Paradise Worship - Part 1

Today I attended the first day of the Paradise Church's National Worship Conference (hosted by Assemblies of God of Malaysia, held in Penang Christian Centre). I was able to apply for a half-day emergency leave, so I was only able to attend half of the conference as the sessions are spread across working hour. I attended only two sessions, or rather, workshops, which was Vocal Techniques and Keyboard Techniques. The speakers were Chloe Moldovan and Jaye Liubinskas respectively. Both are leaders of Paradise Church in Adelaide, Australia.

Chloe was very good in sharing the ways of breathing, the ways of projecting our voices at different pitches, and most importantly, in getting our mood to practice what she taught, hence bringing the workshop lively. She shared the most basic and important way of breathing, which is through our diaphragms. Also, she shared on how we position our projected sounds in our mouth, treating it as our bathrooms (bathrooms form an environment that naturally create echoes, forming a natural microphone to ourselves). To tackle higher pitched voices, we were taught to use twangs and append it to our natural voices - which is great for we learnt how to avoid falseto. Not forgetting breathing intervals being essential in buying us time to change our voices into twangs.

For Jaye, she shared on the importance of keyboards with good sound, the usage of keyboard sounds in Praise, Worship, and Alter-Call sessions. She also shared on the proper chord progressions and dynamics used in P, W, and AC. Most importantly, she also shared that a keyboardist must not be a distracting factor, and always be aware of what the worship leader is doing so as not to disturb the flow of the worship - be spiritually and physically aware of the surrounding. As a matter of fact, all these were in fact applied by Andre during Shalom meetings!! Something that I should have known - just that Jaye had put it into words for better understanding.

What I was amazed most was the 5-minute wrap-up session, where the invited session presenters from Paradise Church (led by their Senior Executive Pastor Matt Heins) lead the short worship session. As they took over the musical instruments and began playing the song "The Stand", I could feel God's strong anointing amongst the musicians, and it flowed towards and across the congregation! The 5-minute worship, though brief, was truly intense, and the manifested presence of God is so strong that I nearly burst in tears.

That was 5 minutes. I am actually very excited at the Live Concert tomorrow!