We have finished 3 weeks of our Marriage Matters series and so far it’s going great. After spending the first two weeks talking about some foundational stuff around God’s design and intent for marriage this week was all about “Why Bother?” It was sort of a “if that’s what marriage is all about, why even bother??”

Earl talked about issues like divorce, same sex marriage and common law relationships and how, at the core, each of those go against God’s design and intent for marriage. After taking some time defending marriage as a good thing which is worth pursuing, he gave some words of advice to various groups in our church, including to students. I don’t normally post audio from our messages but thought I’d pull out this clip and post it here so that you could hear it. Great stuff.

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I know that I haven’t done a worship confessional in a while but I wanted to fill you in on something that worked GREAT this past Sunday. Normally we do two extended sets of worship during our services but for a few reasons we only had time for two songs plus a chorus tag or something like that added in between.

Thematically, we were focusing on the grace of God and we were able to establish that pretty strongly in the first set through songs and a responsive reading. We got to this second set and I wanted to move people from a place of grasping the GREATNESS of God and moving them to thinking about the GREATNESS of His grace. And yes – I had two songs to do that :) No problem, right??

So here’s what I did -

First, we tore the band down. Instead of our set up from the first set – guitar, bass, drums, four vocalists – we had me on acoustic, one of our singers with a shaker and our drummer. The other singer and I were sitting on stools on the front edge of the stage with our drummer in the centre behind us.

We started the set by leading the congregation in prayer – giving them a chance to thank God for who He is and what He has done in their lives this past week then moving to a time of confession and expressing our dependance on Him. Out of that we moved straight in to “Everlasting God” – this song is a huge favourite of ours and it goes over very well every time we do it. We started and finished the song with the pre-chorus section – “Our God, You reign forever/Our hope, our strong deliverer” – just to emphasive our dependance on God.

From that we moved in to the chorus of “For The Glory Of It All” by David Crowder. This is a song we’ve done a few times but by just repeating the chorus we made a quick transition from the big-ness of God coming to earth, to be among us, for His glory.

Oh, The glory of it all is You came here
for the rescue of us all
that we may live for the glory of it all

Oh You are here with redemption for us all
that we may live for the glory of it all

Awesome. Such a simple declaration of the greatness and the glory of God coming to earth for His own glory and so that we may also experience the fullness of who God is.

Out of that song we went straight in to “The Wonder Of Your Cross” by Robin Mark. This song is new for us as a congregational worship song but almost everyone was familiar with it when we started doing it a few months ago so it goes over HUGE every time we do it. And this Sunday was no exception. We moved the lead vocal from me to the female singer just to give a different sound and it was incredible. The little instrumental melody line that happens in the intro is also a variation on the theme that happens in “Everlasting God” so it worked together great.

We also did all 3 of these songs in the key of A so I didn’t have to worry about any key changes, etc during the whole run.

Okay – recap -

• Prayer
• Everlasting God – beginning and ending with the pre-chorus
• For The Glory Of It All – chorus only repeated twice
• Wonder Of Your Cross – female lead vocal

It was one of those beautiful moments where we were able to move people intellectually and emotionally very quickly while creating an environment that really encouraged people to respond in worship. And that is exactly what they did! At both services we had people sitting at the beginning of this set and at the first service only a few stood but the expression of worship in the room was unreal. At our second service people were standing with hands raised and were in genuine worship as a response to the GREATNESS of God and His grace.

So there you go – I know that sometimes you don’t have much time for singing but you still want to do something that will have lots of impact. That’s an example of somethign we tried which worked really well.

I’m not sure who it is but somebody over at Leadership Magazine has been reading the blog and finding the content helpful. Very cool! My  blog along with a bunch of others that I read were listed together as being helpful for readers.

Here’s a photo -

I asked this question on twitter tonight but I’m posting it here as well because I’m really interested in some good response on this one.

Those if you who celebrate communion together regularly at church, is it done with juice? wine? both?

What’s your style?

So I’m pretty pumped about heading to re:create next week and catching up with some good friends but I’m also really excited about a class that I’m taking in a few weeks at Heritage Seminary. I’ll be taking a Theology of Worship course with Dr. David Barker, a man whose teaching I’ve really enjoyed and respected in the past.

Here’s the course description -

What is it that we are supposed to be doing when we gather on a Sunday for a “worship service”? Often the experience has been wonderful–we’ve sung, prayed, heard the Bible read and preached, and celebrated communion. Other times the experience has been difficult–for many reasons (we can all think of all kinds of reasons!). So, what is the problem?

Why is what is intended to be the heart of our response to God so variable and volatile? It is evident that what is lacking is an understanding of worship that is not driven by personal tastes and preferences, but rather by an understanding of the nature of God and theforms, functions, structures and diversities of responses to God that are pointed to across the breadth of the whole Bible.

We will talk about the importance of corporate worship in the church, how it affects evangelism and social response, and its impact on personal and communal spirituality. It will encompass a broad sweep of the entire Bible seeking to bring together a coherent and radically biblical perspective on the nature and practice of the worship of God.

I’m excited about going through the class and learning more about what Scripture says about the Church and how she should worship but I’m also excited about praying and dreaming about the impact and implications of that in what we do here at OBC.

So what are you learning?

It’s late. Isabelle doesn’t want to sleep. I do. We’re hanging out and decided that we should make some videos.

Last week I posted a job opening for a full-time worship ministry director at a church just outside Toronto. Another job posting was sent my way and I thought I would pass the info along. Like last time, if you’ve got questions about the posting there is contact info in the listing – this isn’t a position that I’m hiring. You can apply online here.

Bethel Baptist Church is located in Strathroy, Ontario about two hours west of Toronto.

One of the interesting parts of what I do is that every now and then a challenge comes along where we need to try something completely new. I came up against the challenge of finding a way for our church to send questions by text message related to a series that we’re doing and found that there isn’t an obvious solution for cell phone customers on Canadian carriers like Rogers, Telus or Bell Mobility.

We are in the middle of an 8-week series called “Marriage Matters” and one of the key things we wanted to open up was the opportunity for people to submit their marriage-related questions. If you’re married, you’ve got questions! If you’re not married, you’ve got questions! We know that people have questions and we want to give them a chance to share them with us. We are planning on using the last Sunday of this series to take time and answer some of the questions which have been submitted.

We spent some time talking about how we’d like people to get questions to us and we came up with three options -

1. Connection Card – this is our communication piece that we ask people to fill in if they’re visiting or have prayer requests
2. Email – questions can be sent to an email address or through a form on our website
3. Text messaging – this one is new for us and turned out to be a little bit of an adventure.

The first two were fairly easy to implement but it’s the text messaging option that was the tough one to figure out. I asked for some help on Twitter, did some searching on Google and was able to find a handful of companies that would have done exactly what we needed but they were only available for cell phone customers in the US and didn’t service Canadian customers.

Not cool!

Eventually I was able to find my way to a company called WeTextIt that specializes in generating customer feedback via text messaging – sounds like exactly what we need! After a few emails and a couple of phone conversations our program was up and running and we came up with a very simple solution for people to send us their questions.

Basically it works like this – if someone has a question they simply type the word ‘ask’ followed by their question and send it to 889898. The question is put in a database which is sent to us weekly. So, for example, if your question about marriage is ‘Who should I marry?’ you would type ‘ask who should i marry?’ and send that text to 889898 and it would be delivered to us during the week.

Obviously, if you’re looking for instant communication between your crowd and the speaker, this isn’t a good option for you. BUT.. For us and what we are looking for, this is the perfect solution!

My friend Matt emailed me to let me know about a church just outside Toronto that is looking to hire the right person for their Director of Ministry position. If you are interested, there are instructions below on how you can get more information -

*MINISTRY POSITION OPENING*

*Harvest Bible Chapel York Region* is actively seeking to fill the position of *Director of Worship*.  This is likely a Full Time position although a half time role is possible depending on the circumstances of the candidate.  Major aspects of the role would be:  *worship leading in our services, planning and administration, worship training and equipping for the worship musicians in the church, organization of the audio/visual ministry, volunteer recruiting, and other duties as required.* Equally important will be partnering with the Senior Pastor (Paul Whittingstall) in providing passionate and faithful worship service leadership.  A track record of worship team leadership and musicianship is a must and a passion for “contemporary worship without compromise” will be evident.  Qualified applicants will resonate with Harvest’s doctrine, practice, and worship philosophy (see links below for more information).

Resumes can be sent to Ruth Naismith, Administrative Assistant (ruthn@harvestyorkregion.ca).

Our Church Website:  www.harvestyorkregion.ca
Our Family of Churches (Harvest Bible Fellowship): www.harvestbiblefellowship.us

If you were paying attention, you might remember that back in the fall I was blogging about finding myself in a bit of a creative funk. It was nothing life-threatening but just one of those seasons that we go through when you find ourselves up to our necks in routine and the same old, same old.

One of the things that this led me to was the exploration of photography as a new hobby. I began researching the art of photography and cameras in general and became pretty interested in all of it. I got up to speed pretty quickly on lots of new terms – SLR, ISO, f-stops, AF-S, exposure, white balance and speedlights.

After looking at a bunch of different options and trying to be realistic about how far I’m going to go with this (my wife is great at helping me remember those kinds of things!) I ended up getting a Nikon D60 with the standard 18-55mm lens as well as a 55-200mm lens, too. I won’t bore you with the details because you either know about all this stuff or you don’t care, don’t want to.

I took a 4-week photography class offered by our local camera store and learned the real basics – settings on the camera, photo composition, depth of field techniques, etc – and since then I have taken my camera almost everywhere I go. I love being able to get pretty decent shots of my family with almost no setup time and I also love having the flexibility of editing and fine-tuning photos to get really nice shots if that’s what I’m looking for.

I know that most musicians are familiar with the concept of GAS (gear acquisition syndrome) but I’m pretty sure that the same thing exists for photographers as well. You get one component and then you realize that if you just had that one extra thing, your photography life would be that much better :) I was able to slay the GAS beast just a little bit over Christmas when I bought an SB-600 speedlight thanks to a generous gift from our elders. I haven’t spent a ton of time with it but I’m already noticing some pretty dramatic differences in the results.

I’m hoping to expand this hobby more and more this year – I’ve already been taking photos for some concerts and had one picture run in a regional newspaper. They have asked me to continue taking photos for them and it looks like that will be a good arrangement. I don’t see this as a money-making venture for me at this point – just a way to get my creative juices flowing a bit more and explore the world from a new perspective. I know that my skill, technique and ability has a long way to go but I am really enjoying being able to experiment and try new things. Having a few little people around the house willing to be my test subjects is also a bonus!

So what about you? What’s new for you this year? I know some of you who read are big in to the photo thing so what’s your one big tip for people who are just starting out? Let’s hear it.