The Dates for our 2012 National Conference are set!

March 30th – April 1st, Garth, Caitlyn, Jesse and I will be travelling out West to St James church in Okotoks, just south of Calgary, to put on a 3 day conference for Musicians and Youth Ministers. Calgary was chosen as the location because the majority of request for our Massive Worship travel team comes from out there!

Our theme for the conference this year is “Awake my Soul” and we are just starting to get in touch with a list of top notch speakers and musicians to see if they can come and contribute their passion to this year’s conference! We are so excited to get together with friends and fellowship out West!

The Massive Worship travelling team will be assisting us this year, as well as a handful of Alumni who currently live in the area. I have never been a part of the conference myself, but a guy who I supervise, from the Massive Worship travelling team; Cameron, told us to “remember, we are planning something powerful”. He then went on to say that one of his close friends had her first truthful encounter with God at a previous conference in Toronto!

Matt 18:20 "For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”

Peace to you all!

Emma Fradd
Massive Worship Coordinator

REGISTER NOW!

Hello people!

These past few weeks have been filled with much music... I mean lots of music. Music practice, band practice, more music practice...etc. There is a well known saying "practice makes perfect". Although we practiced a lot I wouldn't say that our first Youth Rally this past week in Ottawa wasn't completely perfect, perhaps better, however, i am giving it the title of 'epic' and as a result I have decided to change that well known saying. So for future reference... "practice makes EPIC".

The evening consisted of; praise and worship, a talk, drama and testimony as well as a fun musical moment highlighting a fiddle, a melodian, and a banjo. Yup, you read right, a BANJO... how EPIC is that. Not only was the music fantastic, the crowd of grade 7's 8's and 9's loved the different instruments and the evening itself.

It was a great evening of music, praise and most importantly Jesus. I spoke to several teens after and they expressed that they were so glad that they had come! The following morning we packed all of our belongings, instruments and gear into a trailer and we hit the road. It's really interesting traveling in a seven passenger van with seven fully grown people and multiple backpacks. I guess you could compare it to cramming the seven dwarfs into one of those red wagons you see kids pulling down the street. People look at it and wonder "how did you ever fit all of that in there"? The answer is simple. Only by the grace of God. :) Well, it's late here in Saskatchewan where we are right now and my body thinks that we are in Ottawa, so I should probably hit the hay.

Many Blessings,

Erin

P.S. PRACTICE MAKES EPIC!

Yo peeps!

Erin here from Massive Worship. This year is going to be massive and full of Worship! Our team of seven can hardly wait to cram into the van and begin traveling across the country proclaiming Christ and his kingdom through music. We are still in the midst of Massive worship training and will have our first official youth rally in the next couple of weeks. So pumped!

Last week we did our first practice retreat. It went well! We had a full band setup in a church basement for the retreat and as a result the church janitor, secretary and a bunch of random repair men had quite the musical day. The retreatants also enjoyed the prayerful tunes, they were singing and dancing along and by the end of the day they were Congo lining it up.

Prayer time with the grade six students was particularly moving. When we entered into the church they were reverent, respectful and prayerful. Many of the students wanted prayer and some of them were praying the rosary and reading the bible during prayer time. All in all, the day went really well and our team is looking forward to starting ministry full time.

For now, we are still training in Ottawa. More updates to come.

Many melodies,

Erin

Novermber 2010

Massive Worship has been kicking it in Nova Scotia for some time now. How I know that we have been getting the full experience of this reality is that one of our host families brought home live lobsters for supper. We were all very excited…it’s not quite the meal you would normally get down in Alberta where most of us are from… or Ontario…or Australia for that matter. Anyways the lobsters screamed and then hit the table and our host dad gave us a dinner tutorial on how to savagely tear apart a lobster with our bare hands. It was one of our more memorable experiences. Definitely worth documenting. After we left we were faced with a predicament. We had a free weekend and nowhere to go. Then Divine Providence kicked in and a very awesome priest invited us to stay at his rectory in Digby, NS. It was a short walking distance from the waterfront of the Bay of Fundy, which was beautiful, there’s nothing quite like the coming up over the ocean.

He then invited us to play for Mass that Sunday, and since we didn’t have anything planned he decided to let us play a concert that same Sunday afternoon. The only thing is that it wasn’t advertised or anything, because it was so spontaneously planned, all Father did was invite people out when he was saying Mass that weekend. We played for Mass and were welcomed warmly and then when the afternoon came around there were 60 people that came out to the concert! We were amazed. Especially because we weren’t even supposed to be there, it wasn’t scheduled, God just wanted us to be there, so we were. These people came out not knowing what to expect and they were touched with a worship experience, and once again we were all moved by the grace of God working through our music and through us. I am constantly in awe of the greatness of God. Personally, Massive Worship has changed my life too. I came onto the team not knowing what to expect and not knowing what Praise and Worship of God really means. There is a quote in one of our talks that says, “Worship is our response to who God is.” This hasn’t really meant that much to me until just recently. I feel that God has given me a glimpse of the true heart of worship. Worship really is our response to who God is… how can we know the love God has for us and not try in some small way to give it back? To offer up our lives as a prayer and to just give Him the Praise He deserves.

Being on Massive Worship has opened my eyes to the gift of Worship and I am so happy that we have this mission. We are heading to Yarmouth tomorrow where we will be playing at Mass some more and an Adoration night. We are also excited because our wonderful supervisors will be joining us for the weekend. They arrive tomorrow and we all get to spend the weekend together at a Parish Hall. It will be a great time!

Until next time, have a very blessed month and I hope that God will some how call you, wherever you are, to respond to who He is.

Sincerely,

Brandi Olson

The Massive Worship Youth Rally.

A 2-hour concert, filled with teachings, skits, and of course Music. Sounds pretty epic ey?

Now picture yourself in Grade 7 or 8 or 9 and not being too fond of Jesus or His teaching. Alright, this is now the Youth Rally that our team put on in Cold Lake. It was hard, although a few really enjoyed it and got into it, the majority of students were talking to each other, giggling, possibly finding us very cheesy and silly, which is fine, we’ve felt like that before, but I suppose it is a rather hard thing to experience when all of us on the team want so much for them to know, experience and encounter Jesus, our God. During our time of prayer, Riane shared her testimony, and then led us in a prayer where we repeated after her. One of the lines we repeated was “Jesus I open my heart to you” and after everyone said this I heard a voice from the crowd say very boldly “I don’t”, Riane continued with her prayer…

When I heard this, my heart broke, to hear somebody completely reject Jesus flat out without even being “open” to him. I suppose it affected me a lot more because it was being “open” to Jesus is what led me from an atheist back to my Catholic faith. And I started to become very discouraged. My thoughts sounded like this: “Jesus, what the heck? How can this be? They are not even open to you, how are you supposed to do anything through us if they don’t even care about you? Why are we here? Jesus, are you just humbling us? I can’t do this” In this moment I really felt Jesus saying: “Emma, if you don’t, who will? I have called each of you to be a part of this team to minister specifically to these people in this way” And then I felt that the Lord wanted me to look specifically into the crowd and find the people we were singing for. And amongst the people hitting each other and talking and laughing and making fun of us, I saw this girl in the back row, who had her head propped on her hand who looked like she was really thinking about Riane’s words and our teachings. I began to see little pockets of people singing with their eyes closed. And then to top it off, in the front row I saw this girl in grade 7, singing her heart out with her eyes closed and her hands in the air; grade 7! So beautiful. And this is what fueled me to continue on with the Rally in good spirits.

God really showed me who I was playing for and he reminded me that in the moments leading up to me experiencing God 3 years ago, I was very shut off from him and not open whatsoever; first he had to soften me up. God showed me that there is ALWAYS someone we do our retreats for, even if it’s just one person, our retreats aren’t pointless, even if we do them over and over again, even if the retreatants look uninterested. God is working though our ministry, even if I were to see no one in that crowd praying or singing, God speaks his words through us, and God’s word is truth and truth is effective.

Emma Fradd,

Massive Worship team 2010/2011

We were so happy to arrive in Steinbach! We had passed through the town for one night in February and people seemed to be excited about the upcoming ministry, which was still over a month away. We were also excited to come back to this community, and man were they ever great! Their hospitality and welcoming spirit toward our team blew us away. As some of you know Steinbach is actually home to NET iNFUSE team 2, so the parish was already anticipating us. The iNFUSE team had also been preparing for our arrival by promoting us. We were featured in the newspaper and James was able to do a promotion for the Youth Rally on the local radio station.

We started the week off with the Parish Mission. These are always a joy because of the parishioners that come out. They were enthusiastic and so welcoming and their smiles always make us feel like we are making a difference. We had three great nights. On Friday was our Youth Rally. Our venue was a huge Mennonite Church that is next door to Christ Our Savior Parish. Steinbach has a strong Christian community so the iNFUSE team invited all of the youth groups of the city out to the rally. There ended up being 250 people! It was amazing to have so many faith-filled people from the Catholic Church and different Christian denominations all praising together and just having a great time. There was even a youth minister from a different church that was saying that he was so happy that NET team had come to Steinbach because he had never learned so much about the Catholic church before and that he is going to be sad when they leave. He was also very interested in Massive Worship's mission because he was also a musician.

Then on the weekend we put on a Massive Worship Encounter weekend, which consists of talks, sessions, and instrument training. There were basically two main groups, teens and seniors. We worked with both choirs and the whole group was open and enthusiastic from the beginning. One senior lady was even moved to tears at the end of the first night when we all prayed together. It was just an awesome weekend all around. A few days after this weekend, the choir director of the ladies choir gave Riane a call. Riane was the leader of the vocal workshop, along with Christian. The director said that the ladies came to choir practice and they all did the warm ups they learned on the weekend and they were all talking about how they could redo all of the songs and layer their voices and do more phrasing. The choir director said that Christian and Riane had a huge impact on the choir and she affirmed them on their work. She also went on to say that she had such a good week and was so impressed with all of the events that she went to. She was very thankful and concluded that, “MW doesn’t stand for Massive Worship, but miraculous works.” It was a bit sad to leave because we had made so many great friendships among the whole entire Parish. There were definitely a few tears shed saying goodbye.

Well I guess that wraps it up, since being in Steinbach we have made our way back to Ontario, and I just wanted to mention something that I think is really cool: While on our travel days, we always stop for gas, the cool thing about these two gas stops that is that people recognized that we were Netters, even if they didn’t necessarily know what NET is. The first was a man at a gas station, I don’t exactly remember the name of the place, but it must be a stop for a lot of NET teams because he asked where we were headed and then said that he had seen a lot of NET vans over his years working at this gas station and was beginning to recognize the vans. It was so exciting.

The second was a woman working at 7/11. She asked us if we were Netters, we said yes and she had actually hosted Netters four years ago and she didn’t remember the name but she was able to describe one of the people who she hosted. We easily identified this living room “Good Morning Baltimore” singer as staff member Caitlyn Bondy and had a good laugh. These two encounters just made me so happy that people all across Canada are recognizing our ministry. Even if most of them do work at gas stations. I wish you all a very prayerful Holy Week and a Happy Easter!

God Bless,

Brandi Olson

Massive Worship Team 2010/2011