Jaydubbs.com

The Monday Mojo is a weekly posting of great resources for worship leaders. You’ll find anything from album highlights and releases, introspective articles on worship and the church, helpful media, tips on instrumentation and sound, sites and applications to boost the organization & structure of your respective teams, even simple words of encouragement. Click the Monday Mojo category above or come back every Monday to stay in tune with the mojo… -Jaydubbs

Phil Wickham has been challenging the boundaries of the modern worship sound for the past few years. His sophomore debut Cannons brought his great melodic soundscapes and soaring vocals to the attention of the church, mostly led by the title track of the same name, which was more often than not on most churches Sunday set lists.

But, Phil has raised the notch even higher with his latest debut Heaven & Earth. It’s been quite a while since I remember a modern worship album really stretching the limits when it comes to musicality and pure originality. And that’s just what I experience when listening to this project.

I can’t get enough. It’s seriously been playing in my car for the past 2 weeks straight.

Sure there are noticeable influences, including the fellas from Muse and The Killers on the synth-heavy “Hold On”, and wonderful nods to the likings of Sigur Ros on the ambient beginnings of “Cielo”. But Phil presses into new grounds on most of Heaven & Earth.

Right now, you can visit his site here and purchase a special promotional package. For only $25, you receive an immediate digital download of the Heaven & Earth album (the actual album doesn’t come out until November 17th), a special acoustic version of the album not available anywhere else, an autographed Heaven & Earth album mailed to you in November, and an exclusive Heaven & Earth t-shirt.

Pretty sweet deal. Once you got the album in hand, check out tracks “Coming Alive”, “Heaven & Earth”, “Hold On” and “Cielo”. These 4 are my favorites, but the whole album is without a skippable song. “The Time Is Now” is another catchy track with creative Bonanza-esque strings during the outro. And Phil wraps up the record with a beautiful, broken down tune of hope in “Heaven Song”.

Jess and I recently got the idea from a blog we found to create a list of 101 goals that we want to tackle in the span of 1001 days. We actually started this project on August 7th, but I’m just now getting a chance to write about it.

Some of the goals are very little, simple things that we can knock out in the next week or so. Some are very grand and will take time, discipline, and determination to achieve. But these are the things that we both decided on to succeed in together. And some are very special to us. Our end date is May 4th, 2012, so we’ll see how many we accomplish by then! You’ll continue to see postings as we go when we mark them off as done.

Check out our list on the jump, and remember- these are not in any specific order at all. And we don’t plan on completing them in this order. Read the rest of this entry »

September 2009 will go down in the books as a month of unforeseeable, radical change. It’s a long story but, I got let go from my job leading worship at my home church Cornerstone.

Ok. It’s a short story.

But seriously though. I’ve been serving there for 10 years. From the surface it amounted to an economic recession leading to non-existent tithing leading to ministry budget and personnel cuts leading to me writing this compelling piece of literature.

There are many more details beyond a bad economy, but that is neither here nor there and someday maybe I will tell my grandchildren and you can hear about it through the grapevine or something.

Anyways, back to change. My wife Jessica and I are embarking on a new fantastic journey in which God has yet to unfold completely but has begun to show us sparks and glimmers of. We are excited and free. And part of that change is me having more time to do things that I love…at least right now. So hence, a brand spankin new blog for the masses from yours truly.

It is my hope to create conversation, laugh, cry, explore, learn, play, teach, and love here in digital form. And I have lots of ideas brewing inside my feeble noggin. Stay tuned on the flip friends…

Much love.