Bridge Worship Collective

The Bridge Worship Collective is an overarching ministry that encompasses set design and build teams, production teams, creative videography teams, graphic design for sermon series, hosting and platform teams, and—yes—of course, our music teams, which Pastor Darius does a phenomenal job overseeing! We exist to facilitate encounters with God—moments in our day, our week, where our eyes are turned to Jesus, and we do this by using the beauty of art. I always say to our teams, “Where beauty is, God is present.” The beauty of the arts captivates and translates through different languages, genders, and generations. And let me tell you friends, God has been in our midst as we pray, plan and execute our Sunday gatherings and special services.

So, we kicked off September (remember September? Like, 2019 September?) in style as we launched into our Fall visioning series called “Connecting the Dots”. It was a great vision series that challenged and encouraged us to foster a healthy relationship with God, with ourselves, and with others. This was a great series with a beautiful set design, and that spanned us all the way into our “Greatest of All Time” Christmas series. We kicked off December with an awesome Kidzone Sunday, carried on through to our Ugly Christmas Sunday, and ended on an amazing 2-day 4-service Eve celebration that saw nearly 1700 come through our doors to worship and to celebrate.

Then, the year known as 2020 came upon us…and we were stoked!! We launched into “Life’s Healing Choices”; a timely series for us coming off the holidays. Our creative arts team designed, dreamt, stretched our ministry, and allowed for beautiful moments to capture our hearts and turn us toward Jesus. We sang, we recorded custom videos, we dialed in what we do with people who are passionate to serve…and then…March hit. I remember the Thursday night, as we were preparing for what was to be our regular band and tech rehearsal. We gathered in the auditorium with the staff that were at our church and a couple who were on the phone, and we decided to shut down out services due to the news coming out about the pandemic. And on the very next day, on Friday, we pivoted HARD and we started pre-recording our first worship set and, on Saturday, our very first sermon. Creative Arts had a game plan in the span of a short phone call with Pastor Brian and we executed right away to make sure we didn’t miss a Sunday of worship. And since that time, nearly 35 weeks ago, we’ve adjusted, tweaked, massaged, and SPRINTED over many months to make sure we have excellent, beautiful, weekly online gathering. From recording in the volunteer lounge, to moving to the main stage before the summer, and then finally to building a custom set on the floor of the auditorium that will house us through a building project; this past season has tested and tried our ability to create both quality and captivating, yet authentic and genuine, online content. And we’re excited to see our online reach grow as people come upon our services, fall in love with our staff and our people, our teams, and the message of Jesus, and are proud to share the content with their friends and family all over the country—and even all over the world! We have people now belonging to the bridge who have never had the opportunity to step inside our physical building. What a time we live in! And we didn’t plateau! No—we dreamed big and rebranded our entire Sunday experience coming into this fall, with a fresh new look, a very intentional cinematography and editing philosophy, and our teams have kept serving. As we tweak and adjust, we see more and more volunteers coming through our doors to serve with new tech that we install, and with each new element we create. It has been a wild and tiring ride…but we love it.

And in all that we’ve done, from weekly services to one-off custom song recordings, I am not exaggerating one bit when I say that NONE of this would be possible without a great partner in ministry. Not only do we vision and plan and compliment each other so well in our strengths and abilities, but we actually do kinda like each other!! So, take a moment and check out what Pastor Darius has to say about the music side of the Bridge Worship Collective.

The Worship Ministry exists to lead our church in exalting Jesus through music and we have been privileged to be able to continue to do that even within these current circumstances.

Before COVID, we were gathering together on Sunday mornings and facilitating times of worship, holding Thursday evening rehearsals with our teams, having auditions for our new members, and meetings for team nights to continue to grow as a team. But we have had to adjust. Gradually, as we understood our new normal, we accepted we would not physically be able to gather for Sunday services, team nights, or our Thursday rehearsals and we had to quickly pivot to pre-recording our services. We immediately started working on how this could be done to serve the church in the best way we could.

It was hard to see the opportunities we had while the initial restrictions were rolling out, but we started to bring in a very small team of volunteers to record our first services in the Volunteer Lounge and that team’s patience with us, as we figured things out, helped us to smooth out the process, so that we could continue to grow and refine the online services. Slowly, but surely, we were able to start bringing in our regular roster of team members to worship with us while still adhering to the province’s guidelines. In addition to all this, we’ve been able to onboard some new musicians and vocalists onto the team. I’m sure you’ve seen some of these friendly faces on the screen since March.

We have been able to live out the Worship Ministry’s purpose by facilitating and leading almost 35 pre-recorded worship services. That’s amazing! We’ve done this with the help of a dedicated group of volunteers who have been generous with their time and flexible with changing how things are done every few weeks. This couldn’t be done without them. Pastor Jeff has done an amazing job with dreaming and setting up and creating spaces for us to do what we need to do every single week. It has taken a lot of hard work on his end, especially being behind the camera, being behind-the-scenes editing the service almost every single week. We felt from the beginning that we’ve been producing and facilitating great things every week and our threshold for excellence has only grown.

It’s a completely difference experience for us and for the entire congregation having pre-recorded services, but our hope is that our church body and Markham as a whole are being touched, changed and filled with hope by what we’ve been able to give and produce. We can’t ask for more than that.

We’ve still been able to gather on Zoom for team nights and connect in that way. We’ve even had a guest speaker join us from the US. We’ve also been able to produce a few amazing projects to share with the church community, and have monthly live worship nights called “Abide” to provide a reflective time of worship. Our wonderful leadership team and worship leaders have done a phenomenal job to adjust their strengths to facilitate our times of worship each week while we are still introducing new songs and sets and we are still discussing new ways of improving what we do to best serve our church.

We are still revering God as the most important part of this ministry. We give our praise to Him. We are still joining together. Although it looks a bit different, we are continuously reaching out to our community for Jesus through music and the creative arts.

weekly online worship experiences
produced by Bridge Worship

Why we exist

live viewers each week

total views each week

New Productions

Bridge Worship Video Covers

Team Building

new team members since COVID

team nights over Zoom for team building and connection

Stories of Impact

Our Mission