Collide Magazine

The Story of The Carols' Story

Scott McClellan - Originally posted Monday, November 3, 2008 -

In 2006, Irving Bible Church in Irving, TX decided to celebrate the Christmas season through a project that combined music, Scripture, story, and design. What began as an idea, suggested by a member of Irving Bible, for a CD carolers could give as they made their rounds that holiday season, evolved into a 40-page booklet and 10-track CD package titled The Carols’ Story: A Love Story in Song.

While caroling became less of a focus for the function of the project, “the caroling idea was maintained as the main theme,” says Russ Ware, IBC’s Worship Pastor. Also maintained was the concept of members of the IBC community giving the CDs away, whether to friends, family, neighbors, or total strangers. Ultimately, the church leadership “wanted to do something for Christmas that would fit in with IBC's current emphasis on generosity and getting outside the walls of the church,” Ware continues.

Conventional wisdom suggests that if a church seeks to share a message with the surrounding culture, especially through a medium such as music, distorted guitars and catchy, throwaway hooks are the way to go. To get its proverbial foot in the door, a message ought to be cloaked in the style of the moment, right? One might then expect traditional hymns to be abandoned in favor of more contemporary tunes fit for Top-40 radio. You know, something with some relevance to people’s everyday lives. At the very least, one might expect Ware to enlist the electric guitarists, bass players, keyboardists, and drummers that accompany him on Sundays at Irving Bible. The music on The Carols’ Story, however, is not what one might expect.

Instead, the Vox Humana choir—an a capella choir consisting of participants from IBC—belts out traditional Christmas hymns such as “Joy to the World,” “Good Christians All Rejoice,” “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” and “Silent Night.” “I wanted there to be some 'old world' feel from a creative standpoint,” Ware says, “something to give it a little more artistic depth. Another desire was to keep the recording simple, yet original.”

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The music’s relevance—if in fact that is the correct term—is then derived from the hymns’ history and familiarity, rather than their sonic packaging. “We wanted to do things that people would recognize and would connect with right away,” he explains. The ultimate goal of the recordings, and in fact the project as a whole, “was that we would take songs, several of which people had probably sung all their lives without thinking too much about them, and bring out the underlying meaning.” In an effort to convey that meaning as clearly as possible, the CD was not required to stand alone.

Part of the project’s appeal for the Irving Bible staff was The Carols’ Story’s potential capacity for connecting “in a missional way with where the IBC community was headed.” That’s why, Ware says, so much effort was put into the book that accompanies the recordings. Rather than produce a traditional CD insert, which is almost as much of an afterthought as the cellophane wrapping involved in most CD packaging, the team involved with The Carols’ Story sought to create something different. “We really wanted it to be as much a little book with a CD attached as a CD with liner notes.” Ware explains, “We wanted people to be drawn to the booklet, to want to read through it, not cast it aside as they put the CD in their player.”

With the help of Linda Tomczak, the IBC member who initially proposed the idea for the project, and artist Michelle Davis (www.ilivetocreate.com), the team was able to accomplish just that. Tomczak wrote the text that shares the story of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ over the book’s first 31 pages (song lyrics and production credits comprise the final nine pages). Near the beginning of the book, grungy text poses a vital question, “Why are we still singing about a baby born two thousand years ago?” The book then tells the story about which the iconic carols were written and what happened in the 33 years that followed—not to mention the hope, love, grace, and peace found therein.

Graphic designer Michelle Davis, who often does design work for IBC, was charged with visually bringing the story of the carols to life. Her use of classic and contemporary elements lends a sense of both history and immediacy to the book, effectively and engagingly capturing the drama and significance of the two thousand year-old event in question. Together, the story and artwork form a riveting and compelling presentation of that ever-elusive concept, the true meaning of Christmas.

All told, The Carols’ Story project involved not only the talents of Ware, Tomczak, and Davis, but also Evantell, a Dallas-based evangelism resource and training organization, as well the IBC sound team, and, of course, the choir. The end result was a high-quality collection of timeless Christmas carols and an articulate answer to the question of why Christians still sing about a baby born two thousand years ago.

The CDs themselves were priced in such a way as to encourage bulk purchasing (one for $10, five for $35, 10 for $50, and 25 for $100), in hopes that IBC members would generously share The Carols’ Story with those around them who could benefit from the important story of hope told through music, images, and the written word.