Easter Sunday responsive reading

Here is a responsive reading we used on Easter Sunday at Orangeville Baptist Church. We took the traditional Paschal greeting and added some resurrection scripture to it. Great way to start our services together.

Leader:
Christ is risen

Congregation:
He is risen indeed!

In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. 1 Peter 1:3
He is risen indeed!

Jesus has come that we may have life, and have it to the fullest. John 10:10
He is risen indeed!

If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! 2 Corinthians 5:17
He is risen indeed!

God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him. Acts 2:24
He is risen indeed!

Christ is risen
He is risen indeed!

 

Image from Flickr

 

Good Friday – Community Service

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:

A table of candles. at 5 different points during good Friday’s service a candle will be snuffed.

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.

OBC – Easter Choir Practice

Choir isn’t something that we normally do at OBC but I thought we’d change this up a little this year and put together a worship choir for our Easter Sunday services. We opened it up to anyone in grade 6 & up and there’s no requirement on previous singing ability. My gut told me that we would get enough people interested in being a part of this that there would be a solid group of singers who would join our band for the services on that morning.

Well tonight we had our first rehearsal and had 40 – FORTY!! – people come and sing. I know that 40 isn’t a huge choir but for us trying something new it was pretty encouraging. Like I said on twitter tonight, I’m really glad that we decided to do this and I’m really glad that we’ve got five weeks to practice before the big day

Thanks to a shipping issue, I wasn’t able to give our choir the actual parts they’re going to be singing but instead I just printed out the hymn charts from CCLI and we ran through those at practice. We rehearsed four songs tonight which will be part of our service -

• Hosanna by Paul Baloche
• Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone) by Chris Tomlin
• Revelation Song by Kari Jobe
• Mighty To Save by Hillsong United

We’ll be adding a couple more songs to this list but doing that much was a big chunk for us to chew on tonight – especially ‘Revelation Song’. I told the group when we were done that this is not an easy song and even if we were doing it with one of our bands we would need several weeks of rehearsal to pull it off. I was very encouraged to hear them sing tonight.

So here we go. A new adventure for me and for OBC – we’ll see how this turns out but it will definitely give me some material for blogging over the next several weeks

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