Quarantine Worship Music

Grace Point Community Church performing
“Do It Again” by Elevation Worship

Grace Point Community Church in Oregon creates a socially distant special music video for their congregation during stay at home orders.

Portland, OR, May 17, 2020 – (bentbeat.com) – When governor Kate Brown announced the “Stay Home, Save Lives” policy in Oregon, Grace Point Community Church in Tigard immediately cancelled their weekly, Sunday, in-person services.  This turned this neighborhood church into a broadcast studio from the staff’s homes.  Worship director, Krista Westfall, was commissioned to handle the technical components to put the service online for the church-goers in southwest Portland.

“With Easter coming up so quickly, we were already behind,” Westfall said in reference to finding a mechanism to broadcast a weekly service.  “We tried everything from Zoom, Instagram Live and Facebook Live, and ultimately landed on YouTube, which we have been using each week since.”

The weekly service involves different staff members broadcasting from their homes in a socially distant world.  Most of the service components, like announcements, prayer, and the pastor’s sermon, were relatively normal.  The main component that changed involved the music ministry.  For the online version of the weekend services, Westfall is usually seen singing alongside a piano or accompanied by an acoustic guitar, filming from a smartphone camera and microphone.

“On a normal weekend service in our building, we would generally have up to ten musicians, singers and technical volunteers all involved to help the congregation worship our Lord in song,” added Westfall.  “We didn’t want to put our artists or their families at risk by having the team in the same room.”

Grace Point’s attendees are reportedly appreciative of the stripped-down music, but admittedly miss the immersive, full sound of a worship band on the platform.  The worship team started meeting weekly on Zoom, in place of their standing, weekly rehearsal.  During that virtual meeting, an idea was sparked to have the worship team create a song separately and put it all together in a single video.

“We called it the ‘Brady Bunch Project,’” Westfall laughed, referring to the opening sequence for the 1970's sitcom created by Sherwood Schwartz. “We asked each of the artists to record and video tape themselves performing their part on a specific worship song.”  

Dave Beatty and Matt Sumner from BentBeat, who also attend and are a part of  the church's music ministry, volunteered production and engineering to help make the video a reality.  

“We are very happy to have the time and bandwidth put this together for Grace Point,” said Beatty.  “The end result was a very powerful worship song that conveys the hearts of the artists in a very real, intimate way.”

The song, “Do It Again” by Elevation Worship, was released in advance of the weekend services.

“It was a labor of love,” said Beatty.  “We are very honored to be a part of this project during this very unusual chapter in everyone’s lives.”

About BentBeat Productions: BentBeat is based in Portland, Oregon. BBP’s focus is on partnering with musicians to produce, record, and release high quality broadcast-level music through streaming services, social media and traditional distribution. BentBeat’s artists are available on Amazon, Spotify, Apple Music and all major music sites. Please join in supporting musicians.

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