Conference Observations

Over the past couple of years I have blogged about the annual worship conference that I attend, the Experience Conference. The conference was last week and once again I thought I would share with you some things that you might find interesting.  So, here we go:

1.  Music people are still weird.  I say this every year when I get back, but it's true.  Music people are weird. We just are.  Unfortunately, I think that I am getting weirder as I get older.  Yikes.

2.  Speaking of age, I am getting old.  It used to be that when I went to this conference I was one of the younger attendees.  Now, I think I am becoming one of the older ones.  And to make it worse, the worship artists on stage are looking younger and younger each year as well. There was a group from Liberty University that led worship for one of our morning sessions.  I'm sure they were all in their early 20's, but I swear they looked like they were all 12 years old.

3.  Choirs are dying.  This is hard to say, but it's true.  The conference had a mass choir for the opening night worship session.  They were very good and had a large number of participants (around 100).  The problem is that the vast majority (90-95%) of them were older than me (41).  Unfortunately, this is what you see in most churches around the country.  The next generation doesn't sing (at least not in choirs).  If we don't do something about this soon, worship choirs will cease to exist.

4.  Hats.  Last year the trendy article of clothing was skinny jeans.  This year, everywhere you looked, hats.  And I'll be honest with you, hats are a 1,000 times better than middle-aged men in skinny jeans:) 

5.  It is really good to laugh.  One of my favorite parts of the conference each year is the fact that they have one comedian per worship session.  It's amazing how much more people sing/worship after they've laughed a little bit.

6.  David Crowder should be on Duck Dynasty.  If you don't know who David Crowder is, he is a Christian music artist best known for the song "How He Loves Us".  While he is an excellent singer/songwriter, he looks like a young Uncle Si from Duck Dynasty.

Well, that's it for now.  I'm sure I'll share some more observations over the coming months.

Worship Big!

Brad