Heather Clark

We had Heather Clark as a guest on Worship Café April 4th. We hadn’t realized back when we booked her that April 4th was Easter Sunday, but it was. And we wondered how that would affect the turnout.

The turnout, as it turned out, was great. Martin was going around just before the session began putting out extra chairs, and it’s a good thing he did. The only seats left open were a couple right up at the front, and at least two points during the webcast we saw the onscreen silhouettes of people sneaking past others to fill those last spots.

Heather brought only her son Josiah and her friend Holly along for the drive down from Kamloops. Often she leads worship with a full complement of bass, drums, electric guitar and a couple of vocalists, but for this session she elected to go with just herself and her piano.

And what a good choice that was – it was a perfect arrangement for the café. The sound was not at all overpowering and was still room-filling with the strength of Heather’s voice and the fullness of her piano.

Right at the outset Heather told us all that she had two basic ways of doing worship: one being with a band leading at conferences or other large events, and the other being just her and her piano when no one else was around but Jesus. And she said her intention was that the Worship Café session was going to be the “just her and Jesus” mode – and it certainly seemed that everyone in the seats was able to connect with where the session headed.

With a great blend of original songs along with spontaneous vocal and instrumental meanderings and songs by other songwriters, Heather’s worship session was (to me) both relaxing and refreshing. We were trying out a new placement for one of the cameras, and I personally really enjoyed working on getting good shots while being in worship mode; I knew several of the songs from before, which made it easy to connect, and there were several new-to-me songs which gave lots of opportunity to head in new directions in worship.

Toward the end of the session Heather brought her song “Deeper” into play (which I’ve always liked) and spent a good amount of time just floating on that for a while. Some of the “classic Heather Clark” songs that are used a great deal by other worship leaders are more corporate and ‘punchy’ in their scope (“Open to me the gates of righteousness and I will go through them… and I will praise the Lord…” with the strong 4/4 beat going on the kick and bass and piano, for example) so it was a real treat to have Heather lead in this much more “Song of Solomon” type intimate setting on Sunday.

I know that everyone in the packed café really enjoyed this more up-close-and-personal time of worship because it felt like most of them came up to Heather and various members of the crew to tell them so. I trust those who logged in online were treated to the same level of connection as we were, and I can’t see why that wouldn’t be the case – I watched the rebroadcast stream again this morning and found it just as bona fide as the live event on Sunday.

Heather will be on the home page streaming window all this week, so feel free to log in if you missed Sunday’s time and you’d still like to catch her worship session. And once we get the session archived, it will be available with all our other past sessions in the Worship Café archives at www.worshipcafe.net (Sometimes that takes a while, but it’ll be there eventually).

See you next week…