All Authority – chorus (Desperation Band) D

After much thought, prayer and discussion, we’ve decided to hold-off running the CCK Worship School Conference for this year, with the intention of picking it up again in a couple of years.

Why?? We are experiencing a particular season of growth and transition at CCK, which requires a ton more focused attention and energy accross every aspect of CCK life, certainly including the worship department… so for this next season, we wanna give as much time as we can to building something outstanding here in Brighton. (More on this another day…)

Is this the end of Worship School? Absolutely, not!

1. Blog. In the mean time, WS will primarily be a worship training blog from the WS team, Stuart Townend, Lou Fellingham, Phatfish, Joel Virgo and myself, plus some special guests now and then. Subscribe to the RSS feed for all the headlines, or follow us on…
   
   
2. Twitter. WS is regularly tweeting short helpful insights for worship leaders, musicians and worshippers.
   
   
3. Conference. We do anticipate hosting the WS Conference in the not too distant future. We’ll keep you posted as soon as we have more on this.

Well that’s the news from us. We shall keep you posted as things develop.

Simon

Well, it’s that time of the year where we up-the-game as a band, and take a quite few evenings out to rehearse rehearse rehearse like crazy as we’re leading worship quite a lot at events this summer, some of which will have albums produced from them… Together On A Mission, Mobilise, Newday, Rendevouz Bible Week France, CCK.

Some of us have been playing together as a band for the last 10 years, whilst the others have joined at some point over this last decade. Over that time we’ve learned a whole lot about what actually makes an effective, fruitful rehearsal… and what makes a frustrating, draining and fruitless one.

So over the next few days and weeks, I’ll try and organise my thoughts on this and get some succinct posts up answering the question ‘What makes an effective rehearsal?’ But in the meantime, here’s a little video of our rehearsal from last night..

Worship School is now on Twitter and Facebook.

We’ll be tweeting our latest blog posts, updates on the Worship School main site and anything else we think you might find interesting. Follow Worship School on twitter

Of if you’re not into tweeting, join our Facebook group and we’ll post out similar info to keep you updated.

Facebook, twitter… what will be next?

Well this is it, the Worship School blog is officially online!

Why?

To keep you up to date with Worship School news, a hub for theological discussion, a few songwriting thoughts and any resources that will hopefully inspire, encourage and challenge you.

My friends and I from the Worship School team, Stuart Townend, Lou Fellingham and Joel Virgo, will be the main contributors towards this blog, but we may have some special guests posting now and then.

Worship School has always been about building the local church for the glory of Christ. Our hope is that this blog contributes richly towards that end goal.

Joel, who grew up in Brighton, returned with his wife Kate to his home town, joining the leadership team at CCK, and being appointed as an elder in October 2006. They have three children. Joel leads the eldership team at CCK. He is also responsible for the ministry team which leads the annual Newday event for young people.

Joel’s blog posts
Joel on Twitter