Church worship workshop set in Birmingham

With 23 years in music ministry, Michael Adler believes that becoming a servant leader and empowering other musicians creates a more fulfilling worship service for the entire church congregation. 
   
Adler, the minister of music and worship at Shades Mountain Baptist Church, Vestavia Hills, in Birmingham Association has also learned the importance of offering music that attracts people from various age and interest groups.
   
“Many churches are doing one hour of contemporary and one hour of traditional church and you are basically making two churches,” he said. “My premise is that you can do it all together and suddenly the body of Christ becomes a body together again.”
   
Because church congregations usually span a broad range of ages and interests, Adler believes blended worship services would reach a wider audience.
   
“The question is often asked, ‘Are you a praise and worship church?’” he noted. “Every church should be a praise and worship church. It is not a matter of style, it’s a matter of are you worshiping and are you praising.”
   
On April 25–26, Alabama Baptist music ministers will have an opportunity to learn practical tips to strengthen their blended worship programs at the “Audience of One” worship workshop at Shades Mountain.
   
Co-sponsored by the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions’ office of worship leadership and church music, the conference will include daytime breakout sessions on worship leadership, technical ministry, student choirs, instrumentalists and children’s worship. 
   
Workshops will be led by church music professionals including the University of Mobile’s Roger Breland, founder of contemporary Christian group TRUTH, and Kim Noblitt, CEO and founder of G3 Worship, a worship resource for churches.
   
Conference attendees will also experience a concert featuring Shades Mountain’s 150-voice worship choir and orchestra and Ram Corps, the University of Mobile’s 21-piece brass and percussion ensemble.
   
Unlike most worship conferences, Audience of One will seek to reach churches that want to offer traditional and contemporary songs during worship.
   
“We are going to be unapologetically blended,” Adler said. “Everything we do has a contemporary heart to it because we want to remain relevant to this generation, but we don’t want to jettison the spiritual depth of our traditional hymns.”
   
He added, “We want to give that church in the middle demographic tools to help build bridges so that praise and worship is not a tally sheet of hymns versus choruses —simply praise and simply worship.”
   
Sessions will include information on making musicians and pastors partners in worship, working with student ministries, using various instruments in worship, giving stages a contemporary look and solving sound system problems.
   
Keith Hibbs, an associate in the SBOM worship leadership and church music office, said, “I think the title of the conference is really the best explanation. 
   
The phrase comes from Kierkegaard, a German theologian, who believed that worship was a drama in which God is the audience of one —meaning worship is for God’s benefit.”
   
“Everything we are doing is going to have a contemporary flavor but we are not going to throw out the old,” Adler said. “We hope when music ministers leave that they will (have) an entire new set of tools to help their church participate in worship across all demographics.”
   
For more information on the workshop, visit www.aooworship workshop.org or the Audience of One Web site at www.audience-of-one.org to hear audio samples. The registration deadline is April 11.