You can see the prefessional here.

Alright. So Sunday was, in fact, pretty awesome.  I’m not sure if it was how we did the service or the fact that we scaled back from two services to one or that it’s that downtime right after Christmas but I really had the sense on Sunday that our church was there to worship. I’m not sure if that should be notable or not but that is the sense I had on Sunday morning.

We basically broke the morning in to three sections – lament, praise and thanks. We thought it was important to spend time expressing each of those things to God being fully aware that there are people in our church who are certainly in a place of lament right now, as well as those who are in great seasons of thanksgiving. It’s good to acknowledge that just because we are praising God through lament doesn’t mean that those who are not in a season of lament need to check out – this is an expression of corporate worship and I’m so thankful that God calls us to worship in these ways and to do it together!

I’ll post some thoughts on each section and why we chose to do them the way we did and then post some closing thoughts too.

• Lament
  Obviously this is the kind of worship that our church (and most churches) are least familiar with. Earl opened with a quick recap of 2007 in the life of our church as well as some global events and then encouraged people to think about the kind of year they’ve had. He then moved into an overview of Psalm 22 (more well-known as the Psalm quoted by Christ on the cross than as a lament Psalm on its own) as well as Psalm 13. We gave people some time of silence to express their frustrations, their longings, their cries to God and then I led them through “Psalm 13″ put to music by Brian Doerksen. Because we wanted the sound of the music to fit the tone of what we were doing, the band for this section was me on vocals and keys plus a guitar player, bass and drums. I did a quick verbal transition that led to “When The Tears Fall” by Tim Hughes and brought the congregation in on the second verse leading to the chorus.
  This whole section went well and even though it’s something that we don’t often do as a church, it is easy to let it pass by too quickly when it does happen. We wanted to stay in the lament long enough to let people experience it and maybe even feel a little uncomfortable as we were doing it.
• Praise
  Wow. This was really the “blow the roof off the place” moment on Sunday morning. Earl set it up nicely with some thoughts on Psalm 145 (each of his teaching sections on Sunday were only about 5-7 minutes long) and then we went right in to a really great section of praise songs. We opened by running through “Praise The Name Of Jesus” twice – once in D, once in E – and did it really heavy on vocals. That led straight into “Unchanging” in E which is a new song for us but is really, really easy to teach.
  During that song I had people in the congregation call out praise to God – loud enough for people around them to hear and be encouraged. Basically calling out an aspect of God’s character that they are praising Him for. I could have been a little more clear in this as far as the idea that it should be loud enough for other people to hear but there were definitely lots of people expressing praise to God.
  Once we ran through that song we hit “Holy Holy Holy” and it was over. Wow. People were singing – loud! Hands up! People genuinely expressing their praise to God in a real way. It was awesome.
• Thanks
  Usually at the service right after Christmas we take time to do this open mic thing where we really encourage people to worship by expressing their thanks to God for something that has happened in the past year. Of course we are always wondering what people are going to say when we open the floor but we try to set it up in a way that will really encourage people to be concise and focused on God with their comments. For the most part, that did happen on Sunday (although Earl did have to give a little mid-course correction early on) and it’s a good way to hear from people in our congregation who are genuinely thankful for what God has done this year.
  We closed the service with “Forever” and it was fantastic.

All in all, a great morning. I love when we integrate the teaching and worship response sections like that although it is much more work to co-ordinate everything and pull it off well. If you haven’t tried something like this at your church yet, I’d really encourage you to do so. Bring the idea up with your pastor and see what he thinks of it. If I can be a resource for you to help you out, let me know.