Best things 2015

I love making lists. Every year in my personal journal, I come up with a list of the best things that happened in the year. Here's my list of the 10 best things related to praise and worship in 2015 in no particular order.

1. Finding Planetshakers
2. Tiff Joy's self-titled album
3. Singing one of the songs I wrote at one of our district church services
4. The iLead Escape frontliners calls
5. Listening to K-Love
6. Attending Chicago's Gospel Fest
7. Crushing my New Year's goal to consistently update this blog
8. Being able to attend a culturally different church and experiencing P&W there
9. The funny memes
10. Getting a church musician. God is still in the miracle business!

Here's to a great year and an even better 2016 - in Jesus's name! :)

What had happened was...

It's almost the end of the year and time to answer the question of whether or not I accomplished my goals with my praise team in 2015.

My main goal was to make the praise team a priority. Did I do that? Yes and no.  I definitely stopped working with the youth department to try to focus. That helped. We had some rehearsals, but the last half of the year we really dropped the ball. I could go into all the excuses, but they don't seem change: conflicts with work schedules killed us. When rehearsals stop, that's the death of a praise team.

My main objective was to get 12 new or retired songs back into our play list. Did we do it? Not exactly. I think we successfully added ~ 3 or 4. Wamp wamp waaaamp!

Not exactly a stellar year, but there were moments of greatness and things are looking up. We finally got a musician. Somehow, my younger brother decided to get off his end and take lessons from my older brother. He's learned about 6 songs and he's really coming along. I'm confident that next year we'll be able to retire our tracks. Gloray!!! We also debuted one of the songs I wrote and then the district praise team sang it as well. Finally, last Sunday someone mentioned wanting to join the team.

Needless to say, we have long way to go. Becoming consistent with rehearsals is going to be my main focus for 2016. No more excuses.

Here's to wishing all of us a triumphant 2016 with our praise teams!

Cheers!