Music For The Christmas Season
November 8th, 2006 by Matt Heerema | Posted in Song Selection
What in the world is a modern-rock / alternative service style church supposed to do around the Christmas season for music? If you’re not careful and don’t plan, you may find yourself breaking out the pianos and hymnals, reverting back to the Christmas music you played as a child, and totally confusing, if not alienating your congregation, who is used to loud, upbeat, modern “worship” music on Sunday morning.
Over the last couple of years at our church, this has been our struggle. What do you do when a small but vocal portion of the congregation demands traditional Christmas hymns, and there is a loud outcry from the four people who are interested in being in a choir? (Actually, there are eight people interested, but only four have the time to put into practices.)
The answer? Re-write the music to the hymns! We do it with others, why not Christmas hymns as well? We’ve successfully refitted ten classics for a guitar-driven, rock band. Some of these we re-did on our own, some were done by other big names (David Crowder, Eoghan Heaslip, Matt Redman), all work very well. The melodies haven’t changed much, and the flow is basically the same, so they are recognizable. These ten, along with a few other pieces of “special” music tend to (yule) tide us over for the season.
- O Come All Ye Faithful
- The First Noel
- Angels We Have Heard On High
- O Come O Come Emmanuel (my personal favorite)
- Joy To The World
- We Three Kings (sing all the verses!)
- Go Tell It On The Mountain
- What Child Is This?
- Angels We Have Heard On High
- Silent Night (of course)
You can download copies of these arrangements (.doc format) here. Let me know if you have any questions! Also, don’t forget to mix these in with your regular repretoire! Nowhere is it written that just because it is December, you have to pick from an entirely different set of music! There are plenty of “advent” songs among our typical repretoire. Also, just to be inflamatory, I have in the past, blogged some priceless Charles Spurgeon quotes on Christmas.
Merry Christmas!
This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 8:08 am and is filed under Song Selection. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
[…] As a worship leader (lead worshiper, music leader, whatever) for our church, the coming advent season is always an enigma to me. The following is an article I wrote over at RockWorship.com, reposted here for your benefit. […]
Matt,
I would be very interested in seeing your arrangements for O Holy Night, O Come O Come Emmanuel, What Child is This, and Go Tell it on the Mountain.
Thanks!!
Matt, do you have any recordings of your band doing these songs?