Christmas vs Easter. What’s the best opportunity for the church? Plus free Easter song and chord chart

Tim Brown is a regular commenter here at Musicademy and his brother was one of our first local guitar teachers. Tim has just released his first album and we really liked one song in particular – Risen King – which is perfect for you to use in Easter services. Tim has kindly written us a guest post and you can download a copy of the song (and the chord chart) for free – see the link at the bottom of the article.

Christmas vs Easter

Certain questions offer endless debates that split the dinner table and cause endless arguments around the world. Fender or Gibson? MAC or PC? Cheese or Chocolate? Easter or Christmas?
For me Easter Sunday is the churches Cup Final, The Superbowl, The End of Season Party.

So with any bold statement half the room agree and half the room may disagree, I can imagine many of you fall on the Christmas side of the debate and want to passionately defend everything that you love about Christmas. I must admit that my view of Christmas may have been tainted by years of working in Retail and endless days of tinsel, glitter and dodgy Christmas hits.

Christmas is a season where everyone gets crazy busy and spends months planning and rushing to get ready for a month or parties, meals, presents and carol services.

By the time Christmas day comes around everyone is exhausted.

So let’s look at Easter…

In the UK for many people the best thing about Easter is the long weekend off work, Finish work on Thursday and go back on Tuesday, it’s the time of year where the weather is starting to warm up and the days are getting longer. It’s the start of Spring and people are in a lively mood, talk of summer holidays starts to emerge and people are coming out of hibernation.

So what about Church at Easter? The Easter weekend stands out in the calendar because it’s all about Jesus, it’s referred to as Holy Week and it clearly puts God on the agenda. It’s the one Sunday each year where the big shops stay shut and it’s fair to say people don’t know what to do with themselves. So why not invite them to Church?

At Christmas it is easy to invite people along to sing some familiar carols and hear stories of the “Baby Jesus” what is more difficult is to move people’s attention from the baby and on to the Saviour.

At Easter it’s harder to invite people but its so much easier to speak about and sing about the Saviour.

Easter Sunday is about celebrating what God has done for us through Jesus, It’s about declaring “He is Risen” (He is Risen Indeed!)

Psalm 22 talks about God inhabiting the praises of his people, when God’s people sing God is present. Is there anything more powerful / more evangelistic than Christians declaring through song the truths of Easter, the rescue message of God, the fact that the “Baby Jesus” grew up to be our Saviour.

We can preach the gospel in creative ways, we can present “The Passion” with dramatic delivery but surely our greatest expression is when we sing at the top of our voices that he is risen and he is alive, The guests might not know the words but when they see a passionate church singing out without the need for words its speaks volumes about what it means to us and what it offers to them.

So I think it’s clear I love Easter, I love boasting about what My God has done for me and love to echo Psalm 98 when it says…

“Make a joyful noise unto the LORD, all the earth: make a loud noise, and rejoice, and sing praise”.

A few years ago I wrote a song for Easter Sunday called “Risen King” I wanted to present the story of God’s salvation and allows the church too loudly sing that he is Alive Today and our Risen King.

So why Easter?

Its the chance to turn to the last page of the book and see how the story ends.

And then sing about it Loudly!

Free Easter song – Risen King

Here’s Tim’s website

Click through to download a copy of the song Risen King here for FREE
and download the chords from http://www.timbrownmusic.co.uk/chords.cfm

Do comment below and let us know what you think of the song!

 

Other posts you might like:

Christmas – big opportunity or big distraction?