Easter Sunday. Not sure it gets any better than that. Packed house for both services, lots of family and friends and people from our community making their annual pilgrimage :) The beauty of knowing that visitors are coming (and we plan for and expect visitors every week) is that you can be praying and preparing for them to respond when they hear the great news of the resurrection. Of course the challenge is that people (not just visitors) go in to “I’ve heard it all before” mode very quickly so you’ve got to present the timeless truth of the gospel in a way that may penetrate an already hardened or indifferent heart.

We’ve been working our way through the gospel of Mark over the past 6 or 7 weeks and on Sunday we finished the series by looking at the resurrection account in Mark 16. As you read, you can’t help but notice the obvious presence of both doubt AND belief from those who have encounters with the risen Christ. Over and over people are told about the resurrection, they are afraid and they don’t believe. Then an encounter with Jesus and they move from doubt to belief. They go to tell others but the others don’t believe. Until they meet Jesus. Incredible.

Let me sidestep here and say that this should be very encouraging to those of you who are in leadership positions at your church and may not be seeing the fruit of lives changed by the gospel. Even those who were in the presence of Jesus himself after the resurrection were not able to convince his closest friends – the ones who had spent three years with Jesus, witnessed the miracles… he even told them three times he would be killed and then alive three days later. And those guys couldn’t be convinced by those who had seen Jesus alive, until they had an encounter themselves. This should be encouraging to you. Pray for Jesus to reveal himself to people who need to know him.

Here’s what our Easter Sunday service looked like -

Everlasting God – Brenton Brown – Bb
Our God – Chris Tomlin – Bb
“He Is Risen!” responsive reading
Christ The Lord Is Risen Today – Bb -> C
Offering
Congregational Prayer
Video –  Skit Guys “Grace”
We Will Run – Gungor – E
Forever Reign – Hillsong – C
Christ Is Risen (chorus/bridge) – Matt Maher – F
Message – Mark 16
I Stand In Awe – Mark Altrogge – A

Three things about our service on Sunday that I want to share with you -

• A couple of really special moments yesterday. At the end of “Christ Is Risen” we normally do this big ending where we just give people a chance to declare and celebrate  - “He’s alive! He’s alive! Our God is not dead, he’s alive!” Yesterday people starting clapping and cheering while we were singing that part. I’ll remember that for a long, long time. Incredible.
• We’ve been praying for some people in our church to come to Christ for YEARS and we saw several of them respond yesterday. We’re doing some follow-up to work through that response and decision but God was clearly at work. Amen.
• I posted this yesterday on twitter – “Worship leaders, don’t let the Pharisees in your church decide if your service was ‘good enough.’ It will never be good enough for them.” I can’t even tell you the kind of response I got from that. It clearly struck a chord. If you feel like nothing you did was appreciated, people were focused on singing the “right” songs rather than focusing on Jesus, if people just deflated you with their words as soon as the service was over know that you are not alone. Jesus is still risen. The gospel is still true. And Pharisees are still present.

I tweeted earlier this week that every Sunday is special but there is something unique about baptism Sundays. I love seeing people “go public” with their faith and this past weekend was no exception. We were privileged to see 8 people from our church – young, old, male, female – share their story of how Jesus has changed their lives and it was a great celebration.

Baptisms are a big deal for us – and they should be! Baptism is a chance for an individual follower of Christ to take a step of obedience in their faith, it’s a chance for our congregation to be encouraged by seeing the ministry of our church bear fruit in the lives of these people and it’s a chance for those who haven’t made a commitment to follow Christ to hear the gospel presented clearly.

At our 9:00 service we had 2 baptisms and then 6 during our 11:00 service so we had some work to do in making the timing of everything work together. We knew we would have about 20 minutes of content at 11 that we wouldn’t have at 9 so we made some adjustments in our planning process. We do a service walkthrough on Friday afternoon where we go through all of the service content and spend time thinking through transitions so making changes ahead of time to how the services would look is a very normal part of our workflow.

Here are the songs we sang on Sunday morning -

All The Earth – Paul Baloche – E
Song of Hope – Robbie Seay – A
In Christ Alone – Stuart Townend and Keith Getty – E
Stronger – Hillsong – A (9:00 only)

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I’m including this as part of the Sunday Setlists party over at The WorshipCommunity.com and giving it the #WorshipSet title so that it shows up on twitter. I’d love to hear how this Sunday went at your church!

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that we are working our way through the entire gospel of Mark between now and Easter. It has been great even in the early stages. We’ve split the book of Mark into 6 weeks worth of daily readings and every day we are posting a quick devotional thought based on the next chunk of the book as we go. When we gather on Sundays, many of us have been reading and spending time in the verses coming out of last week’s message and leading in to this week’s.

This is what our service looked like on Sunday -

Call to Worship – Psalm 100
Your Grace Is Enough – Matt Maher – F
Our God – Chris Tomlin – Bb
Your Kingdom Come – Chris Vacher & Joshua Seller – Bb
Congregational Prayer
Announcements/Offering
Message – Mark 2:23-3:6
Restless – Audrey Assad – C

Three things from this past Sunday -

1. Opened our service by reading Psalm 100 and giving people a few moments to think about how God has shown His goodness, love and faithfulness to them this week. We did that to setup a series of songs that were really a response to how God has done that.

2. At the end of the first set of three songs we gave people another opportunity for prayer on their own. The chorus of “Your Kingdom Come” says “That the lost be found again/ May the broken find their rest / Would we lift Your name up high again / As we see Your kingdom come” so we simply asked people to pray about what that would look like in their lives. Pray for the lost, pray for the broken, pray for God’s name to be lifted high, pray for His kingdom to come.

3. Read the passage – not too many songs about sabbath :) We went with “Restless” and it worked perfectly. It is a beautiful song with incredible lyrics. The band worked really hard on the arrangement and they pulled it off. Very, very sweet moment of worship at the end of both services.

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(I’m including this as part of the Sunday Setlists party over at The WorshipCommunity.com and giving it the #WorshipSet title so that it shows up on twitter. I’d love to hear how this Sunday went at your church!)

We wrapped up a 6-week series at OBC called “Unshakeable Kingdom, Incredible King” this Sunday. We took our time working through this passage from Hebrews -

Hebrews 12:28-13:6

Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our “God is a consuming fire.”
Keep on loving one another as brothers and sisters. Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it. Continue to remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.
Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral. Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said,

“Never will I leave you;
never will I forsake you.”

So we say with confidence,

“The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid.
What can mere mortals do to me?”

Here’s the songs we did this Sunday -

Holy Is The Lord – Chris Tomlin – G
My Hope Is Built On Nothing Less – Hymn/Edward Mote – E
Greatness Of Our God – Jason Ingram, Stuart Garrard, Reuben Morgan – G
Here I Am To Worship – Tim Hughes – E
Your Kingdom Come – Chris Vacher & Joshua Seller – Bb

Special time of worship together. “Your Kingdom Come” is a new song that I’ve written with my friend Joshua – we’re hoping to get it recorded and available for you soon.

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(I’m including this as part of the Sunday Setlists party over at The WorshipCommunity.com and giving it the #WorshipSet title so that it shows up on twitter. I’d love to hear how this Sunday went at your church!)

I was thrilled to be back with my church on Sunday leading worship. I love being able to lead worship at youth retreats, conferences or other churches but there is something pretty special about being back home to lead people I love alongside people I love.

We wrapped up our Psalm 23 series with these songs -

Our God Is Mercy – Brenton Brown – G
Greatness of our God – Jason Ingram, Stuart Garrard, Reuben Morgan – G
Responsive Reading
Our God – Chris Tomlin – A
Jesus, All For Jesus – Robin Mark – E
Video – Psalm 23 images
Message – Psalm 23:5-6
All To Us – Chris Tomlin – A

Three things I want to tell you about from this past Sunday -

1. We set out at the beginning of this series to ask the question, “Is God all we really need?” We used Psalm 23 over the course of four messages (v.1-2, v.3, v.4, v.5-6) to answer that question. It was great to do a series where we stayed focused on one big idea for all four weeks and at the same time had the flexibility to develop different ideas around that same theme.
2. I put together a video with images from Psalm 23 (green pastures, still water, paths) pulled from stock photo sites. I asked friends on twitter where I should get stock photos and most people sent me to two sites. For free photos, people recommended www.sxc.hu and for paid photos they suggested www.istockphoto.com. I ended up using sxc.hu for all but one of the photos (including some submitted by a couple of photographers in our congregation) and it turned out great. Best part about doing the video? I used one of the included slideshow templates from iPhoto ’11 – couldn’t be easier!
3. “All To Us” became a theme song for us in this series and our church loved it. As soon as I heard the song of the new Chris Tomlin album I knew it would be perfect for this series. We were talking about so many of the same things that come across in this song and it was a great fit. Normally when we teach a new song we do it two weeks on, let it rest for a week and then bring it back again the fourth week but we just decided to include it in all four weeks of this series.

I was away this weekend leading worship at a jr high conference but here are the songs that we sang at OBC this past Sunday -

Hosanna – Paul Baloche & Brenton Brown – G
How Great Thou Art – Stuart K. Hine – G->A
All To Us – Chris Tomlin – A
Restless – Audrey Assad – C

These songs are available on iTunes here.

One of the things I wanted to do when I first started this blog back in 2-0-0-something was to have a place to gather my thoughts around what we do on Sunday morning. That has ebbed and flowed but a couple of conversations lately have reminded me of the importance of doing this and so I’m going to attempt to again make this a priority.

Plus, I know my friend Ryan likes reading these updates and finding out more about the songs we sing at church :)

Okay.. so here’s what we did at OBC this past Sunday -

Series: The Gifts of Christmas
Topic: The Gift of Joy (John 17, Hebrews 12)
Big Idea: Jesus’ joy is obedience to the Father
Opener: Wonderful Christmastime by Paul McCartney
Service Outline:
Joy Opener
Meet & Greet
Joy to the World – C
Angels We Have Heard on High – G
Joyful (One Who Saves) – Brenton Brown – D (iTunes USA|Canada)
Congregational Prayer & Offering
Message
Gift Tags & Communion
Jesus Paid It All – Kristian Stanfill – A (iTunes USA|Canada)

Three things to tell you about from this service -

1. This is our Advent series and each week we have been doing three things – focusing on a theme of Advent (hope, peace, joy, love), using a Christmas classic as our opener and giving people a chance to write on a gift tag at the end of the service as a way of responding to the message. The stories we are hearing from these services are pretty incredible, just giving people to answer a simple question like “How has the peace of God impacted your life?” has resulted in some amazing testimonies of God’s faithfulness.
2. The “Christmas classic” idea has worked really well for this series. For our hope service, we used “I’ll Be Home For Christmas.” For peace we did “So This Is Christmas (War Is Over).” “Wonderful Christmastime” was for joy and we’re using “Sleigh Ride” for love. We’re taking the themes of Christmas and showing how they are present even in the cultural celebration this time of year. After the song is done by the band, we have someone come and read a 3-4 minute monologue which sets the theme for the morning.
3. We called an audible at the end of the service and did “Jesus Paid It All” in place of the song we had planned. This takes communication and trust but it was the right call. We had a guest speaker here on Sunday so part of the uniqueness of working with a guest meant that the exact way the message would go wasn’t really known until Sunday morning.

In all, we had a great morning. The services from our Advent series (I’ll do another video blog on the whole concept soon) have been pretty powerful – I love this time of year when people are willing to look at the story of Jesus with fresh eyes whether they are followers of Christ or not.

The last four Sundays of our Romans series has been spent in Romans 8 and it’s not hard to figure out why. This chapter is jam-packed with incredible theology and is deserving of deep study.

Consider for a moment the implications of any of these snippets taken from Romans 8:

• there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus
• if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness
• those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God
• the Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children
• our present sufferings are not worth comparing wtih the glory that will be revealed in us
• hope that is seen is no hope at all
• we hope for what we do not yet have
• in all things God works for the good of those who love him
• if God is for us, who can be against us?
• it is God who justifies
• in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us
• …nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Those are all taken from a single chapter of Scripture! How could we NOT give several weeks of emphasis to this passage??

Here’s what our service looked like on Sunday -

• Welcome/Announcements
• Q&A w/ Paul Sadler, our global ministry partner in Japan
• Call to Worship – 1 Chronicles 16
• Jesus, You Are Worthy – Brenton Brown, Don Williams – C
• Our God – Chris Tomlin, Matt Redman, Jonas Myrin, Jesse Reeves - A
• In Christ Alone – Keith Getty, Stuart Townend – E
• Message – Romans 8:31-39 “When You’re Under Attack”
• Our God – Chris Tomlin, Matt Redman, Jonas Myrin, Jesse Reeves – A
• Everlasting God – Brenton Brown, Ken Riley – A

A few hilights from this past Sunday -

1. It was great having Paul Sadler, his family and some Japanese students here with us this weekend. Paul & his family are ministering in Tsukuba City, Japan and are global ministry partners of our church. We love what they are doing in a place that is very resistant to the gospel. Having them here this weekend to encourage them and hear an update was great for our church family. Also great to have Paul preach on Sunday morning and share some thoughts from this incredible passage of Scripture.

2. I’d been holding on to “Our God” from the new Passion album for a while, knowing that it would fit perfectly with the service this Sunday. I was right – people were definitely familiar with the song and really sang out. To teach it, we started with the bridge – “If our God is for us, who could ever stop us / If our God is with us, what could stand against.” We repeated that line with a little space in between four times so that people were familiar with it. We then hit the intro, to the verse and chorus a couple of times and then back to the bridge. When you’re teaching a  new song, don’t feel you always have you teach the chorus first.
3. I began our songs by encouraging our church to think about what it means to ascribe glory to God. We see that phrase a few times in Scripture – “Ascribe to the Lord the glory due His name.” This ascribing is not about bragging, beating our chests, frothing at the mouth with how great our God is compared to all of those other gods out there but is instead about lifting God up, increasing His greatness, making Him known with the hope that one day the whole world would know of our God’s greatness, majesty, strength and power. I read several verses of 1 Chronicles 16 as a way of demonstrating what this ascribing looks like. The songs we sang, the prayers we prayed together were all examples of ascribing glory to God.

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You can read a bunch more posts like this over at TheWorshipCommunity.com

We had a great morning at OBC (where I’m on staff as the worship director) this past Sunday. How can you go wrong with stories of how people’s lives have been changed by Christ, seeing them baptized, celebrating together in worship and then spending significant time in God’s word? I continue to be thankful for what God is doing in our midst when we gather – we are in this fresh, new, exciting season where people seem to be very willing to engage in worship and show their excitement and joy for the Lord while we are singing.

Here’s what our services looked like this week as part of our Romans series -

• Everlasting Light – Drew Brown, Bob Cottrill, Luke Holst & Keith Sparrow (as part of WorshipRises) – F
• Your Grace Is Enough – Matt Maher – F
• Welcome/Announcements
• Testimonies & Baptisms
• How Can I Keep From Singing – Chris Tomlin – G
• Glorious – Paul Baloche – C
• Everlasting Light – F
• Message – Romans 6:15-23
• There Is A Redeemer – Keith Green – E

I’ve got a second post coming today talking about “Everlasting Light” but the reason that it’s in our setlist twice is that the first time we did it pre-service just so people could hear the song as they were walking in.

A few things from this past Sunday -

1. Like I said before, hearing stories of how Jesus has changed the lives of kids, students and adults to the point where they are ready to go public with their faith never gets old. Being part of a church that values and celebrates baptisms is a real privilege and I am so thankful that God continues to be at work in the lives of individuals in our church. The big encouragement for me on Sunday was that each of the stories spoke of how other people in our church had been influential in the faith journeys of those being baptized – a good reminder that God is at work in the lives of individuals but also in the community life of our church. It’s important to be reminded of that.

2. The middle set of those three songs (How Can I Keep -> Glorious -> Everlasting Light) was very, very solid. We were helped out by using click tracks for the first two songs from PraiseCharts. If you aren’t using the resources that PraiseCharts is producing you should check them out. Great stuff! (I’m a little biased – we’ll have some news on that in the next couple of weeks.)
3. While there was great joy with the testimonies and celebrations there was also a bit of heaviness of Sunday for me, just because of a situation that is happening with someone who is part of our worship team. Our pastor, Earl Marshall, spoke to the severity of continually dreaming of what life might be like “on the other side of the fence” even when we know that making those decisions would only be coming from satisfying our desire for sin. He encouraged those in our church to confess to secret sin, to behavioural patterns inconsistent with live out the gospel.. but above all that he encouraged us to remain focused on Christ, to remember the gospel and to live lives out of the grace and mercy God has shown us in Christ.

All in all, we celebrated, we worshiped God, we opened His word, we gathered together to turn our eyes away from “the hills” in our lives and to focus instead on Christ (Ps 121). You can read more recaps like this over at TheWorshipCommunity.com.

We are in a pretty sweet season at OBC and our Sunday mornings are hitting a really nice groove. We’re not satisfied, of course, with just letting things go well but it is definitely encouraging to have bands that sound good, tech people who know what they’re doing, and services that bring glory to God.

Here’s what we did on Sunday -

Romans 5:12-21- “Pandemic”
You Are – Mark Roach – F
Holy Is The Lord – Chris Tomin – G
Meet & Greet/Announcements
Congregational Prayer
Romans 5:12-21
What The Lord Has Done – Reuben Morgan – C
Psalm 51:1-3, 10-12, Psalm 32:1-2, 10-11
Worship Rises – Joshua Seller & Chris Vacher – A
Message – “Pandemic”
Jesus Paid It All – Kristian Stanfill* – Bb

Overall, we were trying to make a few things happen in this service: 

• Last weekend we ended with a real tone of celebration and in our call to worship I encouraged people to continue in that. You may not have heard “You Are” before but if your church likes to sing Tomlin or Matt Redman, you should definitely check out Mark Roach‘s music. 

   

   

• The passage from Romans that we were focusing on led us to spend some time in confession during our service. We had our pastor come and lead our congregation in prayer and then read the passage he was preaching from – we don’t always do this. We sang two songs between that spot and his message and as part of that section we read together from two confession psalms. I had people take a few moments and reflect on that last verse of Psalm 32 and meditate on the words – “Rejoice in the LORD and be glad, you righteous; sing, all you who are upright in heart!”

   

• The end of our service was just a great opportunity to respond to this truth from Romans 5 that our righteousness is from Christ alone, not from our own good works, our own keeping the law, not even from our faith in Christ – our righteousness is a “free gift” given by God for our good and His glory. “Jesus Paid It All” was a great song to close our service and people definitely made the connect from the truth of that passage to the truth of the words.

   

Great morning. You can read more Sunday recaps like this over at TheWorshipCommunity.com.

*I realize that Kristian isn’t the writer of this song but it was his version that we played. Most people would be familiar with the original hymn and this version has an extra chorus added by Alex Nifong. You can find it on the “Everything Glorious” CD from Passion.