Last night a bunch of us from GH joined 8000 uni students at Sydney’s first Passion Conference at the Entertainment Centre. For those of you who missed out, Passion runs events on college campuses in the states aimed at raising up a generation of passionate believers. The key players are speaker Louie Giglio and the musicians Chris Tomlin and the David Crowder Band. They came to Sydney as the final stop on their 17 city world tour which has taken them everywhere from Hong Kong to France to Africa (check it out at www.268generation.com)

I was very impressed by the night. They got the big thing right: it was all about Jesus. It wasn’t about Louie or Chris or David – or even about us students and our potential – it was about how we are all messed up sinners in need of God’s grace. And it was all done in the power of the Spirit, to the Glory of God.

The night was shaped beautifully around a diary written by a girl who died in a car crash at age 22, 3 months after accepting that Jesus could love even a screw up like her. Interestingly, there was no altar call on the night – the challenge was for people who didn’t know Jesus to talk to the friends who brought them and ask them what Jesus did for them.

But they also got the detail right, which made the night flow and minimised distractions from the message. This is a music blog so I’m going to point out some stuff that I found very interesting.

1. The partnership between Louie and Chris was the basis of the ministry.
The connect between what was being said and what was being sung was inspiring. Each served the other. When the band was on stage while Louie was speaking they supported him, sometimes by playing tastefully in the background, but usually just by listening and responding in their body language to what was being said. Personally if I was on the 17th leg of a world tour I would prefer to take a nap, but they chose to back the preacher. And when it came time for singing Louie stayed on stage and joined in for a couple of songs. They had obviously thought carefully about how the music and speaking could work hand in hand to create a unified night. They were on the same team. Awesome.

2. The night flowed
It was a long night – over three hours – but it had a natural flow and rhythm. The night began and ended with a solid block of worship, featuring well known songs to get us warmed up. There were no wordy introductions to songs, or random interviews to break the mood. Once Chris was finished singing with us Louie came on and spoke with us for a while about the tour so far. That flowed naturally into a time of small group prayer for the countries the tour had visited. Afterward a talk we responded with a song that fitted the mood just right. The whole night ended on a high as we sang Mighty To Save (a song that had been quoted in the girl’s diary entries), as well as some newer tunes we had learned earlier that night. There were times when the tone was casual and light hearted banter established rapport. There were other times when it was appropriate for the the keyboard player subtly play chords from song we’d just sung underneath a more reflective call to response.

3. It felt natural
Those of us who have grown up on a steady diet of Big Brother and Australian Idol an smell stilted, over-rehearsed pretence a mile away. I don’t know how much of what was said and done was choreographed, but it felt natural. Tomlin is a master of establishing just the right relationship between the band and the crowd; he reads them like the veteran of worship leading that he is. He knew how to gently encourage us to sing, dance and reflect with the right attitude and heart. And he knew when we were ready to sing on our own – at one stage he turned the microphone around to face the crowd as they belted out a new tune, I think it was “Sing, Sing, Sing”, or maybe “How Great is Our God”.

This meant that they could deal with the unexpected. The hecklers. The hi hat stand which collapsed in the first 2 songs. The crowd who didn’t know the songs they thought they would.

4. There was strong leadership
The reason why Tomlin is the best worship leader in the world at the moment is that he is really good at leading worship. Even though it was the last city on a massive world tour, it was obvious from where we were sitting (side of stage) that the band and leader were not so locked into a choreography that they couldn’t respond to the crowd and the way the night was feeling. Subtle signals to the drummer let the band know where he was going… Does the crowd need another chorus? Do we need to stop and reflect on why we’re here? The band trusted Chris’s intuition and leadership, and so did we.

5. The AV stuff was great.
The sound and lighting contractor was the same for Passion as it was for Burn Your Plastic Jesus (an event featuring Mark Driscoll which I played at earlier this year), but the quality of the end product was vastly different (in my opinion). Why?

No disrespect to everyone who worked on BYPJ … The difference was not one of talent but one of process. Putting on an event is like putting together a football team: you can’t just get good people, you need to train a great team under a great coach for months. The BYPJ was a team of great players, who had never played together before the grand final. The passion team was a tight team who had been training for years. The difference was audible.

From the foreign faces in the Passion tech team, I gathered the sound, video and lighting operators for passion were part of the passion team flown around the world with the band. The reason why you do this, rather than rely on some just as talented local team, is that the sound guy, lighting and AV guy are really the 8th, 9th and 10th members of the band/football team.

The result was great: The mix was well planned and executed to move with the music, the lighting perfectly programmed to fit the dynamics of the songs, the words and visuals perfectly complementing the music without being distracting.

Clarification: since posting this a couple of people pointed out to me that it might be read as implying that the overseas team made all the difference — not at all what I meant and apologies to the local sound and AV guys if that’s how you read it.

So just to clarify: The BYPJ gig was extremely well done, especially for a one night event. Thanks to the generosity of everyone who worked on the night.

6. The funding model would have made Paul proud
For the number crunchers out there, one of the impressive things about the night was that tickets were absolutely free – distributed among the church and uni groups who bought in to the event. The whole world tour cost 6 million US dollars, and from what Louie said on stage it sounds like that money is all from donations. The model was one St Paul might have written home about. On the inside of each entry wristband, the date and location of the next event on the tour was printed so people in Uganda could be praying for the ministry in France. And instead of a door fee, an offering was taken at each city the tour visited. But instead of going towards paying for that city’s venue hire, the money given at one city goes towards paying the bills for the next city.