We’ll be getting together tonight with friends from our small group to ring in the new year together – nothing better than hanging out with friends playing some Wii, enjoying good food and laughing together.

There’s lots of young kids who will be there so there’s some talk of doing Happy New Year Greenland! as part of our festivities :)

2007 has been a pretty memorable year for me – personally, professionally, musically and blog-ly. Thanks for being a part of the ride. I’m looking forward to a great 2008!

2008 Make It Great!

I’ll do a full confessional in the next couple of days but let me say now that this morning was one of those times of corporate worship that I wish every person connected to our church could have been a part of. It was an honest, genuine, impactful, real time of worship for our church.

Randy Moss dropped a 50-yard pass with NOBODY around him.

Next play Tom Brady goes back to him for a 65-yard touchdown.

Wow. That is killer instinct! 11 minutes away from perfection.

So although I took a bit of a blogging break I still kept up with my Google Reader and came across some great stuff. Here are some links to some posts that I found interesting over the past couple of weeks.

• The Perfect Book For Every Boy From Eight To Eighty… at Ethos
  

  Equal parts droll and gorgeous nostalgia book and heartfelt plea for a renewed sense of adventure in the lives of boys and men, The Dangerous Book is a guide book for dads as well as their sons, as a reminder of lore and technique that have not yet been completely lost to the digital age.

• Christmas Eve…According to John, Paul, George and Ringo at LeadingSmart
  

  The truth about Christmas Eve services at Granger…

  • Included kite flying and ribbon twirling by professional kite-flyers and ribbon-twirlers.
  • Multi-sensory.
  • Three stages built in the crowd throughout the auditorium.
  • A 10′ high, fiber-optic, star floating out above the audience.
  • Amazing choreography by more than 30 cast members.
  • A guest appearance by the Culps.
  • The story of Joseph and Mary and baby Jesus using the songs of the Beatles.
  • Attended by more than 10,500 people — a record.

  Watch it yourself here.

• Christmas Title Package at motionhouse
  

  

• Time: A Sacred Ingredient In Worship at DanWilt.com
  

  In this “time” of Advent and Christmas, recognize as a worshiper that your entire year, your every moment, is about to be guided by this amazing reality: God, in time, has acted. Your year can now begin fresh and God can redeem anything that happens, because Christ has come. The incarnation is transforming your world and mine. As Paul says in Colossians 1, “…In everything, he has supremacy.”

• Light Of The World by Rich Kirkpatrick
  

• Paris’ War Declaration Against Advertising at ParisDailyPhoto.com
  

  
  Advertisers love Paris, but Paris doesn’t like them..

After a nice little blog holiday, I’m back on the train.

Here’s what we had lined up for Christmas Eve. This is a big event in our town and our building was pretty full for both services. Lots of visitors, family and friends and it’s a great opportunity to tell the Christmas story in a really simple way and have people slow down and think about it for a few minutes before they go back to the craziness of this time of year.

Monday, December 24, 2007 – “The Surprising Story Of Christmas”
Welcome
Isaiah 9
Joy To The World
Hark The Herald Angels Sing
O Come All Ye Faithful
Luke 1:26-38
What Child Is This
Luke 2:8-20
Angels We Have Heard On High
Matthew 2:1-2, 9-11
“Expectations, Rumours, Responses”
Poem – “God Is With Us”
Immanuel – Michael Card
Message – “The Surprising Story Of Christmas”
O Holy Night
Silent Night

Our focus on Christmas Eve was to look at the responses of Mary, the shepherds and the Magi to God just showing up in their lives. Obviously the push being to encourage people to think about what their response would be. We sang Christmas songs and had people read some of the passages that told the story.

• The “Expectations, Rumours, Responses” thing was a bit of a monologue that I wrote with someone from our church who presented it coming out of the Matthew 2 reading. The basic idea is that we wanted to place her in the story so she read the verses and then talked about how she had heard the story for the first time from a friend of her father’s who had met these men as they entered Bethlehem. It went over really well and set up the more introspective part of the service.

• The poem “God Is With Us” is from a thing Don Chapman put together. You can get it from his WorshipIdeas.com site but you need to register and then purchase the Christmas service he’s put together.

• “Immanuel” is a bit of a tradition for us. No, we don’t do it like the recording – no oboes or string quartet! :) One of our worship leaders loves to do this song and he pulled it off incredibly – especially at the first service! It was fantastic.

The service closed with a woman from our church who is a classically-trained opera singer doing “O Holy Night” – I think this will also become a tradition for us at Christmastime. She has an incredibly powerful voice and is a great performer. That led beautifully in to “Silent Night” which we do every year as our close. There are candles on chairs as people come in and then we light them during the intro of this song. I love being on stage for the end of the service – we have the best view!!

All in all, the service was great. I had lots of positive comments from people and it seemed like it was an actual worship experience – not just a bunch of Christmas songs all jammed together with a nice little message. I’m glad we took the time we did to think about how this fit with our run of Sunday morning services leading up to the 24th. Everything worked together really well.

I know I’m a little late but how was your Christmas?

We’ve just finished our rehearsal for tomorrow’s service and it looks like it’s going to be a good one. We’ve done this a couple times before where we’ve broken up the teaching and worship/response times in to several sections. Usually on the Sunday right after Christmas we do a “year in review” service where we give people a chance to express their thanks to God for the things He has done in the past year. We do this “open mic” style and although we’re always nervous about what people might say, the focus is usually on what God has done (rather than what someone in our church has done) and people leave feeling encouraged and praising God.

Sunday, December 30, 2007 – “A Psalm Of Praise”
Our God Saves – Brenton Brown & Paul Baloche – C
Everlasting God – Brenton Brown – A
Announcements/Offering/Prayer
Teaching Segment #1 – Psalms of Lament
Psalm 13 – Brian Doerksen – D
When The Tears Fall – Tim Hughes – D
Teaching Segment #2 – Psalms of Praise
Praise The Name Of Jesus – Roy Hicks Jr – D->E
Unchanging – Chris Tomlin – E
Holy, Holy, Holy – Dykes & Heber – D
Teaching Segment #3 – Psalms of Thanks
Open Mic
Forever – Chris Tomlin – G

I’m a big fan of doing these kinds of services – Nancy Beach calls it “leveraging the arts” to support the message. Basically the idea is that Earl will speak for 5-10 minutes to set up the section as a whole then we’ll use silence, music and words as our response to what we’ve heard.

Because we know that not everyone in our congregation is necessarily in a season of praise, we want to move our people through a time of lament. It’s not something that we do enough in our own church and something the church as a whole doesn’t do enough. We’ll try not to move too quickly through that time, either, giving people a time of silence to respond to Psalm 22 on their own and then do two songs that will help people remember that it’s okay to cry out to God when it seems He’s far away.

We’ll do a section of praise, as well, and encourage people in our congregation to call out aspects of God’s character that they are praising Him for. Whether it’s His mercy, faithfulness, grace, love, whatever – there are different parts of who God is that are affecting people in different ways this week. I’m excited about doing this tomorrow.

The last section will be our open mic time and we’ll focus on giving God thanks for the incredible things that He’s done in the life of our church and in our individual lives as well. We’re only doing one service (instead of two) this week and we’ll have a good time of refreshments and socializing afterwards. That should be fun.

Pat and I were talking the other day about strange things that people google to end up at our blogs.

In no particular order, here are my Top 10 Favourite Google Searches of 2007:

1. diaper change video
2. awesome canadian pastors
3. adultery consequences in canada
4. chris tomlin heresy
5. does jesse lacey hate god
6. funny things to get canadians to say
7. kinderegg commercials (That was probably Rich!)
8. christmas songs to sing to your puppy
9. fred mckinnon oh holy night (Fred, it’s never going to die!)
10. the golden compass is a dud

What weird searches are bringing people to your blog?

I’m posting this because someone out there has been googling and looking for a way to contact me. You made your way here and maybe used the contact page to send me a message. I just went and checked that page and it was broken so if you did send me a message then I didn’t get it.

Actually, if anyone’s ever used that contact form I didn’t get the email. Moral of the story? Don’t be a bonehead when you’re typing your own email address and forget to include one letter. Bonehead. But now it’s fixed and should be working just fine.

You can read the prefessional here.

Our setlist -

Sunday, December 16, 2007 – “The Surprising Story Of Christmas”
Pre-Service Christmas Songs
The Son Of God Came Down – Doug Plank – D
with this video in the background
Come Now Is The Time – Brian Doerksen – D
This Is My Father’s World – Sheppard & Babcock – C
Community Stuff – Announcements, Offering, Congregational Prayer
Kids Christmas Songs
Joy To The World – Handel & Watts – C
Joyful Joyful We Adore Thee – Beethoven, Hughes & Van Dyke – G
Glory Of It All – David Crowder – A
Message – “The Surprising Humility Of Christmas”
How Great Is Our God w/ Good Christian Men, Rejoice – Tomlin & Neale – A

All in all it was a great morning. The snow did come – boy, did it come! – but not until after our 9:00 service had begun. I woke up at about 3:30 in the morning checked outside, no snow. Got up at 6:00, no snow. I figured we were in good shape and the storm had passed by to the south of us. But when it came, did it ever come! We got about 12 inches of snow on Sunday – made for some good family time in the backyard on Monday morning.

Alright. Confessional time. We had one of our musicians* lead worship and he did a good job, as usual. It’s been great to see how John has grown over the past couple of years of being involved in our worship ministry. He is getting more and more confident with the transitions and speaking parts between songs – really leading people in worship rather than just leading songs.

I feel like we’re in a really good spot with the music selection for our services. It’s a nice mix of old, familiar and new songs that are giving our people opportunity to worship. We need to branch out in to other artistic expressions of worship too but we’re headed in a good direction.

Well Marty was the only one who commented last week so maybe he’s the only one who will care about this but the tying together of the lyrics of “Good Christian Men Rejoice” and “How Great Is Our God” was AMAZING. Both services I had people come up to me and tell me that the combination of Earl’s message on God’s humility, the first verse of How Great and then the added lyrics had a significant impact on them. One guy was in tears just amazed that God Himself would come to earth as a baby to live a life of humility and sacrifice and then give Himself up to death – even death on a cross!

What a great, majestic, glorious, humble and tender God we serve.

This really is the most wonderful time of the year!

———————–

*I call him a musician only because I don’t want to call him a “worship ministry volunteer” or a “team member” or “someone from our church.” He is a talented, servant-hearted, eager-to-learn friend a co-labourer for the sake of the gospel. To call our musicians simply volunteers is nowhere near sufficient.

My friend Mark has launched a new venture over at SeminarySurvivalGuide.com to help people navigate the waters of preparing for ministry.

Read this and then head over to the blog – it might be for you or someone you know but there is lots of good stuff there!

I got this idea for this laying in bed praying one morning. I was thinking of the four seminary students from our church, and remembering back to my seminary days. I remembered how much I thought I knew, and how little I actually knew about ministry and about what things are really important. I especially remembered colleagues from seminary who are no longer in ministry. Some burned out. Some failed morally. Some should never have been in ministry to begin with.

The attrition rate is bad. Check these stats:
* Half of all seminary students drop out before they complete their degrees.
* The protestant clergy divorce rate equals that of the general population.
* The average seminarian in 2001 graduated with $25,000 in debt
* Of those who begin a career in full-time ministry, only one in ten makes it to retirement.

And so I thought: what if an injection of realistic counsel at the beginning of their ministry preparation could make a difference?