Sunday, September 2, 2007 – “After God’s Own Heart”
2 Samuel 6
Yesterday, Today & Forever – Vicky Beeching
Crown Him With Many Crowns – George Elvey & his friends
Announcements
Prayer
Be Unto Your Name – Gary Sadler & Lynn DeShazo
Indescribable – Laura Story
Message – “Mountain Climbers”
Audio –

#dddddd;background:#f8f8f8" id="audioplayer_1">Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

This Is Our God – Chris Tomlin
Here I Am To Worship – Tim Hughes

This series continues to kill me. Man, it seems like week after week Earl’s messages are hitting home in a significant way. After talking about David’s cave experience a couple of weeks ago it was time for the mountaintop this week. The focus was on worship and how there is a right way and a wrong way to do it. David did it right, Uzzah did it wrong.

One of the fun things we did this week was put together a little video (I’ll get it online once I figure out why YouTube links aren’t working??) contrasting two pretty different worship styles – sacred harp and Hillsong United. Earl asked the question, “which is better?” and his answer was basically “I don’t know but does it really matter?” Kind of nice to place that kind of framework around worship for a church like ours that is almost 150 years old!

So after a message like that the natural thing is to ask myself, “What are we doing right? What are we doing wrong?” Here are some quick answers:

• Right
  • time, prayer, thought, reflection goes in to the overall design of our worship experiences
  • the Sunday morning “product” – music, video, interaction with congregation – is done very well. We have very talented people
  • there is a recognition among the congregation that our time together on Sunday morning is to hear from God’s word, express our praise and worship to Him and to interact on a personal level with our church family – it is a “connect” event on multiple levels
  • our worship on Sunday morning is authentic in two ways
    • it represents who we are generationally (young and old on stage) and artistically (fits the current musical style of our culture)
    • it recognizes that the “artist’s heart” of worship leaders is not always shared by the congregation so not all worshippers will respond to choruses repeated several times, long interludes during songs, opportunities to “raise your voice to God”, etc etc
• Wrong
  • we need to give ourselves more lead-time in our service planning process – I am currently developing a system where we will be working 4-5 weeks in advance
  • this was previously mentioned but I’d love to see us develop a better overall vision of leading worship rather than just leading songs
  • we need to get better at diversifying the components of our worship service – allow for different forms of prayer, place greater emphasis on the public reading of scripture, give space for our congregation to share life stories, etc etc
  • we all need to come to Sunday morning with the 100% conviction and expectation that we are coming to meet with the living God – that changes everything!!

Well, that turned out to be a little longer than I expected. Sorry Rich – although I’m sure you haven’t even made it this far. Buuuuut.. If you have – what are you doing right??