Emmanuel Evangelical Free Church has gathered the creative minds in their community to write an original song inspired by an Easter sermon and is using it to get the youth involved in ministry.

Emmanuel Evangelical Free Church (Emmanuel EFC) in Steinbach and over the past few years, they have gone through a reformation of their worship and creative team, as many people wanted to help out and utilize their talents.

"Many of those people are highly creative and very gifted writers," says Emmanuel EFC Worship Pastor, Mike Burnard. "As that passion has been reinstalled in me and I start talking about it, it's being shared by others that also have this desire to create songs to worship god, but also to have an authentic voice of worship that represents our community."

Burnard is also part of a local band called The Boy and the Sea, and while the band is currently on hiatus, he is excited to engage with his church community by writing new and unique songs.

The worship pastor says that they have many people with many different talents to help them along this journey, ranging from songwriting, video and music production, and audio-visual technicians—each of which has been utilized in the creation of their original song "This is Love, This is Victory."

Burnard excitedly shared that in this season of creativity, they've used it as a way to get the youth in their community involved in the ministry, to help them find a way to use their talents and do it to honour God.

During the COVID-19 years, the entire ministerial team at Emmanuel EFC read a book called "Growing Young," by Kara Powell, Jake Mulder, and Brad Griffin. The book addresses how young people are leaving the church and ways to reintroduce them back. Burnard says the church team saw the urgency in this message and decided to create an opportunity to get young people involved in the church.

"There was one weekend where a lot of our senior staff were gone. It was me preaching, I wasn't even on the worship team which consists of about 25 people to make a service happen. I was one of the three oldest people on the team, the average age that was running the service would have been 22, and that includes 16-year-olds."

Burnard continues to say they've incorporated "keychain leadership" in their daily church tasks, which gives young people leadership opportunities that involve a lot of responsibility and trust but also ensures that the older members are there to help if needed and will help the youth walk through their tasks.

Under the name Emmanual Music, the worship and creative team at the Steinbach church got to work writing a new song called "This is Love, This is Victory," which was inspired by their Easter sermon when the pastor said Good Friday was love, and Easter Sunday was victory. 

That's what sparked the creative juice for Burnard and pitched it to his team and they got to work.

"We have plans to continue to write more songs. [This is Love, This is Victory] didn't just get people excited, it got lots more people inspired."

With many church members coming forward with creative ideas, Burnard says they plan on writing a new song on a quarterly basis.

"Our goal is to really do our best to honour the musicians that are here and honour God with the gifts that he's given us."

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