A couple of weeks ago we celebrated what God has been doing here at Orangeville Baptist Church over the last couple of years. Two years ago we embarked on this crazy journey called BEYOND and we began to dream about God using us to transform our region and transform our world. That transformation first began in us and is now happen regionally and globally so we wanted to hit the pause button, in a sense, and come together to remind people what we’re doing, why we’re doing it and that it’s only because of the grace and goodness of God that this is happening.

We invited some artists to come and perform for us to help celebrate the evening and one of them, Phil Aud, wrote a journal with some reflections on his time here with us. Pretty exciting to hear that others who are in our midst are also getting to capture a bit of what God is up to –

Probably my favorite DVD is Sting’s “All This Time”. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched it…suffice it to say that I can quote most of the lines in the documentary. If you don’t know anything about this recording, it’s basically a small concert on Stings property in Tuscany. He re-arranged and performed many of his well-loved songs. In the documentary section he talked about when it was just an idea and how somebody took the ball and started to run with it. Before he knew it he had a construction crew, band members, video crew, etc. at his house. He said that he felt like saying “Stop, it was only a whim…”. (Hopefully I’m not misquoting since I just said I could quote most of it). In my opinion, this was an incredible “whim” and one of my favorite projects that he has released.

Saturday night Marisa, Tony (our guitarist), and myself went to play at a coffeehouse type event at a church in Orangeville (a place that does not grow Oranges or have orange buildings, or deal in anything orange to the best of my knowledge). We’ve starting doing this stripped down thing and it has been a lot of fun. The church we were at was celebrating what God has done in and through them over the past two years. One of the things that they have involved themselves in is child sponsorship in Uganda. They have also been there to build as I understand it, and have on some level partnered with some folks from there. The Pastor spoke for about 5 minutes and he said, “2 years ago Uganda was just an idea. Now it has become a part of us”. You could sense how much it really had become a part of them. It was awesome to be a part of the night. It got me thinking as I was driving home, how many “whims” or “ideas” do we just pass up and what are we missing out on? Could these whims not be the voice of God at times? I think we often believe that when we don’t pick up the ball and run with some of these thoughts that other people are missing out. This is often true. However, I think that WE are often the ones that are missing out. I could see that these people had a great impact on Uganda. But, I could also see that Uganda had a great impact on them. It was in the air and it was amazing. Maybe we need to start asking ourselves what is holding us back from these whims, and risk a bit more. Maybe some of these “whims” could be the best thing that ever (or never) happened to us.

Okay, I’m going to stop because I’m afraid that I may use the word “whim” one more time.

That is awesome. We are excited to be part of what God is doing here and I cannot wait to see where it goes next.

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By the way, if you want to hear some great, fresh, really enjoyable music you need to listen to Phil’s stuff. He is a great songwriter and an incredible performer. He was definitely the hilight of the night when we brought him to Orangeville! His songs are available on iTunes and he’s available for bookings – buy his music and support what he’s doing.

One of the real unique things we do at OBC is work together with a bunch of churches in our region to host a community Good Friday service. This has been happening in Orangeville for a number of years and I’ve loved being involved since I came here in 2005. The focus of the service has always been the crucifixion and death of Jesus – very much the beginning of a weekend which ends with real celebration on Sunday!

This year, for the first time, we decided to do two identical services. Our building has always been packed when we did one and we’ve talked about possibly making this service multi-site in the future. By taking the first step of offering this service more than once then we could begin to create some diversity in how or when the service is offered. It was definitely the right call! Both services were very full (we only offered childcare at the first service) and our total numbers were up about 30% from last year. It will be interesting to talk through why that was – did churches promote more because we made more space available? did people invite more because they knew there would be room? Interesting questions.

For the service itself, I began working on the content right after Christmas. I came up with the idea of using the stations of the cross as a template for the service design and eventually landed on a concept where we would tell the story of Good Friday in five segments or movements: condemnation, procession, crucifixion, death, burial. We used scripture, readings, songs, videos and visuals to help tell the story. We did record both services (the band was tight!!) and I’ll try and get some audio online later this week.

One of the visuals that we used to help tell the story was a set of five candles on a table right at the front of our stage. These fives candles were lit at the beginning of the service and as we progressed through the five moments – condemnation, procession, crucifixion, death, burial – each candle was extinguished. Here’s a quick video showing what the table looked like – the five candles are talking about are the big ones which are unlit in the video:

We began the service with a call to worship, explaining the morning and our pastor, Earl Marshall, read from John 1 and then lit the centre candle. From there the service progressed through each of the movements. Here’s the rundown:

Call to Worship – John 1
Lighting of centre candle
Condemnation
Reading – Matthew 27:15-26, Luke 23:18-25, Mark 15:16-20
Responsive Prayer
Silent Prayers of Confession
First candle extinguished
Procession
Reading – Luke 23:26-31
“This Is The Day” – presentation song cued to “Passion of the Christ” video
“Mighty is the Power of the Cross” – Chris Tomlin
Second candle extinguished
Crucifixion
Verses on screen – Matthew 27:33-39, Mark 15:24, Luke 23:33, John 19:17-18
Reading from St. Matthew’s Passion

Commend your ways and whatever grieves your heart
to the most faithful care of him who directs the heavens;
he to clouds, air, and wind assigns paths, ways, and course,
will also find ways where your feet can go.

Third candle extinguished
Video – Psalm 22 with St. Matthew’s Passion underscore
“I Stand Amazed (How Marvelous)” – the Passion version
Death & Burial
Reading – Mark 15:33-39
Fourth candle extinguished
“You Gave Your Life Away” – Paul Baloche
“Jesus Messiah” – Chris Tomlin
Communion
“This is the Gift of God” – Carl Cartee
“The Wonder of the Cross” – Vicky Beeching
Fifth (centre) candle extinguished

Alright.. If you’re thinking that the outline looks complicated, you’re right. There were LOTS of moving pieces – four scripture readers from different churches, eight communion servers from different churches, lots of video and light cues and some elements that really needed to happen in the right sequence to have impact. It came off BEAUTIFULLY – this is probably the most complex service I’ve put together at OBC but the response was incredible.

I had run through the service on my own about 6 or 8 times during the week to prepare myself – videos, readings, songs, everything – but then still on Friday morning participating with everyone as we listened, watched and sang together the emotion of the day got to more more than a few times. I had lots of comments from people on not only the content but how everything flowed from the beginning of the service right to the end. This service was very produced but was executed so well by the people involved that it came off very naturally. I was really proud of everyone involved and at the end of the day we had accomplished what we had set out to do – to tell the story of the darkest day, the story of Christ’s condemnation, procession, crucifixion, death and burial. It is a day that I will not soon forget.

I went to see the Newsboys play in Toronto last night – it`s been a long time since I`ve seen those guys play and although I`m not a huge fan of the band they put on a great show and were really entertaining. I was definitely intrigued by the recent addition of Tait as their new lead singer and he did not disappoint. These guys for sure have a bunch of years left in them!

It was also really nice to see a good crowd for a good show! We have had some rough times with the Christian concert scene in eastern Canada but some good tours are starting to pop up every now and then. All of the bands that night were great – DecembeRadio, Vota and Bread of Stone all made new friends in southern Ontario last night and hopefully they`ll all be back.

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We woke up today to a bit of snow on the ground (pretty unusual for April but nothing too crazy) but it has been snowing like CRAZY all day today. This is just not right. Here are some photos from my front porch –